Change Your Relationship To Gravity: Change Your Life

November, 2018

Changing relationship to gravity is one of the foundational principles of Continuum practice. As bipeds, we spend most of our daily lives upright, either walking, standing, or sitting. Occasionally, we lie down. This narrow orientation to gravity creates habits of tissue support.

Changing our relationship to gravity is one of the many powerful ways we can affect the whole body simultaneously. It’s like “cross-training” for life. We can engage in multiple orientations to gravity, like hanging sideways off of a chair, on an upside down slant in order to perform optimally in our primary relationship to gravity, which is primarily upright.

Being at novel angles to gravity increases flexibility, strength, and spaciousness. It helps us develop the fluidity to adapt to novel situations, like having to sit on a plane or lift an awkward size package. It helps us withstand and manage the effects of impact if and when we fall. The ability to orient to the unexpected in all aspects of life is easier if you’ve practiced with something obvious, like gravity.

The inherent creative ability of the body to adapt is always expressing itself in the ways that we reorganize the tissues, spaces, cells, fluids, and water in our bodies to support the demands of embodied life. Changing our relationship to gravity provides endless possibilities to access this creative aspect of health.