How Your Posture Creates Your Mood

Today I want to talk about something that may be intuitive for some of y'alls, maybe like what the heck is this guy talking about? The deep and oftentimes understudied connection between your posture and your mood. And right now, without moving, I want you to just notice what your body's doing. Are you shortly? I mean, Elbows are on this table. Are your shoulders creeping up? Or jeers? Is your chin jutting forward? Classic phone neck? Is your chest collapsed inward? Like you're trying to disappear? Whatever it is, don't fix it yet. Just notice your posture. And the question I want to plant in your mind is, what if the way your body's sitting right now is not just a result of how you feel, but because of how you feel, which is a bit of a chicken and egg question, right? But what if your posture isn't just a physical habit? It's a mood generating machine. And that it's been running on autopilot your entire life. So today I want to talk about the posture mood connection. Not so much as like the stand-up straight and you'll feel better self-help stuff. But I want to talk about some of the neuroscience about the feedback loop between your body's architecture and your nervous system's emotional state. We're talking about how the structure you carry becomes the consciousness you inhabit. Just notice, right? Just feel your body for a second. Your posture isn't just a result of how you feel. It's a cause right now without moving. I want you to notice what your body's doing. This mood generating machine has been running on autopilot your entire life. And again, it's not responding to your mood. It's creating it. So here's something to blew my mind when I first encountered this research is there's a field called embodied cognition. And it's been overturning decades of the old model where we thought the brain was isolated, right? We've had time out, got brain connection for a long time, but we thought it was an isolated command center issuing instructions down on the body. But it turns out the relationship runs in both directions. So your body sends as much information up to the brain as the brain sends down to the body. And the body isn't just hardware, right? It's not just an output device. It's a sensory input that shapes thought. It shapes emotion, it shapes perception. Even identity. The father of modern psychology, William James, he basically back in it was 1884. He proposed that emotions don't cause physical states. It's the reverse. You don't run because you're afraid. You feel afraid because you're running. So your body comes first. Your emotional interpretation then follows. And that idea got buried for a good hundred years, but now we've got FMRI. We have interception research with all this polyvagal work we've covered. James is actually getting some vindication and posture as he decides to sit up even straighter is one of the clearest demonstrations of this principle. In 2010, Amy Cutty had a research team at Harvard and they published something that pretty much shook up the psychology world. They showed that spending just two minutes in an expansive upright posture. What they call the power pose produced a measurable hormone change. Testosterone went up. Cortisol went down. And the participants reported feeling more confident and tolerant of risk. There was a bunch of criticism and debate since then. They couldn't replicate some of the hormonal findings. But what was replicated again and again was that people felt a sense of confidence. They felt the behavioral changes. They felt the subjective shift. And there's been multiple follow-up studies that have confirmed that body position reliably affects psychological state even when the hormonal picture to be a bit more nuanced. And from the other direction, as researcher named Sabine Cock, they've her team showed that people in depressive episodes adopt collapsed inward postures, rounded shoulders, a downcast gaze, constricted breath. And then moving these people into an upright expansive posture, while looking at the mood shifts, memory shifts. They start accessing more positive autobiographical memories. And they found that your postures filter on what memories you can access and what emotional states you could actually generate. And this is where it gets really relevant to the work we're doing in Chigong and essentially anything we're doing in this academy. The Vegas nerve, Pauline Vagel Superhighway, it runs right through your thoracic cavity. Past your diaphragm connecting your brain stem to your heart, your lungs, your gut. So when you collapse your chest, you physically compress the space that the Vagel tone depends on you cutting off the real state. So slumped postures, not just aesthetically bad, it's physiologically compressive, it's jamming things in, it's creating traffic. In this ends up activating the sympathetic nervous system through mechanical pressure patterns. This is where it just gets really crazy and cool. It literally narrows the physical channel, your parasympathetic recovery system uses. And I could tell you this is why every contemplative tradition, everything upstate thousands of contemplative practices around the world. Posture is always considered part of the practice. Now for decoration, the monks and the meditators weren't being precious about form. They understood that structure enables certain states. It shuts down others. So we have to understand that this polyvagal theory just in our heads means nothing. A slumped posture compresses the physical channel your nervous system uses to recover. The vagus nerve, we've talked about this a numerous occasions are polyvagal superhighway runs right through this thoracic cavity. Opening up certain states for closing others. As we understand more and more of this then informs the critical need to carry ourselves differently. So let's make this practical. I'm going to give you a framework to use right now throughout your work. The three structural gates, these are three architecture points, if you will, in the body that either open or close these channels between structure and consciousness and awareness. Think of it this way, your body's a temple and the three gates determine whether the energy moves freely or gets stuck. Number one's the root. Your pelvic floor, your sit bones. When you sit, most of us do what I call the couch collapse. We roll back into our tailbone and we collapse the lumbar curve. Okay, so you, this position signals safety through submission. The body actually reads this as a defeat posture. You are physiologically telling your nervous system, I've given up. And the fix isn't to rigidly force your spine back straight. It's what I would call finding active ground. So you tilt slightly forward until you feel the sit bones making contact with your chair, your cushion. The sit bones are the ischial tuberosity, the bones at the bottom of your butt. You got to feel the chair of the cushion. And then you notice a subtle lift in the base of your spine as you do that. You just activated your root. And when you Your root is engaged, the diaphragm as room to descend. In your breath deepens automatically. Vagal note from there, vagal tone will increase. It's not a metaphor, it's mechanics. You root down, you anchor, the diaphragm pulls, that's how you inhale deeply, is the diaphragm's muscle that pulls downward. The second gate, the heart gate, the sternum, the thoracic spine. This one's the most emotionally loaded of the gates. It's where we hold our grief, it's where we protect our heart, it's where we carry. Unexpressed longing. So a collapsed chest is often a psycho-emotional armor pattern. It's not just a musculoskeletal problem. So the lift here is subtle, we're not throwing the chest out like a military, like muscle man, right? That's a caricature. We're letting the sternum float upwards as if someone has a gentle hand beneath your breastbone, simply lifting it one inch. And as you do that, you feel the shoulder blades glide back and down. So they do, so scapulae, it's called scapion, the North Ptox. Scapulae come back on the back and glide down. Then the collar bones will widen, and the thoracic spine moves from flexion towards neutral. Do this now, do this with me. Notice what happens to your breath. Notice what happens to your field of vision. Notice what happens when you create space for yourself, and then you can occupy it. It really is profound, so subtle, so profound. The third gate, the crown. The cervical spine and the skull have an awkward relationship in our phone culture, right? In our monitored culture or driving culture. The average person carries their head two to three inches in front of their center of gravity. This thing. For every inch of forward head posture, the effective weight of your head increases nearly ten pounds. So that five pound head is now generating 50 pounds of compressive force on the back of your neck. Whoops. It's not just mechanical. That chin forward position. Some researchers call the submission gaze. It directly impacts and affects your brainstem. It compresses the suboxcipital region with a vagus nerve exits the skull. And it ends up creating tension patterns that activate the dorsal vagal shutdown response. We talked about this a few weeks ago. And the correction is to let the crown of your skull float upward. As if there's a golden thread lifting you from the very top of your head this way. Not backward light. You don't want to tilt back into extension. You want to go up straight up. Then the chin naturally tucks slightly. The occipital lifts. And that decompresses the cervical curse. So now let's try all three of these at once. Root down. Ground your root, your butt bones. Heart floating crown lifted. Let's just hold this for ten breaths and notice something. Something in the quality of your awareness shifts. And this is what the ancient meditators know. Structure is practice structure as practice. Let's take ten breaths. Let's go. Like, those are as if it feels right. Couple more breaths. I want you to know just scan your body. Where do you feel the pressure to collapse? See if you could probe into the emotional tone that goes with that shape. And we're going to hook into the first gate again. Tilt slightly. Find those sit bones. Feel that subtle lift in your lumbar spine. See if you could get your diaphragm to pull down and breathe deeper. Try this now. Now let's move to the sternal float again. Slift one inch of the shoulder blades glide back and down. Your collar bones widen. And just notice the expansion in your chest. Notice the expansion in your breath. And see if you could feel the space around your heart. Feel everything opening. A member third gate. Lift the crown up. Don't tilt the head back. Lift the crown up. It could golden thread from the top of your skull. Your chin will naturally tuck softly. Your occipital will rise. And you should feel the lengthening of the back of your neck as you do this. Feel this now. And take some breath. A few more breaths here, locking in old three. Root, heart, crown. Create the space and then feel into it. What's the emotional quality of this architecture? Just feel that. Maybe what thoughts arise in this structure versus the one you started in? This becomes the posture, consciousness, feedback, loop, and real time. So you can gently open your eyes. That's the practice. Three adjustments, 60 seconds, a completely different state of mind. Gate one, tilt slightly forward, feel your sit bones. Feel the emotional quality of that architecture. This is. the feedback loop. Feel into it with your body. From here, I just want to put this in a doggy bag. The modern world, it's a collapsing machine. Our chairs, our screens, our social conditioning, they conspired to pull us into this submission posture. I don't think there's anything insidious. It takes a lot of work to sit on the ground, cross-legged, a lot of postural muscles holding you upright. But we have inadvertently created all these tools and props, things around us. That are now pulling us into this submission posture and the submission posture is generating submission consciousness with drawn, small, defended. So this particular lesson isn't about your breathing exercises. It's about the continuous practice of inhabiting your body with intention that includes how you carry this physical structure throughout your day. Because you're not just some brain having an experience. You're a body-mind continuum and the shape of that body participates in the quality of that mind. So if you will, here's your challenge in the next 24 hours. Set three phone alarms spaced throughout the day. Every five, six, eight hours depending on when your bedtime is. Each time the alarm goes off, pause before touching the phone. And just run through the three gate sequence. Reap heart, crown. Take three breaths. In your corrected architecture. Go back to your day. And a bedtime notice, did your emotional tone throughout the day differ from your baseline? Could happen on day one. It could happen on day five. And if you're so inclined to journal, right, a sentence or two about what you observed. This isn't a practice. It's not a fix. The body has years of habituated patterns that we are undoing in a day takes a while, right? So every moment of conscious architecture is a vote for a different nervous system state. It's got a lot of muscle memory going the other way, don't you? But over 100 days, that can accumulate into a transformation. Do this at home. Do this as often as you can. And I'm open to discussing it now. And I'm curious. They just type in the chat thread, which gate felt the most blocked or unfamiliar? And think about what that might be telling you. I just I'd like to just see it here. Let me pull up the chat here. What do you all hear? Yeah, Susie, it's chilly here too. I don't know what happened. It went from 94 to 60s in one day. Celeste is asking, we're sitting like this. Take less effort over time. Strengthen muscles. There's some exercise we need to do to reinforce it. Great question. The answer is yes. Many of us have not pulled ourselves into this type of posture in years, if not ever. So yeah, there's a bit of work that needs to get done. There's a bit of a learning curve. And there's a bit of repatting, retraining that has to happen for individuals who have just not been using these muscles. It's standing out. So you gotta use the muscle. Susie, take that to the customer service because that's a support at theurbanmark.com. I don't know where gut tests are. But that's not what I want to talk about here. The second gate is the tightest for all right. So I'll reach out. I don't know what's going on. I will reach out. The second gate is the tightest for faith. I wonder what scars have to do with it, due to surgeries. Yeah. A lot of people who fly a lot, travel a lot. The root gets like just the lumbopelvic gets compressed and it gets very difficult. People who've had surgeries, people who have had injuries to the mid body. I see that a lot. I also see that on like, you know, the sixes for people that are at desks. It's a problem. And the next thing for computer workers, Jerry saying that his shoulders are complaining, old injuries. Yeah. And I'm such a lucky guy. I have a couple injuries in each of these gates, right? I've herniated here, tree skiing, I've low back. I've had multiple martial arts and fast life injuries being a skier. So yeah. But the next logical step is to go back into the right posture and create that real state. And there are interesting psychological and emotional qualities that come up. And this having trouble with the bone gate. My focals terrible for the crown. Yeah. There are a lot of interventions that we make that mess us up. I just saw somebody who's bite. Someone was trying to adjust their night guard. They messed up their bite. And so we have to retrain their jaw to come backwards because some dentist was dumb. It's not that hard to set yourself crooked. Especially if you're in your fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth decade on this planet, you got a lot of muscle memory going in different directions. So now the question is, did anyone feel, we did it for a very short amount of time, but did anyone feel a psychological or an emotional quality when opening one of the gates? One of the things that I want to teach you all is perceptual awareness in the subtle areas. Ron says it was calming. Yeah. In a sense of relaxation. There's peace says Vicki. Is it cheating to use lumbar support? Yes, but you got to do what you got to do. Gold standard. And I'm sitting in an office chair right now just to be clear, this is a desk. But gold standard is you can sit on the floor, cross-legged, and your pelvic floor and your rectus abdominis and your entire lumbopelvic acuity is there. And you're just boom, sitting on the floor against gravity using postural muscles to hold yourself up. There's cultures that still eat on the floor. There's cultures that spend a lot more time on the floor. Japanese or flora adjacent, right? Like they get closer to the floor than we do. We got these big chairs that are higher. The closer you get to the floor, the more your postural muscles have to work to kind of maintain you against gravity. I can just as easily right now. Long day, bro. And now I'm in submission posture, right? And that puts me psychologically in a place where I don't know, 20 more minutes sitting like that, I might turn on a TV. So there are cues psychologically and energetically that just start closing the windows. This is more difficult. But this is also where your energy flows, right? Laura felt a sense of cleansing with the thoracic lifting. Yeah, look, folks, I don't think I have anyone in their 20s in this room right now. Maybe I do. Every once in a while we get, you know, what I would call a kid at this point. Most of us have lived for five, six decades. And that comes with planes trains and automobiles. It comes with office chairs. It comes with the stupid classrooms we sat through. It comes with a lot of postural challenges that have been imposed by furniture, which takes our effort out of posture and just bumps, bruises, orthopedic issues, all the things that would be historically there, right? And if this is interesting to you all, I could do a part to the feet or the foundation of your orthopedic house, if you will. Like micro movements and postural elements and proprioceptive awareness that comes from just standing on your feet and grabbing the ground. And that's just that home on your shaggy carpet. Now, walk out on the lawn out there that has a slate. New wants tilt to it. And now your brain is getting all sorts of information about what's up and what's down and where you are in time and space. And that relays up to your brain. And it says, adjust your to be honest this much fire the posterior chain on this other side, this much. And it's just this incredibly nuanced machine that's keeping your head up right. That is if you walk outside with your with your bare feet, right? And so challenging this slowly is important. I got people that are like, hell yeah, I'm in. That makes perfect sense. And then they start doing too much in their source. How? Tip toe into this, right? Just do the three gates and just start working the stuff, right? And as you do, you're going to feel, faith felt an energy search. You're going to feel more energy because what you're doing is two things. On the physics meets efficiency side, you are creating a structure for your fascia to glide better, your diaphragm to pull down better. And for the thoracic outlet to remain open so that your vagal tone goes in the right direction towards ventral vagal, which means you relax and you go to a rest and digest ecology. Just neurology, we get it. On the more esoteric side, you're also opening up the flow of energy with the additional breath and structure. Now that energy can flow freely and remove other blockages and wake up your mind. The water, your consciousness, incredible stuff. Once you step into it, you can't unsee it once you understand what you're looking at. How are the three gates different from a standing position? Great question, Rainey. We have all of that in the standing cheek on positions. I'm not set up in this studio to show you that for say, but imagine you're standing with your weight balanced between your centers of your feet and your heels. Here's my feet. So you would slightly bend your knees and then tuck your pelvis until you find that sweet spot. And the way I describe this and retreats and stuff is as if you had a weight hanging from your perinium, right? The space between your genitals and your anus, right? Like that. Lowest, deepest part of your biological center of gravity. And you had a weight pulling your perinium down. Your pelvis doesn't just tuck in. So you're like zero, but your pelvis doesn't tuck out. Like you got a booty swing is right in the middle and it drops down. Okay. Then from there, you should be able to engage your pelvic floor. And for those of you who aren't practicing kiggling men or women, you're missing a vital component to your power and your longevity. And a lot of the breath work I'm going to show you all in, in suing courses has to do with breathing, kiggling, locking, and that becomes your biomechanical base, but also becomes your bioelectric base. And so dropping into a standing position. Now, like in Wuchi, if you will, the tight she standing position, arms are here. Remember the instruction there is as if you have an apple and reach armpit. What are you doing? You're gliding your shoulder blades back and down. And then your neck, if I'm doing this right, isn't going to do this, right? But I bring my crown up and I line that up. So it's exactly the same thing on your feet. And to be frank, I much prefer this, right, because sitting sucks. Now, I don't want to be the guy standing in an airplane across the country. There's a time and a place to sit. I drive somewhere in 10 minutes. I don't have a standing car. So you have to understand that within the context, right? Of our lifestyles, some of these things we got to be able to do seated. And as much as I can, I get up any time I'm on a phone call. And I've just been, I've been on like a post COVID zoom detox. I don't want to zoom in for right? Like I know what you look like. We're good. Call my phone. That way I just walk around because sitting at a desk doing a phone call is insane. Stand, walk, do the things that you can as often as you can away from a seated posture. But when you're in a seated posture, three gates, find it, lock it, be able to move it, mix in enormous difference. And someone that said energy surge confidence boosting, all that is true. Lots of studies on this. It's a measurable improvement in your state. By just lining yourself up. Think of yourself like your game of jingah. You want to win? Tighten up the blocks, right? Make it work right? Make it work right. All right. A couple of announcements. I've finally locked the contract, if you will, at the venue. I got this really cool venue for the next retreat. It's in Austin because I'm here and in an effort to do these more often. I'm trying to travel less, but it's right on the lake. It's just a really cool place. I'm pretty here. So those of you that are in the coaching programs, you probably have a ticket or two. Those of you are not. You can still buy tickets. I'm keeping it. I'm keeping it small. I'm hatching a lot of eggs right now. And so there's a new book coming and I'm putting a lot of meditation and energy into the book and the process around the book and kind of holding the students that are doing this lights on work. And so I also have to titrate my energy with how much out versus in. So I kept attendance, right? That way I'm not blowing myself out and I could be there for everyone that's there. And I'm going to teach a lot of this, like the postural work with energy movement. So if that's what you do, I'm still pressure here. If that's something you want to do, the details are there. And I'm finishing the sleep modules in lights on right now and personally reconciling my own, like, all trade in rhythms. And I do better with nine hours of sleep. I found shit. That's an inconvenient truth. I have nights where I'm begging my 11 year old to please go to bed when she's like washing her face for the third time because it's my bedtime. And so I'm trying to get to bed and it's getting yourself to a place where you can manage your time to get into bed at the right hour so that you get those seven cycles of proper sleep goes a long way. And I'm about to drive out and look at a multi acre retreat center that we might buy for future encounters. And I'm actually do there in 20 minutes. So I got to go keep doing the work lights on drips every week. The new upstream got course drips every week. It was open. People are like, Hey, this doesn't have anything. It was like, oops, it's supposed to drip every week. And there's really impactful information that's going in there. I've been filming a lot and it's all getting shared with you all. So you'll see it in the coming weeks as it goes live. So that said, I will see you here next week. Same. Yeah, I'll be back. And I'm going on a quick trip, but I'll be back in time. I'll be right here next week. Thank you all.