Adventures in body mechanics

Now here's a bizarre problem for you: how do you correct the way your body is built and moves?

At about the age of 12, I lost the arches in my feet and spent 15 years with orthodic insoles in my shoes, avoiding running long distances because they would cause my knees to swell and lock up for days. Needless to say, it kind of sucked.

Then, about two years ago I started visiting a chiropractor who over the course of several months made adjustments to me that repaired the arches in both feet, albeit temporarily. Since then it's been an ongoing battle to continue to maintain a corrected foot articulation as more than ten years of displacement mean that my bones now naturally align in the wrong spot.

Recently, I've been finding that this has had a huge effect on my poi spinning--especially with regards to foot and body work. A video my girlfriend recorded several months ago of me practicing on top of a wall in Ocean City, MD showed that my gait was a rather underwhelming knock-kneed posture. While the vast majority of techies I know are focused on what the hands are doing, I'm also aware that every other human being the world has been watching me performing and wondering if I have to pee.

To try and get myself in a more performance-worthy posture, I've been attacking my habit of sitting cross-legged when sitting for long periods of time, reasoning that if my inner leg muscles are tightening involuntarily a big part of the reason why could be that that's the posture they remain in for most of the day. Truth be told, the last time my body had this kind of annoyance with me was when I quit caffeine and went through withdrawl. It's definitely made me more irritable, and ironically enough reminds me a lot of a passage from a Michael Crichton book I once read called Travels.

In it, Crichton goes through an entity removal with some New Age-y friends and finds afterwards that after arguments he felt as though a mental place he could retreat and sulk had disappeared and that he was now forced to more directly confront issues that arose around him. Similarly, I feel as though a place I used to go hide in my head has now disappeared and part of my irritability seems to stem from not being able to access a "safe" place inside my head.

Whether its psychosomatic or not, it does make me wonder about the link between body and mind and how embracing physical activities reshapes us both physically and psychologically. In the meantime, my legs are much more easily accepting a normal gait and videos are certainly showing my legwork to be improving as a result. We'll see what happens as the experiment continues.