Singing and posture–see Categories, About, Launch 4-2014

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324595704578241642030220064.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs%3Dcomments

Hi Michael,

That’s one way of looking at it.   A reverse way is perhaps sleeping (and also as described in my above post, daytime standing, walking, and sitting) positions can reduce stressors.

Certainly, when one is physically exhausted, falling asleep is rapid.   Why not, then, also mental exhaustion or agitation?  Eastern mystics have always emphasized the role of meditation in relaxing the mind.   How does sleep affect this?

The first and most critical step of meditation is to straighten the spine.  When one sleeps, one can become bent in numerous ways, such that some muscles are overstretched and some understretched.   A natural straightening of the spine will help these muscles to attain correct tone.

Stressors are usually compounded by out-of-tone muscles and glands.   The reasons why takes some time to explain and will be skipped here.  The general idea is to allows the stressors’ muscular and glandular compounding to be reduced by counteracting muscles, to achieve good muscular tonicity.   With this, the degree of stress felt reduces rapidly.

Hence, proper sleeping position, in my opinion, is optimal on the back, such that the spine’s S shape is properly stretched, and then stretching other muscle groups during sleeping movements. Unfortunately, to get to this point, one may need to do lots of extra stretching work.  Once one has sleeping illnesses, it takes some time and effort to recover.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324595704578241642030220064.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs%3Darticle

Nature’s millions years’ of evolutionary design has already predisposed mankind to proper sleeping position and posture.

Sleeping posture should be seen as part of overall posture.  This article speaks about treating pains with adjusting sleeping positions (and some parts are even inaccurate–for example, with acid reflux, do raise the bed, but don’t prop the head with pillows as article describes, because this bent head-chest position pushes the esophagus closer to acid).   But, the question remains of how is it people have differing sleeping pains to begin with?   How is it that different sleeping positions relieve, or should we really examine using reverse logic, what position-posture caused the pains?

Artificial comfort devices always has some kind of negative affect on evolutionary design, and the bed and pillow are artificial devices.  State-of-nature  sleeping surfaces are usually relatively firm and without pillow.  On such surface, the optimal evolutionary position is most frequently sleeping on the back.

So, how is it that sleeping backside is less common?   The bed and pillow enable these other positions, and over long time, contribute to the mentioned pains.   To properly solve these pains, the view needs to be taken of  incorporating posture-positions and ergonomic furniture during daytime, including sitting and head angles, (chairs, desks, shoes, and even eyeglasses are all artificial devices!) as well as degree of physical activity.

This is not to say changing sleeping positions won’t alleviate pains.  It does say that to prevent such pains involve changing the ergonomic environment daytime and nighttime, so that the efficient-Nature-designed body doesn’t have the pains to begin with.