Kathleen Porter has traveled the world researching natural skeletal alignment in people who have never lost what we all once knew as healthy toddlers. The author of Ageless Spine, Lasting Health: The Open Secret to Pain-free Living and Comfortable Aging and Sad Dog Happy Dog: How Poor Posture Affects Your Child’s Health & What You Can Do About It, she has taught principles of natural alignment through the University of Hawaii at Hilo, the National College of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon and is currently on the faculty of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. A longtime student of meditation, she previously taught yoga for many years and is the director for the Center for Natural Alignment in Portland, Oregon.
In Kathleen’s words:
“My love affair with aligned bones began with an interest in human anatomy and a wish to better understand how the human body works. This interest grew out of years of experiencing tension and pain in my body that never resolved itself, no matter what I tried. I was trained as a massage therapist and a yoga teacher, and taught yoga for many years in Hilo and Volcano Village on the Big Island of Hawaii. I also studied Alexander Technique, Aston Patterning and other somatic techniques. I eventually learned the one key element that had been missing in my understanding—the support of aligned bones—from Jean Couch, founder of the Balance Center in Palo Alto, who was first introduced to these concepts by Noelle Perez of Paris, France.
Learning this was to change my life in ways I could never have imagined. Over time, I came to realize that my own particular approach to practicing and teaching yoga, while it did emphasize deep relaxation and “letting go” into a pose (asana), nonetheless reinforced chronic tensions in my body. This was because what I believed about “correct” alignment, based on 
what I’d been taught, turned out to be mistaken. (Yoga, as a practice that promotes deep relaxation and cultivates a capacity for enhanced awareness is a very good thing. How the physical details of yoga are practiced, however, can, and often do, give a false sense of it being helpful to us). For instance, I had no idea at the time that I was actively teaching yoga, that I had become addicted to stretching, an activity I had to repeat regularly in order to feel good. I also didn’t realize that whatever flexibility I had gained from stretching was neither genuine nor useful in the long run. Once I learned how to align my bones according to the human design and began to put this into practice in everything I did, all day long, longstanding tensions began to drop away, and I no longer experienced that familiar urge to stretch. This was not a quick fix, of course (there is no such thing!), but by learning how to sit, stand, bend, walk, reach, lift, carry and sleep in a wholly natural way, I re-discovered an authentic kind of strength, easy flexibility and fluid movement that is in stark contrast to the artificial, contrived kind of strength and flexibility I once worked so hard to “acquire”.
The most profound outcome of learning how to align one’s bones (besides relief from tension and pain and improved health!) is that this approach is, ultimately, a mindfulness practice—a meditation on the body throughout the day that bestows benefits that go far beyond just feeling good. Who knew that something as “mundane” and “ordinary” as aligned bones could serve as an anchor to the present moment and a doorway to heightened awareness! The changes that I witnessed in myself and many others who have learned to apply these principles to themselves, awakened a passion in me (read: obsession) that caused me to turn my entire life upside down (or, more accurately, right side up!) in order to dedicate myself to spreading the news of this remarkable and overlooked information.
Much of my research has been conducted through working with people struggling with chronic pain, with older elementary age public school students and their teachers, and through travel abroad to gather photographs and interviews with people who live in strong, flexible bodies far into old age. Naturally aligned people of advanced age are difficult to find in the West, and in 2003-2004, I took off in search of people who had lived their entire lives in accordance with nature’s design. I was also inspired to meet and photograph those legendary women who successfully, and easefully, carry heavy loads on their heads. Many of the photographs in Ageless Spine, Lasting Health and Sad Dog Happy Dog were taken during my travels to the Cook Islands, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and Portugal.
As a longtime student of meditation, I have sat in long retreats, often confronting agonizing pain. After learning how to align my own bones, I spent two months in silent meditation at a forest monastery in Burma (Myanmar), where meditation continued almost continuously from 3:30 A.M. to 9:00 P.M., seven days a week. Over the course of time, knowing how to let my bones support me while sitting and walking helped me learn how to surrender more than resist, to relax more than to hold tension, and gave me an opportunity to tune in deeply to the most subtle details of my body’s sensations: how it breathes, how it creates and holds onto tensions, how it lets go, how it feels when it is aligned, how it feels when it is not, and how this body interacts with, affects and IS the mind. Such an approach to meditation, one that includes the body rather than tries to transcend it’s earthly, embodied reality, is a remarkably transformative path.
Ultimately, changing longstanding habits of use of the body is not something that can be done to us by someone else, but rather, something that is an “inside job” that we can only do for ourselves through a continuous process of cultivating awareness. We forget, and then we remember, and then we forget, and we remember again, and then we begin again and again and again, all day, every day, on and on and on. With steadiness and determination, we keep returning to a quality of mind, right here within our skin. This mind/body state becomes more and more familiar, more and more of who we actually are as physical, embodied consciousness. Eventually, we may even touch “home”, a place that can only be recognized with a still mind, an open heart, and an easeful body. Such an outcome is less important than the continuous intention to travel through the moments of this life with a mind/body that welcomes joyful presence over the distracting, noisy clutter of habitual thinking. This is the locus where body, mind and spirit all align and merge as/with One. Transcending the body is a spiritual/psychological concept that, while it may have relevance in an ultimate, absolutist sense, does not make a lot of sense in normal daily life. Human consciousness resides in a living, breathing physical body that is rooted to the earth, just like all other species. While the upright human body can be viewed as a bridge between “heaven” and “earth”, it is a mistake to downplay or dismiss our deep connection to this earth. Such disconnection not only contributes to the epidemic of back pain, (and ankle, knee hip and shoulder pain, along with other ailments), it may well lie at the heart of such widespread disengagement from and destruction of this planet, on which we depend. By re-aligning ourselves with our nature as human “creatures” of the earth and accepting that we are governed by it’s laws, we return to our natural “home base” and recognize ourselves to be individual microcosms of this earth, neither separate from it nor from each other. Such is the dharma of the body.
– Kathleen Porter
