Aston® Postural Assessment

A new paradigm for observing and evaluating body patterns

Judith Aston

• Publisher: Handspring Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781912085354
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Medicina alternativa y complementaria

This is a brand new edition of a successful book which was one of the first to encourage movement therapists and bodyworkers to look at the postural causes of movement problems, rather than focusing treatment just on the physical symptoms. The book explains how to measure and assess posture and provides tools for doing so. The author introduces her unique perspective on body mechanics – Aston-Mechanics® – a departure from the standard model of body posture, and provides many opportunities to practice observation and analytical skills based on this paradigm.

Key features

• The author is widely recognized as a pioneer in the art and science of kinetics for her discovery of the Aston® Paradigm and consequent development of the many forms of movement, bodywork, fitness and ergonomics of Aston® Kinetics.
• She created and developedAston® Kineticsas an educational system of movement and bodywork. Rather than enforcing physical symmetry, Aston® Kineticsseeks to recognize the asymmetries that are natural to a person's body and to achieve the best movement possible.
• Her acute ability to 'see' the body in stillness and motion and to train others to see, move and exercise, established her discipline of bodywork and movement training that is known asAston® Kinetics.
• The book is highly illustrated with over 300 photographs and 150 line drawings. All the illustrations are new for this edition.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

My intention for this book is two-fold: 1) To clearly show how the traditional way of evaluating the dysfunction and ideal structure of our bodies needs to be revised in order to move toward our full potential, and 2) to provide a step-by-step manual for practitioners to learn this evolutionary way of seeing and to include these insights in their own practices. Students often ask me ‘How did you come up with this?’ and I hope that, by including some of my personal experiences and empirical observations, I will be able to illustrate how the Aston^® Paradigm evolved into the foundation for all of the Aston^® Kinetics modalities.

This book focuses on the first essential skills taught in the Aston^® Work curriculum, ‘Seeing the Body: Postural Assessment’. In Chapter 8, I have shared some of the underlying perspectives and rationale for the basic principles of the Aston^® Paradigm, as well as exercises to help the reader progressively train their own seeing and evaluation skills. I explain why the observational plumb line needs to shift forward from its traditional location in order to allow for the natural dimensional integrity of the body to appear. I believe that we also need to appreciate how our bodies have a natural functional asymmetry that reflects our physiology and allows us to enter into movement, rather than projecting an unreasonable expectation of symmetry onto a dynamic system.

Just as any movement can be broken down into its component parts, assessment of the body’s proportion, structure and functioning can be made by accurately reading each individual part, its relationship to another part, its relation to the whole structure, and, finally, its availability to the force of gravity and ground reaction force. We need to see ‘what is’ in the context of the theoretical ‘neutral’ in order to know where we need to go. From there we can evaluate the compromises that are being made in the optimal structure and function of the body and how the dimensions and alignment of each part interact.

Accurate assessment and clear notation allow the practitioner to track the changes from session to session and to deduce whether some essential element is being overlooked. They can also reveal what is more causal and what is more secondary in the client’s patterns, which allows for a more efficient sequencing of session work. Application of these observational and analytical skills makes whatever techniques are used more effective.

Beginnings and influences

Something in my nature has always allowed me to see with great accuracy the ways bodies move, and has provided the empirical foundation for my work. My mother told me that, when I was as young as four, I somehow had the skill of being able to mime people’s body patterns and motions so well that my family knew who I was imitating. I would say ‘A lady came by with these papers for you.’ ‘What was her name?’ ‘I don’t know but she walked like this...’ My mother would laugh and say ‘Oh, that’s Mrs Brown!’

I would dance around the house constantly. My mother said that she enrolled me in the local dance studio as the only way to have some peace and quiet. I studied and performed recitals with this studio until I was 14.

For three years in high school I assisted Mrs Martha Walker in her classes for blind students. Her husband, Mr Del Walker, was the head of the Physical Education department at the college. In 1963, when I was 21, I was hired by Long Beach Community College to set up a Dance Department and to create and teach movement programs for the Physical Education, Theatre, Music and Community Education departments on their recommendation.

This funny story illustrates one of the experiences that influenced how I developed the Aston-Kinetics curricula so many years later. One of the classes I was required to teach the athletes was Social Dance. Whenever one of the students, a talented runner who had won many 440 m events, was trying to do the foxtrot, he awkwardly seemed to be weighted on one foot while trying to step on the same foot. When I asked his buddies if there was some concern I should know about, they said ‘Are you kidding? Come to practice and see for yourself.’ I watched him run: he was smooth, efficient and graceful. I had to determine what was getting in his way when he was asked to dance and how to interrupt that unsuccessful pattern of thought and movement. I intuitively tapped into the movements that his body was accustomed to: instead of teaching dance moves, I asked him to perform series of slow and fast runs, forward and backward and to either side. I held onto his hands while facing him and as I gradually led him into the foxtrot box step, he said ‘Miss Aston, I’m dancing!’ Coach Walker had been watching all of this, and when he caught up with me he remarked that I had an interesting running style. This was puzzling to me at the time, as I would jump, skip and run without any conception about how to do the actions. I learned later how to break down any movement pattern into its component actions, actions that could each be ‘re-patterned’ through a combination of first releasing unnecessary tensions and then learning new, more efficient and less effortful, natural movement sequences. Even later, I discovered how to use the Earth’s laws of gravity and ground reaction force to assist us as we move through our lives.

In 1964 I started my masters program at UCLA. I had taken introductions to both psychology and theatre. But somehow it became my focus to combine dance with theatre and psychology for my thesis. The relationship between movement and the psyche has continued to be a life-long interest, and one of the elements in the Aston-Kinetics training. I find that our bodies manifest their interpretations of emotion, fatigue, anxiety, enthusiasm, etc., and that all of these states have a corresponding influence on the body’s chemistry and holding patterns, which need to be neutralized before they become our new normal.

I offered my first Stage Movement course in 1965. It quickly became apparent that the young acting students were limited in their character expression by their lack of awareness of their own body postures and habitual movement patterns. They needed to be able to see posture and movement in order to build character expressions that were clearly different from their own.

Around the same time I had been asked to create movement programs for a human potential center, Kairos, in La Jolla, California. These participants included group leaders from the Esalen Institute as well as many other experts in the fields of psychology, movement, bodywork and the human potential movement. One of the psychiatrists asked me if I could create a program for his patients who attended his weekend seminars at Kairos.

Then, in late 1966 and mid-1967 I had two serious car accidents. In one, I was rear-ended by someone going 50+ miles an hour when I was at a stop. This left me in a great deal of back and sciatic pain – I was unable to fully stand up, and I was slightly bent over with most of my weight over my right leg. At the conclusion of my course of physical therapy, I was shocked and angered when the final report from the hospital said that they could find no real cause for my pain and that it must be in my head. I consulted the psychiatrist from Kairos who had commissioned my work, saying that the pain felt physically real. He believed me, and recommended that I should see Dr Ida Rolf, who would be visiting Esalen in the spring of 1968.

When I arrived in Big Sur, California, Dr Rolf was fully booked with client sessions, and so I sat on her doorstep for two days until she had a cancellation and I had my first session. I knew immediately that she was someone who knew how to change body patterns and improve function. She must have made enquiries into who the strange woman was sitting on her doorstep, because at t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• About the author
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Foreword by Thomas W Myers
• Foreword by Darlene Hertling
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Alignment and geometric shapes
• 3. Seeing alignment shifts from the side
• 4. Seeing alignment shifts from the front view
• 5. Seeing alignment and horizontal tilts from four views
• 6. Seeing rotations
• 7. Combining tracks
• 8. Aston theory and concepts: Part 1
• 9. Aston theory and concepts: Part 2
• 10. Aston theory and concepts: Part 3
• 11. Integrating seeing into your practice
• Index