So much of our daily lives we spend hunched over our keyboards, peering at our monitors, slouched down in chairs that are not anatomically designed for our bodies. Our newly-acquired (in the scale of evolution) sedentary lifestyle is so far removed from our former active lives. Recall in past history the occupation of most of mankind was simply to eke out a living, scraping it from the nooks and crannies of a particularly hostile and formidable environs.
Hunter/gatherers, nomadic foragers, hunters seeking even the smallest game in thick and forbidding snows, the potato famine, the manual labors of civilizations to pull themselves from the dregs of disease and catastrophe to the utopia of a shining golden era. (Will someone let me know when we get there please? I'd like to stop and stay a while!)
Then, we had the industrial revolution, the creation of machines to simplify and promote mass-production, all this technology to simplify our lives, to enhance our medical care, to prolonge our lives, to let us live lives of leisure. We know engage in a battleground of the mind - we exchange our time for time spent running a computer. Very few goods these days are made by hand, and our valuation of items has ceased to create wonderment. We are a throw-it-away kind of culture. Your DVD player breaks? You throw it away and buy a new one. But your granddad built an armoire by hand over countless hours in a woodshop, sawing, carving, sanding and staining a unique and wonderful piece of family heirloom history? Irreplaceable.
The advancement of the human race in some ways has come, staggeringly propelling us into the future; and in others, has come to a screeching halt. How many of the Average Joe & Jane office workers get ANY amount of exercise into their computer-and-electronically jammed days? Instead of a society of hands-on, we are intellectually brains-in. This means bodies are out. Out of shape, out of strength and out of whack.
Of course we've all been hammered with the information that America is experiencing an obesity epidemic. We have more than we can consume, and consume we do. We eat more than we need, we super-size our portions and eat foods that fill us with calories, but not with nutritional content. We have come to a point in our civilization that our health suffers precisely because of our (relative) wealth.
The advantages of dental care, modern medical treatment, increased nutritional availabity and so forth have expanded our life spans to more than double that of ancient man. But what are we doing with our leisure? Plugged into the same screens we spend our days in front of, scanning Pinterest, engaging in the online gossip of Facebook, looking at cartoons about cats. Yes, I'm as guilty as the next. When's the last time you watched the sunset, or rise (if you're one of those incomprehensible morning people) and truly just took a moment to leave your endless worries and just be present. When's the last time you truly stopped to appreciate the leaves on the trees as they change color and fall to the earth? When is the moment you stood by the water and listened to its song?
Even in our office-bound lives, we still can find a release of our tensions - to take a few minutes to stretch, re-invigorate our bodies and minds, to find stillness for a moment amid the hustle and e-bustle of our modern lives.
For an awesome article on Office Yoga, please check out:
http://www.yogajournal.com/basics/751
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