“Dysfunction is an observable condition… the body sends us a message and a picture; I suppose you could call it an anatomical postcard. But we persist in misreading the postcard. One reason is that we’ve gotten so used to seeing the characteristics of dysfunction all around us that they look normal.” Pete Egoscue

I know you’re probably anxious to get to the juicy bits of this book about psychedelics. While I assure you that psychedelic discussion makes up well over a third of this book, it’s impossible to understand the Posturedelic Hypothesis without a good understanding of posture therapy. So in this chapter you’ll learn what good posture really means, why poor posture happens, and how posture therapy causes good posture.

“LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.” - Timothy Leary

The above quote wryly highlights the profound misunderstanding and fear that have historically surrounded psychedelics. Despite such misconceptions, natural psychedelics have been an integral part of human culture for thousands of years, offering both spiritual enlightenment and healing.

“1. The brain uses its world model to predict the sensory information it will receive in the following moment. The brain is constantly trying to predict what will happen next, based upon what it thinks is happening now. 2. Any sensory information that is correctly predicted is extinguished (filtered out). Only the sensory information that the brain fails to predict - surprising information - is absorbed and processed.” -Andrew Gallimore

The previous chapters are a thorough starting place for understanding posture therapy, but there is much more to learn for the interested parties. This comes not just from the hundreds of exercises designed to improve posture. The real skill and art come in the form of functional testing and fitting those hundreds of exercises into the proper sequences to effectively relieve symptoms while accurately predicting the ones likely to worsen symptoms. This kind of finesse only comes with experience.

I studied both Engineering and Computer Science at New Mexico State University. Whether by chance or destiny, these two fields of study prepared me perfectly to be a posture therapist! It wasn’t the life plan I had carved out for myself, but the nature of my severe injuries drove me toward posture therapy instead. But how did these two seemingly completely unrelated fields help me become a better posture therapist?

A Systematic Approach

A posture therapist must complete a final, yet relatively simple step before creating a customized routine based on the posture analysis and functional testing performed so far. Posture categorization further helps to guide both the choice of exercises and the amount of focus that will be placed on various phases of the therapy process.