Posture

One of my students, who has been doing T'ai Chi about 2 years, worked with some of the team who developed MRI scanning (magnetic resonance imaging). She still works in that field and thought it would be good to scan 'normal' posture and 'T'ai Chi' posture and compare them. The MRI scanner is horizontal, noisy and it takes 5 minutes to scan (I have had one, it's like being in a very tiny, cold, techno night club, but with more atmosphere and more interesting outfits,) so whether her posture is exactly what Mark or myself had last corrected her to, or just near to it, I don't know. She said she tucked the tail bone in and imagined standing with the sacrum pushing forwards and downwards, like in class.

It is wonderful to see the natural curves of the back still present in the corrected posture image, but not so extreme, and with the tail really visible and driving forward. The soft tissues are all visible, unlike with x-rays, and you can see the extension of the erector spinae and lumbar muscles as they lengthen and relax, as opposed to the shortened contracted muscles in the c-curve of the normal posture.