Caitlin Craig Body Mapping exercises

While reading Chapter 2 of What Every Singer Needs To Know About The Body I gained a lot of insight about posture, my spine and how it is the support and weight-bearing part of my body, and the points of balance. Today I spent some time body mapping and going over the exercises and found some interesting discoveries. I realized today that I haven't had an awareness of my spine at all. I've always felt that I had a pretty upright posture (besides the part where I like to collapse below my chest) but I felt like this gave me a completely different way of holding my body up. The exercise where I had to think of posture in different terms (i.e. springy, balance, and buoyant) was very eye opening. I found that balance gave me a centered feeling as I stood in the mirror, but buoyant and springy gave me the energy that my body regularly lacks. Because I learned the proper location of my spine, and its functions I think the other exercise of feeling the spine on your back vs. feeling the spine in the deep center of your body was quite interesting. The part where I stood against a wall to straighten out the curvature of my spine felt awful, and then correcting it by standing up whilst having my skeleton support the weight of my body felt like a relief.

I even noticed that as I was walking home today, it felt different knowing that my lower lumbar vertebrae are in the deep center of me. I carried myself differently, and it almost felt as if I was as light as a feather. I found these exercises to be very eye-opening, and I'm excited to see how it changes my singing.