"In half an hour I enter the hospital again; this time to hopefully get a pacemaker exchange that has been cancelled three or four times already since Christmas due to illness. Despite the risks of infection that my condition carries with the operation (changing it from minor to more major), I am poised for feeling a much-relieved person when I leave hospital today or tomorrow.
Ballet, balance and poise have always interested me, ever since my bad traffic accident at the age of eleven years left me unable to walk again for three years. When I did get my mobility back, one of my legs had stopped growing with the dozens of operations I'd had on it and was three inches shorter than the other leg.
My traffic accident saw me run over by a big waggon, with my body and legs wrapped around the main drive shaft for nearly an hour until workmen were able to untangle and pull me out. After they had spent the first month trying to save my life, I found myself with mangled legs of different length.
Between the ages of 14-19 years, I did everything to restore as much balance and poise to my body as was humanly possible. I engaged in all manner of sports like table tennis, lawn tennis, judo, boxing, running and horse riding. For a brief while, I even became interested in Indian Dance routines. I invariably found all such sports and activities difficult to accomplish without losing my balance and found myself invariably on the floor, having moved too quickly and fallen to the ground.
I particularly found relaxation and meditation methods very beneficial to restoring balance both to mind and body. In my later life as a Probation Officer, for over twenty-five years I became an expert in anger and stress management and in particular, the causes of it and ways of reducing it.
It may sound strange to some of you, but restoring a balance to your mind, your lifestyle and your attitude is far more important than restoring it to one's body, as 'attitude governs action.' Too often in life, we allow harmful attitudes in life to persist and we fall into the trap of living less than honest lives in our dealings with others. As strange as it sounds, if we want to be a straight person and to live a straight life, our starting off point is 'learning to stand up straight and look the other person in the eye.' It is a psychological fact, but we find it almost impossible to look the other person in the eye if we are deceiving them, as it comes unnatural to our automatic body posture and our deceit shows through. Consequently, anchoring one's body force and forcing oneself to look whomever you are speaking to 'straight in the eye', makes telling them an untruth virtually impossible for the vast majority of people.
Decades of research has shown that sitting in a slouched manner and not adopting an upright sitting posture leads to constant backache and lots of unnecessary stress. Sitting up straight has been shown to reduce all bad body posture that results in shoulder and back ache. Telling the truth in all things is a good starting point in life to helping one turn their life around. Another helpful tip I discovered during my years as a Relaxation Trainer was how we can correct our body imbalance by looking at the heels of one's shoes and footwear. We are all bodily imbalanced in some measure and tend to lean our bodies to either the left or the right when we are tense or are being untruthful. So, for instance, if your shoe heel tends to wear down more on the left side, that is the side your body leans when you are being stressful or deceitful. To stop yourself being stressful or deceitful, you have to do the opposite thing! Simply learn to lean towards the upright position when you are next tempted to lie and adopt supple muscles and an easy breathing pattern as you do so.
In my last marriage, my wife frequently got annoyed with the fact that I would often know if/when she was telling me a lie, even when she was stood with her back to me as she spoke because I knew her tell-tale signs of deceit through nothing more than her body posture. We each have 'tension tells' whether it involves standing off-centre in whatever particular way is unique to ourselves. Simply looking at one's worn down heels will show one where correction is required when we walk and stand upright. Believe me, it is easier to be assertive in disposition and tell necessary truths when one is stood upright and one's body is in balance and anchored to the ground upon which we stand. This is one way we can prevent our body moving away from the truth and instead, sticking with what is good and upright." William Forde: March 10th, 2017.