Introduction The client walks in. He is bent over, his head leans out in front of his hips. He walks stiff-legged. His hips hurt. His back hurts. His feet hurt. Question: Is he seventy-eight or thirty-eight – or twenty-eight? Another client’s spine has lost its curves, her toes don’t bend anymore, and walking hurts her hips. Is she forty or eighty? We see this every day in our practices, regardless of our favorite lens for body readings – whether front/back balance or support or lift or core support. No matter the lens chosen, we are always looking at real or potential ‘structural aging’. I created the term ‘structural aging’ to describe (for our profession) what we see over and over again: the breakdown of structural elements in the human body’s relationship to gravity that creates a look or a feel of ‘aging’. Commonly seen and felt physical complaints show up due to a resistance and fight with structural integrity and the relationship to gravity. It is a loss of the grace of multi-planar movement and spirals that exist throughout the body (and in nature, see Figure 1) and within which our spine and body are inherently made to move. It is where we have lost relationship to the context of our environment. Our proprioceptive sense of where the body begins and ends is altered.
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