How Posture Impacts the Rest of Your Life: An Interview with Evie Garcia
As I embark on a more focused journey of spiritual embodiment, I am becoming increasingly aware just how much information and intelligence our physical body holds. Our body knows when it’s off balance, what it needs, and what in our external world is causing the imbalance. It can detect energy outside of us and know how it will affect us on the inside. Our body is a sophisticated and intricate weave of cosmic wonders and we need to respect and care for it.
Naturally, when I met Evie Garcia, a Postural Alignment Therapist and a passionate healer throughout her life (and possibly many lifetimes before), we couldn’t stop talking about the amazing interconnectedness of our body, mind, soul and how something as little as how we sit every day can affect our health.
If you’ve never heard of posture therapy, it treats anyone with chronic pain (back, neck, shoulders, knees, etc.), headaches, bunions, hip hikes, can help prevent a hip/knee replacement, and mitigate pain for anyone with scoliosis, sciatica, gait issues, lymphatic drainage blockages, “tight” body parts, TMJ, Tennis elbow, degenerative/herniated discs, foot/ankle pain, plantar fasciitis, etc. It’s individualized and relationship based — through the process of working with your therapist, you’ll learn to trust yourself and your body and regain self-awareness at a whole new level.
In this interview, Evie shares a generous amount of her knowledge and experience with this therapy, plus some of the simple things you can do to relieve pain in certain areas of your body.
Q:
How did you become a posture alignment therapist and what about it intrigued you?
A:
It’s a long story. I went to school for Exercise Science at Fresno State University. That’s where I grew up and where my family lives. After school, I started an internship with a college professor who owned a gym and worked with kinesiology. He trained me about the fascia lines, the interconnectedness of the body and how to see it holistically. He also started teaching me the patterns of the body, but at the time, I wasn’t quite ready to embrace it. I ended up leaving to go to Santa Monica, and lived there for about a year.
The main reason for my move was to look after an aunt who just had a spinal cord injury. During my stay, I vacationed a good amount, haha, and then found a gym in Santa Monica called Level Five and started working there. It’s no longer there but they primarily focused on fitness and most importantly, posture. The owner there had 15 years of experience with a company called Egoscue, and Egoscue focused on pain mitigation and alignment. His vision is to work with athletes and make sure that they get stronger but most importantly aligned and healthy. So our job as coaches was to make sure they were functional enough to join our classes. So each person had to go through a mini journey of their own first. I loved his whole vision and the way he approached strengthening the body. But what I discovered about myself is that I love the one-on-one connections with individual clients more. So after my time was done at Level Five, I moved back to Fresno. I ended up staying longer than I had originally intended because a good friend had passed away and I got into an accident resulting in some injuries. So there was a good amount of healing I needed to do for myself. And then COVID happened.
During COVID, I went back into personal training while getting my own mental health back on track and started working at a non-traditional gym called SCI-FIT that works with people with spinal cord injuries and neurological disorders. It was an interesting space where neurotherapists worked with people as if they were trainers. During my time there, I got to practice a lot of my posture work with clients because they went hand in hand. One of my best friends at the time became paralyzed from a hiking accident and the exercises I’ve given her were actually able to help her keep her spine more erect. It was cool to work with that clientele because you really have to find creative ways to make things work for every single one of them. When I discovered that even when you move a certain body part manually for someone who is paralyzed, they can actually feel it in a different part of their body. Everything is still connected for them, they just needed a stimulus. That essentially sparked my vision for what I really wanted to do — to have my own business and to work with individuals to help them heal and get stronger.
So I started to transition toward working part time at the gym doing neuro exercise therapy and my own posture therapy work part time. A year and a half later, I got offered an opportunity at Egoscue here in Newport Beach to work as a full-time posture therapist. It was the company affiliated with the previous gym I had worked at — life came full circle. It was a very hard decision, but something was telling me to take the opportunity and experience working at a clinic, so I did. I ended up taking on the majority of all the work at the clinic and really proved to myself that I could run a clinic on my own. So a stressful year later, I left to start my own business, with no clients and a fresh new beginning.
Q:
How do mental and emotional traumas affect posture, and can posture affect mental and emotional health, too?
A:
Just remember, when we talk about mind-body, that the mind actually represses things but our body never forgets. I have worked with many women who have been physically abused and all of them have very similar postural positions. They were all based on fear, how you react to fear and those really bad experiences in life. Your body will experience it before your mind will, most of the time. And as you already know, in Chinese medicine, different emotions connect to different fascia lines and different fascia lines connect to different organs as well. So with that, your body is going to change based on your emotions and your health will change as well.
In reverse, your mentality and emotions can also change based on your posture. If you are sitting all the time in a curled up position, it will affect how you feel about yourself overall because you are becoming smaller over time. And the fetal position is a protective position we are wired to go into when we feel scared and endangered. The flip side is the well-known superman pose that makes you look and feel bigger and more confident. So in the work that I do, I will sometimes give you a posture that opens you up, in a way that your body will feel more comfortable, not necessarily your mind.
I had worked with 2 women who were both abused and in their 60s. When they came to me, they were both very shy and very quiet and experienced a lot of pain in their body. They had emotions stored in specific parts of their body and never dealt with the root of the issue. They thought it was just a muscular-skeletal issue, and never knew that emotions could affect their body. It wasn’t until we started talking about what happened to them and who had hurt them that their body started to release and accept the exercises that were given to them, and that’s when the pain went away. Then at that point, it’s more maintenance. The pain that you put in your body, whether it’s emotional or physical, will eventually show up later on in life; even if it’s not right away, it always resurfaces. This can be posturally, pain, cancer, or other illnesses.
That’s why it’s very important for me to get to know each individual, not only in the way they think but how they were raised and what they’ve gone through, because that’s going to tell me how their body moves, what it's comfortable in, and how I can strategically tackle the issue at hand. Every individual’s therapy is customized differently because of this. Sometimes, it’s not just addressing the muscular-skeletal issues for my clients but having them face emotional issues and let go of them to make our work easier and more effective.
Q:
What are some of the most common posture mistakes people make on a daily basis?
A:
There are so many but here are some I see a lot of:
The tech-neck – people looking down at their phones, keeping their head down either texting or browsing through social media. So I just recommend that you raise your phone and try to keep it at eye level as much as possible so it’s not keeping your head down and rounding your shoulders.
Women arch their backs these days to push out their butt and make them look bigger, and that’s really bad for your back. That’s how we end up with lower back pain a lot of times. I would recommend that you not over extend and to relax the belly. The minute your belly is relaxed your spine goes into a more neutral position.
Sucking in your belly is a common one. Many of us were taught to suck in our stomach when we were little and that can change the way we breathe and cause lower back issues. So keep your belly relaxed as much as possible.
Q:
Can you share some quick and easy exercises to help relieve lower back pain?
A:
If you have lower back pain, this is a really simple and highly effective pose to reduce your pain. You take a chair (a non-swivel one) and place your legs on the chair to form a 90-degree angle with your thighs, while laying on your back. It’s very important to have them at a 90-degree angle so that your back is in a neutral position. You can do this 5-10 minutes daily for pain relief. That one is a great go-to and I recommend it often to anyone who wants to relieve back pain or just wants to ground themselves and feel more connected to their body.
(See image below.)
Q:
What are the courses and services you currently offer?
A:
I offer one-on-one sessions either in person or virtually, and it really depends on what each person is seeing me for. Some people see me to improve their performances and some for healing. If they are here with chronic pain or know that they want to continue working with me for some time, I usually suggest an 8-session package. If it’s an issue they’ve been struggling with for a long time, then I would suggest twice weekly sessions and that will be a 16-session package. I also offer single sessions for people who don’t know me very well and want to give them the flexibility to come and go if they want to.
At the end of the day, I am open to work with them and their comfort level. But my work is about changing habits and it’s not a Band-Aid solution. It’s my job to find the ROOT CAUSE of the chronic pain/physical limitation; the sooner we can find that, the sooner we can work on the main dysfunction causing the symptom(s). Once those are tackled, the symptoms they’ve been experiencing will go away. Remember, joints and muscles compensate for what’s not working so when another body part takes the job of a joint that’s not in alignment with its function, it’ll overwork and develop pain. This is why the location of the pain is rarely ever where the real issue is.
I’m here to work with the people who are ready to do the work, who want to understand themselves a little more and be consistent with developing good habits every day. In fact, at the clinic I used to work at, we call it foundation training. Because we are really helping to train your deep inner muscles to keep you stable and strong, so you can build towards the outside of yourself. So as long as you’re conditioning new patterns for your body you will see results.
I am also developing several workshops to address specific needs, one of which will be to help align and educate pregnant women. A woman’s body goes through many changes after child birth and if they don’t align themselves during that time, they may see many issues surface later on in their body. I also want to provide exercises for these women that can help stabilize the pelvis and mitigate pains such as lower back pain throughout their pregnancy. Proper pelvic stabilization can also prevent premature birth and other issues during delivery.
Evie Garcia is a Postural Alignment Therapist based in Orange County, California. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Kinesiology with a focus on Exercise Science from CSU, Fresno. Her certifications include Egoscue Certified Postural Alignment Therapy (7 years), NASM CPT, Functional Movement Systems, and Reiki Level 1. Evie's experience working with individuals with Spinal Cord Injuries and Neurological Disorders has provided her with an edge in her field of work. Evie is passionate about exploring the full spectrum of health and wellness. She now serves as a Holistic Trainer and Therapist dedicated to helping people enhance their quality of life.
You can connect with Evie on Instagram, TikTok, or email her directly at hbalignment@gmail.com. You can find out more about what Evie offers by visiting her website.
