Reclaim Your Squatters’ Rights

In 1852, an English colonialist working in India voiced his complaints about the local workmen. He was particularly irritated and offended that blacksmiths, carpenters, and masons squatted to work, complaining indignantly, “All work with their knees nearly on a level with their chin: the left hand – when not used as the kangaroo uses his tail to form a tripod – grasps the left knee and binds the trunk to the doubled limbs.” This man was not the first or last to liken people who sit on floors to animals. He was more explicit than many about why he found the posture inferior: it suggested “indolence and inefficiency…especially irritating to an Englishman,” but even more so to one who hires and pays such workmen.

Warning: sitting may be hazardous to your health

Consider this: even if downward facing dog is your favorite asana of all time, would you spend 5 hours a day in it?

The first problem with sitting is that we spend too much time in this one pose. The human body is designed for flow and movement! Furthermore, chair sitting is the worst shape we could choose to spend long hours in – it’s much harder on our bodies than standing. Remember, we are talking about a shape you might hold for 35 to 70 hours a week, year after year. The damage done by chair sitting is insidious because it happens so slowly that we don’t even notice it.

Dr. Galen Cranz, in her book The Chair – Rethinking Body, Culture and Design, reports on research indicating that spending long hours in chair asana diminishes your core range of motion and contributes to a list of health problems you’d rather not have on your resume: back pain, disc degeneration, fatigue, stress, varicose veins, and problems with elimination, circulation and digestion. Worse yet, when sitting in a chair, pressure on the spinal discs is 30 percent greater than when standing. Sitting in chairs strains the spinal column, back muscles, lower back nerves and the diaphragm.

Our sedentary, office-bound lifestyles are a recent cultural pattern. Not so long ago, even if people had chairs in their homes, the demands of their lives guaranteed that they rarely sat for very long. We are primates. Squatters and tree climbers. Animals. Watch what your cats and dogs do all day long. What is natural for us is to move – to change positions often – to flex, bend, twist, lean, wiggle, and stretch through our days. Instead, we have become devotees of chair asana.

Sadly, our devotion is misplaced. The design of a chair has nothing to do with what is good for us. Chairs are like a 21st century equivalent of foot binding or corsets – a strange cultural habit we inherited without understanding the consequences. Someday we’ll look back on chairs the way we do now on cigarettes and wonder how something so bad for us was accepted and used everywhere without being questioned.

According to Dr. Cranz “…holding any posture for long periods of time is the ultimate problem; but holding the classic right-angle seated posture in particular has its special stresses, which no amount of ergonomic tinkering can eliminate.”

Connect With Your Connective Tissue

The connective tissue of our core joints is in a relentless state of contracture. You might say we are shrink-wrapped and the wrapping’s getting tighter. This process accelerates as we age.

When your body conforms to the angular shape of a chair, your spine is at a 90 degree angle to your femurs (thighs) and your femurs are at a 90 degree angle to your lower legs. When you hold this half-flexed, compressive shape for hours at a time over years, your connective tissue shrinks to conform to this underuse of your range of motion and the mobility of core joints becomes more and more compromised. Hamstrings get shorter and tighter and you lose the flexibility of the hips and lumbar spine.

If you’ve lost mobility you can start to regain it by getting off of chairs and hanging out in shapes that demand deeper openness. A great way to do that is to spend more time on the earth. The way our bodies need to shift and move when our hips and feet are on the same plane cultivates core mobility. Squatting does that. So do other shapes we move into when hanging out at kissing level with toddlers. Floor time is core time.

Reclaim Your Squatters' Rights

Squatting is often associated with the poor and humble people of the world. It’s the shape that people naturally fold into to work, poop, give birth and hang out in cultures where even the elders remain fluid and flexible throughout their lives.

Think of Asia, Africa and beyond – people are working the rice fields of India, playing music in Ghana, waiting for a bus in Nicaragua, and they are all squatting. Businessmen in China, wearing their suits, squat when waiting for the train. These people have an innate body wisdom that chair sitters have lost. In a mistaken notion of becoming civilized, we’ve given up full flexion (femurs to ribcage, i.e. squatting,) our essential beneficial asana.

As yogins and yoginis our practice includes the seva (service) of helping to reduce unnecessary suffering in the world. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 2005 Americans spent 85.9 BILLION dollars looking for relief from back and neck pain through surgery, doctor’s visits, X-rays, MRI scans and medications, up from $52.1 billion in 1997. That is a LOT of suffering. Over the years, I’ve met quite a few people who have reduced or eliminated back pain simply by learning to hang out in a squat.

We in the yoga community are the perfect folks to start the ripple effect of the Squat Revolution. We are usually wearing comfortable clothing that allows us to drop into a squat anywhere. We’re used to smooshing into unusual shapes around other people. Our practice includes cultivating a spirit of good cheer, a sense of humor and a smile. If we start squatting in public places, we’ll give others enormous permission to start squatting, too. Hint: When I’m squatting out in the world if people look at me a little suspiciously I just say that I’m doing my back exercises. It’s a good opener and people often start asking questions.

Denise Kaufman