It’s been a long and satisfying process to develop the postural patterning system.

At the beginning I didn’t realise that this was what I was doing. I was just trying to find a way to treat and manage the clients who came to see me for physiotherapy.

As seems to often be the case, after getting my feet grounded as a new physio I wanted to know more and to find better results for my clients. Most seemed to get better, sometimes I fear despite my input, but many didn’t or achieved only a functional level of wellness.

I wanted more than that, for myself and for my clients.

I was trained in the western medical model where evidence based recorded outcomes with scientifically based solutions were the accepted method. There was a hierarchy of medical knowledge and we all played our role as part of the team, even the clients.

The clients came to us to get their bodies problems fixed, as you’d take your car to the mechanic. Sometimes they had to stay over in hospital or recover at home for serious problems but if they could manage it, they’d pop in for a tune up once or twice a week. If it had been possible most would have liked to drop their body off for some work while they went off to do more important things, as they would their car.

We were supposed to know how to fix the problems and would get paid by the government or the insurance company or their employer and occasionally by the clients.

This was the norm. Everyone seemed to understand and accept the system, even if they weren’t best served by it.

But I wanted more than that.

At first I thought that the reason I wasn’t getting the results I wanted for my clients was my lack of skill. I kept my head down and tried to learn as much as possible from my peers and courses and experience. Eventually I felt I was doing as well as most physios and I referred some clients to other physios or practitioners if I wasn’t getting the right outcome.

The clients kept coming. They’d bring their problems and we’d work on them. We’d examine their symptoms and seek to resolve them. We’d consider their fitness, their workplace, training regimes, treatment regimes, lifestyle, age, gender, medical interventions and investigations, doctors reports, genetic history and their story.

We’d quantify their problems, their pain, their disability and their suitability for work or sport or independence. We’d diagnose, categorise, label, presuppose and assume.

The clients would come for a while, then disappear. Often to reappear in the not too distant future with a similar problem to the last one, with a new set of funding.

The system began to change and evolve. As physio tried to progress from symptomatic management to outcome management I began to lose heart. This evolution seemed to increase the distance between clients and therapists, when it was supposed to bring them closer.

We were beginning to look at and be responsible for the management of conditions and their outcome rather than the wellness of our clients – the people, and their outcome.

This evolution was driven by the compensable bodies, who were paying for health care. In the attempt to control and rationalise health spending health professionals were increasingly becoming aligned with the management of health care rather than its provision.

I didn’t want to do that.

To my mind there seemed to be two main problems.

The first was that successful health provision and successful health businesses often have different goals. Trying to be a health provider and to run a medical business often led to a moral impasse, an incongruous situation that compromised both endeavours.

The second problem was the nature of the clients’ relationship with health providers. Clients seemed to feel that if they had a health problem they should take it to someone trained and they would fix it. The medically trained ‘someone’ would be waiting to receive them, ready to work on their problem.

Each party knew their place. This meant in effect that the condition was the problem and needed to be fixed, not the person attached to the condition. There was little or no responsibility placed on the client to resolve the problem mentally, emotionally or financially.

Most clients had no idea how to resolve, or even recognise their problems for what they were. Our society doesn’t educate people to understand how their bodies work and how they should be managed, after all, we have specialist health workers for that.

I realised that if people didn’t know how to monitor and manage their own bodies then they couldn’t be blamed for not doing so.

This realisation was the real beginning of Postural Patterning. I’d worked on developing the system for almost twenty years as a treatment method for my own work with clients. It was increasingly successful as I gained more insight and experience but limited to one on one results.

I wanted more than that.

Postural Patterning is a way of giving people an understanding of how their bodies are working and what affect their normal way of doing things is having on their wellness.

It’s a system of learning and awareness. A way of seeing the causes and effects of how we live in our bodies and a way to manage our bodies wellness better. It gives us the chance to take a greater part of our own wellness management rather than having to rely on other people completely.

Postural Patterning is a system that helps people to see and understand their normal postural habits and the affect the imbalance in those patterns has on our wellbeing.

My part in the postural patterning process is to show other people how to teach, learn and experience postural awareness.

This year we will offer courses in several forms. There will be courses for health professionals of different types, courses for specialist application regarding work, sport and wellness. There will be day courses for the general public on three levels and courses for people with similar health conditions and chronic health conditions.

This is an exciting time.

This year will see the first of the Postural Patterning books, “Common Sense for your Body” being published. We have started work on the audio to accompany the work phase of the book and the first video presentation on postural assessment.

We’ve begun free weekly classes to ensure postural patterning is available to everyone. We’ve developed and presented seminars to businesses under the human relations and health and safety banner. We’ve presented free inservice education seminars to physiotherapy practices, hospital departments and other groups.

We’ve created our first course for fitness leaders and personal trainers and are tailoring the postural pattering system to suit other groups of health professionals. We are planning our first one day course for the general public in March 2013.

There is a buzz in the air about how our society will continue to provide health support to everyone. We need to change for many reasons as the present system is becoming increasingly expensive, unmanageable and unsustainable.

The answer lies in moving away from trying to conquer illness and disability and moving towards enhancing peoples’ individual ability to achieve wellness.

This is the age of the evolution of learning. This is the time where providing awareness and tools to achieve wellness will become the hallmarks for the provision of wellbeing in a holistic and preventative way.

Postural Patterning is part of the bigger picture of individual and global wellness.

This is the vision that Postural Patterning is part of, and that you can also be part of.