3 September

Know how when a gadget plays up, often the easiest way to fix it is to just reboot? Turn it off and on? Reading the work of the remarkable Australian anatomist Raymond Dart made me realise our bodies have an on/off switch too, a way to reboot. It’s pretty remarkable, and simple, have been testing it on myself. If you lay on the floor, preferably on a carpet or rug, in a supine position, or semi-supine (knees up - see the pic, couple of paperbacks under your head), you reboot yourself. Being horizontal like that cancels out the usual gravitational forces we’re subjected to in our daily activities. The effect that has on you is actually far-reaching and is one of the reasons I suspect we sleep every night horizontally too, to do this rebooting. Your breathing normalises to a beautiful smoothness, and any knotted tensions in your body unwind. You ‘unwind’, literally, the torques you accumulate during the day unravel. Because our minds aren’t a separate thing to our bodies, this also starts to unknot tension in your thoughts too. We often have massages or do stretching or other bodywork to try to relieve ourselves of body aches and pains, but usually this doesn’t last long because we’re focusing on bits of ourselves. This horizontal unwinding though is very different, because it unwinds all of you, at once. Lay there long enough, and be aware of your body, and you’ll feel how it’s all connected to itself, and to the world around it, through the floor. You reboot, it changes how you go about daily upright things too, you start to feel the forces directly, and the connections. Give it a good 20 minutes, once or twice a day, the payoff can be enormous. (You can try prone position too, though semi-supine is probably the best one to do the most often. Supine then becomes a great sleeping position.)