To sit or not to sit that is the question...

This little ‘sitting’ thing has grown into a big dilemma in my mind throughout many years of CE experiences working in different places and countries. Now I have decided what it is I believe and I have decided that I will stick to my own ideas whatever the absolute truth is.
The question is: to sit or not to sit on the plinth during CE delivery. Well, I will answer it first as I learnt it and then, think about it twice. This little problem has different angles from which to approach it. During my training at the Peto Institute, Hungary, I was taught not to sit on the plinth in any circumstances because the plinth belonged to the client’s personal territory and it was his/her personal education tool and this we highly appropriated in the conductive education system. Parallel to this I worked as a teacher at the State Institute of the Motor Disabled, Budapest, where there was a CE department and where I met great, enthusiastic, passionate older generations of conductors who learnt from Andras Peto himself. I learnt a lot from these conductors and it was here that I feel I was “made” into a conductor.
Some of these conductors were, interestingly, occasionally sitting on the plinth during lying programs or when clients were also sitting on it in order to facilitate them. When I asked them why they were doing so they would tell me I would learn why after 20 years of service. Their answers were, of course, indications of their own state of health.
Since I am graduated from Peto Institute, I worked in different CE environments in Hungary, Germany, Singapore, USA and in the UK. I met many different points of views. At the majority of places it was taken for granted that to sit on the plinth was OK in any circumstances and there was just no need to open up a discussion about it. In my opinion the worse has happened here in the UK when one of my former colleagues sat on the plinth when it was being used as a table with children sitting around it.
So after many years of experience, I decided to put this little thing in its rightful place. On the one hand, I highly appropriate the philosophy of CE and I try most of the time not to sit on the plinth, however, as the older conductors led me to imagine, there are some very questionable parts of this philosophy from the point of few of a conductors’ health.
Just imagine how unhealthy it is to lean forward and maintain this position for longer periods of time while facilitating, when the client is on a low plinth or when the client is very heavy and you actually propose to lift parts of his body in this position. The health and safety based manual handling book says that you must avoid such movements. Unfortunately, I know of many conductors of my age, or older, who have been sentenced to follow a career other than CE because of terrible spine or other CE related health conditions.
A couple of years ago I did a short search to find out what has been written in our training books or what can be read about it on the Net.

The result was strange. There was no such rule written down anywhere. Nothing to say that you are not allowed to sit next to your client. So, I decided the following that I wish to declare state now:
I totally believe in the philosophy of CE. However, we need to enjoy it responsibly. If the plinth functions as a bed or a tool on which people sit or work I would consider sitting on if it is easier for me to facilitate in this way. This is not supposed to mean that I am looking for the first opportunity to sit on the plinth ‘because I am tired’ and also not supposed to mean that I put my shoes into the client’s face, etc., but it means that I have to be confidentially responsible for my own health as well as that of my client.
Why am I posting this now? Things have changed in my professional life and turned full circle so that I am now working with freshly graduated conductors. They now tell not to sit on the plinth. Why? For all the same reasons I was told before. It feels like I am looking into a mirror. I see myself a decade ago when I was also 'fighting' for all of those things I was taught. They are great people and I assume great professionals too. Still, I think they do not yet have the kind of independence or the confidence that one acquires through years of experience. This confidence often brings with it flexibility and the ability to move beyond different boundaries. I strongly sense the rigid training effects behind the issue. We all know that. It is really so sweet to discuss such things.
Similar situations have occurred on official university research registration documents. I called clients patients. I had to do this for several different reasons. The freshly graduated conductors started to tell me that the clients were not patients but participants. :)