A recent interview with MysticMag - a fascinating webiste for all things holistic.
Ever wonder what “Way Opens” means? Hint: it points to “trusting in the natural unfolding of life.”
Uprooting the Weeds
Truths That Blow Your Mind
Over the years I have heard statements that rang true and woke me up to reality. These are truths that seem obvious upon hearing, but also feel familiar because they are easily verifiable by direct investigation or experience. It leaves you wondering, “how could I have forgotten this?” or amazed that you’ve never thought of it in that way before. The truths that blow your mind.
Steady in the Middle of it All
The spring equinox brings an equal amount of daylight and darkness, and it’s a good time to explore balance. Learning to surf the waves of life requires a commitment to turn toward direct experience, to include whatever is arising with acceptance, to learn how to balance in the gap between stimulus and response. Equanimity develops as the other factors of awakening are cultivated, and mindfulness is the link between them all.
Resisting a Rest
There is a difference between consciously resting and collapsing in an exhausted heap after working hard. It’s also not the same as taking a break to check your email or watch TV. Resting in awareness is restorative and rebalances everything. Really resting involves your participation.
One tried-and-true way to do this is Constructive Rest (CR).
Return From the Ghost Realm
I was 30 years old before I realized that I was disembodied. Like so many people, I walked around thinking I was living a life, and of course I was, but most of my existence played out in my head. I had almost no present moment awareness of my body.
In taking Alexander lessons, I found something better than the short-term safety provided by shutting down or numbing out. I literally learned how to feel my body once again.
I used to think I was rather damaged or deficient in this area, that normal people didn’t have to remember to be embodied.
I was wrong.
Ease Up for a Change
Sensing and Knowing: Your Superpower
Have you ever wondered how you know you’re sitting and not, for instance, standing or lying down?
A key feature of the AT is its ability to activate kinesthetic awareness, which functions like a superpower, helping you know how you are doing anything that you might be doing. It is how you know what you’re sensing and how you sense what you’re knowing.
Includes a Bodymind Experiment
Go With Your Gut
Thinking and feeling, logic and imagination, sensing and knowing -- these are not dichotomies but integrated aspects of human functioning and flow. Not only are we each an undivided entity, we are connected to all living beings: the entire biosphere is unified. And that well-known "gut feeling"? That's not just a concept, it is physiological fact.
There is a Body
It has been my experience over 25 years of teaching somatics and mindfulness that most people are in a state of senselessness. Almost no one is fully inhabiting their body all the time.
Learning to Pause, Sense, Repeat is an easy, practical way to more fully embody your life.
Includes a Bodymind Experiment.
Opening Up
Drop By Drop
Through continual practice of insight meditation and 30-plus years of Alexander awareness and teaching, I’ve become familiar with how major shifts in habitual thinking and being happen. Sometimes the experience of change feels big and nearly instantaneous, like a chunk of an iceberg breaking off and tumbling to the sea. Letting go occasionally feels like an avalanche.
Mostly though, change happens incrementally, bit by bit. Can you sense the gradual growth and changes in yourself?
Expanding and Contracting
Life is fluid, dynamic, and always shifting. Ultimately, this is good news, but we have been conditioned to expect reality to be solid, fixed, and predictable. The essential groundlessness of our existence frightens us, or at best, takes us by surprise, and when that happens, we react by resisting. Habitual, unconscious resistance shows up in the body-mind as contraction. It is such a basic and common response to living as a human that we don’t even notice it. Yet the moment we do, we are liberated and can transform contraction into expansion.
Includes a Bodymind Experiment.
Being > Doing
When we choose to stop working so hard we shift our relationship to ourselves as well as to our social circles. We expect less and question what we believe is expected of us. We might end up doing exactly the same number of things as before, but "I Have To" becomes "I Get To," as we allow more spacious awareness in both body and mind. We can learn to ease up and stop trying to push the river, as they say. Letting go is one way to do less. Letting be is another.
Everyday Alexander: Shoveling
Alexander Technique comes in handy when the snow flies. Shoveling often produces all sorts of minor injuries, aches and pains for people. If you find yourself with low back pain, twinges in your shoulders or neck, or other maladies as result of shoveling, pay attention to how you are bending and lifting when you shovel. Like vacuuming, raking, or gardening, shoveling is essentially about lunging.
Practicing the Pause
One of the key components of mindfulness and somatic processes like the Alexander Technique is practicing the Pause, learning how to wait before taking action. There is a moment between stimulus and response, and in that gap is the possibility of making a fresh, perhaps different choice. When we don't do that, we often increase our own suffering.
Includes a Bodymind Experiment
Walking Away From Pain
Walking doesn't have to wear us down. Our ability to move upright on two legs is a miracle of evolution that we take for granted. What you can see and sense when you're right up on top of yourself is what connects you to the world around you -- and the universe inside, too. The key, however, is how you walk. Alexander Technique teaches how to recover that wonderful evolutionary miracle and walk well.
Alexander Technique and Mindful Parenting
I've learned more from my children about applying the Alexander Technique than from any other situation in life. Mindfulness and Alexander work have made all the difference for me in becoming effective and skillful as a mother, and in sustaining me throughout its continuous challenges. I am far from a perfect parent (whatever that is), but raising children with the Alexander Technique and mindful meditation and movement practices made me a better one. It also helped me avoid unnecessary strain and injury, which is no small thing as we age.
Includes a podcast interview about parenting and the Alexander Technique.
Walking the Alexander Way
Walking well means you are free to notice the power and energy you produce, and the beautiful scenery you encounter, and the other people who are out there trying to get and stay healthy, too. Applying the Alexander Technique gives you the freedom to let your legs move your torso along, to let your neck be free of tension so your head can bob along in balance as you move. It means you can breathe easily and powerfully, with awareness of your back and what is behind you. And you can be grateful for your feet, which do so much for you all day long.
Includes a podcast interview with me about AT and walking.
Awake and Aligned the Alexander Way
If you study and practice the Alexander Technique, it will change your life for the better.
This is a statement I can make with complete confidence and zero doubt. I can say this to absolutely everyone, no matter their condition or circumstances. With very few exceptions, there is no one who can't benefit from the principles and the process created by F. M. Alexander and developed over the past century by those who have followed his path.
That’s quite a claim. Read on.