Stillness as growth

Sometimes getting still to shed a habit and let something new emerge seems fruitless.

We live in a time and space that emphasizes doing.

Waiting IS doing something.

When you plant a seed, many things happen that you don’t see before a shoot comes up from the soil.

You don’t see how the food you eat becomes fuel for your body and brain.

You don’t see how neurotransmitters create elegant, coordinated action.

Slowing down is under rated.

Give yourself some time and space.

Let the story you tell yourself fade into the background for a short time and find your breath.

Try being still with inner space and inner movement.

The Hidden Treasures I Found by Living The Alexander Technique

I was initially drawn to the Alexander Technique because of my hope of having a life in the performing arts. I wanted to be a performer, but I didn’t think I had a stand out level of talent, and I didn’t want to risk living my life forever unfulfilled. I knew the Alexander Technique was part of many performing arts curriculum. I didn’t know what it was, but my good fortune and my instincts guided me to experience it first hand. I expected to teach performing artists, who make up a portion of my practice, but what I enjoy most about teaching the Alexander Technique is the personal interactions I have with all kinds of people.

My focus in my early years as a teacher was on how my skills could help my students. My trainers, teachers and mentors all echoed Alexander’s own experience, that applying my Alexander tools on my own behalf was the mechanism to teaching well.

I taught, as many people, groups and as often as I could. I came to have a deeper capacity for observing and providing more essential, accessible and practical tools to my students; recognizing and providing more teachable moments; and knowing how much was enough. These were all things I aspired to and watched for.

But there are hidden treasures that come from living the Alexander Technique, and no one could have predicted how I would mine the gifts that I have gotten. Some of those treasure might never had come to me without living through things I never wanted and hoped would never happen.

I’ve written about my experiences with anxiety and depression, which coincided with my response to the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election here in the US.

What it’s been like for me since Covid-19 Lockdown and the 2020 Election

It’s coming up on a year since I began physically distancing, stopped teaching in person lessons - effectively shutting my practice - and watched a not unexpected pandemic and all its concomitant fallout play out.

I have had moments where I feared for my mental health over the course of the pandemic and the 2020 election. The Alexander Technique gave me the capacity to know I was experiencing trauma, and that I was in a precarious state, and it gave me a lifeline to get to the next safe harbor. I sought help, and returned to tools that helped me before. They helped me again.

For me, Alexander Technique isn’t about my alignment or physical posture, except to the degree that those are sign posts of how I am in myself. Being, not doing, is how I experience my life more with each passing year. F. M. Alexander’s understanding that one can’t separate mind from body from psyche - and my recognition that I wouldn’t want to if I could - is more of my lived experience with each passing day.

At various periods of my life, I have been drawn to the question: Would I be willing to give up everything in order to have everything? Getting nearer to that as my personal reality is more possible with the stillness I can reach for with my Alexander Technique tools. I can quiet the inner dialogue that revs my nervous system and generates dis-ease, emotional pain, fear, and discomfort.

I am learning to reach for inner or outer narratives that ease my suffering instead of compounding it. And I am keeping a close watch on how regret shows up for me. This pause or reset in how life shows up has placed me in the center of just how uncertain everything is. It can be overwhelming to be so present to that fact. And it can be thrilling.

I had no idea when I started lessons and then trained as an Alexander Teacher that I would discover AND build capacities for meeting life’s challenges as well as I have. So far I keep finding new reserves after waves of crushing realities rain down on me. It seems as though I keep waking up to the horror and the amazing beauty of humanity and life itself over and over again.

Some of the hidden treasures I found:

• Resilience

• Patience

• The ability to self-sooth

• Living my values more of the time

• Not feeling defensive

• Solving problems more easily and quickly

• Feeling more empathy for myself and others

• Leaving and avoiding unhealthy relationships

• Better listening skills

• Taking more pleasure in daily life

• Greater creativity

• Improved intellectual capacity

• Seeing the bigger picture

• Kinder self-talk

• Better self-esteem

• More satisfying and meaningful relationships with family, friends and others

• Joy in movement

• Appreciating what I have

Practical How To:

I go back to the step by step process I learned over 37 years ago. I pause, come to inner stillness, give myself time to find more inner space and wait for a shift inside. Sometimes the shift is significant, sometimes it’s barely noticeable, but something changes. I engage in this throughout my day, sometimes without such a systematic sequence, but just an awareness to expand.

Would I be willing to give up everything in order to have everything? More and less. How much of a choice do I have? It depends. When I have a choice, what do I choose?

From May 2006: The Alexander Technique is a vital tool for managing your stress

I wrote this post for National Stress Awareness Month in May of 2006. I imagine many of your are experiencing stress. The Alexander Technique is a vital tool in managing your stress.

Here are the top three physical symptoms of stress, cited from this website in May 2006:

• sleep disturbances

• back, shoulder or neck pain

• tension or migraine headaches

The Alexander Technique addresses stress and tension from a mental and a physical approach.

On the mental level, students learn to identify their unique stress triggers, and how to slow down the rate at which they react to those situations. For example, when facing an unpleasant event (dental visit, presentation at work, loaded family interactions), learning to recognize the anticipatory anxiety, in the form of self-talk, can allow the student to then notice the physical responses. This can include tightening the neck, tensing shoulder or jaw, and perhaps subtle breath-holding.

Observing inner dialogue, some of my students realize they are feeding their anxiety by expecting negative experiences, or recalling past events over and over. They are able to re-direct where they put their attention, and find they can minimize the affect of their worry.

On the physical level, students can learn to release degrees of tension and contraction in the neck, shoulders, jaw and elsewhere. Even when their thoughts wander to triggers, they can still release muscle tension, minimizing the impact of the stress.

Self-Care: It Feels Good and It’s Good For You!

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash

I was working with a client who had originally come to study with me years ago to help her with her singing. She recently returned to lessons, this time to manage a diagnosis of bursitis in her hip joint. No longer working in music, she was now in the world of Not-For-Profits and business. She’d had PT, and was taking Pilates, and something her Pilates instructor said reminded her that Alexander would be a good tool in her toolbox for self-care and healing.

We picked up almost right where we had left off. Her nervous system still remembered our work in the Alexander Technique, and within minutes of the start of our first lessons, she was pain-free while sitting, which has been one of the challenging activities she had been dealing with for 4 months before reaching out for lessons.

In our last lesson, about 7 lessons since she returned, she was her usual, delightful self. I was surprised when she told me “I really only smile like this when I am at my Pilates sessions or here with you at my Alexander lessons. I sort of feel guilty that I am taking time away from my business .”

“Really? “ I asked.

“Oh, yes, my colleagues and co-workers would be surprised to see me smiling so much. I’m not like this at work.”

“I never thought about it, but by it’s very nature, shouldn’t self-care be pleasurable?”

She paused, and took that idea on board.

What a thought: something that is good for you can be enjoyable?

I shared this obvious, but not so obvious, perspective with my students all week. “This is one of the healthiest professions in the world: I get a great lessons every time I give a lesson.”

One of my students broke out in laughter during his lesson, when I told him this. “I do better when I teach, and your lesson is better when I practice what I preach: ease, calm, poise, and efficient effort in my own system while I put hands on you to help you find an easier way of being in your own system.”

Not all helping professionals get benefits for themselves when they see clients. Massage therapists are often fatigued and find their work physically challenging. Their work can put then at risk for injury because they have to work so hard.

One of my teacher-trainers who was a founding member of The American Center for the Alexander Technique (ACAT), Debby Caplan,, worked as a physical therapist in the 50’s, helping amputees and injured veterans recover from wartime.

In some cases, they had undergone amputations and needed to relearn the activities of daily living. Debby was tiny, about the same height as me, 5’2”, and she said that her daily work was physically demanding, including helping patients transfer from bed to chair to walking. Debby said she managed the demands of her work by coordinating her own movement and activities with Alexander Technique concepts and principles, and she left the hospital each day with more energy, less sore and strained than many of her much larger co-workers in the field.

Debby had been trained to teach Alexander Technique in her late teens by her mother, Alma Frank (who had been trained by and graduated from F. M. Alexander’s teacher certification in England).

So, next time you are in the process of doing something that is supposed to be good for you, and you are enjoying the process, or experiencing greater ease and relief, consider that this happy-product of self-care may be a clue that it’s working! Not everything that is good for you has to be unpleasant…