We all have days when we are dragging ourselves around. 95 F weather. Too much insanity on the news from Russiagate to neo-Nazis to North Korea. We hold tension in our bodies and then loose touch with them. Basically a bunch of walking zombies. Seriously. This is part of the reason I've begun to study Somatic Experiencing (SE) which puts the focus back on a subtle awareness of the body and what it has to tell us.
Tonight I attended a workshop in a local church sponsored by the Riverarts arts council on the Alexander Technique so I could compare it to SE. Mr. Alexander was an actor who began to loose his own voice on stage so he studied his own body patterns to determine how to fix this. His technique emphasizes awareness of the head and neck and how this "steers" the body in space. People experience "tightness" wheightedness, breathlessness - and the instruction (very simply as this is all that I learned so far) is to free your neck and push up from the earth and not give into the gravitational force that pushes us down. It's a simple subtle instruction that I've found myself remembering as I went through the following day. "Where is my neck? Is it connected to my body? Am I straining to do an action? Can I push down on the earth to rise up into action without straining my neck?
We had a wonderful, out-of-the-box teacher from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia named Ariel Weiss who lead us in numerous exercise designed to make us aware of our bodies in space. Her favorite word is buoyancy. The way I see this it this is another way of stepping into the flow or energy stream to make use of it.
Tonight I attended a workshop in a local church sponsored by the Riverarts arts council on the Alexander Technique so I could compare it to SE. Mr. Alexander was an actor who began to loose his own voice on stage so he studied his own body patterns to determine how to fix this. His technique emphasizes awareness of the head and neck and how this "steers" the body in space. People experience "tightness" wheightedness, breathlessness - and the instruction (very simply as this is all that I learned so far) is to free your neck and push up from the earth and not give into the gravitational force that pushes us down. It's a simple subtle instruction that I've found myself remembering as I went through the following day. "Where is my neck? Is it connected to my body? Am I straining to do an action? Can I push down on the earth to rise up into action without straining my neck?
We had a wonderful, out-of-the-box teacher from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia named Ariel Weiss who lead us in numerous exercise designed to make us aware of our bodies in space. Her favorite word is buoyancy. The way I see this it this is another way of stepping into the flow or energy stream to make use of it.
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