Your Custom Text Here
I AM NOT I
by Juan Ramon Jiménez
I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.
I Am Not I by Juan Ramon Jimenez - Famous poems, famous poets. - All Poetry
HAPPY SOLSTICE
☀️
As performers and teaching artists, we hone our ability to be flexible, available, and responsive.
☀️
And we are human. Sometimes we are stuck.
☀️
For those in this hemisphere, how are you meeting the summer solstice - the longest day - today?
☀️
How could connecting with the guidance of the light or the sun be a support to you today?
☀️
How does the shifting of the seasons resonate with your own internal shifts or stuckness?
☀️
What needs to shift in you in order to be a conduit for new insight and realization?
☀️
What gets in your way?
☀️
How do you create space - or not - for your clients’ insight?
☀️
{As always, thank you for my mentor Babette Lightner at Wholeness in Motion for this inspiring inquiry.}
DO I WANT TO GO WITH THE FLOW?
My teacher asked our group this question in a movement class recently, and it made me think about when I feel at ease in myself and the situation, and when I feel resistance or strain.
And now I’m bringing this question to you.
We are self-regulatory beings, designed to meet moments of resistance and adapt.
We are designed to discern what is happening, integrate what we need, allowing us to adapt to a new situation, and discard what we don’t need.
“Adaptation/learning underlies the literal physical adaptations our system is constantly making to our lived and imagined experiences. We are talking about adaptations on every tissue level from genes in our cells to neural network connection and pruning--- WHOLENESS.”
Babette Lightner, Wholeness in Motion
Every need or desire is paired with a corresponding resistance (#wholeness). By bringing gentle awareness to our resistance, we can learn more about how we learn and what’s meaningful to us.
Perfectionism is an example of resistance AND support. Am I overeager to learn this new piece of repertoire perfectly? How is my resistance impacting my learning?
How is my resistance supporting my learning? What function is my resistance serving? Perhaps it’s a message from my system to slow down; maybe I’m rushing through this too quickly to really integrate these new skills, for example.
Change (a.k.a. learning) involves a letting-go process, and acknowledgement of what is impermanent (thank you to Babette for introducing this word as part of the learning process).
This can be challenging when we’ve been holding onto our habitual patterns for a long time, even if we have outgrown them. Letting go of “trying to be right” tendencies can be a challenge because we are so used to being perceived in a certain way, predicting outcomes, etc. Trying to be “perfect “has probably served a very important purpose up until now.
(If you’re curious to dive a little deeper into our familiar “trying to be good/right/perfect” routine, and how it impacts our experiences with learning and performance anxiety, check out this great article, Good For Whom? by Elizabeth Garren on David Gorman’s Learning Methods website.)
Self-regulation refers to your ability to manage, adjust to, and recover from extreme situations. This can include emotional and psychological self-regulation, and physiological self-regulation. It can be a conscious or unconscious process.
It can be useful to build awareness around how you self-regulate - both consciously and unconsciously - because our systems crave stasis - equilibrium - balance in order to function and relate optimally in the world (whatever “optimal” is for YOU - it will be different for each person).
A healthily, optimally functioning human is designed to be able to return to stasis after a moment or period of stress or stimulation.
We are designed to be able to adjust to the regular ups and downs of daily life. When we experience a stressful stimulus or situation, our nervous systems become activated. Throughout the day, from moment to moment, we naturally move through a process of arousal and recovery. We are generally able to recalibrate using our built-in and learned self-regulation tools and strategies.
A bunny lazily munches on some clovers. It is relaxed and at ease. Suddenly, it notices a fox approaching. The bunny freezes for a moment, assessing the potential threat, then quickly breaks into a run, racing to a safe place. Once it gets to a safe spot where the fox can’t enter, the bunny will lie down and shake. This shaking is how the bunny processes the effects of this stressful moment. The shaking releases muscle tension and helps to process excess adrenaline. This process is the bunny’s way of supporting its nervous system to recover and repair, so that it can go back to nibbling clovers and living its bunny life.
We humans are also animals, so we have a similar physiological self-regulatory process. For our psychological and emotional self-regulation, we can also draw on interpersonal supports like telling a trusted friend about a stressful situation, or getting a hug when we are sad or scared.
In some circumstances, however, our innate process of recovery and repair gets interrupted. For some reason we may learn that it’s not okay to self-soothe or be supported when we are sad or angry or scared. Our family or school or work culture may have certain “rules” around needing to “toughen up,” for example, or we learn that we have to “hold it together” for everyone else.
The natural release of shaking or crying or getting a hug or moving when you need to move might not be modelled or accepted in certain situations. Without this support, our recovery cycle gets interrupted, and we get stuck in an incomplete loop. And so we keep accumulating unprocessed cycles of energy in our bodies until we reach a point where this way of being is no longer sustainable.
This unprocessed energy can show up in your body as:
muscle tension
chronic fatigue
digestive issues
headaches and migraines
irritability
musculoskeletal or postural issues
holding yourself in a particular posture or shape, possibly for protection
brain fog
vocal fatigue or hoarseness
jaw tension
tight or closed throat feeling
When we have persistent experiences of stress, it can be taxing on our whole being, taking a toll on our emotional, psychological, and physiological wellbeing. We can get stuck in a habitual pattern of responding to stress, even after the stimulus is no longer present - even after the fox has disappeared.
This stuckness can mean that we are functioning outside of our window of tolerance, or our optimal arousal-recovery zone. From here we may push ourselves to do more or work harder when what we really need is support and rest. When we become dysregulated in this way, we are unable to take in new information (i.e.: learning process or reading a challenging email) or function physically (i.e.: efficient singing coordination or safe lifting) the way we’re used to.
Your nervous system connects to all of your organs and tissues and automatic survival functions, including your heart, lungs, and voice. It also controls your muscles, motor function, and coordination.
When you are dysregulated, ALL of your systems are impacted, including your circulation, breathing, sound-making coordination (aka singing and speaking), and the ability to express yourself fully and effectively. Muscular coordination can also be affected, especially if your system takes you into a protective holding or compressed body posture when it perceives a threat to your safety.
The Alexander Technique can help you self-regulate by teaching you how to slow down, do less, and reconnect yourself with your body. The skills of pausing, sensing, awareness, and redirecting attention you learn in Alexander Technique lessons can support you to recalibrate after or during periods of overstimulation and stress, including helping to regulate your nervous system to bring you back to your optimal arousal-recovery zone.
Through verbal guidance and subtle hands-on support from your AT teacher, each session supports you to bring new awareness to your whole-self unity. We use simple everyday movements like sitting, standing, walking, lifting, and lying down to illuminate the interconnectedness of your thoughts, actions, and muscular involvement/coordination. We explore anatomy to clarify how you’re constructed, and how you can work with your human design instead of against it, for optimal efficiency of movement. We investigate how your attention and intention are inseparable from how you function in the world, so that you can better understand how to work with yourself, rather than against yourself. You will gain tools to help you ground yourself, so that you come back to being a receptive listener, who can respond with flexibility and awareness in a wide range of situations, including day-to-day activities like doing dishes and brushing your teeth, as well as specialized activities like singing and teaching.
FOR EXAMPLE, you may discover that you’ve been working harder than you need to while you’re singing. In the Alexander Technique we call this goal-oriented, perfectionistic over-efforting “end gaining,” and it’s a fairly common way that we get in our own way. Your new awareness of your end gaining, coupled with an embodied experience of how your shoulders relate to your hips - has a releasing effect on your whole torso and breathing mechanism, also releasing something in your jaw, and giving you a new experience of singing with more ease and availability. In learning to allow things to happen rather than doing them, you get out of your own way and can be more available for expression and emotion.
Hellooooooo, increased vocal range!
Hellooooooo, access to resonance!
Hellooooooo, availability for longer phrases!
A NOTE ABOUT POSTURE - When you start to unravel your habitual responses, and begin to notice how these responses have been impacting your body, you may find that you experience postural changes as a result of your new awareness and new way of using yourself. While improved posture is not a goal of this work, you may experience this and other benefits from working on yourself in this way.
After a series of Alexander Technique sessions, many people make new discoveries about themselves. This could include:
postural changes
reduced back pain
relief from pain, muscular tension, and stiffness
breath awareness and ease
more ease working at the computer
responding to stress and anxiety with more flexibility and availability
improved balance and coordination
ease of movement and mobility
preventing injury
expanded attention span and increased focus and concentration
Whatever your reasons for exploring embodied work such as the Alexander Technique - whether it’s an interest in learning about your anxiety, addressing postural concerns, or investigating vocal issues - you will undoubtedly gain new perspective about your innate wholeness. Which, in my humble opinion, is always a good thing.
To learn more about how we can work together to support your needs, click below to schedule a free 20min consultation:
For examples of how we might work together, visit my YouTube channel:
To dive right into self-regulation application, click below to purchase the 30-Day Constructive Rest Invitation self-guided online course:
Today my young student was really struggling with a song she has been working on for a few weeks.
When a student - of any age - is in the early stages of learning something new, I always allow creative interpretations of notes/rhythms/tempo. Instead of jumping in after a run-through to fix or correct, I simply ask the student, “How did that go for you?”
Invariably the student - especially adults - will be hard on herself, immediately going to all of the things that went wrong.
We do this. As musicians, many of us have been trained to zero in on errors. With this narrow focus, trying so hard to get it right, we can lose sight of the big picture: what went well, what felt good, what was different - not better or worse, just different - than last time.
When I asked this student how she thought it was going today, she said, “Good, but I still made lots of mistakes.” (Note: One note was out of place. One. And maybe the tempo was slightly inconsistent. And maybe she was moving through it with some hesitancy - which makes perfect sense, given that she was being so darn careful not to make any mistakes! More on this in a bit.)
My student seemed unable to even consider dynamic range or musical expression until she could get Every. Note. Perfect.
We regularly build on sight reading skills in her lessons. But I didn’t want to use this moment to work on those skills directly. I sensed we needed to shake things up a bit and come at this selection from a different angle. I could sense that she was stuck, and not in the right headspace for direct skill acquisition.
“I have an idea,” I told her, smiling a bit impishly. “Tell me what you think about this: what if this time through you make mistakes ON PURPOSE? As many wrong notes and wrong rhythms as you dare, and as wildly incorrect as possible.”
Her smile got HUGE. She enthusiastically agreed to give it a try.
And my goodness, if it wasn’t the most musical and expressive performance she’d ever given!
After she’d finished her new variation on this old song, I asked her, “What was your favourite mistake?” And she excitedly listed at least seven spots where she had deliberately done the wrong rhythm, the wrong notes, sustained a pitch for way longer than was written. Her FAVOURITE moment was when she deliberately played the “mistake” she often makes by accident. (Normally she huffs and tenses up when she gets to this spot in the music - this time she lingered there, riffing on her usual “mistake” and creating a real musical moment.)
She seemed so empowered in that moment of describing her experience of making mistakes on purpose. Her eyes got very wide and her face was open, full of wonder and joy. Her “mistakes” were no longer owning her. She was owning her “mistakes,” and making them into purposeful, deliberate, expressive musical moments.
My student’s discovery about the empowerment of on-purpose mistake-making reminds me of my own early learning experiences. I used to be so held back by trying to be perfect. All the time. At everything, not just music-making.
Eventually, thanks to the support of many wonderful, compassionate teachers and mentors, I came to understand that learning happens in the miss-takes, in the off-target moments (I recently wrote a post about learning as target practice. You can read the full article here). These teachers understood the conditions necessary for humans to learn: namely that there needs to be an environment where off-target moments, experimentation, and surprises are welcomed, modelled, embodied, and encouraged.
So. Back to my young student and her discoveries about miss-takes.
This particular student isn’t even a teenager yet. So I held back my exuberance about what her discovery means about how we learn, and how important “mistakes” are to the learning process. (To be fair, I have had some version of this conversation with this particular student on several occasions as we examine “perfectionism” together in a light, playful way, creating our own experiments and games around “trying to be right” vs allowing all sounds to be welcome. But I’ll save that story for another time.)
For example, in order to make mistakes on purpose, this student had to actually think about the correct notes/rhythms in order to mess them up. She was able to attend to her music-making and interpretation in a different way.
By deliberately doing it the “wrong” way, she was actually teaching herself how to do it the “right” way!
Before, her goal had been: “don’t make any mistakes.” (I think many of us can attest to how successful THAT goal usually is!)
Her new goal was: “make mistakes on purpose.” Which, as it turns out, was a heck of a lot easier - and more enjoyable! - than trying to be perfect. AND actually resulted in an expressive, musical, inventive, colourful, and FUN performance.
The part of her conscious attention that had been all tied up before in trying to be right, was now free to attend to much more nourishing aspects of music-making, like personal expression, interpretation, spontaneity, and creativity.
Would this student be happy presenting her on-purpose mistake-making rendition of this song in recital? Likely not. (I, however, would be thrilled to attend such a radically authentic performance … but maybe it’s a wee bit early in her musical career to be encouraging performances that challenge traditional music-making paradigms and music-consumption habits … hmm?)
I can tell you, however, that when this student went back to performing the selection as written, those halting miss-take moments from before were nearly non-existent. And her engagement with the music had really shifted since her first run-through. She was smiling at the end. Which is a huge win, and much more important (in my humble opinion) than being perfect.
By deliberately messing around with her song, and owning her miss-takes, this student was able to actually WORK ON the spots that had been getting in her way before. The difference was that this time she was going about it through a less direct, more creative approach that came from curiosity and experimentation, rather than perfection.
So. Bloomin’. Cool.
PS - I also 100% use this purposeful miss-takes game with my adult clients. There is no age limit for being hobbled by so-called “mistakes,” nor for re-molding those miss-takes into satisfying, yummy artistic expression.
What does Supported Singing mean for you?
Do you think about your breath?
Your diaphragm?
Your ribs?
Your bones and muscles?
Your larynx?
How about your back? or your legs?
(Spoiler alert: all of these aspects of Supported Singing are CORRECT if they support your ability to sing with joy, freedom, and ease.)
Many of us have our own understanding of what “singing with support” means to us. Often this understanding emerges from our early voice lessons, from ideas passed down from various teachers over the years, from our own lived experience and exploration.
There was a time when I didn’t have the tools to connect with my inner wisdom about what worked for me and what didn’t, what was true for me and what wasn’t. I looked outside of myself to my teachers and coaches and music directors and peers to fix what I thought I was doing wrong. And I wasn’t always supported in the vulnerable, messy moments of my learning. I was even hurt sometimes by the feedback I received. However well-meaning and unintentional, these statements hurt me. They burrowed into my body and festered into inaccurate beliefs about my abilities and worth as a singer and as a human.
Thankfully, I was also gifted with knowledgeable, compassionate mentors and colleagues who understood the complex art of whole-person pedagogy. And my experiences learning with and from these magical unicorns continues to shape the way I create, lead, and teach today.
To me, in this moment in time (subject to further inquiry and exploration), Supported Singing requires an unwavering belief that the student has the information about their voice and body, not the teacher. I don’t have that information unless and until I ask for it. Only when I gather the information from my student can I suggest/offer/observe/update. (And of course Supported Singing also includes: technical knowledge, anatomical understanding, stylistic sensibility, musicality, etc. - voice teachers have many finely-tuned skills!)
In my studio, I understand Voice and Movement sessions to be a shared, co-created experience between myself and the student, where I defer to the student’s in-the-moment experience rather than imposing my own beliefs/opinions about what something should look or sound or feel like. Breathflow, soundflow, and movementflow emerge from this foundation.
So, what does Supported Singing mean for you today?
“When learning a skill you have to go off target to learn the coordinations, synaptic connections, neural pathways that let you learn the skill or hit the target.”
Babette Lightner, “Learning - Target Practice”
I’m going to begin with a bold statement:
There are no such things as mistakes.
Okay. We’ll come back to that later.
We aim for the bullseye, but we likely won’t hit it right away. The bullseye - or learning goal - keeps us on track and allows us to chart a path. Or more accurately, your wholeself notes “okay, that’s not the target” and adjusts accordingly (click here for Babette Lightner’s article, which goes into more detail about the other-than-conscious, systematic adjustment process of experiential learning).
The juicy part of the learning process actually happens during the process of taking shots at the target and missing. These off-target moments - “mistakes” - are what teach you where the target is and where the target isn’t.
In order to carry out the process efficiently, though, it is helpful to get as specific as possible about your desired outcome. “Sing the phrase correctly” isn’t as specific or achievable as “sing the interval of a 6th accurately in measure 6.”
Once you clarify your learning goal and consider the learning context, you are empowered to assess whether you have the appropriate tools to actually achieve your goal in this moment, or if you need to hone some side-skills first.
You might consider the following questions as a way to get more specific about what you want to assess:
How familiar am I with this song?
Have I sung a 6th before?
Do I know what a 6th sounds like?
Are these pitches in a comfortable range for me today?
This line of inquiry may seem pedantic, but it’s amazing how often we set about trying to achieve a specific outcome without checking our tools first (i.e.: preexisting knowledge and experience). Imagine walking into a dark room to find your phone without turning the light on first. You could bumble around for several minutes, crashing into things and banging your toe five times, without changing how you are searching for your phone. Or, you could turn the light on first, survey the space, decide how and where to search, and then move accurately and efficiently toward your phone. It’s less about doing things the “right” way, and more about having choice and intention.
The target practice model can be applied to your learning process in this way:
clarify your specific goal - decide to aim for the bullseye - see above re: 6ths or finding your phone
aim - see the bullseye - have your specific goal in mind
take action - pull back and release the arrow toward the bullseye - take action toward your goal
assess the result - note how close the arrow landed in relation to the bullseye - note how close you were to your target
decide what to do next - am I satisfied with this outcome? If yes, choose a new target. If no, reassess your goal and allow your system to adjust before going again.
take action again - lather, rinse, repeat
The other important piece that can get in the way of how we respond to off-target moments is the negative value judgements we ascribe to making a mistake, often internalized from some earlier experience before we had the agency or lived experience to assess outcomes for ourselves.
Remember: the moment of being off-target is the rich, fertile learning moment when you are most available to awareness, potential, growth, and change.
We often want to rush through this off-target moment because it’s accompanied by an “ugh” feeling, which may be unpleasant, and can even be downright anxiety-inducing. “Ugh, I made a mistake! Now everyone will laugh at me and see the truth: that I’m stupid/untalented/a fraud!” Because maybe at some point in your history, you went off-target and someone did laugh. Or mishandled the moment in some other unhelpful, unsupportive way. And no one was there to remind you that going off-target is a crucial part of the learning process, and that that person’s laughter says more about them and their value judgements around “mistakes,” than it does about you or your juicy learning process. And so you internalized the belief that “mistakes are bad,” and maybe even, “if I make a mistake, I am bad.”
No wonder your system may respond to off-target moments with “ugh” or discomfort or fear or anxiety - it made sense in that long-ago moment. But does it make sense now? What is different now, in this moment of being off-target? How are you different now? What supports, knowledge, lived experience do you have now that you didn’t have then, that tells you a different story about your worth and value?
See what happens when you slow down to attend to what happens for you when you go off-target.
You could invite a new sort of inquiry that might look something like this:
What happens in my body when I realize I’m off-target?
What sensations am I aware of?
What thoughts come up?
What feelings come up?
What support do I need in this moment as I sit with these sensations and thoughts?
How old do these thoughts and feelings feel?
Whose voice do I hear speaking those negative/chastising words?
It’s fair to say that this approach to learning - allowing all sounds and outcomes to be welcome and encouraged - takes GUTS. It takes courage to allow and accept unfamiliar sounds and sensations. It takes courage and patience to sit with the “ugh” response to being off-target. It takes courage to trust your system’s ability to course-adjust to support your learning process, to trust that your only job is this: to intend - aim - do - assess - adjust - do again.
Letting go of “being right” takes a heck of a lot of GUTS. Being vulnerably, fully, wholly YOU takes guts. This type of radical courage allows curiosity and creativity to emerge. And it makes sense in a new way when you consider, this might just be how learning happens.
Here’s the bold statement I opened with:
There are no such things as mistakes.
What do you think about that now?
What happens in you when you allow this possibility: it’s the off-target moments - what you used to misdiagnose as “mistakes” - that allow you to assess whether you have honed the necessary skills yet, and allow you to constantly reassess your path toward your learning goals.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Many thanks to Babette Lightner for framing Dr. Leon Thurman’s learning research into a fully embodied learning experience for singers, teachers, and conductors. Her article “Learning - Target Practice,” which inspired this post, can be found here.
Thanks also to David Gorman for the clarity of his Learning Methods approach to systematic inquiry. His article “What’s the opposite of perfect?” speaks to the effort of striving and how it interferes with learning and creativity, and can be found here.
What is your natural self-nourishment go-to? When you need to recharge, what do you usually do?
Do you go for a run or do some gentle yoga?
In order to truly tap into your innate recuperative super powers, it’s important to know what you want to recover FROM, and what you want to recharge FOR? (As in, “I am nourishing myself in order to do ________ [insert chosen activity here].”)
There is something so comforting about watching a TV show you’ve seen dozens of times, isn’t there? It’s predictable. You know how it’s going to end. You know the conflict will be resolved by the time the credits roll.
We crave resolution. We are comforted by patterns and predictability.
And yet.
A resolution of a dissonant musical chord is only so sweet because we experienced the dissonance that preceded it.
A luxurious yawn-sigh-stretch feels yummiest when we’ve been sitting in one position for hours without much movement.
So, we actually need the dissonance in order to fully appreciate the resolution. We need the moments of grip and stuckness and low energy in order to fully appreciate the experience of ease and lightness and aliveness.
These extremes and contrasts are what provide a wholeness of experience, and make us whole.
Recuperation encompasses a wide range of activities, because you as a human embody a wide range of states of being and every-changing needs. Instead of thinking “I need to calm down,” consider why it makes sense that you’re in the state you’re in, experiencing what you’re experiencing right now, in order to decide what you need next and what to do to achieve it.
We often associate recuperation with relaxing and calming activities like deep breathing and gentle stretching. The term “self-care” is often used to describe the activities that help us recover from the typical state of being in Western culture: overstimulated, over-worked, and stressed-out.
(I’m speaking in very general terms here. I recognize that not everyone will fall into neat-and-tidy columns of “calm” or “jazzed.” It’s more likely that many of us find ourselves somewhere different on the calm-to-jazzed spectrum at any given moment, while also noticing that we have a default energy base most of the time. What’s yours?)
If you spend your whole day teaching people new skills and solving problems, you may need to just BE for a while, without learning anything new or pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone.
If your day is full of quick-thinking and fast-moving, you may crave slowing down and feeling your body. The movements you choose and the sounds you make will reflect this.
Recuperation can cover a wide range of activities, not just calming ones. It just depends on where you’re coming from and where you’re heading next. Knowing what you need and how to support that need is a big part of taking care of yourself.
If you’re about to go to sleep and you’re feeling antsy, you’d probably be more likely to do some mindful breathing or watch your favourite TV show than go for a jog or do some jumping jacks, for example.
If you’re pumping yourself up to give a motivational speech or teach a voice lesson, and you’ve been lounging on the couch all morning, you might jump up and down a few times or walk briskly around the block to get your blood pumping and wake yourself up.
You can know what you need in these situations, so you can choose the recuperative activity that will best support you.
Sometimes you need to recuperate from lethargy or a lack of energy. These are the moments when there is so little going on, so little stimulation in your day-to-day, that it’s difficult to predict what’s coming next (#lockdown). And so you feel stuck.
Lack of variety in your daily activities can create a stagnation that no amount of meditation or relaxing bubble baths seems to budge. What your system might crave in these moments is stimulation, something to ignite your curiosity and mobilize you to take action.
The “low tone” energy state requires a different sort of recuperation than when you’re feeling overstimulated, stressed out, or over-worked. In these moments you may find recuperation in a vigorous activity like jumping jacks, punching the air, or jiggling, combined with short, sharp exhalations of breath. Again, the movements you choose and the sounds you make will reflect what you need in these moments.
Learning to tune in to - and decode - the signals your system is sending you takes time and practice, especially when the dominant culture around you may not place value on your preferred pace and the time and space experiential knowledge requires. (Western culture, for example, tends to value intellectual knowing and cognitive processes over embodied/experiential ways of knowing.)
Your body is constantly communicating your current state of being and needs. Muscle tension or low muscular tone, for example, can alert you to where you’re coming from, and what you might need (a massage or a jiggle, respectively). Cue listening to “monkey mind” and “brain fog” signals, too.
Your breath is a barometer for how you’re doing at any given moment. Long, slow breaths can tell you that you are calm or relaxed or sleepy. Short, shallow breaths can be letting you know that you are unsettled, while heavy, full breaths could be an indication that you have just exerted yourself.
At any given moment you can attend to what you’re experiencing in the moment, and make a clear choice about what you’d like to do next, based on what you need, rather than what some external source is telling you you “should” do or feel.
To experiment with first-hand, lived experience of the range of recuperation, you can explore the self-guided Constructive Rest course, or attend the live 4-part Breathing Series group classes.
Special thank you to Babette Lightner for her wisdom, and Maureen Batt for her collaboration. 🦄
Empathy.
Difference.
Presence.
Wholeness.
Bradley’s article is about fish, but it’s also about being human, I think.
Umwelt is a word German biologist Jakob von Uexkëll created to mean “the surrounding world.” As Bradley points out in his article, “Do fish dream?”, a fish’s surrounding world is fundamentally different from ours: subaquatic and fluid. Is there something enlightening for us in trying to understand their world?
How might it change me to try to imagine someone else’s umwelt?
I see this as my work and my responsibility teaching Voice and the Alexander Technique, and as a therapist.
Even if I don’t get there, how might I be changed by the process of listening, receiving, seeing, feeling, trying to understand someone?
How might this receptivity support my student or my client?
Read the full article here.
If you’re experiencing neck pain or headaches, you might be clenching your jaw.
Release your jaw hinge (this joint is just in front of your ear).
Lay your fingers gently along the length of your chewing muscle. This is your masseter muscle and it’s one of the strongest muscles in your entire body. It runs north/south from your cheek bone to jaw bone.
Soften this strong muscle. Allow your fingertips to gently swipe down along the length of the masseter muscle, encouraging an unclenching you might find that your molars part at the back, or that your lips part. This is okay.
Allow the release to trickle down through your neck and shoulders.
How does your neck feel? Your head? Can you type from this released place? Text on your phone? Sing a phrase?
*** Calling all my fellow “Type A” companions! ***
Alignment vs ALIVEment
Alignment = arrangement in a straight line, or in correct or appropriate relative positions
Alivement = opening up to the world around you and allowing your beautiful coordinating system to balance you as needed
Let me be VERY clear:
I am someone who wants to get things RIGHT. Usually immediately. (Hence the type A reference.)
I often try to arrange myself AND MY LIFE in a straight line, in an appropriate (correct) position in relation to ideas, people, tasks…literally everything. I like my work space to be orderly - if not tidy, at least organized in a way that makes sense to ME. I like when plans go according to, well, plan.
My penchant for organization CAN BE one of my superpowers. But it can also make me rigid, unspontaneous, tense, stressed out, and tired. And just overall lack-lustre.
When I try to organize my body with the same fervour with which I try to organize my life (hint: THEY ARE THE SAME THING), things just don’t work the way I want them to. For example, I get back pain when I try to “align” my spine “properly.” My breathing feels shallow when I try to lift my sternum and “open my heart.” My voice is thin and my sound is pressed and edgy.
Alivement is a choice.
Alivement is a moment-to-moment CHOICE I make to LET GO of my fixing. I choose to RELEASE my heart in order to allow it to open. I choose to RELEASE my neck and shoulders in order to allow my whole torso to open as my breath moves.
I choose to RELEASE my holding, my trying to be right, forcing outcomes, my “correct alignment” in order for my beautiful system to coordinate itself.
I choose to release in order to allow an opening.
Friends, this is NOT EASY. Choosing to let go and fully experience my aliveness in response to the world means also feeling the less pleasant sensations and feelings. I read somewhere that in order to feel joy we have to feel pain. I’m learning to trust that. And my back pain is gone. And my voice is full.
What is the dance of healthy boundaries?
How do you know you exist? How does your body remind you that you’re alive?
👉 e m b o d i e d r e l a t i o n a l i t y
The art of knowing what’s right for you by relating to your environment, to another human being.
Allowing for differences of opinion, agreement, feeling understood and misunderstood, seen and unseen. Allowing your full range of emotions and sensations in response. Allowing the push and pull, back and forth, yielding and pushing.
Meeting in the middle.
I dance with you so I can know myself.
I am me.
You are you.
We meet each other in the middle - with compassionate boundaries - to know we exist.
This is the dance of knowing where I end and you begin.
There is no formula. Just being.
We can only truly feel our SELF in relationship - with each other, with the ground, with the air, with the planet.
When you spend as many hours in front of the screen as you’re doing these days, it doesn’t take long before you’re feeling stiff, stuck, and in pain.
Your shoulders are up around your ears, aren’t they?
Your head is reaching out toward the screen, right?
Your brow is furrowed, for sure.
One simple thought can help you get unstuck: UNSCRUNCH.
Remember: your head rests on top of your spine, roughly behind your nose. (Yes, waaaay up there!)
Do this:
Take your hands off the keyboard.
Stand up.
Look out the window so you can see far.
Let your shoulders release away from your ears.
And unscrunch your neck.
Pause. Unscrunch. Each moment is an opportunity to start fresh.
Special thank you to Cathy Madden for originating this wonderfully helpful (to me) word: unscrunch.
The Gestalt cycle of experience demonstrates the process of how we take care of ourselves. It is a process of self-regulation, outlining the steps we take - conscious or unconscious - to find and maintain inner balance.
Needs can be emotional (belonging, safety, connection) or physical (hunger, thirst, too hot/cold).
The self-regulation process moves from becoming aware of a need (i.e. thirst), mobilizing toward meeting that need (getting up to get a glass of water), recognizing when that need is satisfied (no longer thirsty), and withdrawing and moving on (checking in with yourself to see what else you need in this moment).
Some needs we can meet on our own (grabbing a snack when hungry), and some we will require outside support (setting a broken bone at the hospital). The type of support will of course vary from person to person (a toddler may need help getting a snack, while an able-bodied adult may be more self-actualized). Our ongoing work is to recognize when “I got this” will work (self-support), and when to ask for help (environmental support).
We are constantly changing and growing. Our needs are constantly shifting. As our self-awareness develops, and we gain more life and interrelationship skills, we become more resilient and interconnected with ourselves and the world. We become more able to ask for help, and because we are more supported, we can show up to support others.
To learn more about how to use your body sensations and awareness to take better care of your whole self, book a chat with me today:
🎥 Calm - VIDEO PLAYLIST 🎥
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3nUnbdrhRjyaTXBQhzgA7qI1AdQXJxai
What does “calm” mean to you?
This playlist highlights some ways to reconnect to your innate ease and vitality.
Calm doesn’t have to mean lying on the floor. It can simply mean noticing your current pace and choosing to pause in awareness.
This simple act of pausing and noticing shifts can shift your mood/sensation/intention, without you having to DO or FIX something.
The Alexander Technique offers an effective process for learning. By pausing and becoming aware of sensation and intention, you are priming your system for receiving new information.
When your system senses a threat, it will click over to survival mode. This mode is characterized by fear and anxiety. Physical manifestations could include contraction, tension, compression, constriction. In survival mode, your system is not in a receptive state to receive new information.
In short: when we are fearful/worried, anxious, we can’t learn.
In his book Body Learning: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique, Michael Gelb describes the ideal learning environment as one that is “free from comparison or competition.” With a focus on self-acceptance, the Alexander Technique inherently supports this type of learning environment.
The Alexander Technique teacher is highly skilled in presence, kinaesthetic listening, and holding space for self and other. So lessons can provide a container for safety, learning, and growth.
Instead of “doing the how,” we are giving an intention that allows the “how” to happen.
Babette Lightner on skill acquisition
🐌 Did you realize that your beautiful system is designed to coordinate around your intention, without you having to work so hard?
🐌 Trust. What are the implications of trusting intention when honing vocal technique?
🐌 How does understanding your human design as a coordinating system (David Gorman’s term) impact how you learn, practice, and teach?
🐌 How does this knowledge and understanding influence the types of verbal cues we give to our students? Our choice of language?
DOING vs ALLOWING
TELLING vs INVITING
MAKING SOMETHING HAPPEN vs NOTICING
Relaxation is a common misinterpretation of the sense of ease and efficiency.
Relaxation and collapse have their usefulness! One of my Alexander Technique teachers once said, “sometimes you need to take a good ol’ SLUMP!” And I do. Choicefully and mindfully.
What I teach is a clarification of the SENSATION of relaxation when a student moves or sings in a way that feels easy and efficient, especially if what they’re used to is the sensation of EFFORT (heavy, tight, strained). Links to Babette Lightner’s Wholeness in Motion work HERE.
🎥 VIDEO 🎥
🐛 Come back to your innate wholeness by jiggling. In shaking and jiggling, we press ourselves away from the ground very quickly many times. In Alexander Technique we call this relationship opposition.
🐛 Jiggle with an awareness of releasing your joints: let the hips, knees, and ankles be free. Allow your head to be dynamically poised on top of the spine (not slack but continuously pointing forward and up).
🐛Jiggle with a sense of buoyancy through the pelvis, ribs, and arm structure. Not making these areas dead weight but feeling the springy nature of your torso as you bounce and jiggle and wiggle.
🐛 Add sounds. Sing a phrase. What do you notice?
