Are you you are feeling Zoom-fried? Does your work set up feel more and more uncomfortable the longer you work at home?Even the most sophisticated embodiment teachers are reporting Zoom exhaustion, and they have worked years on their skills, so don’t feel bad. There is hope! I’ve been teaching embodiment online for 5 years and leading webinars for online educators since the COVID pandemic began. I want to share with you a few simple tips that will help you reconnect with the wonder and joy of your body, which is an endless resource.

Learning to use it, however, requires a shift in attitude and a willingness to change behavior.

George Russell, an expert chiropractor, said to me in response to one of my newsletters about joy being more important than expertise: “I’m not interesting in finding a “teacher.” I’m not interested in mastering a system. I’m living in a world of wonders, and I want to walk around some.” It’s this state of wonder that we are missing as our movement life has narrowed during COVID. It’s up to us to re-claim it. If you are determined to do so, please read on.

Here are some of the things people say during and after my webinars:

“It’s strange to feel better after a Zoom meeting instead of worse!”

“I think some of my exhaustion has been because I’m learning so much about myself and this new medium, not because there is anything wrong.”

“I want to be able to help my students stay in their bodies when they’re in my classes online – I don’t want them to have to learn a whole new embodiment form like Yoga or something. Now I feel like I have a few tools that I can use to help them right away.”

Alexander Technique has always offered powerful tools for adapting, changing, and letting go of habits that no longer serve us. Letting go of what is familiar (like connecting with humans in person!), however, also brings grief. Yes, there is joy at discovering new ways of connecting to our own bodies, finding out what is really important to us during times of stress. But also grief. Both are present in my webinars, and both are present these days as I absolutely thrive in my online classes and private coaching.

Thriving and grieving are good friends. Nothing to be afraid of.

Connecting through our computers is possible, but it is different. It fools us into forgetting the ground we are standing on and the parts of our bodies that cannot be seen on screen. Much of the stress, visual burnout, and exhaustion we experience comes from our vulnerability to these stimuli, fueled by our beautiful desire to connect with one other.

Our unconscious responses to the computer itself, which distorts perception in many ways, are often the cause of disconnection, frustration, and feelings of isolation. If you accept this, you can give yourself some time and space to deal with it.

Here are some simple resource you can tap into for relief right away:

– 360 DEGREE HORIZON:

seeing the horizon line/ground in your own space as your main focus or as the background to the image of the computer. This lets your body know where the ground you are standing on is, where “up” is.

– YOU ARE ALLOWED TO MOVE:

Move your body gently – it won’t distract people. Movement brings sensation, and helps you remember that your body has volume and exists in three dimensional space outside the screen.

– LET YOUR ATTENTION WANDER AWAY FROM THE SCREEN:

Allow time and space for the world that contains your computer, even if it means you miss a movement on screen. You can look out the window and still hear what people are saying – your body is amazing! 

– GET COMFORTABLE WITH BREATHING THROUGH A PAUSE: Allow time between speaking, listening, and being heard. There is a time lag inherent on Zoom that confuses us. We tend to jump in and squish it. What if that time could be used to remember your body and the space it has around it?

Stepping away from our screen a little bit goes against instinct because we have been taught to sit still and pay attention.  Participants in my webinars have found that instead it makes us feel more rather than less connected. Some people find that if they let their visual and physical attention wander while in meetings, they hear everything and are actually more able to stay connected and retain content of the meeting or class.

Our body is our real home. Remembering that the camera is seeing us, in our room, in our whole body, takes an effort of awareness – it’s new. It takes time to be able to practice these simple things in each others presence. The payoff is huge, however. If we ignore our body, we suffer greatly. If we include it, we are so much more able to get energized and truly connected.

If you’d like to get some individual coaching on this please reach out using the link below. You don’t need to be an Alexander Technique master to try these things. They are simple things I can share with you right away, and you will be able to share them with friends and clients too! It’s a great value:

PERSONAL THRIVE ON ZOOM/WORKSTATION CONSULT:
A 45 minute assessment of your relationship to your computer and Zoom, normally a $100 value, now for $75. Satisfaction Guaranteed 🙂 Go here to book your session!

The first week of June 2020 has broken us.

Maybe like me your heart is in pieces, maybe like me you are aware that fixing it is not an option.

Words are not my native language, but I try. The day on which I wrote this was a “national day of stopping” business as usual. Stopping to look at what we have become, where we are as a culture, a country, a gathering of human beings.

This is a new level of stopping I wouldn’t have come to on my own, if not for the public health crisis brought on by COVID and the senseless murders of black people in this country: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others that I don’t, yet, know by name. Memory is embodied in language as “knowing something by heart.” There are so many that we have never even collectively heard of, whose names are known only to their families and friends. Every day now as I write this new unknown murders of innocent black people are coming to light – all of them happening since January of this year. It’s too big for my mind, but not my heart.

Without my heart my mind is useless.

What saved me this morning was picking up bell hook’s book “All About Love.”

It helped me to remember that I can look at everything that’s happening right now as if it was all about love. My fear, pain, anger, even hatred of Trump when it comes, is all about the loss of love and the need for love, the profound effort to return, over and over again, to love of life in all things. The risk that young people are taking in the streets is a return to love. The smashing of stores is painful and often senseless, but the refusal to put profit over life is not. It makes deep sense. We have let hate become a way of life and we have to stop it.

All the work we have done to get in touch with our bodies is going to come in handy now. Your body, your true home, is so vulnerable. It has everything you need to know about racism contained in it. Your body knows what it means to feel free, to move as you wish, to have space to breath. Your body knows what it really means when you forget about how important that is for other human beings.

Your body knows what it feels like to not be free to move even an inch, to breath, to speak. George Floyds last words were words of love. If you watch the video, you don’t just hear that love. You feel it in your whole body as his precious life is taken from him. Your heart knows what it is to be stomped on, enslaved, imprisoned for profit, brutalized, and beaten. Our sensitized bodies feel the violence done to others as if it was happening to us.

Because it is.

Our body instantly recognizes the complete disassociation expressed in the calm, cruel demeanor of policeman Derek Chauvin as he took George Floyd’s precious life away. I’m grateful to feel broken, to feel angry, to feel outrage, to feel grief, to feel hope. I’m grateful to be a mess today. Today, these are the fruits of embodiment.

I’m not scared of these feelings.

I’m more scared about what will happen to us if we can no longer feel them. And that gives me courage to keep doing what I’m doing.

Get close to what you love. Hold, touch, and share it. Help each other to get close and stay close to it, whatever it is. Trust it and let it be your guide.

I want to thank the students who came to class this week and helped me to stay in touch with my body, heart, and mind in motion. And that’s what we need to do – move forward in a new way. Let the old broken way go and stumble on, not knowing how we are going to end racism but knowing that we must if we love life.

There is something very important about a dance class – it’s a collective revivification of ourselves in each other’s presence that energizes us in a way that we cannot do on our own. Even online, this magic always visits us.

We move forward together and reconstitute our broken hearts into something new.

I turned on the radio this morning during breakfast and the announcer said

“Brace yourself for what could be the worst week in American history!”

And I thought, “is bracing myself going to make this week somehow better? I don’t think so! How does this guy know ahead of time that this coming week will be the worst ever? I’m not saying this is not a crisis, but what if next week is worse. Will bracing myself help then either? Not.”

Bracing causes broken bones.

What would happen if I softened myself instead?

After 14 days of fighting what was probably COVID19, I’m feeling a bit… quiet. What I had was mild, according to what I hear, but I was humbled and made vulnerable by the experience. It truly stopped me in my tracks. Am I grateful for the Alexander Technique? Yes! Did I practice Mobilignment™ in the bathtub, and in my bed? Yes! Did those things make a difference? They did to me in the moment. Scientifically I have no idea, and I don’t want to alarm you in any way by making you think that you need what I have in order to be OK. You do not.

I do know that bracing against reality is a total waste of energy. Bracing isn’t going to keep our health care workers safe, or bring the grinding hulk of greed and profiteering going on in our government and healthcare industry to a halt. All it’s going to do is stress out your already challenged delicate tissues even more.

I prefer to Mobilize and Mobilign. There is positive energy in the quiet softness of your mind and body. It is an endless resource that is always there for you. None of us as individuals can beat this thing, and no hero is going to save us with their braced puffed out chest and superhero suit. It’s going to be you, fighting like the dickens to take the best care of yourself that you can, and it’s going to be us, caring for each other, one creative moment at a time. It always was.