The Power of How: A journal about The Alexander Technique and Movement

A VERY SPECIAL OFFER AND IMAGINATIVE FOOT PAIN SOLUTIONS

 

 

 

Mobilignment™ is really taking off. Next month I will be teaching live classes in NYC at Movement Research. But if you are not in NYC, maybe you’d be interested in this special offer: one free online 30 minute session and one group class.

I need 6 people to be part of a Mobilignment class online that will be used on my website as a way for people to see what a Mobilignment class is like – and how fun it is!!!! Each participant will get one individual free 30 minute Mobilignment session, and one free Mobilignment group class, in exchange for their presence.

Have you been curious? No previous experience is necessary at all! So this is your chance to jump in.

Free Mobilignment Class will be November 10, 12:00 – 1:15 EST. Once you register to participate, you will need to set up your free 30 minute lesson for a time convenient to you, before that November 10 class.

DEADLINE FOR SIGNING UP TO PARTICIPATE: OCTOBER 28

Now, as far as foot pain solutions goes…my suggestion for today is to get off of your feet! There is only one Moblignment point totally designed to be weight bearing on the bottom of your foot. In the illustration above it would be right under Crime & Corruption! How appropriate for todays news.

Can you take 5 minutes today to do something out of the ordinary with your feet? Something other than sitting, standing, or walking?

Here are a few suggestions, but I’m sure that you can come up with your own:

1) Lie on your back with your feet resting on a wall. Play around with brushing your feet along the wall at different angles: side, bottom, top of your foot. You will have to let other parts of your body move, turn, roll, in order to rest different parts of your foot on the wall. As you lie there let your neck be easy and calm, and let your head rest. Let your back widen and your pelvic floor open.

2) Find a way to move about without putting the sole of your foot on the floor.

3) Imagine that the bottom of your foot was an eye. How would you move? What would your eyes (left and right) see?

INTERESTED IN WORKSHOPS AND TRAININGS?

Here are some of the things that my Moblignment Level 1 Teachers have said during the course of our training about the benefits of our practice:

“Practicing the “preludes” I find that that I can stop trying so hard, orient towards what is positive for me in the moment, and connect with myself without effort.”

“I feel relief at discovering what is holding me back!”

“It’s so important that I have time to integrate my emotional responses to change.”

“It’s amazing to see myself clearly without critical judgement!”

MOBILIGNMENT CLASSES:

1) WORLDWIDE ONLINE:
Next class Sunday, October 27
11 – 12:30 EST, $35, Register here.

2) MOBILIGNMENT LIVE IN NYC, WEEKLY CLASSES IN NOVEMBER & DECEMBER
Alexander Technique and Mobilignment™ at Movement Research in NYC
Gibney Dance, 280 Broadway
Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:00 pm
Click here for more info.

3) MOBILIGNMENT TRAINING:
Our second training is now open for registration! The training is online, January 6 – 10, 9 – 11 am. Early bird registration at $496 offers a discount of $30 and is open until November 15, 2019. Anyone who has attended classes already is welcome.

Interested? Drop me a line!

4) ARE YOU AN A.T. TEACHER?
Come explore your brilliance in the Alexander Technique Experimenters Union, where we share new, unique teaching ideas in a structured environment and give each other constructive, reliable feedback. We dare to go where no one has gone before!

We meet online every Friday from 12:00 – 1:15 EST, Go here to register and find out more about our peer-to-peer work exchange format.

Our online meetings have been so full of support, joy, and discovery!

October 21st, 2019 • No Comments

HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE MYSELF FROM HEAD TO TOE

  

 

My feet were once the most hated (yes, hated) part of my body. They did not look good, or more importantly, feel good when I pointed them as a young dancer.

Since they wouldn’t do what I wanted them to do, I decided quite consciously to hate them. You can imagine that this didn’t work very well in terms of getting me what I wanted:

– a foot that looked long and pointed clearly in any direction

– a foot that felt good, soft, and springy that I could jump, turn, and balance on.

Needless to say, this may have contributed to all of the sprained ankles, knees, and shin splints that I experienced by the time I was 23.

I realized this morning, as I prepared to make the last video in my Mobilignment™ Series, that I had arrived at my foot. I also realized how much my feelings about my feet have changed!

The Alexander Technique is perfect for those who want to learn self-love and self-care. An Alexander teacher will not focus directly on your emotional state. You are not trying to change it at all. In my case, this was probably the only way I could have discovered a different relationship to my emotions. My relationship to myself was one of compulsive control, so if you had directly tried to pry me away from that project I would have resisted. In fact, if you knew me in those days, I probably did resist!

My feelings about myself weirdly shifted from hate to love almost instantly during my first Alexander influenced dance class. I honestly didn’t know that it was possible to send a light thought to myself, feel that good, and dance at the same time. The feeling good translated instantly into gratitude. Thank you Clare!

This is called “sending direction” in the Alexander Technique practice. You think of your own energy flowing in a direction that is in harmony with your structure, and with the force of gravity. You make friends with gravity as a springboard for your movement.

Right now you can imagine energy running down your leg and out of your toes. Self-hate, away! Like an internal massage, this movement of energy might bring about a softening of your foot where it is in contact with the floor. It might become a bit more springy. It might ease a pulling in your neck when the rest of you realizes that your foot is on the ground.

Since you are probably on your feet for much of your day, how you feel about them is profound. How they touch the floor and spring up off of it is profound. Imagine what it really means if you hate them! Or, if you just never think about them until they hurt.

So welcome to the International Month of the Foot! More to come…

Lots of love,

Clare

 

CONNECT WITH ME IN PERSON:

1) Free 15 minute phone consultation: (718) 243-2720

2) Private AT lessons in my Madison Square Park Studio

3) Private Mobilignment™ sessions online

 

INTERESTED IN WORKSHOPS, TRAININGS, OR ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE COMMUNITY PROJECTS?

Here are some of the things that my Moblignmen™t Level 1 Teachers have said during the course of our training about the benefits of this our practice:

“Practicing the “preludes” I find that that I can stop trying so hard, orient towards what is positive for me in the moment, and connect with myself without effort.”

“I feel relief at discovering what is holding me back!”

“It’s so important that I have time to integrate my emotional responses to change.”

“It’s amazing to see myself clearly without critical judgement!”

1) WORLDWIDE MOBILIGNMENT™ONLINE:
Next class Sunday, October 27
11 – 12:30 EST, $35, Register here.

2) MOBILIGNMENT™ LIVE IN NYC, WEEKLY CLASSES IN NOVEMBER & DECEMBER
Alexander Technique and Mobilignment™ at Movement Research in NYC
Gibney Dance, 280 Broadway
Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:00 pm
Click here for more info.

3) MOBILIGNMENT™ TRAINING:
Our second training is now open for registration! The training is online, January 6 – 10, 9 – 11 am. Early bird registration at $496 offers a discount of $30 and is open until November 15, 2019. Anyone who has attended classes already is welcome.

Click here for more information.

4) WORLDWIDE ALEXANDER TEACHER EXPERIMENTERS UNION:
Come explore your brilliance in the Alexander Technique Experimenters Union, where we share new, unique teaching ideas in a structured environment and give each other constructive, reliable feedback. We dare to go where no one has gone before!

We meet online every Friday from 12:00 – 1:15 EST, Go here to register and find out more about our peer-to-peer work exchange format.

Our meetings are full of support, joy, and discovery!

September 30th, 2019 • No Comments

WHAT IS THE BEST POSTURE FOR BREATHING?

 

 

Good posture is really important, but…is it more important than breathing? We think not! Breathing trumps all for us humans – it’s more important than water and food, even.

We’ll be looking at breathing, movement, and balance April 6 in my class at Balance Arts in NYC. Go here for more information and to register (keep scrolling to the bottom of the page :-).

I have alot of students who come because they know something is wrong with their breathing, and/or something is not right with their posture – but often they haven’t put those two things together.

The two biggest postural challenges to easy breathing are:

1) OVERLY SLACK/RELAXED POSTURE
This is where you don’t have enough muscle tone in your back, you slump, and your belly is pushed out. Since the primary muscle of respiration, your diaphragm, runs the circumference of the bottom of your rib cage, if your ribcage is squashed down into your belly you will have difficulty breathing. The front of your neck will be pulled down into your ribs, and it will be hard for the air to get through.

2) OVERLY RIGID STIFF POSTURE
If you are trying to lift and widen your back and shoulders to make space for breathing, you may find that this “lift” is a bit disconnected from the rest of your body and is actually really really hard to maintain; furthermore, you may be stiffening your shoulder blades which will mean your ribs can’t move at the top end of their structure and that will also impair your breathing. Your jaw will be pulled in as you lift your chest up, and this will close the airway as well.

SO WHAT’S THE RIGHT POSTURE FOR BREATHING?
The way into breathing, in my Mobilignment system, might surprise you. It starts with spatial awareness & head balance, which contribute to healthy but adaptable postural tone. Postural tone, it turns out, is much more complex and adaptable than “position” because it’s job is to manage your support in the gravitational field, which is a “whole body” activity.

Curious? Watch the video to find out more. It’s about the joy of spatial awareness, specifically regarding the presence of the hyoid bone, a small horseshoe shaped bone that is suspended in tissue in front of your trachea and behind your jaw. It’s a microcosm of your posture – too much tone relative to gravitational necessity in this area, and you can’t breath; not enough tone, and you can’t breath either.

You can have a positive influence on breathing and balance through waking up the spatial awareness of this little bone. Some of you may know more about the muscular anatomy surrounding it than I do – but knowing all that anatomy doesn’t provide the joy and ease that spatial awareness can give you :-).

I’m right in the middle of a fascinating webinar on the Alexander Technique and Science, and am beginning to understand the whole issue of “posture” in a new way. We don’t know for sure, but it’s starting to look like posture and movement may be two different, parallel systems that influence each other but are also independent of one another. The science is super complicated, so until I understand it better I won’t go into detail.

What I wonder is how does spatial awareness contribute to stable posture? And how does the Mobilignment material tap into that system, creating a harmonious, fluid relationship between support, stability, and movement?

All my life I’ve been a dancer interested in movement phenomena – and that puts me in the company of many many dance innovators who are out riding the wave of movement, a little bit ahead of science. Sometimes we are totally off in left field, but sometimes…..we are on to something, and what we know can contribute to the larger conversations around human functioning and well being.

I can only pray that this is the case with me. But if not, it’s pretty fun out here in left field. Come join me.

MOBILIGNMENT LIVE IN NYC: FIRST SATURDAY OF EACH MONTH
Next class: Saturday, April 6, 3:00 – 5:00, at Balance Arts, 151 West 30th Street, 3rd floor, $45
Register here.

ONLINE WORLDWIDE: LAST SUNDAY OF EACH MONTH
Next class: Sunday, April 28, 11 – 12:30 EST, $35
Register here.

Go here to watch the growing number of videos on Mobilignment™.

I also give private sessions in person and online. Private lessons available in single, 5, and 10 lesson packages. Go here for prices and more information.

April 3rd, 2019 • No Comments