Photo by Nik Shuliahin

Do you get overwhelmed trying to keep up with current news and events? That’s probably a good thing.

Why? Because it means you are actually really sensitive underneath it all. You are responding naturally to something that’s crazy and upsetting.

I’ve been in the woods for a week, no TV and no news. When I finally got bars on my phone and read the front page of the NY Times, I just cried. Don’t worry – I had a lovely vacation even so!

I’d been so maxed out on the news that I stopped feeling it. The only thing that helped me to recover my natural state of giving a damn was taking a break – and it’s very hard to do that if you live in a city because the news is everywhere, even if you don’t deliberately read it.

I no longer expect myself to be immune to news overload, to be able to stop obsessively checking social media, to be able to stop the resulting emotional shutdown. My body is trying to help me out, and responding in the only way it can. There is no quick fix for this state. It’s human and normal to be affected by the news. What’s not normal is to expect myself to be able to conquer my own sensitivity.

One step, one nerve at a time, it’s possible to get back in touch with your self. It just takes time, and it helps to have a simple process to follow. That’s what I’ve devised over 17 years of teaching sensitive artists how to take care of themselves.

Try starting at the beginning. The first cranial nerve, the foremost one in your brain, is for smell. Try this experiment right now:

1. Imagine the distance between your eyes, see out of your eyes into the distance.
2. Your organ of smell is high up in this space. Feel the air going in, cooler, and out, warmer. Stay with this motion for a few minutes. Notice any smells.

Feel any easier – less focused, less tight, more balanced? I hopes so. Maybe you will be able to step away from the news now 🙂

P.S. The more sensitive you are, the more you need a good self care practice. I hope you will sign up for my newsletter if you want to get more self care tips.

Go here to sign up for my next workshop.

Go here to try a 30 minute consultation – all you need to bring is a flower :-).

“POLES ARE FOR SAFETY, NOT FOR YOUR LATEST ROUTINE”

– my favorite broken subway rule

Real life circumstances sometimes call for a little rule-breaking. Dancers understand this instinctively. Where most people are afraid of falling – like on a moving subway train – dancers see opportunity: for self-challenge, for making money, and putting on a good show! They have a certain crazy faith in balance, space, and their own physical intelligence. If I can imagine it, they think, I can make it happen!

I’ve seen alot of scared passengers on the subway during these crazy routines, but I’ve never seen anyone get hurt. The risk is carefully calculated. After all, if you hurt your audience, they won’t give you their hard earned cash. If you are a dancer, though, you know: dancers do get hurt. If you are a dance educator, or a touch professional who helps dancers sustain long careers, you know what I mean. Dancers take alot of risks, and sometimes pay a price – willingly or not. The challenges of my dance life, and a desire to take better care of myself inspired by my first experiences with the Alexander Technique, led me to several key questions by the time I was 25:

– Could it really be this easy to let go of ideas about movement that no longer serve me – so I can keep dancing?

– Is it really possible to stop holding myself back physically, mentally, and emotionally?

– Am I willing to trust my intelligence and imagination and stop hurting myself?

– Am I willing to stop trying to control outcomes (including the audience’s perception of me) that I have no control over anyway?

If you are a movement educator or a dancer in pain, there is a good chance that you’ve got ideas about how your body is supposed to move that are not in harmony with the actual design of that body. No, it’s not just that dance is hard. Those ideas (and many of us have multiple and conflicting ones) are deployed in our bodies in full force especially when under the stress of performance. The good news is, there is a way you can discover what they are really doing for you, good or bad!

In my Beginners Mind, Beginners Body Workshop the most important tool you will receive is a reliable method of finding out for yourself if your ideas about movement are true (not harmful) or not. It’s not just another “technique” to learn. It’s a method for finding the truth of the body for yourself, making your already considerable body of knowledge even more valuable and accurate, so you can keep doing what you love and share it with the world.

Here is my most recent video on the nerve supply for your arms. It might give you an idea of how you could do one of these crazy pole routines without hurting your delicate shoulder joints!
 
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Spring!

Spring is a great season for my message today, which goes out to all of you:

Bodyworkers
Alexander Teachers
Physical Therapists
Somatics Teachers
Anatomy Geeks

I have developed a special workshop for you! Would you like to:

1) De-pressurize & revitalize your whole body
2) Show you how to stop hurting delicate fingers, wrists, elbows, arms, and shoulders
3) relieve “knowledge overwhelm”, reignite your innate creativity, and refresh your spirit?

Register before April 22 and get a 20% discount. Want to find out more? Read on below, or go right to the registration page on my website.

Do you ever feel like knowing so much about your body/mind can be a burden? Like, Knowledge Overwhelm? Do your hands, arms, and shoulder hurt after a day of work, even though you feel like you should somehow know better, cause you know so much? If you’ve studied the body a lot, you may have been given tons of great information. But have you been able to really understand it? Do you had trouble figuring out how to use your hard-won knowledge in practical ways? I’ve got the perfect antidote.

I’m prone to overwhelm. My endless curiosity and my hunger for learning are something I just can’t seem to turn off. To balance that part of my nature out, I have developed a practice that allows me to start fresh, all over from the beginning, every day. I’m so glad that I don’t have to come from a place of knowing everything anymore. Instead, I can use the Alexander principles to start from a more open point of view: a place of finding out, verifying, and trusting my own discoveries.

My working title for this practice is “Beginners Mind, Beginners Body”. It follows the 43 segments of our head-to-tail structure, which can be found at all levels of tissue: bone, muscle, nerves, skin. It can seem way too complex, but I’ve found that if you give yourself time, it’s actually simple and refreshing. It’s the perfect antidote to overwhelm. I’ve been exploring the nerves in sequence, one at a time, by working with the layer of tissue with the most sensation: the skin.

When you touch skin, you are contacting many layers of intelligence. It doesn’t require “hard work” to make that contact. The skin does the work for you because it has so much nerve supply! An area of skin that is innervated by a particular nerve is called a “dermatome.” So you could also call it “dermatome mapping.” This is a deep dive, experiential practice, not one that requires memorizing names and information. It’s more like going for a refreshing swim!

I’d like to invite all you body geeks to join me in this practice. I’ve been doing videos starting from my head, and working towards my tail.

Go here if you want to start at the beginning (the jaw). If you have a problem area, you can jump in at any point that interests you. I’ve been so sick this week that I wasn’t able to create a new video, but that’s OK. Go here if you want the most recent video on cervical nerve 6, which innervates the skin of the thumb.

If you are included in the list at the top of this email, chances are your thumbs get a lot of pressure! Maybe you don’t have to work so hard.
And please – if you feel like you should already have the answer to this problem, you are moving more into knowledge overwhelm, and maybe just maybe you need a break.

Happy Spring! Lets see if we can peel away some of the layers of what we think we know, and the meanings that have accrued to parts of our bodies, and see what our bodies have to teach us from the inside out.