Alexander90210

Think about something you believe in strongly, say, that capital punishment is immoral. Feel the belief strongly as you sit at your computer reading this blog post. Then slowly stand up and then slowly sit down again and notice how sitting and standing affect the quality of your belief. As you fold and unfold your limbs, does your mind stray from your belief? Does your belief seem less important to you once you have to think about sitting and standing? Does the stimulus of sitting and standing distract you from your belief or lessen the intensity of your belief? Now lean forward and let your head rest in your hands. How does that affect your belief? Take your hands away and roll your torso forward so that it is resting on your knees and your head and shoulders are rolled over your knees. How does this affect your belief?

Now stand up and bring your hands to your head and hold your face. How does this affect your belief? Now bring your hands to your hips and let them rest on your hips. How does this affect your belief? Now try on various customary positions, either sitting or standing or lying down. How do these changes in position affect your belief? How do these changes in position affect your ability to hear opposing beliefs? Are you better able or less able to listen to opposing points of view in different positions. Not only does every belief and every emotion carry with it varying levels of body tension, the amount of tension you hold in your body and the way you arrange your musculature will affect the quality of your thinking and emotions.

Performance is generally hurt by strongly-held beliefs. When you are strongly in your beliefs, you are less open to the present moment. You have increased body tension. Fluid movement through life and the graceful performance of your tasks generally requires releasing most if not all of your beliefs. Thinking creates greater body tension than observing, which in turn creates greater body tension that participating. There are certainly times when we need to think and to observe, but generally speaking, we are better served by participating in life rather than trying to impose our beliefs upon it. Life generally does not go better when we live in a top down world where we are constantly seeking to fit reality into our belief system.

I have many strong beliefs, but throughout the day, I am consciously trying to let go of them when I don’t need them. I like to walk, at times, without holding any beliefs.

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Loren Shlaes writes:

The anxious child treats many everyday activities as if he is experiencing them for the first time. He can’t easily adapt to novelty, and he can’t internalize routine. Long after the beginning of the school year, he enters the classroom and needs adult supervision and guidance to take off his coat, put his backpack in his cubby, and sit down at his desk.

The anxious child isolates himself in the corner, hangs back on the playground, won’t touch the craft materials at school, won’t try new foods, won’t participate in circle time. He hangs on his mother and has a hard time separating from her and diving into the cheerful chaos of the classroom, earning his mother the disapproval of the school’s social workers for making him too dependent on her. He has a very hard time going to sleep and wakes up during the night. At family gatherings he disappoints the relatives because he can’t bring himself to allow the grownups to hug and kiss him or to play with his cousins, preferring to sit in a corner and read a book or engage in some other solitary activity.

Top down strategies {appealing to the child’s intellect to overcome his inability to participate in everyday life} are of little use when a child is chronically anxious. The child can’t talk easily talk himself into doing what the grownups want him to do. The more the grownups try to persuade, the more obstinate he becomes. He can’t intellectually persuade himself that everything is all right. He can’t self regulate or self soothe. He gets jacked up and stays that way, escalating until the inevitable melt down, or he is seen as having a frozen affect, looking like a deer in the headlights. His automatic response to life is a resounding “NO!” and he may come across as perpetually defiant or angry.

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Loren Shlaes writes:

Occupational therapy assists people who for various reasons cannot meet their responsibilities and are not functioning at their highest potential. A child who is not succeeding in school and can’t meet the grownup’s expectations falls into this category.
Sensory integration based occupational therapy can be very helpful to a child who is struggling in the classroom by strengthening his body, correcting delays in his neurological maturation, improving the way his senses take in and respond to his environment, and helping him become more emotionally flexible. School based therapists also work on helping the child with his hand eye and fine motor coordination, handwriting, social skills, and anything else a child needs to succeed in the classroom.
What Does Sensory integration Mean?
Sensory integration refers to the ability to take in, perceive, and act on sensory information in an accurate way. Our behavior is based on our perceptions of the world around us. If a child cannot correctly perceive and interpret what goes on around him, or if his balance is off and his coordination is poor, his behavior and actions are going to reflect that.

I notice that the more I free my neck, the less I think. Instead, I am in the moment. Once I start thinking and reminiscing and believing, my neck and back tighten up. I find it impossible to have a belief without tightening up. Conversely, when I free my neck, all my beliefs disappear and all of my intense emotions soften.

There’s a concept in the Alexander Technique that all beliefs are unnecessary muscle tension.

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Ingrid Bacci tells Robert Rickover: “All of this work revolves around — how am I? Tension is about self-punitive behavior, which originates from feeling that I am not OK. I am dependent and I have to work to make myself OK. So then we try to control [and tense up].”

“Everybody knows that we have better mastery when we are relaxed than when we are agitated.”

Robert: “We live in a culture where if something is not working out, the impulse is to do something to fix the situation. A basic Alexander principle is that before you start doing some new thing, it would be good idea to find out what you are doing now and it is more than likely that some of what you are doing now is not helping you.”

Ingrid: “When we flow freely, we flow best.”

“If you learn to stop the mental chatter, then real information comes through. You don’t pay attention to your mind, you pay attention to your sensations and to letting go of tensions in your body and then your mind quiets. We associate mental chatter with what do I have to do? Do I have to buy magnesium? Do I need to do more exercise? Do I need to call this person? In Alexander Technique, you let go of lists of to do, you get quiet, and real understanding of what you need to do emerges.

“You can use Alexander Technique to teach intuition to people. Intuition is nothing more than being more present to your non-conscious mind.”

“You can help people to do regressions where you help people get in contact with past traumas that might inhibit their functioning and create emotional conflict. If we learn to let go, everything functions better.”

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(Reuters) – President Barack Obama, who had medical tests on Saturday after complaining of a sore throat, is suffering from acid reflux, the president’s physician said.

“The president’s symptoms are consistent with soft tissue inflammation related to acid reflux and will be treated accordingly,” Obama’s doctor, Captain Ronny Jackson, said in a statement.

Acid reflux is a condition in which the stomach contents flow back up from the stomach into the esophagus, causing such symptoms as heartburn and sore throat.

ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE & ACID REFLUX.

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Some tips from a FB thread of Alexander Technique teachers:

* I’ve heard things like free, releasing away from the skull, down and away…

* The head’s going forward and up is preventive of it’s going back and down to compress the spine. The jaw’s tracking forward and open—easily, finding it’s own way— is preventive of its going back and down.

* Some teachers suggested thinking of the letter ‘K’ with the jaw freeing in the forward and down direction.

* That jaw releasing back can be cause for snoring as it closes the vocal tract. I think that back is a dangerous word in talking about the jaw, just as it is when talking about the head’s relationship to the torso.

* In my experience, when we go into more of a “primary curve” (spinal flexion) the jaw releases forward, and in “secondary curve” (spinal extension) it goes back. If your dad’s jaw is releasing back when he falls asleep perhaps it’s because he’s also pulling his head back during sleep… but then again, I could be wrong. On another note, to release my jaw I like thinking of my lower back molars on the jaw bone (wisdom teeth if you have them) and thinking them heavier than the rest. I find this gives me a nice release without any extraneous “doing” on my part.

* I believe the jaw is a gliding, sliding joint, not a hinge.

* I just say, “Let your back bottom teeth release away from your back top teeth.” In other words, “Let your jaw yield to gravity.” Now, as far as the mapping goes, make sure your students don’t have an idea that they have a “hand puppet” mouth. Also, I give directions for the tongue before directions for the jaw. A lot of people habitually press their tongues to the roof of the mouth, creating tension in both the tongue and the jaw.

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I have spent over a hundred hours listening to Tony Robbins talks and he always has a hoarse voice. Looking at his recent interview with the New York Times, it is easy to see why. He tightens and compresses his neck, putting pressure on his voice box.

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BLOG: The Science of Kissing, What Our Lips Are Telling Us by Sheril Kirshenbaum says “A good deal of the scientific literature speculates that kissing may have evolved to help us choose a suitable partner, or to realize when a match is a bad idea…The exchange of olfactory, tactile, and postural information might trigger unconscious mechanisms that guide us in deciding whether we should continue, and a kiss might even tell us about a potential partner’s level of commitment and genetic compatibility.”

Now let’s consider what could be meant by “postural information”. When we’re using our phones, what tends to happen is that we make ourselves shorter. This is a common habit, that when we want to reach to look at something or kiss someone, we push the face forward and press the head back and down into the spine. Compressing the head and neck is different from tilting the head, which is is possible to do just by tipping it back and not over-tightening the muscles in the back of the neck.

“Kissing presents some interesting kinaesthetic challenges. A tall partner tends to stoop and reach down to the shorter one, misusing himself (or herself) in the process. Unwittingly, the shorter partner aggravates the problem by making herself (or himself) shorter still.” – The Alexander Technique, A Skill for Life, by Pedro de Alcantara

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Raquel Baetz writes: When my repetitive strain injury became too painful to ignore anymore, I was using a top-of-the-range ergonomic chair, specially designed for computer use.

I still got injured.

Why? Because no chair can prevent musculoskeletal disorders such as repetitive strain injury.

Back then, I sat with my legs crossed – Buddha style – up on the chair. At the time, I thought this position was ok, because it felt comfortable.

Not anymore. Now I know that how you use your chair is more important than what chair you use.

“The next posture is the best posture,” says Galen Cranz, professor of architecture at University of California Berkeley and author of The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design.

Cranz is a big proponent of moving – often – and changing chairs as much as possible throughout the day. In this podcast, she talks about the chairs she has in her home – a huge variety, and she moves between them regularly (as well as sitting and lying down on the floor).

Cranz is also an instructor of the Alexander Technique. This discipline teaches people how to sit, thus taking the responsibility for comfort and safety away from the chair completely. Here’s a blog by Alexander Technique teacher Adrian Farrell where he explains, “a chair is an inanimate object, it is incapable of ‘doing’ anything, let alone taking responsibility for you”.

We should all take a lesson from Farrell and Cranz – especially at the office.

In an ideal world, we’d all know how to sit, and we’d have many different chairs at our disposal, enabling us to change at least every 20 or 30 minutes, alternating with periods of standing, squatting, even sitting and lying on the floor like Cranz. (In this utopia, we’d all have the brand new iWatch too – reminding us to stand up.)

In my experience doing workplace assessments, the office workers I talk with find the idea of switching chairs…well, a bit weird. And most people think they know how to sit already.

Also, even if employees were willing to rotate chairs, most offices don’t have a big selection on hand, and people are often territorial about the chair they do have.

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