Training Journal: Classes with Judith Leibowitz #12

Training Journal: Classes with Judith Leibowitz #12

January 12, 1978

Topic: Use of the arm in gesture. Begin with primary control. Use of the whole torso involved in direction. The arm gesture comes out of this. Think of air under the scapula. Think of air under the sternum. Release out of the neck. Support of the arms comes from the back of the torso which begins low in the deep area below the muscles of the [buttocks].

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Training Journal: Classes with Judith Leibowitz #11

Training Journal

Wednesday, January 11, 1978

We will begin working on ”the uncommitted hand”. As an Alexander teacher, the biggest asset is “the uncommitted hand”. Let them be free. No unnecessary tension in them. Touching another person is communication. The hand is listening to the other person. It is a double communication. Tension interferes in this communication.

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Training Journal: Classes with Judith Leibowitz #10

Training Journal: Classes with Judith Leibowitz #10

Friday, December 16, 1977

We had a discussion about directing as a non-endgaining activity. It was suggested that the work is about giving yourself more space. Direction is not a movement. Direction is a thought. Movement is a result of direction. Direction precedes movement, and integrates and releases through movement.

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Training Journal: Classes with Judith Leibowitz #9

Training Journal: Classes with Judith Leibowitz #9

Friday, December 2, 1977

There is no right way to direct, only direction.

On the street, I may see what I want to happen to me in the person ahead or me, or direct the person in the mirror.

Judy: “Like the Macy’s parade balloons, only expanded with energy rather than air.”

Must be willing to give up what you think is true.

Not to be rigid.

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The Tao of Scoliosis

by Cate McNider (originally puplished here)

Scoliosis, the lateral asymmetric deviation of the spine, is idiopathic. That means doctors don’t yet know or fully understand it.

Tao of Scoliosis.JPG

Experientially, we know the causes are as varied as the people that suffer from it. Here’s a synopsis: Muscles pull bones, stimulated by messages sent from the nervous systems motor pathway, to animate the muscle fibers to contract or release. The messaging can also be a suspension of movement, as in holding the diaphragm from inhaling or exhaling. Repetition of such an action or non-action, over time, creates a pathway in the nervous system messaging, which then becomes a habit, which develops into a pattern.

The diaphragm is the nexus of the deviation for the upper and lower side of the spine to be pulled to the right or left in opposition. It’s a powerful trampoline-like muscle that encircles the base of the ribs, creating a boundary from respiratory and digestive systems, massaging both with each action, acting like a pump of sorts. It has anchors, tendons into the spine, the longer of the two on the right side. Over time, that right side anchor has more leverage to pull the upper body into a twist to the right. The lower body, meanwhile, seeks to balance the developing imbalance by pulling back, creating the S-curve. (I’ve found a C-curve to be more common—only one side majorly deviates the spine, usually the upper and again to the right.)

The body’s innate intelligence makes the best of a bad situation, ever attempting to maintain balance, especially to counter strong forces. The mind is the arbiter in shaping the body—how someone accepts a stimulus, or misunderstands a stimulus due to youth and inexperience, begins to shape how they see the world, and in turn shapes or misshapes the body. A force strong enough in an instant, or repeated over time, has the power to imprint itself on a growing spine into pulling it in opposing directions.

And that gets us to the shape of Tao: the light spot in the dark and the dark spot in the light. The spine is the divider of the duality of light and dark; apply a stimulus strong enough to deviate it from an upward balance of the two, and you have expressed a division of mind against itself. Beliefs taken literally by the body have colored the reality of what is true—they warp the frame of the skeleton receiving opposing messages.

There is a naturalness we all are born with, which is colored by our interpretations of our environments, family, culture, language and customs. We are not exactly a blank slate; we bring with us in our spirit knowledge that we will need for this life’s journey, and as we have to learn about where we find ourselves, because we don’t know yet, we make incorrect assumptions, and internalize messages that become the positions from where we act and speak, shaping our minds and thus our bodies. While nature provides all creatures with defensive attributes—the skunk’s pungent scent, the tiger’s sharp claws, the snake’s venom—we humans mostly have our minds to navigate the world and defend ourselves.

We feel before we have language. In our movement, synapses are made between the brain and the body. Our eyes lead us through developmental patterns, homologous, homolateral and contralateral into standing out of curiosity; our world expands and we expand upon our reflexes, into pushing, pulling and reaching. We have all five senses that inform us of our environment, plus the native and primary receptor of vibration, which is feeling. We all felt a situation before we had the language to understand it fully. We felt safe or unsafe. We were hungry or not hungry. We were cold or hot, wet or dry.

In these early years, the feeling groundwork is laid for later complexity. One person may perceive a stimulus as no big deal, but for another person it’s a pivotal event. That pivot, that moment of hinging is in the nexus of the length of the spine or its compression, and the width of the diaphragm or its contraction. This is the center line defining yin and yang, the left side being the feminine and the right being the masculine. Feminine is receptive, masculine is projective. Feminine is space and masculine is form; ergo, there is form in space and space in form. We breathe space (air) into us, drawn in by the diaphragm and pushed out by the diaphragm. Suspend this natural process with a shock and then repeatedly out of fear, and it can become an unconscious habit of withholding the inhale or exhale. Add the effect of the stimuli on the heart and you can have an emotional shutdown; the spine deviates from its support of the heart.

Our strengths and weaknesses are readily perceptible to one who sees and understands the language of the bodymindspirit. Yes, I mean that as one word. We are Tao, the whole circle, but when we swing from yin to yang, pulling ourselves apart by giving the mind power beyond our conscious control, it can become a switchback trail that we must retrace, undoing the misunderstandings, letting the spine untwist itself with every recognition.

For example, I was about 7 or 8 when my father said to me that "thinking is superior to feeling.” Whether he meant it as an order, a threat or a suggestion, it’s how I took it that created my future reality. I was standing at the top of the stairs, up from the front door, on the new white carpet, my hands on the railing, poised to make a decision that energetically would become a base of how I would interact in the family. I made a decision in that moment (I didn’t want to be ‘inferior,’ whatever that meant, since I was already competing with two older brothers) to follow what I thought he meant, which energetically resulted in evacuating my solar plexus, to my brain. Subsequent events further affected me and my body, which having shut down my feeling center could not support me and the forces were greater than my mind could process. The incoming information went out another pathway and was stored in the body’s tissue. Many other defining moments are what I have allowed for decades to unwind, returning my spine to an upward length and width, to wholeness.

If we take the time to understand this relationship of the mind and the body, we can significantly rewrite what will become our future. Understanding the past that has written itself on our body, we can undo the wires that unevenly hold the muscles in opposition. The muscles that are being held by the information messaged by the nervous system can also be messaged to unhold the information.

It’s a choice: Do you want to create yourself after a Picasso or a Modigliani, or do you want to be free to be you? Who is you? (That's not a grammatical error.) Are you in balanced opposition to gravity or are you suffering under the weight of your thoughts about what you think about reality? Remember, you create your body and your reality! Do you want to keep swinging back and forth on the Coney Island ride of suffering, or do you want to undo the lies you accepted so long ago, and discover how you really feel?! Allowing is the new doing.

(These mindbody truths hold whether you have developed scoliosis or not.)

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Cate McNider has been working with the bodymind and spirit for 29 years. Through every stage of her healing and working with others through different modalities, she now finds the Alexander Technique, most actively helps others address pain and stress. She is giving online classes during this time of 'social distancing'. President of The Listening Body® has spent three decades in the Healing Arts — spanning Massage Therapy, Reiki, Embodied Anatomy, Yoga, Body-Mind Centering®, Contact Improvisation, Deep Memory Process® and more — and has further sensitized her instrument through the process of Alexander Technique. Her AT training represents the culmination of a lifetime of work and study and a springboard for future creations. Cate is also a painter and published. www.catemcnider.com and www.bodymind.training.

Training Journal: Classes with Judith Leibowitz #8

Training Journal: Classes with Judith Leibowitz #8

More involved with what your hand must tell the other person, and what your hand is picking up in that person.

Remember, asking questions won’t always get the answers. Some answers come from just plain working.

Again, head direction. Keeping from bearing down. A lot of this work will be experimental. Being willing to work without results.

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Language matters: defining terms

Language matters: defining terms

I was working with a colleague who has been teaching over video. She said one her students didn’t know what she was asking when she said “Release.”

Release seems like a straight forward and simple word, but in our work as Alexander Teachers, it has layers of meaning.

The dictionary.com definitions of “release” that are most applicable to Alexander Technique are:

Verb (used with object), release, released, releasing:
to free from confinement, bondage, obligation, pain, etc.
to free from anything that restrains, fastens, etc.

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Sherlock Holmes? Not quite, but Alexander teachers do detective work.

Sherlock Holmes? Not quite, but Alexander teachers do detective work.

by Brooke Lieb

In a recent video session with a colleague, we debriefed a series of three lessons she taught to a new student. It was hard to tell whether she was pleased overall, or disappointed. The student has a pain condition, and reported different degrees of change, relief and comfort at all three lessons.

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Stimulus Is Everywhere

Stimulus Is Everywhere

by Cate McNider (originally published here on September 30, 2020)

“In one social-science experiment, people were told to spend 15 minutes alone in a room with their thoughts. The only possible distraction was an electric shock they could administer to themselves. And 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women shocked themselves, choosing as Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist, writes in a Times Op-Ed — “negative stimulation over no stimulation.”

That’s provocative, but let’s go a level deeper: What if the stimulus is not obvious?

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Machines That Grind Wonder

Machines That Grind Wonder

We have this recurring nightmare in my house where my wife and I are sitting in the kitchen after putting the kids to bed. After 20 minutes of silence upstairs, just as our withered and awkward adult personalities are again beginning to emerge, we hear a crackle from the baby video monitor which means someone is physically handling the microphone in my daughter’s room. We sink into our stools and resign ourselves to the punishment ahead. My 2 ½-year-old has rocked her wheeled crib across the room and is now cupping the baby monitor in her hands like an evil sorceress. Her nose and mouth fill the small video screen in the kitchen as she asks, brightly, “Can I wake up now?

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From July 17, 2014: How To Sleep Better

From July 17, 2014: How To Sleep Better

by Jessica Santascoy

Many people ask me if the Alexander Technique (AT) can help with insomnia and getting a better night’s sleep. Yes, AT can help!

My sleep ritual is inspired by AT principles and strategies, and it’s one of the most effective I’ve ever used. This ritual requires very little effort and it can be done before bed, in bed, or if you wake up in the middle of the night. Also, the order of the steps isn’t important - you can do them in any order you like.

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Anxiety Generates an Endless To-Do List. Don’t Listen to It.

Anxiety Generates an Endless To-Do List. Don’t Listen to It.

Embedded within everyday anxiety is the hope that if we could only complete the remaining tasks on our to-do lists, then we could rest in an aura of accomplishment and contentment. Anxiety creates its own logic: we should maximize all our moments with doing or thinking about doing. I know it’s hard for me to relax when I think about my swollen email inbox. Email has a field day with my adrenal glands.

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The Alexander Technique Can Help us With Discomfort Caused By The Computer

by Melissa Brown

Melissa computer illustration.JPG

As we work and socialize remotely these days, we do a lot of sitting at the computer. Many of us have even added “zooming” to our daily routines. As a result, we often feel stiff and sore. Shoulders, necks, upper and lower backs can start to ache.

The Problem
The problem is simple: when we sit at the computer, we usually pull forward into our screens, crane our necks and slump. Then our muscles begin to ache. To try to undue the slump, we attempt to sit in what we think is “good posture” - a military kind of pose, pulling the shoulders back and tightening the abs. Unfortunately, our “good posture” is just a new uncomfortable tightening that we can’t sustain.

The Alexander Technique can help us find a comfortable, balanced state where we are sitting without pulling ourselves around. In the Technique, we are exploring an easy, free use of the body, where the head is poised on a lengthening spine, the torso is lengthening and widening, and the joints are open and spacious, not tight and/or compressed.

The Set-up
Computer
Your screen should be at eye-level so you can sit comfortably without craning your neck. If you have a laptop, you will need to place some books underneath it to raise the screen up. You’ll also need a separate keyboard. I got mine for about $50 at Staples. If you have a monitor, just make sure that you don’t have to constantly look down or up to see the screen.

Legs
You will want to sit with your feet on the floor and your knees lower than your hips so your legs can fall away from your hip joints, giving you more space in those joints. (If your chair is too low and your knees are higher than your hips, the thighbone will fall back into the hip joint and compromise that spaciousness.) This may require using a different chair than the one you usually sit on.

Arms
Whether you are using the keyboard for typing or the mouse for a zoom meeting, have your hands at an easy distance from the keyboard and mouse. You want to be able to reach them without leaning in, craning your neck and/or slumping.
In order to avoid crowding in the joints of your arms, you’ll want your keyboard and mouse to be positioned so your wrist is below your elbow and your elbow is below your shoulder joint when you are typing or clicking. This allows the arm bones to flow out of the joints.

If your desk does not allow for the wrists to be below the elbows, see if you find a higher chair where your feet can still reach the ground.

The Technique
To find the poise and ease that that we want, we need to stop tensing our muscles and tightening our joints and we need to gently coax our bodies into a new and more beneficial organization. Be aware that if we work too hard in an effort to change, we risk creating a new kind of tension. So be easy with yourself.

Though the Alexander Technique is a practice and it takes time to apply its principles, here are just a few ideas that you can try on your own:

First, you want to let yourself find the support of the chair. You can place your hands under your gluts to find the sit bones - which are the knobby bones on either side of the tailbone. Keep the hands there for a few seconds and then gently pull the bones out to either side. This may help you feel more balanced in your seated position. Then, see if you can release any excess tension in your leg muscles. Let your feet soften and allow them to find the support of the floor.

Release any tension that you sense in your neck and jaw muscles. This will help you stop pressing your head down onto your neck and creating downward pressure on the torso. It will also allow your head to gently poise on top of your spine so your whole spine can begin to decompress upward and your back can release into its true length and width.

As you extend your arms to make contact with the keys or the mouse, see if you notice any unnecessary work in muscles of the shoulders and the arms and if so, let it go.

While you sit, you can choose whether or not to use the back of the chair for support. If you do rest back, make sure your feet are still touching the floor and you can reach the keyboard easily. I often place a firm pillow at the back of the chair behind me so I can reach the keyboard easily. You can actually use the support of the back of the chair or the pillow to help you release your back into length and width.
It is also very important to take breaks and stand or walk around the room at regular intervals.

Melissa Brown is an nationally certified teacher of the Alexander Technique and a graduate of American Center for the Alexander Technique (ACAT). In both her group classes and private lessons, Melissa works with students with physical limitations and pain as well as with people who are simply looking for better posture and more ease in movement. She also really enjoys teaching actors and other performing artists.
If you have any questions about the set-up for the computer or how to apply the Alexander principles, please feel free to email Melissa or visit her website .

Melissa Brown teaching.jpeg

Melissa teaching a student

Not Going Out? Try going in.

Not Going Out? Try going in.

by Cate McNider

When you can’t go out, go in. Instead of getting more and frustrated and angry, look for shelter within. It’s there — you just have to explore. Here are some ideas on how.

Find a space in your home where you can sit comfortably. Turn off your phone. Close the door. Let anyone else around you know you’re ‘going in’ and you would appreciate not being disturbed. (Or you can just say you’re working.)

Now sit.

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Global Timeout - Individual Tune-In

Global Timeout - Individual Tune-In

by Cate McNider

It has been posited, that this pandemic is the Earth giving us humans time in: ‘Timeout’. Which translates to an opportunity to tune-in to one’s self. The choice has been made for us. How you handle the edict from the Earth, the CDC or WHO, is what you can control. How do you respond? Is it triggering anxiety, worry, desperation and fear? If you are, you have the world’s company — it has indeed gotten real!

relationships can be. The issue is in the tissue.

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