Unwinding Patterns

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.  Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning Stumbling across somatic educational practices including the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method changed my life. Beginning with the physical I slowly gained a consciousness of habitual physical patterns I used in everything I did that contributed to my experience of life. I later came to realise that my patterns of thinking were also habitual, often negative and undermining my wellbeing. I began to recognise and understood the force of habit in my life. The power this has to rule our lives and keep us stuck in patterns of thinking and movement which may have once served us well, but may no longer. About eight years ago I found myself in a place of pain at every level. I was suffering from a deep depression, high anxiety and expanding physical pain, which grew from in...

    The Alexander Technique (AT) affords us the opportunity to live and move from “a place of possibility” [1] - to inhabit a way of being in the world which is not attached to the person we learnt to be while growing up. It teaches us to become aware of ourselves in movement, to see where habitual tightening and over-tensioning in our body-mind is reducing our capacity to live and respond to life with ease and flexibility. In a workshop last year using the Neutral Mask (from the world of actors) and the mirror, long-experienced AT Teachers enabled me to become aware of the reality of one of my deeply embodied habits. As I stood in front of the mirror with the mask on what I saw in myself was a deep sadness, which I saw created a slight dropping along my front body and tightening into my centre. I cannot say exactly where or what this sadness relates to but rather that as soon as I saw the masks lying on the table at the beginning of the session this is what I ...