Unlock Your Mind and Body

Here is my online diary of all my Alexander Technique learnings and discoveries as a student and teacher. Learn the benefits of the Alexander Technique and the pitfalls to avoid when learning it yourself...

Friday, November 10, 2006

Getting Us Thinking...

I wrote my last newsletter about position and posture vs. freedom and flexibility. In it I said that if what we want is flexibility and ease of movement why do we focus our attention on achieving the correct position for something instead? The reality is that by achieving the "correct" position for something we end up using more tension and effort which has the reverse effect - we end up more tense and often with more aches and pains then we started. ("correct" - this is what we think is correct)

To achieve flexibility we need to think in a way that is consistent with flexibility and rather than going for correct and fixed positions we need to learn to think about moving in a free and easy way.

Why am I writing about this here? Because I've had students who read the newsletter last week and then started thinking about this contradiction in what we ask for and what we want. And it got them thinking, questioning what they were doing and giving themselves the opportunity to ask for flexibility. You can't ask better than that!!

In one of my group lessons today we were also talking about this and I enjoyed being reminded about it and re-learning for myself to ask for what I want not what I think is kind of a vague description of what I want! So we can all start asking for flexibility today...
 
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