Inviting change to emerge through awareness and being.
SenseAble Movement Sessions
Traditionally, the Alexander Technique is a method of mind-body reeducation that invites all of your parts to communicate with each other more efficiently and effectively. In SenseAble movement sessions, with the support of Wholeness in Motion principles, we move away from fragmenting ourselves into parts, and more towards wholeness.
One of the results of this process is that you may experience less muscle tension or discomfort and move towards feeling more balanced and coordinated, so that you can sing/breathe/move/live with more vitality and ease.
In his book The Alexander Technique Workbook, Richard Brennan describes the Alexander Technique as integrating the “human” and “being” parts of ourselves. Putting “consciousness back into whatever you are doing: it is the practical application of being in the here and now” (p. 11).
What to expect:
Physiological You - We will explore how your physical parts are interconnected, and all work together to create a cohesive, coordinated whole so that you feel more balanced and free when you sing, speak, breathe, and move.
This is your DOING self. Action, making things happen, engaging with the world around you.
Psychological You - We will explore how your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and intentions have a direct impact on your voice, breath, and body, AND what to do with that information so that you have more choice in how you approach your art, work, creative projects, and daily life.
This is your BEING self. Being, experiencing, receiving, consciousness, responding to the world around you.
Our DOING and our BEING selves are interwoven and inseparable. You are actually ONE cohesive, integrated, whole self.
In-person sessions:
Body-oriented explorations and hands-on work can support you to experience other ways of knowing, beyond intellect and cognition, which help to deepen your understanding of yourself.
“Touch” doesn’t have to mean physical contact. We touch and are touched in many different ways.
”touch” can include:
sound
eye contact
physical contact body-to-body
physical contact body-to-object (like a ball or dowel)
physical contact object-to-object
“The point of touch is where something comes back to life.”
- Gianni Francesetti
Meeting in person allows us to explore the hands-on component of the Alexander Technique which many students experience as a great support.
Through gentle hands-on guidance and verbal cues, I will support you to notice yourself moving through simple daily activities such as standing, sitting, walking, and lying down. We will use these movements as supports to begin to build awareness around your habitual ways of moving through the world.
SenseAble touch is non-manipulative and non-invasive and entirely optional.
These sessions are offered in my studio space (location details available upon booking).
Due to the ongoing circulation of COVID-19, we will discuss COVID considerations together in advance of any in-person sessions to co-create a safe-enough environment for us to work together in a way that works for both of us.
Virtual sessions:
Working virtually allows you to expand into the comfort of your own personal space, with a dedicated and keenly observant guide (me!) supporting you to build awareness and understanding around your movement and intentionality.
Like in-person sessions, we will use simply daily activities such as sitting, standing, walking, and lying down to begin to build awareness around how you move through the world.
When you awaken to awareness through embodied discovery, this is your body showing you something about yourself. This is your body teaching you about what you like/don’t like, what you need/don’t need, what works/doesn’t work for you. We might use the touch of our own hands on our own bodies, paired with movement and verbal guidance, to amplify what is already there, allowing you access to parts of your experience that were previously unavailable.
The fee for SenseAble Alexander Technique sessions is $120/60min.
A bit more info about the Alexander Technique:
This practical teaching method is over 100 years old - it is tried, tested, and true, and is constantly evolving to adapt to the constantly changing needs of people today.
My colleague Amy Ward Brimmer describes the Technique as “a simple yet powerful approach that offers the opportunity to take charge of one’s own learning and healing process, because it’s not a series of passive treatments but an active exploration that changes the way one thinks and responds in activity. It produces a skill set that can be applied in every situation. … Lessons leave one feeling lighter, freer, and more grounded.”
Our work will weave together a tapestry of movement and sensory modalities designed to best meet your needs. At its heart, SenseAble Alexander Technique work is an experiential method of self-discovery that is based around a set of principles. These principles include pausing, noticing, and bringing intentionality into any activity.
The Alexander Technique process supports you to recognize and (re)assess your habitual tendencies of movement and behaviour, so that you can speak/breath/move with vitality, flexibility, and spontaneity.
Our work together is to start to see what’s interfering with your performance - in any activity, not just voice-related! - so that you can start to make changes and move toward different experiences in your chosen field (again, not necessarily singing!).
We do this by building awareness around your unconscious tendencies, so that you can have some choice in how you move and react to situations, so that you can prevent tension and discomfort from building up in your system.
These tendencies are often a tangle of the physiological, psychological, and emotional, and so we explore them whole-istically and piece by piece … sometimes we zoom in, sometimes we zoom out, always exploring within the context of your whole experience.
We also build new awareness by clearing up misconceptions about anatomy stuff so that you can work WITH your design, rather than against it.
Your body has a way of storing past experience for future use. These past experiences might include:
injury
physical and emotional stress
a sudden shock to your system (this could be physical, emotional, or psychological)
performances that didn’t go as planned
inherited conditions
what else would you add?
Every experience we have in life translates directly into a particular coordination.
Human beings are remarkably good at adapting.
It’s just that sometimes we adapt AWAY from our natural design.
The Alexander Technique can help you get back on track so you can get back to singing/running/dancing/computing with more choice and awareness.
We will work together to improve communication between your mind and your body - including your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations - and to build a more reliable relationship with your whole self so that you can have more ease in performance and daily life.
We will work together to build understanding around how your body parts are interconnected so that you can make informed choices about how you move, sing that song, breathe for that phrase, sit at your computer, work on your lesson plans, write your script, speak in front of your colleagues, etc.
We will work together to understand how your thoughts and intentions translate into muscular engagement, so that you can reframe how you think about certain activities to achieve more reliable results.
Possibilities for exploration:
Support and balance.
Responsive coordinating system model vs postural/alignment model.
The power of pausing vs fixing.
Exploring planes of movement - sagittal, vertical, horizontal - as a way of expanding awareness of yourself and how you move in space.
Building understanding around self-regulation, co-regulation, the stress response/cycle, and other nervous system responses, and how these processes impact our function and coordination.
Breath awareness: trying on various established breathing techniques with the intention of getting curious rather than perfecting or mastering.