Your Sense-Able Body: Self-Regulation and the Alexander Technique

Self-regulation refers to your ability to manage, adjust to, and recover from extreme situations.  This can include emotional and psychological self-regulation, and physiological self-regulation.  It can be a conscious or unconscious process.

It can be useful to build awareness around how you self-regulate - both consciously and unconsciously - because our systems crave stasis - equilibrium - balance in order to function and relate optimally in the world (whatever “optimal” is for YOU - it will be different for each person).  

A healthily, optimally functioning human is designed to be able to return to stasis after a moment or period of stress or stimulation.

We are designed to be able to adjust to the regular ups and downs of daily life.  When we experience a stressful stimulus or situation, our nervous systems become activated.  Throughout the day, from moment to moment, we naturally move through a process of arousal and recovery.  We are generally able to recalibrate using our built-in and learned self-regulation tools and strategies.

The Bunny and the Fox: The Threat-Safety Processing Cycle

A bunny lazily munches on some clovers. It is relaxed and at ease. Suddenly, it notices a fox approaching.  The bunny freezes for a moment, assessing the potential threat, then quickly breaks into a run, racing to a safe place.  Once it gets to a safe spot where the fox can’t enter, the bunny will lie down and shake.  This shaking is how the bunny processes the effects of this stressful moment.  The shaking releases muscle tension and helps to process excess adrenaline. This process is the bunny’s way of supporting its nervous system to recover and repair, so that it can go back to nibbling clovers and living its bunny life.  

We humans are also animals, so we have a similar physiological self-regulatory process. For our psychological and emotional self-regulation, we can also draw on interpersonal supports like telling a trusted friend about a stressful situation, or getting a hug when we are sad or scared. 

Can you think of some examples from your own life of the ways that you self-regulate when you’re in pain/discomfort/just feeling a bit “off”?

In some circumstances, however, our innate process of recovery and repair gets interrupted. For some reason we may learn that it’s not okay to self-soothe or be supported when we are sad or angry or scared.  Our family or school or work culture may have certain “rules” around needing to “toughen up,” for example, or we learn that we have to “hold it together” for everyone else.

The natural release of shaking or crying or getting a hug or moving when you need to move might not be modelled or accepted in certain situations. Without this support, our recovery cycle gets interrupted, and we get stuck in an incomplete loop. And so we keep accumulating unprocessed cycles of energy in our bodies until we reach a point where this way of being is no longer sustainable.

This unprocessed energy can show up in your body as:

• muscle tension

• chronic fatigue

• digestive issues

• headaches and migraines

• irritability

• musculoskeletal or postural issues

• holding yourself in a particular posture or shape, possibly for protection

• brain fog

• vocal fatigue or hoarseness

• jaw tension

• tight or closed throat feeling

It All Adds Up

When we have persistent experiences of stress, it can be taxing on our whole being, taking a toll on our emotional, psychological, and physiological wellbeing.  We can get stuck in a habitual pattern of responding to stress, even after the stimulus is no longer present - even after the fox has disappeared.  

This stuckness can mean that we are functioning outside of our window of tolerance, or our optimal arousal-recovery zone. From here we may push ourselves to do more or work harder when what we really need is support and rest. When we become dysregulated in this way, we are unable to take in new information (i.e.: learning process or reading a challenging email) or function physically (i.e.: efficient singing coordination or safe lifting) the way we’re used to.

Your nervous system connects to all of your organs and tissues and automatic survival functions, including your heart, lungs, and voice.   It also controls your muscles, motor function, and coordination.

When you are dysregulated, ALL of your systems are impacted, including your circulation, breathing, sound-making coordination (aka singing and speaking), and the ability to express yourself fully and effectively. Muscular coordination can also be affected, especially if your system takes you into a protective holding or compressed body posture when it perceives a threat to your safety.

In short, when you are attempting to do something as complex as singing while dysregulated, you may find that pushing or trying harder or practicing more is not working anymore.

You may need to attend to your whole-self regulation first.

Cue: The Alexander Technique

The Alexander Technique can help you self-regulate by teaching you how to slow down, do less, and reconnect yourself with your body. The skills of pausing, sensing, awareness, and redirecting attention you learn in Alexander Technique lessons can support you to recalibrate after or during periods of overstimulation and stress, including helping to regulate your nervous system to bring you back to your optimal arousal-recovery zone.

Through verbal guidance and subtle hands-on support from your AT teacher, each session supports you to bring new awareness to your whole-self unity. We use simple everyday movements like sitting, standing, walking, lifting, and lying down to illuminate the interconnectedness of your thoughts, actions, and muscular involvement/coordination. We explore anatomy to clarify how you’re constructed, and how you can work with your human design instead of against it, for optimal efficiency of movement. We investigate how your attention and intention are inseparable from how you function in the world, so that you can better understand how to work with yourself, rather than against yourself. You will gain tools to help you ground yourself, so that you come back to being a receptive listener, who can respond with flexibility and awareness in a wide range of situations, including day-to-day activities like doing dishes and brushing your teeth, as well as specialized activities like singing and teaching.

FOR EXAMPLE, you may discover that you’ve been working harder than you need to while you’re singing. In the Alexander Technique we call this goal-oriented, perfectionistic over-efforting “end gaining,” and it’s a fairly common way that we get in our own way. Your new awareness of your end gaining, coupled with an embodied experience of how your shoulders relate to your hips - has a releasing effect on your whole torso and breathing mechanism, also releasing something in your jaw, and giving you a new experience of singing with more ease and availability. In learning to allow things to happen rather than doing them, you get out of your own way and can be more available for expression and emotion.

Hellooooooo, increased vocal range!

Hellooooooo, access to resonance!

Hellooooooo, availability for longer phrases!

A NOTE ABOUT POSTURE - When you start to unravel your habitual responses, and begin to notice how these responses have been impacting your body, you may find that you experience postural changes as a result of your new awareness and new way of using yourself. While improved posture is not a goal of this work, you may experience this and other benefits from working on yourself in this way.

After a series of Alexander Technique sessions, many people make new discoveries about themselves. This could include:

• postural changes

• reduced back pain

• relief from pain, muscular tension, and stiffness

• breath awareness and ease

• more ease working at the computer

• responding to stress and anxiety with more flexibility and availability

• improved balance and coordination

• ease of movement and mobility

• preventing injury

• expanded attention span and increased focus and concentration

Whatever your reasons for exploring embodied work such as the Alexander Technique - whether it’s an interest in learning about your anxiety, addressing postural concerns, or investigating vocal issues - you will undoubtedly gain new perspective about your innate wholeness. Which, in my humble opinion, is always a good thing.

Would you like to learn more?

To learn more about how we can work together to support your needs, click below to schedule a free 20min consultation:

For examples of how we might work together, visit my YouTube channel:

To dive right into self-regulation application, click below to purchase the 30-Day Constructive Rest Invitation self-guided online course:

Try this: Making Mistakes on Purpose to Access Creativity and Expression

Today my young student was really struggling with a song she has been working on for a few weeks.

When a student - of any age - is in the early stages of learning something new, I always allow creative interpretations of notes/rhythms/tempo. Instead of jumping in after a run-through to fix or correct, I simply ask the student, “How did that go for you?”

Invariably the student - especially adults - will be hard on herself, immediately going to all of the things that went wrong.

We do this. As musicians, many of us have been trained to zero in on errors. With this narrow focus, trying so hard to get it right, we can lose sight of the big picture: what went well, what felt good, what was different - not better or worse, just different - than last time.

When I asked this student how she thought it was going today, she said, “Good, but I still made lots of mistakes.”    (Note: One note was out of place.  One.  And maybe the tempo was slightly inconsistent. And maybe she was moving through it with some hesitancy - which makes perfect sense, given that she was being so darn careful not to make any mistakes! More on this in a bit.)

My student seemed unable to even consider dynamic range or musical expression until she could get Every. Note. Perfect.

We regularly build on sight reading skills in her lessons.  But I didn’t want to use this moment to work on those skills directly.  I sensed we needed to shake things up a bit and come at this selection from a different angle. I could sense that she was stuck, and not in the right headspace for direct skill acquisition.

“I have an idea,” I told her, smiling a bit impishly.  “Tell me what you think about this: what if this time through you make mistakes ON PURPOSE?  As many wrong notes and wrong rhythms as you dare, and as wildly incorrect as possible.”

Her smile got HUGE.  She enthusiastically agreed to give it a try.

And my goodness, if it wasn’t the most musical and expressive performance she’d ever given!

After she’d finished her new variation on this old song, I asked her, “What was your favourite mistake?”  And she excitedly listed at least seven spots where she had deliberately done the wrong rhythm, the wrong notes, sustained a pitch for way longer than was written.  Her FAVOURITE moment was when she deliberately played the “mistake” she often makes by accident.   (Normally she huffs and tenses up when she gets to this spot in the music - this time she lingered there, riffing on her usual “mistake” and creating a real musical moment.)

She seemed so empowered in that moment of describing her experience of making mistakes on purpose. Her eyes got very wide and her face was open, full of wonder and joy.  Her “mistakes” were no longer owning her.  She was owning her “mistakes,” and making them into purposeful, deliberate, expressive musical moments.

Learning is Target Practice - there are no mistakes

My student’s discovery about the empowerment of on-purpose mistake-making reminds me of my own early learning experiences. I used to be so held back by trying to be perfect. All the time. At everything, not just music-making.

Eventually, thanks to the support of many wonderful, compassionate teachers and mentors, I came to understand that learning happens in the miss-takes, in the off-target moments (I recently wrote a post about learning as target practice. You can read the full article here). These teachers understood the conditions necessary for humans to learn: namely that there needs to be an environment where off-target moments, experimentation, and surprises are welcomed, modelled, embodied, and encouraged.

So. Back to my young student and her discoveries about miss-takes.

This particular student isn’t even a teenager yet.  So I held back my exuberance about what her discovery means about how we learn, and how important “mistakes” are to the learning process.  (To be fair, I have had some version of this conversation with this particular student on several occasions as we examine “perfectionism” together in a light, playful way, creating our own experiments and games around “trying to be right” vs allowing all sounds to be welcome. But I’ll save that story for another time.)

For example, in order to make mistakes on purpose, this student had to actually think about the correct notes/rhythms in order to mess them up.  She was able to attend to her music-making and interpretation in a different way.  

By deliberately doing it the “wrong” way, she was actually teaching herself how to do it the “right” way!

Before, her goal had been: “don’t make any mistakes.”  (I think many of us can attest to how successful THAT goal usually is!)

Her new goal was: “make mistakes on purpose.”  Which, as it turns out, was a heck of a lot easier - and more enjoyable! - than trying to be perfect.  AND actually resulted in an expressive, musical, inventive, colourful, and FUN performance.

The part of her conscious attention that had been all tied up before in trying to be right, was now free to attend to much more nourishing aspects of music-making, like personal expression, interpretation, spontaneity, and creativity.

Would this student be happy presenting her on-purpose mistake-making rendition of this song in recital?  Likely not.  (I, however, would be thrilled to attend such a radically authentic performance … but maybe it’s a wee bit early in her musical career to be encouraging performances that challenge traditional music-making paradigms and music-consumption habits … hmm?)  

I can tell you, however, that when this student went back to performing the selection as written, those halting miss-take moments from before were nearly non-existent.  And her engagement with the music had really shifted since her first run-through. She was smiling at the end. Which is a huge win, and much more important (in my humble opinion) than being perfect.

Paradox: Learning happened

By deliberately messing around with her song, and owning her miss-takes, this student was able to actually WORK ON the spots that had been getting in her way before.  The difference was that this time she was going about it through a less direct, more creative approach that came from curiosity and experimentation, rather than perfection.

So.  Bloomin’.  Cool.

PS - I also 100% use this purposeful miss-takes game with my adult clients.  There is no age limit for being hobbled by so-called “mistakes,” nor for re-molding those miss-takes into satisfying, yummy artistic expression.  

🐛 Get Your Wiggle On! - Finding Vocal Release Through Jiggling

🎥  VIDEO 🎥 

https://youtu.be/858vhGKSE_c

🐛 Come back to your innate wholeness by jiggling. In shaking and jiggling, we press ourselves away from the ground very quickly many times. In Alexander Technique we call this relationship opposition. 

🐛 Jiggle with an awareness of releasing your joints: let the hips, knees, and ankles be free. Allow your head to be dynamically poised on top of the spine (not slack but continuously pointing forward and up). 

🐛Jiggle with a sense of buoyancy through the pelvis, ribs, and arm structure. Not making these areas dead weight but feeling the springy nature of your torso as you bounce and jiggle and wiggle. 

🐛 Add sounds. Sing a phrase. What do you notice?