Alexander Technique at Your Desk | Ease for Dancers & Sensitive Movers
Do you lose your sense of movement and ease when you sit at your computer?
As dancers and sensitive movers, we often spend years developing a deep kinesthetic awareness—only to feel it disappear the moment we sit down to “work.”
In this video, I share a simple Alexander Technique–based reset you can use anytime to keep yourself from collapsing into your screen.
You’ll learn how to:
Engage your curious mind instead of your critical mind
Reconnect with your head, spine, and breath
Restore fluid, supported sitting
Bring artistry and presence back into everyday activities
Try this at your desk today and notice what shifts.
If you’d like to go deeper, I offer free consultations in which we can discuss what you need and how to apply this work to your body and your movement.
A transcript of the video is below if you’d prefer to read rather than watch and listen.
Hello, friend.
I've had several people talk to me about trouble that they experience when working on their computer, especially as highly sensitive dancers and movers.
That when they work on their computer, it's like they their body kind of disappears. That whole kinesthetic sense, that facility they have with their body disappears. They get so drawn into their computer.
They’re curious about how to incorporate being both a mover, and sensitive, and work on the computer at the same time.
What happens when we get drawn into a computer? We start doing very weird not so great things with our bodies and eventually we feel the effects of it through pain or discomfort.
What I'd like to show you is how to start to repattern that so you can actually bring your whole physical, beautiful, kinesthetic self to working on your computer.
The first part, as it is with anything that I offer, is to engage your curious mind. This is so important and makes a huge difference in working with your body.
If we just kind of go in, a lot of times we have a judgmental mind or an evaluating mind. We really want to get into the curious mind that is looking for information, that really wants to know what's happening.
I'm going to do a whole video about coming into the curious mind. I just wanted to mention it here.
So let's get into it a little bit.
Go ahead and close your eyelids and just take a moment where there's nothing in particular you have to do.
Then if you're on your computer, you can open up an email, start typing an email, and as you're typing, just pause.
Pause where you are, because you're in the midst of doing something. You're in the midst of typing, of finishing an email. That's what you're about to do. You're about to type something. You're about to finish.
And you notice what's happening in your body. As a dancer, especially a highly sensitive dancer, you have a very well-trained kinesthetic sense. You can start to check out what's happening in your body right now. What's happening with your head? What's happening with your back? What's the quality that's going on? What's their relationship?
Now, I'd like you to start to come into where your body is as you let go of what you're about to do.
For instance, you're most likely sitting. Right now, I'm sitting. I'm kind of leaning into my computer almost like I'm about to fall into it. If I just relaxed here, I would fall forward. So, I'm pretty much falling and keeping myself from falling. I'm not really sitting.
So let yourself kinesthetically come into sitting on your chair. Okay, now you're sitting.
And amazingly, when we start to work on a computer, it's like our body disappears. We forget kinesthetically that we even have a body. We know it intellectually on some level, but we're not kinesthetically connected to our body.
So you can remind yourself that you have a head. Seems obvious. It’s surprising how your head disappears when you're so focused on your computer. So come back, you have a head.
“Oh yeah, I'm sitting. Oh, I have a head.”
What that does for me, I want to start to look around. Especially where I am, it's so gorgeous. “Oh yeah, I'm seeing now. Oh, I have eyes.”
Of course, you have eyes because you were reading, but that's an intellectual thing. You weren't kinesthetically connected to your eyes.
“Oh, my feet are on the ground.” You don't have to make your feet be on the ground. They probably already are.
So you can connect, reconnect to very simple, fundamental things about your body, which includes just remembering you have it.
That starts to open something up in you.
Now when you come back to the computer you get to still have a head. As you come back to your computer, you get to still be sitting.
And if you start typing again, most likely pretty quickly your body will disappear or it'll be at this kind of background level or an intellectual level or just a discomfort level.
And you pause again and you start this process anew.
Where am I? What's happening in my body?
Ok, can I come back? I don't mean physically. It could be a physical movement, but I mean come back kinesthetically. I'm here. I have a head. Oh yeah, I'm doing something funky. I'm sitting. Now I'm going to let myself sit.
I'm breathing. Oh, yeah. I'm going to let myself breathe.
You get to kinesthetically come into what your body is already doing, where it already is. You don't have to make it do something else, but you can let it change as you come into what's happening.
Practice that with your computer. You could set a little timer, perhaps 10 minutes. And when it goes off, that's your cue to pause and reconnect. In doing so, you start to shift yourself off of that pattern that's not serving you so well into something that has more fluidity, more connection, more openness, and more ease in it.
That's all for today. If you enjoyed this video, please let the mysterious algorithm know by commenting, liking, and subscribing. Please leave any comments about what you found useful, what didn't work, any questions you have. These help me make future videos that will really be helpful for you, because my goal is to help you out.
Until we meet again, take care.