Bring Ease Back Into Your Body

Feeling stiff or heavy in your body?

As a former dancer and sensitive mover, you might notice that your body doesn’t feel as fluid or free as it once did — even in simple everyday movement. I'll guide you through an easy, gentle way to bring ease and lightness back into your body — no stretching, forcing, or “getting it right” required.

This is a simple Alexander Technique practice to help you reconnect with fluid, effortless movement in your daily life.

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.

As a dancer, you might notice that perhaps your body doesn't feel as fluid in its movement and powerful and simple as it used to.

Especially as you age, your body might be feeling heavier than you're used to, more stiff, a little more stuck, and just doing things in your life can feel harder. Bending down to get something off of the floor, reaching up to get something off of a shelf, just your basic moving through your day can feel harder than you think it should.

The good news is that what you're feeling is not necessarily how things have to be and is definitely not a prediction of how your future will be.

What we can do is use tools of the Alexander technique to help bring ease and fluidity back into your life in this moment.

Rather than spending hours and hours on it or having to wait years or setting aside huge chunks of time, you can bring it into your life right now.

The Alexander technique is about repatterning your mind and your movement patterns to help bring that ease back in and to recognize what's going on in your body that is taking you away from the freedom that is there.

A key to this is to begin with a curious mind.

As dancers, many of us developed a certain way of viewing ourselves that has a lot to do with judgment and criticism and getting it right and fixing it. And that whole way of approaching ourselves, our movements, and our bodies has an overall tightening effect on you and will actually make it harder to bring in that ease.

So we want to be curious. A curious mind has more fluidity in it, has more openness in it. It's not getting stuck on how it thinks things have to be.

As an example, we can look at what you are currently doing, what's happening in your body.

As dancers, especially highly sensitive dancers, you really have this skill to start to notice this.

A lot of times we're kind of resting on our laurels as being dancers, as being good movers, and we're not always connected to just what's happening right now.

To give you an example, when I was preparing to record this, I was at my computer and I was thinking about what I was going to do and decided to just apply it right then and stopped.

So wherever you are right now, you can stop and ask with that curiosity, what's happening right now?

I'll show you what was going on with me. I was at my computer. I was sitting like this, looking. I stopped and said, "What's happening right now?"

You can go through your body, take your time, don't fix it. Just slowly go through your body.

Start with your head.

What's happening in my head and my neck if I connect to that? I notice that my neck is getting crunched in the back. Okay. And then when I go to my shoulders. Oh, my shoulders are being held.

Now instead of fixing it, you can let it change. “I don't need to do that. I don't need to hold my shoulders or crunch my neck.”

I start to go through the torso. And oh, I notice there's this bracing happening in my low back. Okay, I don't need that either.

Start to come out of these things that you don't need.

I'm slightly lifting myself off of the chair I'm sitting on. I don't need to do that either.

I notice that I'm pressing into the ball of my right foot and my right heel is actually off the ground. That's a lot of effort I don't need either.

Start to scan through your body and take your time with it, resisting that impulse to try to quickly fix yourself and do it right or get back into that dancer posture maybe you think you're supposed to have. Slowly go through and start to undo the effort that's there that you don't need.

Now I'm at my computer and it doesn't mean I still couldn't be resting my chin in my hand. I can. But I don't have to lift off my seat. I don't have to squeeze the back of my neck. I don't have to lift my shoulders. I don't have to lift my feet.

I'd like you to stop right where you are and start to scan through your body and see what's happening and what's not needed.

When you first start to do this, you might not notice a lot. That's okay. The skill is there. It might just need to be developed a little bit. The more you do it, the more refined that skill will become and the more you'll notice and the more you can let go of.

Just start there. That can be plenty. That can really be such a wealth of change.

I invite you to bring that into your day. Let's say five times a day.

Stop. What's happening right now? What's not needed?

Scan through your body. Start at your head, go through, go to your feet or start at your feet come up.

You're not looking to get yourself in the right place.

You know, once I took this yoga class and I didn't have a shirt on. I was looking in the mirror and my ribs looked like strangely twisted. I spent so much of the class trying to get my ribs into what seemed like the right place. I was doing all of this weird movement stuff until finally realized it wasn’t working. All I was pretty much doing was using all this tension to try to get my ribs in the right place, trying to make them look a certain way.

And that's a very dancer thing to do, trying to make ourselves look a certain way, regardless of how it's actually affecting us in the moment and affecting our bodies.

That is not what I'm inviting you to do.

I'm inviting you to stop. Get curious. What's happening right now that's not needed? And then let it go.

That's all. Start there.

Let me know how that goes.

If found this useful in any way, please let the mysterious algorithm know by liking, commenting, subscribing, and if you have any questions, if things worked for you, things didn't work for you, please leave a comment and let me know because I read those comments and those will help me make further videos that can speak to you, because that is the purpose of this work.

And until we meet again, take care.