Letting Go of the Body I Thought I Wanted and Finding Freedom Through the Alexander Technique

What happens when you stop chasing the body you think you should have—and start honoring the body you do have?

As highly sensitive dancers and movers, we often hold an image of how our body is supposed to look or move—an image shaped by years of training, mirrors, and performance. But that image can quietly become a source of tension and disconnection.

In this video, I share how I learned to reframe that mindset using the Alexander Technique—how to value presence and freedom of movement over external appearance, and how this shift completely changed the way I experience my body, exercise, and life. This was the day I realized that the qualities of ease, fluidity, and connection in my body mattered more than how it looked.

If you’ve ever compared your body now to what it once was—or felt like you lost the ease you used to have—this video is for you. You’ll discover how honoring your body as it is now can open a deeper sense of artistry, sensitivity, and joy in movement.

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 want to share with you the power of connecting with your body as it is now rather than what it used to be or what you think it should be.

This really came to a point for me years ago when I was first taking Alexander lessons with my teacher and at the same time I was exercising a lot. I was also training to be a Pilates instructor at that time. I was doing Pilates practically every day and I was also weightlifting and doing cardio. Really being pretty intense about my exercise plan.

And what happened was that after I would have my Alexander technique session, I would feel just so easy in my body. I was living in New York, walking and just floating down the street and didn't know my body could even feel that way. It never felt that way from dancing itself.

And then one day I went from my Alexander Technique session directly to the Pilates studio where I was training and I started working out and I noticed that this free fluid feeling I had basically slowly disappear as I exercised.

And that was crazy because I just spent all this money. You know, I didn't even really have much living in New York at that time for this Alexander session and then away it went not more than an hour later.

That really caught me off guard. That had never happened before, because I'd never gone to exercise right after my session.

I remember later that day when I was at home, I was standing in front of the mirror. I thought, "Okay, well Ian, you can either keep pursuing the body that you think you're supposed to have, that looks a certain way, or you can you can pursue the quality that you're enjoying. This quality of fluidity, this quality of easy movement, this quality of connection. Which one are you going to do?”

That was a tough choice for me because being a dancer, I had a strong idea of how my body should look. I really had this desire of how it should look.

And I chose the quality.

At the time, I wasn't skilled enough to understand I didn't have to stop exercising. I could actually change the way I exercised, which is what I spent many years doing. And now I do exercise. I kind of did get the body I wanted anyway, but I didn't have to pursue it in the way I was.

I got it by staying with the quality of connection, of fluidity, and ease.

I'd like to invite you to look at your own priorities.

As a dancer and a highly sensitive person, you might have built this somewhat unconscious list of priorities in yourself about your own body, about how it should look, what it should be capable of based on things that happened in the past.

Things that happened in the past can influence how you think your body should look, how it should feel, what you think you should be capable of now. And that is a hard thing to put on yourself in the present.

Instead, you can connect to your body as it is now. And when I say that, I don't mean all your beliefs about your body as it is now. I mean, literally just connecting to your body right now.

You can start to change that list of priorities and put honoring and discovering your body right now at the top.

That is a very different way to live. It's a very different way to move.

Rather than using your body to accomplish things, when you can put honoring your body at the top.

You can still accomplish things, but you're led by honoring and connecting to your body. That guides you in the manner in which you accomplish things, in which you move through your day.

That is very different.

I think that's all for today. For some ideas on actually how to do that I encourage you to watch some of my other videos.

Today I wanted to encourage you to get curious about how you think about your own body. If you are often comparing your body as it is now to what it was in the past and you might feel some loss over that. That’s totally normal.

If you enjoyed this, please let the algorithm know by liking, commenting, subscribing. Please leave me any comments of what you thought was interesting, any thoughts you have, any questions because I will read those comments and they will help me make future videos that can speak more directly to you, because that is the point.

Until we meet again, take care.