The Alexander Technique, The Peaceful Body, The Walking Way, Tai Chi
Japan, Germany, USA
PERSONAL WELL-BEING
We want a body that can move comfortably through the years. We want a body that can work well, and has some energy left over for play. We want to feel good in our own skin. We want to be stable and mobile, still and moving, open and focused. We want to be relaxed and ready, gathered and expansive, soft and powerful. We want to be light and substantial, spontaneous and deliberate, committed and free. We want to be able to proceed, to live, work, and love generously and freely.
Students seeking personal well-being have experienced such diverse benefits as comfort and ease of motion, clarity of thought, deeper sleep, heightened sensory awareness, improved posture, reduced anxiety, less compulsive eating, hand, wrist, neck, and back relief at the computer, greater love and respect toward their bodies, healthier sense of self.
PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE
What does it mean to be competent at our work? It means being able to begin when it’s time to begin, being able to work for a reasonable and productive length of time, and being able to stop when it is time to stop. It means knowing how to work without hurting ourselves. It means knowing how to manage pressure and stress, knowing how not to hurry, not to rush. Pace, peace and productivity are not mutually exclusive.
Competency, for most of us, entails being able to speak so that we are understood. It requires being able to listen non-defensively. It means learning how to welcome criticism, and that means being in control of your reactions and responses. It means being fully present with a student, client, or customer. These are, to a large degree, physical skills.
Competency means finally making the transition from working hard to working well. With an embodied, operational understanding of the principles that govern human coordination, comfort and competency become one and the same.
PEAK PERFORMANCE FOR PERFORMING ARTISTS AND ATHLETES
We know trying hard does not work. That’s because when we try hard we are engaging the very habits that block us from “entrance into the zone.” Peak performance is a matter of unlearning, of disengaging restrictive habits, of unplugging them. It’s not doing more that gets us there; it’s doing less.
And it is thinking less. Peak performance is the immediate, accurate, and inclusive perception of reality, received through a harmonious use of the senses, free from the intervention of language, thought, or analysis.
It’s a state of non-anticipation. It’s when we are preparing for nothing in particular, but ready for anything that may happen. Complete openness.
For most of us entering this zone, where everything seems to happen by itself, is elusive. But it is possible to learn how to shift into that realm of grace more easily and more often.
There is another world, but it is in this one.
William Butler Yeats
