Gently Break Habits by Identifying & Noticingby Jessica S. Santascoy
What's your stimulus?
Identifying a habit can be a window into beginning to use your body efficiently and getting rid of unnecessary pain or tension. Let's take the habit of tightening the jaw. Tightening often starts with a stimulus. Maybe you step into a meeting and you feel like the people in the room make you clench your jaw. Tightening your jaw is the beginning of a chain reaction. Seconds after tightening your jaw, your throat closes a bit and your breath becomes more shallow. You start to become impatient and wish the meeting would end, and you start to think you're wasting your time. Now your jaw feels soldered shut!
What the Alexander Technique can do is help you recognize stimuli that cause you to misuse your body. My laptop is a stimulus - my jaw tends to become tighter as I continue looking at the screen and typing. Simply noticing is enough to loosen it. I don't have to say to myself, "relax the jaw," noticing is enough. The trick is to be gentle with yourself, and allow a more useful chain reaction to take over - the jaw loosens, the breathing becomes easy, the throat relaxes, the work flows.
Identifying stimuli, (such as a meeting or the computer), and noticing your reaction can help reverse misuse and begin to create a pattern of more efficient use of your body. Over time, patterns of more efficient use of the body will replace the patterns that causes undue stress.
Jessica S. Santascoy is training to become an Alexander Technique teacher at The Alexander Educational Center in Berkeley. She's a stargazer, foodie, and climbs volcanoes when the opportunity arises. Follow Jessica on Twitter @jessicasuzette and friend her on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jsantascoy.
