Feeling Pressure to “Do” Something: The Physical Reality Principle

When I am feeling stressed, whether it be a result of guilt, worry, sadness, anger or fear, I feel like I need to do something to make things better.  When weighed down by this pressure, I tell myself very directly that doing something is a physical act that requires the use and availability of my body.  If my body is […]

The Issue of Fragmentation: The Mind-Body Connection

Notwithstanding the innate harmonization of the body, many of us still perceive ourself to be fragmented. The mind, for one, is commonly thought of as other than the body, and it is this misperception I would like to address here. The universal phrase “mind-body connection” reflects the impression that the mind and the body are […]

No Effort

As an Alexander Technique teacher for 20 years, I have been in the business of illuminating how muscular effort is an extraneous phenomenon in our life. Generally, in an Alexander application, this pertains to walking, talking, sitting, standing, and moving through our everyday activities (for example, we don’t need to tense our neck or back […]

Action

Excerpt from “The Myth of Doing” I define action as the body’s existence in space, in any moment, in the configuration it is in, in relationship to its environment.  Action is simply a person’s natural state of being; it is not something other or additional to that status, as our mind imagines.  So even if […]