Help! Too much internal awareness! I’m self-conscious and uncomfortable!

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I whipped this out for my SFSU students. Perhaps you will find it useful.

Sometimes in Somatic study, we can feel destabilized by too much internal awareness – especially if it is negative. If you are feeling this, you are not alone. It is something that happens to everyone at one point or another. We focus too much on the feeling inside and lose sight of the whole of our being in relationship to the world.

Somatic study is relational. Our bodies, our emotions and our neurological mapping of ourself includes the space around us and other people. Scientifically this is called “peripersonal space” and “interpersonal neurobiology”. You can look it up. It’s fascinating.

But what can I do on a practical level if this is happening to me?

Expand your field of vision. Allow yourself to see off into the distance and far to the sides as if you were standing on the top of a mountain or at the beach. Letting your sight be far, free and wide will have a relaxing effect on your mood and breathing.

Look around and orient to pleasant things in your environment. Looking up at the sky is a good quick tip.

Practice sensing the space above you, behind you, to either side, below you and in front of you – kind of the way you can sense the edges of a swimming pool when you are standing in it. Do you have a favorite direction, that feels especially good to you? Indulge in that. Try sensing the space at 3 feet distance, and then expand it to the edge of the room. See how far it feels good to go. Some people go out to the edges of their perceived Universe. All of this can help take the focus off too much inner sensation.

Expanding spatial awareness will also expand your body physically – alleviating some of that unpleasant too-much sensation. Our body expression follows our attention. If we focus inward, we contract; outward we expand. In the future, if you are sensing inwards, keep some part of your awareness outward as a tether. See if you can do inner and outer at the same time, for a 50/50 awareness split.

Prof Elyse

p.s. you can also try this with hearing

p.p.s.Photo of Sky Dragon/ Sea Horse. Magical messengers are everywhere if we look. Photo by Elyse Shafarman

Rushing

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BodyProject Blog ~ where thought is the Active Ingredient, by Elyse Shafarman

Like a bird, I walked into a glass door this morning, right before my first class of the year at American Conservatory Theater, where I teach Alexander Technique to MFA actors. My aim was to arrive early, but events *conspired* against me. The outfit was wrong. I needed to bring lunch. I couldn’t find my keys. By the time I arrived downtown, my heart was beating rapidly, a staccato accompaniement to the inner monologue featuring my pet fears. I dashed into Peet’s to grab the coffee I hadn’t had time to make. The line was long and the clock was ticking. “Let’s skip the coffee,” I thought, and spun towards the exit, promptly bashing my nose against the newly washed glass door.

I heard the crowd gasp. Stars and stinging pain, but no time to stop. My class was in 15-minutes. When I got inside the building, I noticed that my nose was bleeding and turning purple. Luckily, emergency ice packs are never in short supply at A.C.T. It’s easy to injure yourself while conjuring the energies of the unconscious.

It did made a good opening story, illustrating two key principles of the Alexander Technique:

1)  Awareness – of self and environment

2) Taking time.

Clutching my ice-pack, I taught for the next five hours. I felt my neck stiffening, a predictable result of the impact and nerves. But as you teach Alexander Technique, you also apply the principles to yourself. I taught my students to imagine warm coconut oil lubricating the joint that connects the neck to the head. We found ways of moving where tight muscles unraveled and space opened between joints. We paid attention to our bodies, but also our minds and our emotions. We dwelt in that space, which so few of us ever give ourselves, where we take time to notice impulses and chose our course of action. By the afternoon, my neck tension was gone. I felt good enough to take a dance class (first checking with the advice nurse at Kaiser. Head Trauma is nothing to joke around with).

My colleague, Monika Gross, shared the following story about Frank Pierce Jones, a renowned American Alexander Technique teacher and Classics professor, who conducted the first scientific studies on the Alexander Technique at Tufts University in the 1960’s and 70’s.

I heard a great AT anecdote involving Frank Pierce Jones. He was in London during one of the trips he made to take lessons from FM Alexander. One day following a lesson, he went back to his hotel room and he raised up the window to let in some air. He didn’t realize the frame didn’t have a mechanism to stay up by itself, and it landed right on his hand. A massive wooden old London hotel windowframe. Yes, very much pain was felt. He said later, he didn’t know exactly why but because he had just come from a lesson he thought, “Oh well, I’ll just stop and direct myself for awhile.” (After extricating his hand first, I assume… That would have been unusually skilled levels of inhibition otherwise!:) He said that the next day, he didn’t even have a bruise on his hand, and he was quite impressed with the result of his “Quick on the Pause” response to a trauma.

Like Jones, I had minimal bruising and no neck pain on the following day, perhaps due to the Alexander Technique.

And although there was nothing overtly dangerous about my lateness, the panicky thoughts created a situation where I was accident prone. We learn (or, in my case learn again) in the Alexander Technique that we have a choice about our reactions. Headlong rushing rarely delivers the calm, cool and on-time result one might hope for.

For all of us, it’s helpful to remember to take more time. More than anything we do, it’s often the empty space we leave – between – where life/body/mind resolves and organizes.

Eyes Free and Wide to See from the Point of Vision

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Elyse Shafarman

Eyes free and wide to see from the point of vision — Countess Kitty Wielopolska

Sometimes, the Alexander Technique eye direction is described as a Zen Koan. What is the point of vision? No one knows. I imagine that the point of vision is the occipital cortex, the location in the back of the brain that does the job of seeing. Knowing that my brain can work helps me to relax my eyes. Sure, the optic muscles have plenty to do in terms of focusing and orienting, but it helps to remember that the eyes are light receptors, and it’s the visual cortex that sees.

A little history: The eye direction was originated by Countess Kitty Wielopolska, an American who attended FM Alexander’s first training courses. To say that Kitty lead an interesting life is an undersatement. She left the Alexander training course due to a schizophrenic break and spent time an institution. Her illness remitted, she became a nurse and eventually married Count Wieloplska. Later in life, Kitty completed her training as an Alexander Technique Teacher. She mastered the schizophrenic voices that still spoke to her by using the Alexandrian process of inhibition. When she heard voices, she was able to inhibit an automatic response to believe or obey them. For anyone who remembers, “A Beautiful Mind,” the story of the Nobel prize winning mathematician John Nash, this conscious route to self-healing will sound remarkably familiar. Kitty created the “eye order,” as a creative response to her sister’s narrowing vision from cataracts. Kitty observed that directing the eyes seemed to have a global effect on her quality of attention and freedom.

The direction, “Eyes wide to go apart,” frees the forehead, lips, tongue, shoulders, neck and even hips. For anyone familiar with modern research into the polyvagal theory, the connection between calm relaxed attention and freeing of key structures associated with head orientation and communication should be no surprise. Kitty and her collaborators surmised that the eye order seemed to signal her nervous system to come to a state of openness.

No doubt that what we do with our eyes and face has a lot to do with social signalling. Often we tighten our eyes to indicate that we are listening, paying attention, or even putting on our compassion face (you know what I mean). You can probably name the myriad of “faces” you wear to be liked and accepted by the tribe. Sometimes it’s a good idea to check in and ask if social signaling is replacing genuine felt emotion, and what the cost might be to your use. By “use”  I mean the total sum of your mental, emotional and physical responses to life.

An expanded visual field is conducive to psychological openness. It’s trite but true to say that with open awareness we are more likely to see more than one side to a problem. In contrast, narrow vision is correlated to problem solving and heightened vigilance (aka stress). Obviously, concentration is necessary in the short term, but when employed unremittingly, as we do in our small screen culture, it will effect the quality of our use – and perhaps our cultural behavior.

I could write more about this, and probably will, but for now, play a bit with thinking, “Eyes free to go wide”. What happens to your seeing, your breathing, your state of mind and state of heart?

To support this, here’s a practice to relax the facial muscles:
Relax Your Face, Elevate Your Mood

To learn more about Countess Wielopolska:
Here’s an article that I originally read as a xeroxed sheaf while a student at the Alexander Training Institute: From a lecture by Countess Catharine Wielopolska, Certied Alexander Technique Teacher

This book, by Kitty and interviewer Joe Armstrong is a fascinating catalog of Kitty’s life and one of the rare explorations of the relationship between the FM Alexander Technique and mental illness Never Ask Why, by Kitty Wielopolska