Living At Ease With Stress [ http://bit.ly/c97olq ]
I very much recommend reading »this article from the »Alexander Technique in Edinburgh website about dealing with stress and how the Alexander Technique can be of great help there.
http://www.alextechedin.co.uk/living-at-ease-with-stress
When our minds are buzzing around with the ‘what ifs and what shoulds’ - ‘pasturising and futurising’ as somebody once called it, our body reacts as if each of the memories, worst-case scenarios or dramas which we are thinking about are actually happening right now. An all-out alert message rushes through the whole system, it goes into ‘fight or flight’ mode as if we were faced with an immediately life-threatening emergency, producing many of the only too well known effects of stress and anxiety – and we carry this state of emergency around with us for much of the day. When we are back in a full and free awareness of the present moment, the nervous system calms down, because you are signalling that the present situation is not, usually, a real emergency.
With Alexander Technique we learn to balance our amazing facility to be elsewhere in our minds (‘lost in thought’), with the ability to choose to come back home to the present, which is the only place where change can happen.
As an added benefit the article provides insights not only in stress reduction but also gives advice on poise and the uprighting mechanisms - and generally about vital concepts of the Alexander Technique:
Simplifying somewhat, we have two different muscle systems. One, a chain of muscles which run deep along our bones from the soles of the feet up to the top of the spine, is concerned with support and stability. They work in association with gravity and with our skeleton to keep us easily upright for as long as we need to, without tiring. This is because these muscles are composed of fibres (red, slow twitch) which are intended for endurance, and can easily keep the body upright and co-ordinated for as long as necessary. These are the muscles you see working most efficiently in small children, who do not end up slumping with exhaustion at the end of a hard day’s play. This system of muscles has not worn out or gone anywhere, whatever age we are - if rediscovered and used correctly, they will keep us in balance and at ease all day long. We might call them our ‘Supporting and Being’ muscles.
The other system of muscles wraps around these, and includes those we see on the ‘outside’ –including back and chest muscles, shoulders, arms and legs - the ones that athletes and body-builders develop. We might call these our ‘Moving and Doing’ muscles – their job is to move us, and all the other objects with which we interact, around. They can do this job very effectively, but only for relatively short periods.Unfortunately we have got into habits of confusing these two systems.
[ via »a tweet from »twitter.com/AlexTechEdin ]
