My thanks to all of you for connecting with Way Opens Wellness in 2021.
Enjoy this video highlighting some of WOW’s events and activities, with inspiring words and images.
Ease Up for a Change
Sensing and Knowing: Your Superpower
Have you ever wondered how you know you’re sitting and not, for instance, standing or lying down?
A key feature of the AT is its ability to activate kinesthetic awareness, which functions like a superpower, helping you know how you are doing anything that you might be doing. It is how you know what you’re sensing and how you sense what you’re knowing.
Includes a Bodymind Experiment
I Don't Know
Success and failure are both teachers. Whether the journey is supremely successful or fails to launch at all, the learning happens in the evaluation phase. One teaching I’ve gleaned over the years is that the willingness to sit with “I don’t know” is bound to increase a sense of wonder, curiosity, authentic interest. And that’s a good attitude to bring to all phases of creative endeavor.
Go With Your Gut
Thinking and feeling, logic and imagination, sensing and knowing -- these are not dichotomies but integrated aspects of human functioning and flow. Not only are we each an undivided entity, we are connected to all living beings: the entire biosphere is unified. And that well-known "gut feeling"? That's not just a concept, it is physiological fact.
Come See for Yourself
To truly test a practice and its effects on your life, you must actively engage with the practice. But it may be easier to give something a try if you know its proven track-record. Here are multiple links to evidence for the effectiveness and the health benefits of the things I practice and teach: Alexander Technique, Qigong, and Mindfulness Meditation.
There is a Body
It has been my experience over 25 years of teaching somatics and mindfulness that most people are in a state of senselessness. Almost no one is fully inhabiting their body all the time.
Learning to Pause, Sense, Repeat is an easy, practical way to more fully embody your life.
Includes a Bodymind Experiment.
Opening Up
Drop By Drop
Through continual practice of insight meditation and 30-plus years of Alexander awareness and teaching, I’ve become familiar with how major shifts in habitual thinking and being happen. Sometimes the experience of change feels big and nearly instantaneous, like a chunk of an iceberg breaking off and tumbling to the sea. Letting go occasionally feels like an avalanche.
Mostly though, change happens incrementally, bit by bit. Can you sense the gradual growth and changes in yourself?
How to Be More Like Charlie Chaplin
I waved away notions of self-love as indulgent navel-gazing, an attempt to escape from the "realities" of the world and its troubles. Then I had an experience on retreat that changed all that. I began to realize how harsh I was with myself, and once recognized, this insight led to a huge transformation.
Turns out that Charlie Chaplin had a similar experience, and his On Loving Myself can be a roadmap to move from self-loathing to self- love.
Expanding and Contracting
Life is fluid, dynamic, and always shifting. Ultimately, this is good news, but we have been conditioned to expect reality to be solid, fixed, and predictable. The essential groundlessness of our existence frightens us, or at best, takes us by surprise, and when that happens, we react by resisting. Habitual, unconscious resistance shows up in the body-mind as contraction. It is such a basic and common response to living as a human that we don’t even notice it. Yet the moment we do, we are liberated and can transform contraction into expansion.
Includes a Bodymind Experiment.
Being > Doing
When we choose to stop working so hard we shift our relationship to ourselves as well as to our social circles. We expect less and question what we believe is expected of us. We might end up doing exactly the same number of things as before, but "I Have To" becomes "I Get To," as we allow more spacious awareness in both body and mind. We can learn to ease up and stop trying to push the river, as they say. Letting go is one way to do less. Letting be is another.
Everyday Alexander: Shoveling
Alexander Technique comes in handy when the snow flies. Shoveling often produces all sorts of minor injuries, aches and pains for people. If you find yourself with low back pain, twinges in your shoulders or neck, or other maladies as result of shoveling, pay attention to how you are bending and lifting when you shovel. Like vacuuming, raking, or gardening, shoveling is essentially about lunging.
Practicing the Pause
One of the key components of mindfulness and somatic processes like the Alexander Technique is practicing the Pause, learning how to wait before taking action. There is a moment between stimulus and response, and in that gap is the possibility of making a fresh, perhaps different choice. When we don't do that, we often increase our own suffering.
Includes a Bodymind Experiment