Merely knowing that in a given situation you get too tense, doesn’t mean you understand how to transform embedded reaction patterns. Insight, meditation, mindfulness and relaxation exercises reduce pressure and tension temporarily, but do not re-wire neuromuscular pathways or re-educate the organism at any fundamental level.
The rational brain cannot talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. The analytical, reasoning part of the brain, centred on the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex, has no direct connections with the emotional brain, where most imprints of chronic stress and trauma reside. However, the medial pre-frontal cortex (our centre of self-awareness) does.
By learning to consciously perceive inner and outer muscular reaction patterns and their somatic-emotional-mental correlation, you are helped to engage in a self-dialogue which leads to a differentiated, layered perception of yourself and your present life situation, with options of widening of the space to act.
Conflicts become experienced as a challenge that you feel equipped to face through an expanded range of choices and strategies.
The goal is reduced stress and an attitude to life less limited by the imprints of your past. An integrative synthesis of formative-somatic exercises, Alexander Technique, Somatic Experiencing and Pesso-Boyden System Psychomotor has been found to liberate reflexes and feelings of aliveness. Imaginative exercises are used to help stabilise the new patterns.
Along with lessening symptoms, there grows a capacity for self containment, in place of reactivity – a quality of clear thought, reduced tension and warm self contact.
The step-by-step nature of the work allows confidence in yourself and in the process to grow organically.
A brief word on the Alexander Technique. This concerns itself not with posture or shape, as is sometimes thought, but with our biochemical-postural-emotional-imaginative realities. The Technique aims to teach you to neutralise your habits of postural and mental stress. It’s what you stop doing rather than what you do that counts. We call it ‘non-doing’: a quality of consciousness that supports non-reactivity or ‘inhibition’.