Book a session of constructive rest–expansive and vitally refreshing–a highly creative encounter with Alexander Technique. You’ll temporarily disengage all your habits connected with your uprightness and engage the formidable powers of the human imagination, most particularly of YOUR imagination. Einstein imagined a train moving at the speed of light and his conclusions changed our world. Your imagination can do the same for the expanding world in which you live. Imagine.

Have a nice lie down. You have the time. Lie on a carpeted floor or yoga mat, or on a massage table if one is nearby. Support your head with a small pillow or a couple books, finding the height that feels best. Comfortably bend your knees and allow your feet to fully meet the floor or table. (We’ll say floor from now on). Enjoy your lie down for a moment and we’ll agree not to press our spines into the table at all. We love our curvatures. 

Speaking of shoots and leaves

We might, in our work on the table or floor, think of our heads releasing from the torso and our response might become as habitual as our thinking. We might, more imaginatively, envision the curled head of a fern growing from our atlas. Imagine it coiling back toward our occiput, up toward the crown of our head, and forward toward the oculus, a living, breathing dynamism. In the language of Alexander Technique that would translate to “forward and up.” If you notice a change in your breathing, please know this is the special marker of change. There is more to come. Imagine.

Back, meet table

In a constructive rest, our torso becomes a foot. Like the foot, our back’s architecture contains an arch and we do not want to press the foot or the back into its respective floor.  We deeply appreciate their curvatures, never pressing into floor or table to eliminate them. We meet the table and appreciate the three dimensionality of our back, the front of our spine far more central to our torso than we may have imagined. The fern-like uncoiling of our head continues to unlock the chains of our habit. Imagine.

Your head and feet correspond

There is a very real connection of the foot to the head, the constitutional vessel it’s called in certain practices of Asian medicine. The heel releasing from the glutes and along the back of the leg mirrors the release of your head from your torso, two fern heads uncoiling contrarily–“reverse English”, it’s called in certain circles–moving outwardly and infinitely away letting the spine into its natural length. Are you breathing differently? Are you lengthening and widening? If so, it is the gift of your imagination. Why not expect wonders?

We expand in order to breathe

You are lying prone now, on a rug or a yoga mat, a small pillow under your head or a couple books, and your knees are comfortably bent. Every breath is freeing, the floor of the pelvis, the thoracic diaphragm, is descending with every inspiration. You expand in order to breathe; your head pulses away from your head, your head from your heel, not a continuous tone, but a note, and with every note, a breath. Imagine.

Book it:

•  A 45 minute session of constructive rest one to three persons, virtually by Zoom: $150.

Photo:Istock

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