BEGINNER MIND, BEGINNERS BODY

Spring!

Spring is a great season for my message today, which goes out to all of you:

Bodyworkers
Alexander Teachers
Physical Therapists
Somatics Teachers
Anatomy Geeks

I have developed a special workshop for you! Would you like to:

1) De-pressurize & revitalize your whole body
2) Show you how to stop hurting delicate fingers, wrists, elbows, arms, and shoulders
3) relieve “knowledge overwhelm”, reignite your innate creativity, and refresh your spirit?

Register before April 22 and get a 20% discount. Want to find out more? Read on below, or go right to the registration page on my website.

Do you ever feel like knowing so much about your body/mind can be a burden? Like, Knowledge Overwhelm? Do your hands, arms, and shoulder hurt after a day of work, even though you feel like you should somehow know better, cause you know so much? If you’ve studied the body a lot, you may have been given tons of great information. But have you been able to really understand it? Do you had trouble figuring out how to use your hard-won knowledge in practical ways? I’ve got the perfect antidote.

I’m prone to overwhelm. My endless curiosity and my hunger for learning are something I just can’t seem to turn off. To balance that part of my nature out, I have developed a practice that allows me to start fresh, all over from the beginning, every day. I’m so glad that I don’t have to come from a place of knowing everything anymore. Instead, I can use the Alexander principles to start from a more open point of view: a place of finding out, verifying, and trusting my own discoveries.

My working title for this practice is “Beginners Mind, Beginners Body”. It follows the 43 segments of our head-to-tail structure, which can be found at all levels of tissue: bone, muscle, nerves, skin. It can seem way too complex, but I’ve found that if you give yourself time, it’s actually simple and refreshing. It’s the perfect antidote to overwhelm. I’ve been exploring the nerves in sequence, one at a time, by working with the layer of tissue with the most sensation: the skin.

When you touch skin, you are contacting many layers of intelligence. It doesn’t require “hard work” to make that contact. The skin does the work for you because it has so much nerve supply! An area of skin that is innervated by a particular nerve is called a “dermatome.” So you could also call it “dermatome mapping.” This is a deep dive, experiential practice, not one that requires memorizing names and information. It’s more like going for a refreshing swim!

I’d like to invite all you body geeks to join me in this practice. I’ve been doing videos starting from my head, and working towards my tail.

Go here if you want to start at the beginning (the jaw). If you have a problem area, you can jump in at any point that interests you. I’ve been so sick this week that I wasn’t able to create a new video, but that’s OK. Go here if you want the most recent video on cervical nerve 6, which innervates the skin of the thumb.

If you are included in the list at the top of this email, chances are your thumbs get a lot of pressure! Maybe you don’t have to work so hard.
And please – if you feel like you should already have the answer to this problem, you are moving more into knowledge overwhelm, and maybe just maybe you need a break.

Happy Spring! Lets see if we can peel away some of the layers of what we think we know, and the meanings that have accrued to parts of our bodies, and see what our bodies have to teach us from the inside out.

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