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3/ Awareness is like a wide open 3D perceptual filter. You can have your attention on these words while still being aware of the sounds of cars on the road, a slight breeze from the window or a feeling of tension in your left foot. Attention moves around within awareness.
5/ If you're like most people then your habitual way of reading shuts your awareness off to almost everything but the screen. It's as if you were only aware within the boundaries of an elongated spheroid reaching from your head to the screen.
6/ Try this: Read AND expand that shape to include the whole room. Read AND notice the space behind you. Read AND add in the space above your head. Read AND add the space between you and the screen. Allow it to be there. We unconsciously 'compress' this space.
7/ If you had even the slightest realisation that something different just happened, you got it. That is what we learn to play with through Alexander Technique. As a teacher I would bring about this sense of expanded awareness in you through touch.
8/ Not only that, but I can get a sense for the shape and size of your awareness in any given moment. That's part of my role as teacher. It's not just possible, but testable, repeatable, falsifiable and learnable. Just don't ask me to explain the mechanisms by which it works.
9/ Why is all this important? Because there's a relationship between this expanded awareness and our habitual ways of being. Let's say I get you into this state of expanded awareness while you're standing in front of a chair – and then I ask you to sit (this is how we teach).
11/ Not only that, but you won't be able to prevent that collapse from happening. What a teacher would teach you, over time, is how to maintain your expanded awareness through these triggers. And when you can do that, you open up opportunities for change.
12/ I took this from one of my newsletters, so if you're a subscriber then you've already read this. Sorry! https://t.co/00qgrWPCFd
Meta] If you've come across this thread in isolation and want to go deeper then you might be interested in my 'thread of threads' on the topic. https://t.co/pppidMHSzH
Meta] Also, if you want to dive much deeper into this stuff, I have built what I believe is the only asynchronous online course that explores Alexander Technique from a first principles perspective. You can find out more and stay up to date by going here: https://t.co/GHzsyr4ILq