Tanya Shoop - Alexander Technique - Tanya Shoop

December 15, 2014May 17, 2019

Text Neck from Poor Posture

Drawing showing strain on neck if leaning forward in neck

Holding your head down to look at a mobile when texting can put a real strain on the body. A recent study states that texting can harm your health. Poor posture is one of the main causes.

Text Pain, Neck Pain

Our heads are quite heavy, around 4-5kg. This is the weight of 4-5 litres of water:

Better Posture

This is fine when the head is in balance. But tip the head forward and start multiplying those bottles of water.

Thus good posture and head balance is important. This is what the Alexander Technique is all about. Imagine a point between your ears. This is where the head neck joint is.

Forehead Forward

Next, consider that the forehead faces forward and doesn’t tilt upward. We don’t need to fix it the head into place but need to think for it to be in balance.

Phone to eyes, not head to phone

Now let’s bring the phone into the picture. Instead of tilting the head down, we can bring the phone upwards towards the eyes. This leaves the head neck balance alone and takes the strain off the neck, back and shoulders.

Alexander Technique Lessons

Any Alexander Technique practitioner can help you learn the skill of ‘mind talking to muscle’. We help you to understand what natural body use is and how to achieve it for yourself. We have a very gentle touch which guides the body how to let go more, even when it may have spent years, or even decades, holding on for dear life.

Call now to book an appointment and start taking care of your spine.

September 16, 2014November 13, 2018

A Simple Body Scan

One simple way to calm mind and body is to do a body scan. You can start from your head or your feet and can think this through in greater or lesser detail, depending on how much time you have. It’s a simple way to tune into the body at any time during the day. It’s also a great way to help settle down for a good night’s sleep as Chris Holt’s insomnia body scan describes. Here is a simple scan that you can run through; do adapt it for your own body:

Feet: Become aware of your feet and include the sense of space between your toes
Ankles: Think of olive oil trickling through your ankles
Lower legs: Allow your calf muscles to relax, and the muscles at the side of your shins
Knees: Our knees have fronts, backs and sides. Time for some more olive oil or WD40 to trickle through
Upper legs: Tune into the front, back and sides of your thighs and release any tension
Pelvis & hip joints: Think of some undoing in the ball and socket of your hip joint, untighten any tension in your buttock muscles
Front of torso: Let your belly and solar plexus relax, think of opening across the belly and chest
Back of torso: Think of the back lengthening and widening, releasing tension and tightness
Arms: Allow the arms to flow out from the torso, thinking of them being long and lithe. Soften in the biceps and forearms
Wrists and hands: Think of the wrists as being wide, the palms as being open and the fingers and thumbs being long
Collar bones and shoulder blades: These have a natural width. If you’re upright, think of these as floating on top of the ribs
Neck: Release any tension in your neck, imagine space between the bones and remember the neck has a front, back and sides
Head: Visualise space at the head neck joint. Allow the head to be poised and balanced on the neck – still but not stiff
Face: Soften and widen between the brows and bridge of the nose, soften the lips and think of space between the back teeth. Relax your tongue towards the base of your mouth, rather than pressing against the roof of the mouth.

See if you’re able to continue with this awareness and relaxation as you continue with your day.

July 10, 2014October 21, 2018

Creative Writing, Body Mindfulness and Calm

A new discovery has been the use of creative writing to help observe my body and its posture (or ‘use’). I recently went on a great workshop called Creative Writing and Yoga with Philip Cowell. Normally I have a complete writing block, hence the lack of regular posts on my blog, and this causes me some angst. But the writing workshop has freed things up a lot.

Every day, I now write four pages in a notebook. These are called Morning Pages – possibly familiar to people who have read The Artist’s Way. It’s stream of consciousness writing with no rules and no need for internal editing. It has given me a sense of calm as it’s essentially an opportunity for mindfulness by decluttering one’s thoughts.

Yesterday, I was writing away and my thoughts were drawn to my body – how I was sitting and writing. I started documenting this. I noticed that I was sat slightly off the chair as I hadn’t moved some things under the table and so was sitting around these. My head was resting in my left hand. Bit by bit, I wrote these observations down, with a writer’s eye. It was useful not to change anything immediately so that I could explore the details.

Then I put my ‘Alexander hat’ on. And I shifted the things from under the table and brought both feet on the floor. I relaxed my right shoulder, thought up through my spine and head and I let my left hand softly help keep the pages of my book open. Much more comfortable.

It has been a revelation to use writing to bring a greater body awareness.

One exercise in the Creative Writing for Yoga workshop happened after we’d done some gentle yoga movements. We then had to write a letter to a part of our body. A few people read their pieces out. They were so different. Some were funny, others moving, all were observing things from a more unusual perspective. Someone wrote to their thumb, another to their belly, I corresponded with my left hip.

So these are my offerings:

Write Morning Pages – 3 or 4 pages, any time of day, anything that’s in your mind
If you are aware of your body as you write, note it down in detail. Tensions and all. Then become more thoughtful and note that down. This doesn’t have to be in your Morning Pages.
Do some gentle movements and then write a short letter to part of your body

April 25, 2014

Being too sorry

When I am moving someone’s leg in an Alexander Technique lesson and I ask them to let me take the weight of their leg, quite a number of people apologise and say sorry for holding tension in their leg. Clearly they’ve not done anything wrong. But saying sorry is a strong habit. It’s quite a British habit as my tale will tell later. We’re very proficient at saying sorry…. even when we don’t need to.

If someone bumps into us or accidentally kicks us, we can be the one to apologise. Occasionally, if I’m working with someone who is particularly apologetic, I invite them to a “sorry challenge”. Here’s how it goes:

Try to notice how often you say sorry
Then try to not say it if you don’t need to.

It may feel a bit bad to not say sorry, or naughty or it may even feel a bit rebellious. That’s just fine. It’s pretty tiring to be good all the time and we’re human, after all.

What does that automatic “sorry” do to us? Well, it’s different for everyone. But it can make us feel small, insignificant, unimportant. It might make us tighten and shrink a bit.

A Swedish friend who has recently moved to the UK told me of an incident on a London bus when a young man had accidentally kicked an older woman’s foot. He mumbled an apology but she hadn’t heard it and rebuked him loudly. He apologised , they had a chat and all was remedied. My Swedish friend was amazed on 3 counts:

The chap had said sorry in the first place;
The woman had exclaimed out loud at him not saying anything;
The man apologised again and they had a chat.

She didn’t think any of this would happen in Sweden. Imagine what my friend would think if she kicked me and I said sorry to her!

(And sorry to any Swedes who would have apologised on the bus.)

April 9, 2014October 21, 2018

Hands-On Yoga: asana and the Alexander Technique

Do you practice yoga and want to explore a new perspective? Or have you studied the Alexander Technique and want to try it out within a yoga setting? Three years ago, I’d been practising Chris Holt’s gentle style of Hatha yoga and was drawn to her retreat in southern France, run by an Alexander Technique colleague, Lucy Ackroyd. The combination of yoga, AT discussions, a rural setting and having meals laid on was bliss. The three of us held long conversations, exchanging ideas and understanding. Yoga, like the AT, is all about awareness – of body, mind and the relationship between the two. The mindfulness aspect of the AT is really helped by the meditation practices of yoga and I’ve found that people who mediate are used to quietening down their “mind chatter”.

Chris and I have developed a workshop style we call Hands-On Yoga where we are bringing the 2 disciplines together. I explain some of the ideas behind the Alexander Technique and Chris then brings this to teaching classical Hatha Yoga asana. As Chris demonstrates and describes these postures and movements, I bring a gentle hands-on touch, helping encourage further releases from tension and making subtle adjustments where required. With this fusion of our work, we are hoping that people will gain a deeper self-awareness and sense of comfort and ease.

The style of yoga that Chris teaches is very gentle and very thoughtful and it appeals to me on many levels. She spends time exploring small movements so each yoga student can see what their range of movement is like, for example with their shoulders. When we move on to some of the yoga postures, she reminds us of the experiments we did with the shoulders so that arm movement is more considered and doesn’t involve arching of the back or raising of the shoulders. This is so in keeping with AT mindfulness and I sometimes use some of these movements in my Alexander teaching practice.

Chris has also trained in restorative yoga. Here she uses a variety of supports – bolsters, blankets, blocks – so that the body feels totally supported. Keeping in these postures for a few minutes is supremely relaxing and can enable a deeper release of tension. I have brought some of this into my Alexander practice and sometimes use a bolster under the knees for some people when they are lying in semi-supine, particularly if they have tension in their legs and hip joints that is hard to undo.

With our Hands-On Yoga workshops and holidays, we have a mixture of AT insights, yoga and meditation practice. Some sessions are separate and at other times, they work in conjunction. “It’s truly brilliant,” says Kate Byron, who joined us on retreat in 2013. “The attention to detail has really helped me understand what yoga can be and helped me start to feel in touch with my body, which I haven’t felt for years.”

Chris Holt and Tanya Shoop run occasional Hands-on Yoga workshops in London and will be leading a residential Hands-on Yoga retreat 5-7 September 2014 at Holland House in Worcestershire.