Ease, Restoration & the Art of Non-Doing
2020 has been a challenging and difficult time across the globe. As the year draws to a close we are pleased to join with master-teacher Kristen Davis in our final workshop series of the year, designed to support a sense of ease, calm, steadiness and restoration. Here we speak to Kristen about her practice, the Alexander Technique, and what 2020 has taught her.
What is the Alexander Technique?
The Alexander Technique is a form of expanding awareness and re-educating the body-mind to then shift patterns of chronic tension. The Technique keys into the body’s natural dynamic coordination of postural support, movement and breath, allowing the body to right itself.
How did you come to discover the Alexander Technique?
I discovered Alexander Technique in college as a dance major. I was always looking for ways to train and support the body, and ways to uncover my own authentic expression. The dancers that I most admired all seemed to have in common that they studied Alexander Technique. I took my first Alexander Technique class and my first Yoga class in the same week in 1993, and I’ve been practicing the two together ever since.
You speak of practicing yoga from a place of non-doing, in accordance with the body-mind - what is this and how does it help us as practitioners?
The idea of non-doing comes out of the recognition that most of our “doing” is conditioned. We have developed habits in the ways we stand and walk, think and talk, and move. Many of these habits are ways of contracting, making ourselves smaller. These are not just physical patterns but are patterns that are woven through our nervous systems. They work against the body-mind’s natural way of being.
The body is designed to move with ease, to be open and fluid, with a mind that is relaxed and stable. The Alexander Technique lays out a practice of non-doing:
Observing the body and becoming sensitive to its needs;
Letting go of the body’s habitual way of “doing” and the mind’s habitual way of plowing ahead; and
Tuning into the body-mind’s intrinsic organization and helping movement and life flow from there.
When using the Alexander Technique, a practice of non-doing, as the basis of a yoga practice, it quickly brings you into the deeper, more subtle aspects of asana and promotes an attention and sensitivity coming from the collaboration of body and mind.
Through non-doing, we stop fighting the body, we stop dominating the body. We find an OK-ness with how it is. We find an ease and lightness.
2020 has been such a difficult year for so many people. How will this workshop support them to move forward?
All of the difficulty and stress of this year has to be metabolized, processed through the body. It’s too much for the small mind. We have to give ourselves time, and space, and a practice for letting the body work through these emotions and constrictions. This workshop will be a weekly appointment to care for ourselves, to put down our heavy burden, to relax, and to restore our energy reserves.
What is your intention in creating this workshop? What do you hope people will learn and/or experience as a result of attending?
I want us to have this weekly appointment to come together, to care for ourselves, to care for each other. I want people to experience the possibility of resting into an expanded awareness, a larger, more open sense of themselves. A sigh of relief, a load being lifted, a feeling of buoyancy and ease. My hope is that they will learn a process for tuning into this in any moment, at any time of the day.
What has your experience of 2020 taught you and what are you doing to manage the stress and challenges for yourself?
What did 2020 teach me?
The only way for me to find any sense of peace and stability is to be present moment by moment. This presence is PRACTICED. I sit zazen (seated meditation) twice/day. I do Yoga and Alexander practices most days. It is somewhat shocking how dependent I am on these for my well-being. If I miss a day of meditation or yoga I can feel depressed or destabilized.
I am looking at what I take refuge in: Buddha and Buddhist teachings; my Zen community; Yoga and Alexander Technique practices; my family and friends; animals and nature. These are all wholesome. Then I see my conditioned, habitual ways of taking refuge in endlessly reading news; eating sugar; lazing about. I try to meet those habits with gentleness, softness, kindness. They do not serve me, yet times are hard. It’s all ok. In seeing these habits with kindness, I find myself less drawn to them.
In my little NYC apartment shared with my partner, our 12-year-old son, one dog and two cats, rarely leaving this little space, always together…I am seeing my own anger! Oh, it arises again and again throughout the day. I realize now how often in the past I would miss it. It can just be this brief stiffening at my husband’s comment; just a flash of irritation. I stay with it now. No story about it, not acting on it, just giving it time to flow through my body, trying to soften to it, allow it. It is such a relief to do this! When I can remember, and give myself this moment to just relax with the anger, it is freeing.
Find ease & restoration with Kristen Davis’
On-Demand Course available NOW!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristen Davis
Kristen Davis, former owner of Yogasana Center, has been teaching Yoga and the Alexander Technique since 1995.
Her classes are rooted in her Iyengar training under her mentor, Donald Moyer, the “means-whereby” of the Alexander Technique, and her deep practice of Zen Buddhism. The result is a meditative and focused practice that looks to uncover the habits and conditioning that create obstacles in the body-mind-heart.
Learn more at www.kristendavis.com.
