What’s Back There? Exploring how we hold and move ourselves with a tip from the Alexander Technique.

I’ve just come from teaching a new yoga class that incorporates a new cue I gathered at my recent Alexander Technique retreat with Lindsay Newitter in France. (Yes, it was as magical as you are imagining!)

It’s always amazing when, after doing and teaching yoga for more than 20 years, a new idea transforms the way I hold and move myself. I’ve been diving into the Alexander Technique in the past few years, and the more I learn, the more I know I need to learn.

During the recent retreat, I was guided to the realization that we live in the front of our body. Lindsay used the image of a lollipop on a stick to represent the face and the neck as they continually float in front of us, teasing us ever forward. Perhaps mostly the face, which we use to reach out and contact the world, often with full disregard to anything else in our body!

Imagine looking at your phone, checking the temperature on your tea kettle or looking for a book on your shelf. Where is your face going? Probably full speed a-“head”! And yet our face is not our whole head, and our front of the body should not be doing all the driving. Think of a car with front wheel drive vs. all-wheel drive. There is so much more stability when we use all of our wheels.

So in our yoga practices this week, I asked students to “flip” their awareness, thinking about how the back of our head and body is allowing and directing movement—or at least how it could be. In an almost surreal experience, we moved into poses allowing our back bodies to ease us in. We lifted our heads to look forward using guidance from the back of the head vs. reaching forward with our face. We brought awareness to how the mind—and more specifically where we direct the mind—can have significant effect on how we move.

Allowing the mind to shift from the front of the body doing the directing, to the back body doing the directing, is quite the task when you think about it. These are subtle changes in our awareness, and while my students are all very experienced and proprioceptive, I was still not certain I could communicate this via a Zoom class. But I hoped I could!

At the end of our practice, I inquired from students about whether 1) this made any sense to them and 2) what they experienced. I was astounded. One student had the insight that she was often jutting her face forward and found herself wondering why she did that. Others found the focus on the back of the head more relaxing for the neck. And everyone seemed to realize what I had: There is something profound to this idea!

As with any transformation in thinking, this idea has led me beyond my physical body, wondering what else I am missing in life because I’m so focused on moving forward. What if we stopped more, moved forward less, and gave ourselves time to slow down and rest into our back body? What if we gave ourselves more time to stay still?

There is comfort in these ideas, and we can all benefit from stopping, absorbing, digesting and resting! And over time, with repetition and practice, these changes can shift our whole being to more balance and softness. Ahhhhh.

We’ll be continuing and building on this practice through October. If you are curious, join us! Classes continue Tues and Thurs on Zoom from 9-10am (CST) and all levels are welcome to this therapeutic, gentle yoga practice.