Inviting quiet
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
6d ago
I’m a big fan of Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now“. It’s transformative. I’m also a fan of the “Power of No”, in the Alexander sense.  Or as FM Alexander coined it, “conscious inhibition”. (He was pre-Freud, so not a particle of emotional repression was involved, phew!) Conscious inhibition covers a lot of territory, from the very simple to the extremely profound. Simple: Not doing what I don’t want to do. I prefer not to sabotage myself with any excess mental, muscular or any other tension! Profound: A deeply quiet state of non-doing. Below the conscious level ..read more
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Injury recovery: update from a journey with AT, tai chi and energy
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
5M ago
This blog from 2017 was inspired by two of my excellent colleagues: Jeanne Barrett in Seattle has written movingly about her long recovery journey following a severe knee injury. Brooke Lieb wrote about using the Alexander Technique to recover from trauma after being bitten by a dog. After reading their accounts, I was ready to tell mine. In 2016, I had one of those bad split seconds. I was using a very sharp knife and I slipped. The knife went all the way through my left hand, between the metarcarpal bones just below the 4th finger and pinky. It could have been a lot worse, but as it was I ni ..read more
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Let your back do its job
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
1y ago
One of my favorite Alexander missions is to ‘fill out my back’. So what does that mean? We have a strong tendency to inhabit our front half more than our back half… which is pretty understandable since our world is mostly in front of us. In front, and down. We get stuck down into our front half, a lot. So… Show me the antidote! How can I fill out my whole back? Let’s say I notice that I’ve gotten pulled forward. Again. (Insert celebratory moment: I noticed, woot woot woot!) How about I get REALLY CLEAR about what I don’t want by noticing aspects of my forward-downward-pullingne ..read more
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Build your toolkit
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
3y ago
An insider joke in my house comes from an old New Yorker cartoon, in which a man has just arrived home from work and is fumbling with his overcoat. Clearly aggrieved, he says to his wife, “What a day! First, I almost missed the bus, then my pen ran out of ink… and now I’m having trouble with this button on my coat!” Ever since, we’ve referred to the tiny irritants of life as ‘coat buttons’. I would wager that the challenges of 2020 and early 2021 can tax our reserves to the point of making the coat buttons practically intolerable. The stress is swirling around out there along with the virus an ..read more
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Adding AT Sparkle to your Covid masking
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
3y ago
We’ve had fun in our AT Spark Zoom classes lately applying AT skills to mask wearing! None of us can avoid having to don ’em these days, so why not embrace the task as the splendid opportunity it is? We can use the mask to liven up our postural poise and balance while protecting ourselves and our neighbors. We played with noticing what our response to the mask is if we just stick them on our faces in the usual manner… Feels claustrophobic, breathing restricted, working my eyes too hard to look friendly… and oy, does my jaw tend to get tight. Check, check check! Then we approached th ..read more
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Spreading the good news: options for skillful aging
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
3y ago
The older I get, the more it’s true: Alexander awareness is amazingly helpful when we’re young. It’s absolutely essential as we move into the challenges of aging. Apropos of which, here’s a great new article which features several of my excellent colleagues: The Alexander Technique: A Mind-Body Practice for All of Us “They tend to be my best students, because muscling through pain or discomfort doesn’t work anymore. Now they need a more efficient way of living and moving and standing”. – Eve Bernfeld, about her students who are 60 and older A fair number of my students are 60 or older… and so ..read more
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The adventure of online classes and lessons
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
4y ago
Alexander teachers are accustomed to giving and receiving huge amounts of subtle information through our hands. In a time when we can’t be near each other, I decided to embrace the new terrain of online teaching by offering classes and lessons. I began with great trepidation and was very pleasantly surprised by the degree of subtle connection that can happen. And… it’s fun! The Technique at its heart is a process of attention and intention. You learn to be more skillful with the use of your attention, which helps you become more elastic and dynamic. Students who get my ‘Alexander Spark’ email ..read more
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Sailing the uncertain seas
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
4y ago
I write this as the Covid-19 virus wave is spreading, with all its attendant discombobulation. On the practical level, we can plug in sensible precautions, such as the most effective way to wash your hands. See also “How not to touch your face“, below. What other subtle skills can we bring to the endeavor to help us bolster immunity and navigate a tad more serenely? It turns out that many of my favorite ways to invite quiet flow just happen to buoy up resilience by improving vagal tone, which dials up a parasympathetic (rest and digest) response from th ..read more
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Breathe yourself tall
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
4y ago
When I describe breathing coordination, lots of students say, “huh, that’s the opposite of what I guessed!”  And it’s perfectly understandable, based on what we see happening in others and what we feel in ourselves. “Don’t I rise a bit when I inhale and relax back down when I exhale?” Yep, that may be what we see and feel…. but is that what we’re actually designed to do?  Let’s take an internal peek: imagine a little avatar of you, floating inside your lungs, observing what happens. Look around:  Your ribs are the walls surrounding you. Your diaphragm is the floor beneath you ..read more
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Where do my legs begin?
Alexander Technique with Tully Hall Blog
by Tully Hall
5y ago
As some of my students know, I took a workshop this summer on How to Walk in High Heels with Alexandrian poise! I would have had precisely zero interest in such a thing — I hate high heels — until a respected colleague whom I’d thought would avoid it like the plague absolutely raved about it. So I went… and here’s why I loved it: A) It was an absolute hoot. B) It gave me new insight about where my legs actually begin and how an elegant sashay on stilettos is indeed possible. C) I became a Goddess*. But first the legs. Take a look at how we can balance effortlessly over the hip joints, th ..read more
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