A small injury in 1983 changed my life forever. While sliding a Thanksgiving turkey into the oven, my spine went “kkrrnnncchh”! I was fine until the next day, when my neck suddenly went into spasm. My head wouldn’t turn, my arms couldn’t move. I was definitely stuck.
As a former dancer, I was no stranger to injuries. Years of working in movement and theater will do that to you. So, on the advice of a friend I went to see an Alexander Technique teacher. Six weeks later I was out of pain, but I kept going to Alexander sessions because I loved the way I felt.
Wanting to learn why the Technique gave me a sensation of lightness and ease, I joined an Alexander training program. As I studied I began to experience my Self differently. Obviously, my structural relationships were changing — that’s how “lightness and ease” came about — but my relationships with loved ones also began to shift. FM Alexander had described his work as psycho-physical: implicit in the subtle structural shifts are psychological/emotional shifts. In other words, when one’s structural Self is in right relationship, other aspects of Self can come more easily into alignment.
In 1991, after three years of training, I began teaching Alexander Technique in Jerusalem. Later, when we moved back to Washington, D.C. it helped me navigate the surprises and stresses of cross-cultural relocation. More importantly, my practice of the technique sustained me during the years of my late husband’s illness and dying. It helped me connect with my inner knowing of how to be present even with uncertainty and loss. Nevertheless, something was still missing for me. And I didn’t even know it.
The revelation came in my first work in Wholebody Focusing with Kevin McEvenue. Recent vision testing had diagnosed complex vision distortions, including my inability to see three-dimensionally. In that workshop, as I experienced my embodied Self in relationship with the environment, I could actually “see” what my brain was taking in. Only then could I begin the process of unraveling how “lack of perspective” had shaped my reactions and affected my life.
Kevin’s work also opened a new range of sensing for me in my Alexander work. His interweaving of Gendlin’s process of inner-listening with Alexander’s process of inner-directed movement gave me access to a means of attuning with others. Alexander training had taught me not to “get in the way” of a client’s process. Wholebody Focusing gives me a language for that — for my experience of being present and trusting what I sense. It confirms that I do sense clients’ impending shifts before they occur and lets me trust my sensing of grounded presence as well as ungrounded absence. This refinement of my sensing-abilities is what allows me to bring people into their bodies.
I have over 40-years of involvement with “bodies” as a teacher, performer, director and guide. Through Wholebody Focusing I have discovered how it is to be at home in my “body” and at home with my Self. I look forward to sharing a new experience of “body” with people of different Focusing levels, life-experience, language, culture and customs.