Do you want to improve your posture for life and for work?
Do you want to enhance your personal energy and self-confidence?
Walk In Balance Coaching promotes deep transformative postural self-awareness and a positive attitude towards yourself. Learn life-changing skill-sets that help improve your posture and manage stress, pain and tension.
Change Your Thinking About Your Posture
The human body works as a global network, not as separate parts. All of our accumulated life experiences directly affect our posture. Conversely, our posture also affects the way we feel, think and sense ourselves. No matter how we look at it, posture is both cause and effect. Therefore, the term 'posture' is not any 'ideal' static shape to take on, but a body in constant communication with its senses, adaptable to the task at hand.
Posture training is of top-most importance for peak performance among the world's elite movers such as olympic athletes, musicians, public speakers, actors and dancers.
Here is a fact: Much of our postural pain is self-made.As you might have experienced, trying to follow old-fashioned posture commands such as "Sit up straight!" or "Pull your shoulders back, tummy in!" only adds to any strain and tension we already feel. Such advice reinforces the slouching and muscle tension that is already present, potentially injuring the neck, shoulders or spine, and can prompt back pain, shallow breathing, headaches, attention problems, mood swings, exhaustion, or sensations of anxiety, low self-esteem, and stress. This can also lead to premature aging.
Posture is the most overlooked health issue in today's world. Your life's quality depends on it.
Here is a fact: How we do any activity is how we do all activities! Our attraction to technology tends to pull us down to it and into ourself, claiming full control over our senses and fixing our posture. But so can many other activities such as 'relaxing' on a couch or doing the dishes. Habits developed in one activity will show up in virtually all others we do - we just don't realize it until we start feeling stressed out or are in pain.
To change unhealthy posture for real, we need to befriend our habits. We need to be interested in ourselves! What exactly am I experiencing right now, and what does it mean? How does it affect my physiology and mental attitudes? What other choices can I make that don't overwork my system?
This is a very sophisticated process, full of joy and surprises, and unique to the Alexander Technique.
Find Comfort In Your Body
Alexander work defines a process by which you learn to take back full ownership and comfort in your body. The sense of being in your body dramatically shifts towards more joy and self-connection. You will light(en) up, and with it your relationship to your environment and to other people. It is about the quality with which you inhabit and express yourself.
Letting go of useless habits and muscular tension that has negatively impacted your body's functioning enters you into a new and wondrous realm of being yourself. Here lies the freedom to make new and improved movement and behavior choices. Applying integrative methods that help you regulate your entire nervous system and stimulate your thinking mind will further guide you towards harmony and balance of 'mind, muscle and emotion'.
Throughout the Alexander process, there are no typical exercises to repeat, and you don'tneed to buy special tools or other equipment. Just bring yourself and your sincerity, and your interest in discovering and learning about yourself. Everything that happens in a lesson can be directly applied to real life.
Snippets Of Praise...
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Work With Flora Experience And Expertise
"The Power and Well-Being of the Body lies in the Artistry of its Use." Flora D.H.Ojanen
After more than two decades of teaching experience in California, she has developed potent tools and embodiment techniques that help you rediscover your natural and effortless posture. Whether gardening, sitting at your computer, yoga, running, weight lifting, leading your team, feeling more confident, or playing your instrument is what you love to do - you can learn to do it with more ease and enjoyment.
Her signature teaching process is not only based on the Alexander Technique, mindfulness, modern neuroscience, self-regulation, psychology and human functional anatomy & design, but also on the great Daoist teachings and movement arts - because the outlook you have on life sets the tone for not only how you act and feel inside, but how you perceive the world around you.
Flora's teaching is science-based, fun, light-hearted, deep and inspiring. Every single concern or question regarding your posture, symptoms, embodiment, life experiences, structural integrity & personal empowerment is important and taken very seriously.
For any activity you want to improve, an important key is to diagnose the actual impact your unique and unconscious habits are having on your muscles and on your present mental state. Flora can help you move, think, plan and find new choices for doing and being. You will practice freeing up formerly unknown space in your body, and re-connect to your innate ability to feel in charge, coordinated and aware of yourself in daily life.
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Flora is a skillful teacher and mover. She will help you demystify your posture. You will understand how you can stop the common yo-yo effect of slouching/tensing/slouching that everyone struggles with, no matter who they are. Through that process you can build lasting tools to help you feel great in your body.
If aging or loss of function is your concern, Flora can help you.
Being balanced is relaxing. It stimulates the activation of our parasympathetic nervous system: Restore, Renew, Digest and Rest. But as we age, our balance can get seriously challenged. There are many reason for it: osteoporosis, loss of muscle mass, accidents, eye sight problems, accumulated stress reactions, or even having an 'old age attitude'.
Physical balance goes hand in hand with mental balance, and we must attentive to the fact that our bodies love to get tune-ups at any age. In the same way, staying interested in what is going on around us, and keeping life's sparks flying high is the foundation for a healthy attitude and experience while 'saging'.
Did you know that delicately coordinated eyes and spine are essential for good posture?
Learning to respond with less tension to life, being less reactive in general, and learning to move not against but with your physical design will give you the power to take charge of how you move, feel and look. A person in balance is poised and looks at ease. A person in balance feels light and energetic, free of tension, and ready to move.
Only when all parts of the body can relate in a subtle and free relationship to each other, thus allowing lengthening in statue and widening across the body, can dynamic posture and optimum breathing be possible. Come and study the Alexander Technique!
Your Posture At Work Sitting Is Movement
You already have a standing desk and ergonomic office chair, and maybe even purchased wearable devices claiming to help with posture, but your pain and tension continue to increase?
Posture is deeply ingrained and habitual, and it can be difficult to sense what it is that we are actually doing with ourself, especially when we are 'sitting still and concentrating' so much of our day. If you learn to consider sitting as movement, you will have a better chance improving your postural response than trying to figure out a correct sitting position (which is impossible!).
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Great posture comes from understanding how mind and body work efficiently and united, not from a new expensive chair or smart-looking external device like a back brace. While good ergonomics are of course important, learning to sense what movement choices are actually available to you in the work set-up you use, is the missing link to postural health at the computer.
Long term and high-level unmanaged stress in the system can keep the body in fight-flight-freeze mode, signaling the constant release of stress hormones. It dulls our senses, and limits the flow of blood and oxygen to the parts of the brain and body which are responsible for relaxation, revitalization, healing and growth. Weakened sensory messaging to our brain prevents us from feeling a level of safety, intensifying our stress response.
Postural self-regulation as it is taught in Alexander work will guide you towards freedom from the impact of excessive mental stress on your posture. This is a life-supporting process suitable for any age!By understanding the triggers that produce acute stress and tension in your body, and then stopping those triggers from getting expressed, you can effectively prevent chronic pain from developing.
Alexander teachers are posture educators. A deteriorating posture is one of the primary signs of structural aging. What tends to age us fast are our habits. Poor habits of statue and body use can come to dominate all our activities.
They continue long after the initial reasons for developing them have gone, and often result inunnecessary muscular efforts and a depletion of our energy with possible long term consequences - back strain, breathing problems, compromised balance, neck pain, migraines, anxiety, high blood pressure, excess tension, prolonged exhaustion, low self-esteem, strong emotional stress responses or mood swings.
Different from other modalities and medical interventions, in Alexander coaching lessons you are not treated as a patient, but empowered as a client with respect to your unique life experience. You've got the chance to become an expert of yourself by learning essential skills to eliminate the cause of your postural tension and unease.