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Move Well. Feel Good. Look Great.
Good Posture Rules!
Do you want to experience more power, comfort & joy in your body?
Posture is the most overlooked health issue in today's world. Your life's quality depends on it.
Did you know that you can free yourself of much of your tension and pain by improving your postural functioning and alignment? In fact, you can:
* Feel in control of yourself
* Let go of daily aches and pain
* Enjoy more ease in your body
* Have more available energy
* Let go of movement restrictions
* Get more done with more ease
* Find balance in mind, body & emotion
* Improve the quality of your movements
* Have more confidence in yourself
* Increase your vitality naturally
You can achieve all that by joining a dedicated personalized program that helps you gain the practical experience you need to make new & skillful movement choices so you can feel better. This program will empower you with tools you can use for all aspects of your life. Did I mention that my process is as fun as it is deep & profound?
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Why Posture Matters
The way you use your body shapes how you experience your life. Your posture is the result of the conscious and unconscious patters and impulses you use for moving your body. They express all of you, all the time. Wherever you go, there is your body. Whatever you do, you do it with your body. To know your own postural patterns is so empowering because they are the key to understanding how to shift from tension to ease, and from stress to freedom.
I specialize in helping you to improve how you move and how you feel in your body. Postural efficiency not only supports new healthy lifestyle choices that can reverse or prevent existing health issues, it can also brighten your personal energy signature and magnetism so you can feel confident doing what you love doing most in your life.
Body Mind Emotion
You Are Whole
Your body functions as a unified, intelligent whole. It never works as separate parts. While it's true that your beliefs, experiences and the stories you tell yourself about them shape your body's postural expressions, it's also true that how you move your body shapes the way you think, feel, and express yourself. No matter how you look at it, posture serves as both cause and effect for the quality with which you live in your body.
Unfortunately, this holistic view of posture is not always so obvious, or even easy to comprehend. You are always right in the middle of your own experience, which can make it challenging to "see the forest for the trees" and to perceive yourself clearly.
Moreover, just google 'posture' and you'll notice tons of dualistic, fragmented ideas about what is 'wrong with you' and your posture. This view tends to shame us into thinking we must 'try harder' to 'do better', which can set off difficult emotions in many people, stirring feelings of inadequacy, not being good enough, or a sense of lacking. You are not lacking. You are already whole.
My mission is to help you discover how you're already designed for health, safety, balance & ease as you live creatively and joyfully in your human body.
The Truth About
Posture Myths
Have you ever tried to 'fix' your posture with mainstream commands such as "Sit up straight!", "Pull your shoulders back!", "Suck it up!" or "Hold your nose up high!"? Then you've probably noticed how it's impossibly hard to do because it's exhausting, brings on tension, induces stress and feelings of failure, and adds even more strain to your whole self!
Repetitive exercises that aim to fix you into a certain shape, or that stretch or strengthen isolated muscles so that they can hold your body upright in a 'right position' are dangerous and do not work, because they go against everything that is true about how your body operates by design.
Your body is not interested in upholding a certain shape. Your body is made for dynamic adaptation and movement that is harmonious with its innate design, which is a design that promotes wholeness, balance and connection.
Holistic Posture
Updated
We need to move away from thinking about posture only in terms of "good" or "bad", and towards a viewpoint that implies the possibility for holistic, conscious, and empowering change. Your posture is an expression of you, a signal. Your posture is how you've learned to respond to life, and there is nothing wrong or bad about any of it. It's your adaptive physical expression with which you are currently meeting life, and with the right tools and understanding you can change yourself in a minute should you decide to,
Your posture is how you've learned to respond to life. There is absolutely nothing wrong or bad about any of it. It's your adaptive physical expression with which you are currently meeting life, and with the right tools and understanding you can change yourself in a minute should you decide to.
Because your posture is a collection of behaviors you have learned in order to function and survive, you can also learn to stop doing what no longer serves you or makes you happy. You can learn to do something different.
My posture programs promote deeply transformative self-awareness & a positive attitude towards yourself. Discover life-changing skills designed to improve your posture so you can better manage stress, pain and tension.
Lasting Changes
Free Your Body
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, you need to befriend your habits. You need to be interested in yourself by asking questions such as: What exactly am I experiencing right now, and what does it mean? How does it affect my physiology and mental attitude? 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.
Finding 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't need to buy special tools or equipment. Just bring yourself and your sincerity, and your interest in discovering and learning about yourself. Everything that happens in each session can be directly applied to real life.
Client Love
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Work With Me
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.
Dynamic Posture
Graceful Aging 101
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.
When Your Posture Creates Pain
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.
Improve Your PostureDiscover how your body is designed to function.
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Move With New ComfortFind lightness and ease in your movements.
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Embody Yourself FullyAllow your inner strength & beauty to shine.
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Posture Habits
And Structural Aging
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 in unnecessary 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.
New AwarenessCultivate presence and moment-by moment awareness.
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New DirectionsEstablish balance and coordination in daily movement.
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New ConnectionsReturn to deep confidence, self-respect and happiness.
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Walk In Balance
Alexander Technique Center Berlin
