Category: Habits

How You Use Yourself Matters. But What Does This Mean For Your Life?

8/17/2025

Self-use is an interesting concept. Let me explain.

Imagine you're carrying a backpack full of groceries. If you sling it over one shoulder, let the straps dig into your skin or carry it unevenly, it quickly becomes uncomfortable and heavy. But if you adjust the straps properly, distribute the weight evenly and walk with awareness, the backpack feels lighter and moving becomes more easy.

You of course know, without being told, that how you carry your backpack changes how you perceive it.

But think for a moment of your body as a sort of backpack. “Use” is a word we often use in the Alexander Technique, and it means how you carry and move yourself in everyday life.

And how you use yourself matters greatly.

The word "Use" is not about how you look or whether you are strong or flexible, but how you do things with your body, how you sit, stand, walk, or use your breath.

Even how you think is an aspect of your "Use".

Most of us never really stop to consider how we're using ourselves.
Instead we focus on the objects around us: the chair, the desk, the phone.

But how we carry our body through space, how we respond to gravity and to the objects we encounter, how we hold our head, how we breathe and what we pay attention to: all of these aspects of BEING are part of our Use.

This is such a rich field of exploration; a fascinating and empowering study of YOURSELF because taking charge of how you are BEING TODAY affects everything about your body's future health and wellbeing,

Take typing on a computer for example. You might rest your wrists on the desk, pull your head forward into the screen and hold your breath.... often habitually and without even noticing.

But over time your neck starts to tighten, your shoulders rise up and your wrists feel stiff. The task (sitting and typing) is simple, but your "Use" is creating tension.

The same task done with different Use can feel effortless. Your body is beautifully adaptable; it's a living, moving system that responds to how you use it. If you use it with habits of tightness, tension, or compression, it will feel heavy and uncomfortable.

But if you use it with awareness, balance and ease, it will feel light and alive.

The great news is that Use can easily be changed. You can learn to stop pulling yourself into patterns that create tension, imbalances and compression, and instead learn to move and express yourself with more freedom and less effort.

This is what I teach in my private, 1:1 coaching programs. This is the essence of the Alexander Technique: To help you become consciously aware of how you use yourself in everyday life so you can choose different ways: with less effort less and more freedom.

In short, "Use" underlies everything you do. It's the missing piece that connects your structure with your movement and your feelings. When you understand and improve your Use, pain and tension release away and life becomes a little easier.

You then truly transform how you feel in your body.

Check out my posts on Instagram to learn more about the way I think and teach. Click here if you would like to speak with me to find out how I can help you improve your Use so you can let go of strain and tension and feel great in your body.

Why Popular Attempts To Fix Your Posture Don’t Work (And What To Do Instead)

3/6/2025

Have you ever spent countless of hours at a doctor’s therapy office or the gym repeating exercises aimed at relaxing or strengthening your aching muscles and joints, hoping it would get you out of pain and fix your posture?

But nothing made a lasting positive impact on your well-being...

Does it feel crazy that your body seems to always revert back to your old patterns of slouching, stiffening and tensing up? You correct yourself for a while, but soon enough, you’re right back where you started.

Consider this:

1. Posture cannot be improved by exercising ‘weak’ or relaxing “tense” muscles because there is a reason why they act the way they do. That reason are your whole-body, dysfunctional movement patterns.

2. Posture cannot be ‘fixed’ by forcing your body into a certain position and then holding it there, because it's unnatural and creates more tension and stiffness.

How posture works

Your posture works through a holistic set of processes that are happening in your sensory and nervous systems, and that are directly influenced by the way you move and think.

Imbalances in your musculoskeletal system are the result of the unconscious messages your muscles receive from your brain that cause dysfunction in how your body operates.

So the real million dollar question is this: How can you use your mind and thinking to develop movement patterns that promote a superb functioning for your body as a whole?

How can you develop a use of your musculoskeletal system that makes you feel balanced and empowered? How can you work more skillfully with your awareness so that your body is adaptive and free to do what you really want it to do, and not held back by dis-ease and limitations?

If you want to improve the way you move, look and feel (your posture!), pay attention to how you guide and direct your body into activity. Think of your body as one unified whole, not a bunch of isolated muscles that you somehow need to manipulate.

Muscular dysfunction must be addressed on the level of consciousness and thought because muscles are merely the 'actors' and 'responders' to the way you think - they're not the 'directors' who holds the whole vision.

It is never too early or too late to learn how to let your posture support you effortlessly for life!

All you need is a simple learning process that helps you to recognize & address the repetitive and dysfunctional patterns that shape how you move, stand, and sit every day so that they not only become functional but promote balance, lightness and ease for your body.

This is the foundation of the Alexander Technique—an educational discipline and body of work that helps your posture to become something you experience, map, guide and enjoy, not something you force.

If you want to learn more about holistic posture improvement go to walkinbalance.net or click here to set up a complimentary New Posture Consultation call and learn how I can help you improve your posture, now and forever.

How Holistic Posture Training Helps You

10/21/2024

Holistic posture training starts with an important and crucial mindset shift:
Posture cannot be "exercised" into shape—it can only be minded.

This means that strengthening your core or back muscles won’t solve the issue of slouching or relieve persistent neck and shoulder tension. Instead, there are deeper, more concrete patterns at play that need to be understood and addressed.

These patterns are habits ingrained in how you move and coordinate your body, and my role is to guide you toward experiencing these underlying habits firsthand. The real source of your discomfort isn't a weak muscle group but rather an unhelpful coordination pattern.

Slouching, for example, isn’t a sign of failure or weakness. It’s simply an expression of the way your body has learned to move over time.
By understanding and becoming aware of these patterns, you open the door to meaningful change. Let’s start by observing how you coordinate yourself in everyday movements.

This could be as simple as how you walk, stand, sit, or even type at your computer. These patterns don’t change based on the activity; they remain consistent because they’re habitual and repetitive for all of us. The good news is that if we can examine how you hold yourself in one activity, it can reveal a lot about how you approach all other activities.

Once you begin to recognize your typical patterns ("slouching" for example) you can use that awareness to discover new, less stressful ways to move. I will guide you through this process, helping you explore and practice alternative movements that are easier on your body. This isn’t about forcing yourself into a "correct" posture but about understanding how you can naturally move in a way that feels better and works for your body.

Ultimately, the goal is to help you return to the driver's seat of your own body, where you have the freedom to choose how you want to show up in your everyday life. This is the beginning of holistic posture training—a learning process that empowers you to find ease, comfort, and control over your body.

If you’re ready to start sorting out your posture and feel better in your own skin, I’m here to help. For more about this topic download my FREE E-BOOK POSTURE AWARENESS GUIDE, or book a complementary call with me here to find out how I can help you to unravel the patterns that keep you stuck so you can find a new way forward.

Virginia Woolf and the Standing Desk

6/2/2016

3 Comments

It is said that Virginia Woolf wrote while standing at a desk 3'6" tall because she wanted to be like a painter who could instantly step away from her canvas to get a better view...

She was onto something. Coming up and out of the mental thicket for air, with wide eyes and ears to inhale space and sound, refreshing the senses to allow the emergence of the grander picture...
Beautiful and relatable. Protagonist for the standing desk.

3 Comments

How You Use Yourself Matters. But What Does This Mean For Your Life?

Why Popular Attempts To Fix Your Posture Don’t Work (And What To Do Instead)

How Holistic Posture Training Helps You

Virginia Woolf and the Standing Desk

Walk In Balance Center Blog

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BerlinTel: +49 (0)160-3728007

​San francisco work with me virtually​FROM ANYWHERE!tel: 415-879-0038​

Testimonials​

Berlin
Tel: +49 (0)160-3728007

San francisco
work with me virtually
FROM ANYWHERE!
tel: 415-879-0038

Testimonials