Yoga
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Yoga is a body/mind discipline that can be adapted to all abilities and phases of life. Alexander Technique offers a way to release the unconscious tension that interferes with ideal movement. The synergy between the two allows you to solve physical problems, access your full range of motion, and enhance the pleasure of your yoga practice.
Using the delicate Alexander touch, Joan can help you relieve pain, improve breathing and work at your own level. With insight, encouragement and time to unravel the strictures of habit, you can expand more fully into your yoga practice. In Joan’s yoga classes, she encourages students to accept where they are and celebrate what they can accomplish. Her words and hands-on feedback help each person unravel their limiting habits, fulfill each pose to find ease and pleasure in the practice of yoga. |
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Joan began to learn yoga from a book in 1969 as the basis for a home practice. Then, after years of focusing on dance and exercise, in 1996 she joined the many who were rediscovering yoga and began to study with Molly Fox, Alan Finger, Michael Leconczak, Jodie Rufty and jackie Prete. Over the next few years, she went on yoga retreats, wrote about yoga for national magazines, and continuted to study with Jonathan Gordon and Jimmy Berneart. She completed an Anusara-inspired teacher training with Molly Fox and Jackie Prete in 2002.
Since then, she has taught weekly classes and presented workshops highlighting the exquisite pairing of yoga and Alexander Technique in NYC studios -- Shakti Yoga, Yoga Center of Brooklyn, Yoga People and other studios.
Currently, she teaches in Brooklyn at Jennifer Brilliant Yoga in Park Slope and at the Ancram Opera House in Columbia County. She will begin a ten-week class at the Douglas Dunn studio in SoHo on Tuesdays 10-11:30 beginning in March, 2009. |
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As teachers or practitioners of yoga, we are constantly engaged in the interplay of effort and ease. As we challenge ourselves to move into new areas of strength, coordination or flexibility, we often bump into limiting assumptions and patterns of tension. F.M. Alexander, in solving his own vocal problem, created a method for unraveling unconscious movement habits. His insights and approach can be a valuable tool for us, at any level of practice.
Yoga and the Alexander Technique have some commonalities. Both promote inner connectedness and expanded consciousness through the body. Both relieve pain and improve breathing, posture and alignment in movement. Both improve overall health and raise the spirit. In order to achieve these benefits, both challenge our habitual ways of moving. The primary difference is that yoga is an ancient philosophy, a detailed and infinite set of postures and practices, and Alexander Technique is a century-old approach to movement – a way of doing things that we can bring to any activity, from holding a child to singing an aria to sitting well at a desk. As a longtime student and teacher of both, Joan integrates its principles into her yoga classes. |
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F.M. Alexander articulated three interlocking skills he called awareness, inhibition and direction.
Awareness is an endless cooperative venture for teacher and student. The teacher offers insights about areas that, when released, can awaken untapped reserves. The student can then build on that new kinesthetic experience.
Inhibition is the capacity to unravel excess tension, to pause in the process of striving. As we try to capture the essence of a pose, we can often bring too much effort to the task, interfering with the body’s natural flow. Reducing muscular effort can be the prelude to finding a new reservoir of strength and steadiness.
Direction is the act of envisioning the flow of energy in the body. Sometimes, simply “thinking up” will produce lightness and ease, clarifying a posture and bringing more pleasure to practice. Rather than forcing a movement, we can engage the mind to subtly guide the body from within. The Alexander Technique is a useful lens through which to perceive asana practice, another tool for self-development to support our ongoing inquiry into the enlivening process of yoga. |
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Click the link below for an article highlighting Yoga & The Alexander Technique... |