5 week online classes—

Are you—

• Freaked out about the overlapping disruptions?
• Ready to face the realities and the feelings?
• Worrying about the climate, rather than exploring possibilities?
• Wishing for care, love and pleasure without denying grief and uncertainty?

Then you will benefit from this class and being in community.

Without skills in self-regulation and resilience practices, our capacity to respond in healthy and choiceful ways is diminished.

In this 5 week interactive online class, you will learn core embodiment principles, so you can respond from presence, compassion, and embodied choice:

• How to catch yourself when you’ve disconnected and bring yourself back to presence. 
• How to breathe fully, and use breath to calm and quiet your nervous system.
• Practice rest, joy and pleasure as an antidote to pain, sorrows and suffering. 
• Share concerns and ideas in a community of like-minded people.
• Explore choices of what to do in the radical uncertainty we face.

In these small classes, we increase connection with ourselves and others and the more-than-human world as we navigate these times—experiencing community care as part of self-care.

RSVP by email. A Zoom link will be emailed upon registration.

Suggested donation is $125 –

To reserve your space, please email me and deposit $50.00 to Venmo @Constance-Clare-Newman *

*if you prefer PayPal or check, let me know. Financial challenge?  Smaller donations are possible. Let’s work it out together & make it a win-win.

 

Examples of Previous Classes and Workshops—

 

Alexander Technique for Artists—

 In this 5 week online class, we will explore Alexander principles as they apply to creating art. Come join a rich and practical exploration of how mind and body habits influence your way of being as you create.

• Get your body-mind into a “blank slate” to begin work.
• Learn to use less tension and effort in your making.
• Explore using the “just right” amount of energy for your technique.
• Find the space between idea and execution that allows spontaneity and surprise.
• Practice catching yourself when you disconnect from your wholeness, and bring yourself back to presence.

 

Alexander Technique for Chronic Pain

In this 5 week online class, we will practice awareness of postural habits, reducing tension and compression, and increasing efficient movement as these relate to pain and recovery.

Continual pain is the ultimate distraction, draining your resources, limiting how you relate and function. It can often lead to anxiety, depression or disturbed sleep. No longer just the body’s response to a problem, it can become the problem itself as pain becomes the focus of attention, which can spiral and increase the pain being experienced. This vicious cycle can to some degree be interrupted and altered. Alexander Technique practices help to intervene in the tension cycle and concurrent stress reaction, which can bring relief, or at least stop pain from becoming worse or becoming entrenched.

If you suffer from chronic pain, perhaps you’ve sought out many remedies in a frustrating search for relief. Depending on your condition, you may have tried chiropractic, drugs, massage or surgery. Each of these treatments may play an important role in recovery. But the Alexander Technique’s unique contribution is education, offering you a way to understand the pain cycle, improve awareness, recognize red flags, and make new choices.

Come join a rich and practical exploration of how mind and body habits influence your pain and overall quality of life. Learn how to:

• Be in better balance, effortlessly upright, no slouching, no rigidity.
• Reduce big muscle use so smaller muscles can work better.
• Become more attuned to the body’s warning signs of tension and compression.
• Cultivate full capacity breathing, with minimal effort and maximum efficiency.
• Use the “just right” amount of muscle effort during PT or exercise.
• Get in tune with comfortable sensations in your body and less stressful thoughts in your mind. Even in bodies experiencing pain, there are opportunities for comfort and pleasure.

As you gain control over your tension and stress responses, you can shift your entire system from a state of alarm to calm. As you lessen your pain and give your body a chance to heal, you also become better at self-regulating your nervous system to experience some serenity

In 2008, the journal BMJ featured a study of nearly 600 chronic pain patients that found that the Alexander technique reduced back pain better than massage or exercise alone. Plus, the effects were lasting—even after as few as 6 lessons.* According to the BMJ study, Alexander lessons “reduce back pain by limiting muscle spasm, strengthening postural muscles, improving coordination and flexibility and decompressing the spine.”

*https://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a884

Resilience Practices for Stress and Anxiety

Stressed? Overthinking? Negativity? Uneasy? Dread? Worry?

All completely normal in our current times. But when we live in a near-constant state of alarm, we are less able to access our inner body-based resources to return to center.

In this 5 week interactive online class, we will practice skills in self-regulation, strengthening our capacity to respond in healthy and choiceful ways:

• How to catch yourself when you’ve disconnected from your wholeness and bring yourself back to presence. 
• How to breathe fully, and use breath to calm and quiet your nervous system.
• Practice rest, joy and pleasure as an antidote to stress, suffering and exhaustion. 
• Release tension and experience easy posture.
• Calm your mind and explore neuroplasticity.

Embody Wholeness for Performers—Effective Practice, Embodied Performance 

This 5 week interactive online class (Wednesdays at 9amPST/12pmEST/5pmBST, November 18-December 16) will introduce you to how the Alexander Technique helps you play an instrument, practice dance, sing a song, do a monologue, or any other performance activity—with less tension, more kinesthetic awareness, and fuller presence.

Constance will lead movement, breath and body explorations. Class is a time to come into wholeness, relaxed yet alert, grounded yet energized, soft yet strong. Everyone will receive individual guidance, group feedback and practices to help you work on your own.

Every performer can benefit by:

·      better body awareness

·      less tension

·      increased physical range

·      fuller breath and voice

·      amplified confidence and presence

·      practices of ongoing self-sustenance

Alexander Technique for Musicians—Intermediate—

Effective Practice, Embodied Performance

This 5 week interactive online class continues from the introductory class to explore how we can play music with less tension, more kinesthetic awareness, fuller breath and clarity of focus.

Do you struggle with tension when you make music? Do you want to have better posture but feel like you are working too hard at it? Does performance anxiety interfere with your ability to enjoy yourself?

For over two decades I have helped performers from all disciplines come closer to their potential and perform with more ease and fluidity.

This class will help you:

• Improve your sound
• Reduce unnecessary muscular tension
• Clarify your focus
• Hone your rehearsal strategies
• Open up your artistic interpretations

Constance’s online classes explore embodiment within a nurturing, supportive, and lively Zoom classroom. For musicians of all levels: amateur to professional. Everyone will have an opportunity to receive individual coaching on a short musical excerpt of their choice. Enrollment limited to 8 students.

 

Self-Regulation for Anxiety and Stress: Embody Wholeness with Somatic Practices

If you experience an inability to focus, or feel that you aren’t thinking rationally, or have trouble taking in new information, or if you are overthinking, ruminating and imagining negative outcomes, and all you can focus on is fear, uneasiness, worry, dread or nervousness, you are experiencing anxiety.

During the pandemic, anxiety has risen even among people who normally feel centered and content. But when we live in a near-constant state of alarm, we are not able to access our inner body-based resources to return to center.

In this 5 week interactive online class, we will practice skills in self-regulation, strengthening our capacity to respond in healthy and choiceful ways:

• Build self-awareness and body awareness
• Develop fuller breath
• Release tension
• Quiet your own nervous system
• Calm your mind

In these small classes, we increase connection with ourselves and others as we navigate these times—experiencing community care as part of self-care.

Embody Wholeness with the Alexander Technique—5 week Problem Solving Class

In this online class, we will practice the classic Alexander principles for effortless posture, fuller breath, efficient movement, calmer mind and enhanced awareness.

And in each class I will address a problem that participants bring. For example:  

“My neck hurts when I’m on the computer.” “My TMJ is acting up” “I can’t stop my mind from racing.” “My posture is terrible.”

The problems that come up are relevant to all, even if you currently aren’t experiencing TMJ, or anxiety or back pain.  

As we explore what not to do, what tension or patterns we can un-do, we find where we can stop reacting and start responding in the present moment with choice.

In these small classes, we increase connection with ourselves and others as we navigate these times—experiencing community care as part of self-care.

Embody Wholeness—Enhance Breath Capacity

This online interactive 5-week class will help you enhance your breathing, expand lung capacity and practice a moment-to-moment ability to return to center in this time of uncertainty and change.

Anyone can learn these somatic tools—

• How to catch yourself when you’ve disconnected from your wholeness and bring yourself back to presence.
• Full capacity breathing, as you are designed to do, with minimal effort and maximum efficiency. When the breathing mechanisms function optimally, the fully oxygenated system increases alertness and health.
• Breathing practice as something that can be incorporated into daily life, not as an extra thing to do.
• Self-sustainability and Resilience

Survival Skills for Sheltering in Place—Presence, Pleasure and Play

This online 4-week class will help you practice the moment-to-moment ability to return to center in this time of enormous challenge.

The ability to self-regulate and re-orient your nervous system to pleasurable calm and playful liveliness will help you move through this most un-ordinary time.

In this time of disruption, resilience skills are not a luxury!

This class teaches practical embodiment skills and resources from the Alexander Technique and other somatic modalities.

• Calming your own nervous system
• Connection with self, others and nature
• Creativity meeting the current challenges

With increased presence, you’ll experience yourself as more centered, connected and creative.

With presence, your moment-to-moment choices are more aligned with your inner self, and you are less reactive to outside pressure and what others think. As your capacity for presence increases, your capacity for pleasure widens to include simple and daily delights. Your capacity for play opens up enjoyment and creativity.

It may seem weird to discuss the role of pleasure and play in general, especially while we’re in transition from “lockdown.” However, every day more research confirms the importance of play and pleasure for a healthy and resilient nervous system.

Connecting to presence, pleasure and play leads to a more lively, robust, spacious, rejuvenated, vigorous, blooming, restorative, joyful wholeness.

• How will your relationships be better when you feel more pleasure?
• How will your work be better when you feel a dynamic centeredness?
• How much better will your body feel with more playfulness?

Centering and Resilience—

Self-Sustainability for Activists

This 4-week mind/body class (January 12th-February 4th, 2020) is for any activist who wants to be able to shore up presence and resilience. The cultural norm of burn-out and illness is not necessary, and certainly does not model what we want in the world!  Many of us hold onto and embody the stress of these turbulent times and with all the demands for attention we feel like we’re running on fumes.

For the sake of the common good, activists Can work in a sustainable way. Somatic tools and practices for centering will be learned to access inner resources for self-sustenance, well-being and action in the world. Experiential exercises will include sensory awareness, breathwork for emotional self-regulation and embodied strength in posture, movement and voice.

We will explore individually and as a group the following questions:

• How has being an activist impacted your body?
• How does “being different” create hyper-sensitivity and hyper-vigilence?
• What do overwork and depletion do to your mind/body being?
• What self-sustaining practices can work for you?
• How can holding space for change be a source of strength?

You will explore how some habits and patterns have become stuck in your body and what options you have to change. You will learn mind/body skills that will facilitate feeling centered and finding balance within yourself, during times of rest and rejuvenation, and during action and in times of challenge. You will take away practices to sustain yourself, being present to the big picture of loss of democracy and climate collapse and being present to your daily life with it’s logistics and responsibilities.

Less Effort, More Ease—

A one-hour Introduction to the Alexander Technique

Feel lighter, stand taller, walk easier.

Explore new ways to ease up on your body and increase your effectiveness. Constance teaches principles and practices from this 100-year-old mind-body method. Group exercises explore posture, movement and breath from the inside-out. Hands-on guidance helps you release excess tension, decompress your spine and tune into a dynamic balance of the whole self.

Great for clubs and groups!

Avoid Text Neck by Learning the Poise of the Alexander Technique

Experience less tension, strain and effort. More awareness, balance and ease.

• Do you want to improve your posture, avoid text neck, back pain and RSI?

• Do you slouch over your electronics and then try to sit up straight, then find yourself slouching again?

• With the Alexander Technique you can learn how to use digital devices in a way that cares for your body, reduces tension and helps you find balance in all your activities.

  Enjoyable class that includes group exercises, demonstrations and gentle hands-on guidance.

Great for clubs and groups!

Centered Dog Walking:

Don’t let yourself be pulled off your center!

Don’t let your dog trip you! Don’t let your arm be pulled out of your socket! 

Come learn how to stay centered and grounded while teaching your dog to walk politely on leash.

Actors, Musicians, Singers, Athletes!

Effective Practice, Embodied Performance—

Alexander Technique Workshop for Performers and Athletes

No matter what you practice, it is the HOW of your practice that determines the quality of your performance.

So often, as artists or athletes, we unconsciously create habits of over-work and too much tension, which interfere with the quality of our performance — and in extreme cases, the ability to perform at all.

The specific Alexander principles of head/neck/back coordination determine the organization of the rest of the body. Stripping away unconscious over-effort leads to a deeper awareness and ability to find balance, support, and efficiency—and ultimately prevent injury.

This class includes movement, breath and body explorations. Bring an instrument, piece or movement to explore. Everyone will receive individual hands-on guidance, group feedback and practices to help you work on your own.

When Your Body Needs Help!

Alexander Technique Workshop For Dancers 

Whether you have injuries or just an over-worked, stressed body, come for a practical exploration in how the Alexander Technique principles can be applied to working with your self in your daily life, in your daily technique class and in performance.

As dancers, sometimes we think that the harder we work, the more we will achieve. Alexander Technique teaches that how we work becomes just as important as the level of physicality at which we work.

Bad habits can accumulate over years, from using our bodies poorly in daily life as well as injuries. Unless we are mindful of how we use our bodies in regular life, bad habits can seep into dance class.

Head moving up off the top of the spine, while the torso lengthens and widens, legs and arms moving away from the torso, these are classical ballet ideals, and also principles that Alexander work clarifies in a practical way.

Join Constance for practical brain/body experiments in the most efficient way to gain a flexible, lengthening spine in daily life, in technique class and in performance. 

Everyone will receive individual hands-on guidance, group feedback and practices to help you work on your own.

Work smarter, not harder—for more expression and less tension.

Centering and Resilience: A Workshop for Queer People—

How has homophobia and/or transphobia impacted your body?

• What does shame and humiliation do to the body?
• How does being victimized live in the tissues?
• How often have you experienced the fight or flight response, when the only option was freeze?
• How does the knowledge of “being different” create hyper-sensitivity and hyper-vigilence?
• What does internalized homophobia/transphobia do to your body?

Come explore this question with other queer people in an introduction to how mind/body (somatic) work can be a resource for being fully present to your whole self.

Constance will introduce you to skills that build resilience and resources for grounding and presence in the body.

Building embodied awareness will deepen your ability to return to your own felt sense and your own authenticity even in times of challenge.

Sitting for Meditators—Easy & Upright

with the balanced poise of the Alexander Technique

• • A rich exploration of how bodily habits influence your meditation practice and your daily life.

• • Hands-on work while you sit on the cushion (or chair) that will help you kinesthetically find more ease, mobility, breath and grounding.

• • Feel more in tune with softer, lighter sensations in your body.

• Cultivate a balance of easeful support that invites gentle aliveness to show up. With a more relaxed posture your mind can become less agitated and quiet down.

Aging and Posture

You don’t have to compress and shrink as you age.

You can learn to de-compress your spine, release tension and move easier.

The Alexander Technique has been helping actors and singers for over a century to stand tall, breath fully, and move efficiently.

In this enjoyable class, Constance will guide you with this hands-on method to explore your potential in postural health.

Great for clubs and groups!

Since the Alexander Technique is fundamental to being and movement, it can be helpful to a wide variety of human endeavors. Below are some more specific classes Constance has taught:

Effortlessly Upright: No slouching, no forcing

Walking with Spring: Light and easy

Exercise: Using the “just right” amount of effort

Your Harmonious Design: For musicians

Back Pain: Decompressing the spine

RSI: New patterns for repetitive movements

Integrated Ease: Yoga students

Embody Wholeness and Presence: For teachers and therapists