Sensory Untrustworthiness

“The reader who reviews the experiences that I have tried to set down…will notice that at a certain point in my investigation I came to realize that my reaction to a particular stimulus was constantly the opposite of that which I desired, and that in my search for the cause of this, I discovered that my sensory appreciation {feeling} of the use of my mechanisms was so untrustworthy that it led me to react by means of a use of myself which felt right, but was, in fact, too often wrong for my purpose.”

“I draw attention to this point, because over the long period of years in which I have been engaged in teaching pupils to improve and control the manner of their use of themselves, I have found that untrustworthiness of sensory appreciation is present in varying degrees in all of them, exerting, as in my own case, a harmful influence upon their use and functioning, and consequently upon their manner of reacting to stimuli. The whole experience, indeed, convinces me that the prevalence of sensory untrustworthiness is of the utmost significance in relation to the problem of the control of human reaction.”

F.M. Alexander
The Use of the Self

When you Notice, sensory untrustworthiness stops being a problem because you stop making choices based on whether or not something feels right to you. If you Notice before moving you can evaluate the quality of that movement solely on the basis of whether or not you Noticing at that moment. If you are Noticing, moving in that way is increasing the ease and flexibility in you. If you are not Noticing you are mis-coordinating yourself.This doesn’t mean that you won’t also have a kinesthetic experience of the activity; it simply means that the you stop using the "rightness" or "wrongness" of the feeling to determine future choices.

The Small Smile Circle

When I was a kid I used to hate it whenever someone seeing a sour expression on my face said: "You know, it takes 50 muscles to frown but only 17 to smile." Back then, I would frown even harder and explain that I was frowning because I needed the exercise.

The fact is that smiling is easier to do than frowning and does release tension. And it doesn't even have to be a "real" smile. Try this little experiment:
1. Notice
2. Think of something funny or else make your face smile mechanically
3. Notice again and let the smile rise like heat to your eyes
4. Notice again and let the smile seep like water down to your heart area
5. Go back to 1

Do a couple of rounds of the circle and see what happens. Do it slowly at first so that each time you Notice you do it simply and clearly. Have fun.

A Flash of Patience

In order to fully take advantage of what Alexander discovered, we have to find a balance between "doing" and "non-doing". We have to differentiate between the things we have to do and those things which we have to allow to happen. If we try to do the things that should be allowed to happen we are too pushy whereas if we wait around for a thing to happen when it needs to be done we are too passive.

Noticing is a way to sort these things out. When we begin with it, its disappearance alerts us to when we're being too pushy. During an activity, its continued presence tells us that our manner of use is not interfering with our freedom and flexibility and we are operating efficiently. Noticing makes it possible to instantly access more of our available resources. All it requires of us is a flash of patience.

"We must be patient, we must wait; but wait correctly, through the creative process of Non-Action. We make ourselves accessible to the flow of chi in our bodies and the current of the Tao in our lives. The method is to eliminate blockages. There is nothing which we have to do; that to which we aspire is already there. We must disolve the blockages and let it emerge."

Cheng Man-ch'ing
There Are No Secrets

"Am I Noticing Right Now?"

After you've had the chance to work with Noticing for a while an interesting thing begins to happen, Noticing becomes almost effortless. All it takes to begin Noticing is the simple question: "Am I Noticing right now?"

The question itself is both transformative and transparent. It transforms you much like the question "Am I thinking of yellow?" transforms you. If you are asking that question then you are thinking of yellow. The same is true when you ask yourself if you are currently Noticing. Just asking initiates a process which stimulates your postural reflexes and releases excess tension.

The question "Am I Noticing right now?" is also transparent in the sense that you can observe any activity by looking through it. Noticing does not require very much attention. You don't have to focus on it in order for it to work. Once you start by doing it, it can become like peripheral vision. It's like looking through a picture frame. Looking at an object through a frame it is possible to be aware of the soft outline of the frame while still being able to see clearly the activity you are engaged in.

As long as you continue to see the frame's faint outline, you know that you are continuing to Notice and therefore are continuing to faciliate the balance of stillness and movement that charcterizes coordinated action. If that frame disappears you know that you have interfered with your body's natural ability to adapt to the changing conditions of movement and you are less coordinated.

The true value of Noticing is not only that it improves the quality of the way you are moving but also that it requires so little of your attention that you can do it while you do whatever else you like. It can exist way in the background but still give you accuratee feedback as to how you are doing.

No Hurry

"Do things slowly and reverently as if it is the axis on which the whole earth revolves, slowly, evenly without rushing toward the future."

Thich Nhat Hanh

Inconsistency and Renewal

The best way to break through the seeming solidity of your habits is to be inconsistent. Habitual movement is an attempt to be consistent by connecting past movement experiences with present ones. Habits of movement are generalizations; a form of stereotyping. We try to recreate an old response to one situation and apply it to the situation we are facing now. The problem is that the breath you are taking right now is not the same breath you took yesterday or even a second ago. Each one is as unique as a snowflake. Still, for some reason, some part of us treats them as if they were the same instead of letting each moment have its own identity. Noticing is a way to break out of this kind of stereotyped response to things. Each act of Noticing is like taking a photograph with a flashbulb. At the instant of the flash, you are allowing your mind and body to spontaneously respond to the particular demands of the activity at that moment. When you next Notice the same thing happens and if you keep taking one flash photo after another, you can slice through the solidity of your habits, enjoy the surprise of spontaneity and move through life with a natural sense of ease that is constantly being renewed.

Self-Science

In order to take advantage of what Alexander discovered you have to take a scientfic attitude. If a scientist is told that a particular formula yields a certain result he may inquire into the steps that his fellow scientist has taken. At this point his knowledge is second-hand, so he repeats the experiment, following the process, to see if he obtains the same result. Once he has lived the perspective presented by the other scientist, what was once a hypothesis becomes first-hand knowledge.

Alexander succeeded in observing his subjective experience so keenly that eventually his subjective impressions became objective. When he said: "You can't know a thing by an instrument that is wrong.", the "thing" he was refering to was his Self and the "instrument" that was wrong was his sense of feeling.

By becoming more and more intimate with the mechanics of his own interference, Alexander was able perceive himself non-selectively; he was able to see-through his pre-conceptions and arrive at a clear understanding of how the quality of his observation determined the quality of his movement. If we are to benefit from his research we too have to engage in our own rigorous process of self-observation. We too have to become self-scientists.

Four Horses

"It is said that there are four kinds of horses: excellent ones, good ones, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver's will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth one will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is for the fourth one to learn how to run!"

Shunru Suzuki

One of the main reasons you Notice is to find out when you are not Noticing. It's the shadow of the whip.

Three-Sided Circle

There are three steps to the process of making a change in ourselves. The first, and probably the most difficult, is realizing that we actually need to change. The second step is doing something different to bring about that change and the third is remembering that we need to keep doing the first two.

One of my favorite Alexander quotes is: "The things that don't exist are the most difficult to get rid of." Until he lost his voice, Alexander had no idea that he was interefering with the freedom and flexibilty of his entire psycho-physical mechanism. The severity of the problem and the way it kept him from doing what he loved to do was what motiviated Alexander to figure out how to do something different in order to solve the problem.

But even after he discovered that different thing; the "means whereby" he could change his habitual use, Alexander had to "stick to principle" and continue inhibiting and directing on the conscious level in order to prevent himself from collapsing back into his old unconsciously directed habits.

By monitoring{Noticing} whether or not we are continuing to do the something different step, we are, in effect, returning to the first step; because if we find that at the "Noticing moment" we are continuing to "do something different" i.e., employing our new use, then we are doing fine. If, on the other hand, we discover that we have stopped doing that "something different" and returned to our old habitual use, that discovery in itself brings us back to the first step: we see we need to make a change and can do so if we choose. In this way the three steps have come full circle.

Is Noticing An Action?

Q:
Is Noticing an action? Does it require effort? Can you think about Noticing and not do it or does the problem always stem from doing too much?

A:
Noticing is an action that does require some effort but not that much because it is just thinking. Marjorie Barstow coined the phrase "constructive thinking" to describe the help you give yourself when you apply Alexander's discoveries. It is very possible to think about Noticing without actually doing it. Whenever you think things like "I should be Noticing more often" or "When I Noticed yesterday I felt great." you are thinking ABOUT Noticing. This is Noticing as a concept or an abstraction and it's different from Noticing as an action, the act of Noticing, which is a simple act of attention. It's similar to certain kinds of meditation. How much physical effort does it take to be aware of your breath? Not much. But the restlessness of your mind keeps taking you down other paths that lead away from attending to the simply fact of your breathing {or a mantra or a visualization etc.} Noticing, like meditating, is a thinking simplifier but one that works best in the thick of daily activity.

Most people do tend to work a little too hard sometimes. I think this is because we're so often looking for results. We Notice for the purpose of improving , which in itself is not a bad thing but a problem arises when we have a pre-conceived idea of what that improvement should feel like and then we create that feeling to confirm to ourselves that we are getting better. Unfortunately, the feeling created is just a mirage and one that's generated by the same habits of perception and movement that caused the problem in the first place so it's a case of the blind leading the blind.

The way out is to change the way you monitor your progress. Instead of asking yourself "do I feel like I'm improving?", ask yourself: "Am I Noticing right now?" If you do that over a period of time you will begin to realize that knowing you are Noticing is synonymous with knowing you are improving. You'll be developing a "sense" of how you're doing that is much more refined and immediate than a feeling. Kinesthetic feelings are not bad. They are an essential part of the way we experience things. It's only when we push them up to the front and try to use them as guides that they get in the way.

Non-Doing

“The right art,” cried the Master, “is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in one and the further the other will recede. What stands in the way is that you have too much willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.”

Eugen Herrigel
Zen in the Art of Archery

Not What But How

“If there is no joy, ease or lightness in what you are doing it does not necessarily mean you have to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. How is always more important than what. See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.”

Eckhart Tolle
The Power of Now

Inhibition, Non-Doing and Noticing

Inhibition, which is normally thought of as a negative term, was used by Alexander to describe a positive process. In the preface to the second edition of The Use of the Self Alexander wrote: "My record shows that the further I progressed in my search for a way to free myself from the slavery to habitual reaction in "doing," {which I had created for myself by trusting to the guidance of my unreliable sense of feeling}, the more clearly I was forced to see that my only chance of freeing myself was, as a primary step, to refuse to give consent to my ordinary "doing" in carrying out any procedure."

Refusing to give consent to his ordinary "doing" or inhibition was the initial step that Alexander took to free himself from his habitual manner of use. He also called that step "non-doing". "Non-doing" although the opposite of "doing", was not passive in any way. It was his actively refusing to jump straight into his old way of doing things. It was his refusal to be guided by his feelings which, through experimentation, had proven to be unreliable.

When I use the word Noticing, I am describing that same inhibitory first step. By Noticing before carrying out a procedure, you are refusing to jump into your habit. Noticing also stimulates the postural reflexes that allow muscular tonus to be distributed more equitably thoughout your body leading to increased ease of movement and a sense of lightness.

In additon, Noticing allows you to shift away from using your sense of feeling as your guide. Instead of evaluating how you're doing by how it feels, you can monitor yourself by attending to whether or not you are currently Noticing. This allows ease to be the preparation for your next movement rather than your habitual excess tension.

Notes of Instruction

The Resurrection of the Body was the first book on the Alexander Technique I ever read. Collected and introduced by Edward Maisel, TROTB was an collection of Alexander's writings that also included prefaces to his books written by John Dewey and George E. Coghill and a scientific paper by Frank Pierce Jones. My favorite part of the book, however, was the little 10 page chapter entitled: Notes of Instruction; a collection of things that Alexander said to a variety of students during actual teaching sessions.


Control should be in process, not superimposed.

Change involves carrying out an activity against the habit of life

When you are asked not to do something, instead of the decision not to do it, you try to prevent yourself from doing it. But this only means that you decide to do it, and then use muscle tension to prevent yourself from doing it.

The things that don't exist are the most difficult to get rid of.

You can't do something you don't know, if you keep doing what you do know.

Everyone is always teaching one what to do, leaving us still doing the things we shouldn't do.

We can throw away the habit of a lifetime in a few minutes if we use our brains.

You can't know a thing by an instrument that's wrong.

You all believe that you must know whether you are right or wrong if you are to make progress.

When people are wrong, the thing that is right is bound to be wrong to them.

Everyone wants to be right, no one stops to consider if their idea of right is right.

When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won't want to use it.

The Moment of Truth

In every activity there are moments that are more difficult to pull off than others. For a violinist it might be a sudden flurry of notes; a golfer might have trouble bringing the club back evenly; in standing up, someone might be particularly challenged by the transfer of weight as they straighten their legs. Most activities have at least one “moment of truth”; a moment that demands a more resourceful use of ourselves. Noticing right before and right after such a moment gives us greater access to those resources. Here’s how it goes:

1.
Choose a movement that reverses directions and is cyclical. Raising your arms to shoulder height and then lowering them is a good one to start with.

2.
Begin with your arms at your side and then use Notice-Move-Notice to get the movement started.

3.
Just before your arms reach the top, Notice again and then Notice immediately after they change direction and are on their way down.

4.
Just before your arms reach the bottom, Notice again and then Notice immediately after they change direction and are on their way up.

5.
Up and down is one round. Do 16 rounds.

In this case the “moment of truth” is the change of direction from up to down. It’s the most dramatic change so it requires the most freedom and flexibility. By Noticing before the change your coordination is optimized. Noticing right after keeps you from “glomming” on how different it feels. M.O.T. can be applied to any activity with a problem spot or two. Down the line we will explore ways of determining where, in an activity, the moments of truth are.

Sticking with Uncertainty

“Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don’t interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with a desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us disappears. We can bring ourselves back to the path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment----over and over again”

Pema Chodron

Inhibition and Noticing

Inhibition is perhaps the keystone of the Alexander Technique. Despite the negative connotation the word came to have due to Freudian psychology, Alexander never stopped using it because no other term expressed more precisely what he wanted to say. To Alexander, inhibition was the act of delaying the instantaneous response to a stimulus until a response could be made that didn't impinge upon functional balance of the organism as a whole. Inhibition is the flip-side of excitation, but Alexander felt that inhibition was even more important in that it came first. To refrain from an act is no less an act that to commit one and inhibition is the act that sets the stage for all the amazing changes that follow.

In my teaching although I use the term Noticing what I am really talking about is inhibition. Like inhibition the first thing that Noticing gets you to do is stop. It is impossible to change the way you do things if you keep doing them the old way. So, by Noticing before you jump into your old way of doing things, you create the possibility for something new to happen.

The second thing that Noticing does is it switches you out of "feeling" mode into an open-ended state of awareness. Easily paying attention to the openess above your head prevents you from checking your body kinesthetically to make sure it feels ready to move. This is the first thing you do before moving according to your old habits. Before we move habitually, we project on to our body our impression of what we think it should feel like in order to successfully accomplish that movement. Generally, that feeling gets projected so unconsciously, so fast and so often that we believe that is part and parcel of the movement itself and subsequently we can't imagine accomplishing that movement without first having that feeling.

The simple beauty of Noticing is that it disrupts all of that in a flash. By shifting our attention to the openess above our head, which can't be felt, we switch out of feeling mode. This frees us from the assumption/validation cycle that traps us in our habitual way of doing things. As long as we continue to renew our Noticing, our organism can respond according to the needs of the activity and we move more harmoniously.

Letting Go of Tension {Surrendering to Resistence}

"It is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that is the main determinant of what kind of future you will experience. So to surrender is the most important thing you can do to bring about positive change. Any action you take is secondary. No truly positive action can arise out of an unsurrendered state of consciousness...Start by acknowledging that there is resistance. Be there when it happens, when the resistance arises. Observe how your mind creates it. By witnessing the resistance, you will see that it serves no purpose."

Eckhart Tolle
The Power of Now

Noticing is a change in consciousness. You step back from your usual way of trying to understand what's going on and instead choose witnessing over trying to fix things. As you become better acquainted with how your habitual patterns of excess tension and overdoing come into being, you begin to understand how to prevent them from occurring by simply making the decision, moment by moment, to be aware of the possibility of freedom and ease and let go of trying to control.

Will and Willingness

In beautiful movement a balance is always struck between doing and non-doing, acting and allowing;between thinking and permitting your intrinsic intelligence to have its say. For this to come about we have to enjoy not knowing and be able to quietly observe the unfolding of our actions. It is a delicate dance that begins with your willingness to first pay gentle attention to the present and then let fly.

"One does not consciously have to plan how to act; instead one lets the appropriate responses happen of themselves. This is one of the great inner secrets of sports. There is a certain point of unity within the self that the conscious mind and will cannot direct. Command by instinct is swifter, subtler, deeper, more accurate, more in touch with reality than command by conscious mind."

Michael Murphy
In the Zone

"When once you are free from all seeming, from all craving and lusting, then will you move of your own impulse, without so much as knowing that you move."

Lao Tsu
Tao Te Ching

Habits and Noticing

Noticing is a way catch yourself hardening into habits. We use habits to make ourselves solid and fixed in order to brace ourselves against the uncertainty we encounter in our daily activities. Unfortunately {or fortunately} life is fluid. If we approach life by stiffening up and shutting down we don't experience how fully able we are to adapt to its changes. Use Noticing to counteract that shutting down. As you go through the day observe how you greet each new situation. If you can enagage in something new and are able to Notice at the same time, then that present activity has increased your general ability to adapt to future activities. You open and soften in the face of uncertainty instead of getting harder and more resistent. That way, habits don't need to be broken, they just need to be neatly folded and put away.

Touching the Water

"When you see only waves you might miss the water, but if you are mindful you will be able to touch the water within the waves as well. Once you are capable of touching the water, you will not mind the coming and going of the waves. You are no longer upset about the beginning or the end of the wave or that the wave is higher or lower, more or less beautiful. You are capable of letting these ideas go because you have already touched the water."

Thich Nhat Hanh

Stop Making Sense

We always seem to be trying to make sense out of reality. In truth, what we do is make reality out of our senses. Looking at a suitcase, if you assume that it is heavy and you go to pick it up, your assumption will dictate the amount of force you apply to lift it. If it turns out to be empty it will fly up in your hand; our assumption having directed your body to prepare for something heavy. It's a self-fufilling prophesy: we anticipate that the suitcase will be heavy and then we create the feeling in our body that corresponds to the effort required to lift that heaviness.

This is delusive thinking. We deluded ourselves into thinking that the suitcase was heavy and then we acted as if that was true. At the center of all this is our kinesthetic sense. We project a kinesthetic image of how a heavy suitcase will feel and then we counter that heaviness by creating a sensation in our body that corresponds to our idea of what strength feels like. It is only when the suitcase flies up into the air that we realize that we have misjudged the situation.

All habits of movement are based upon assumptions and therefore are, to a greater or lesser extent, misjudgments. No matter how many times you have done an activity, each time will be different. You may have taken thousands of steps but the next step you take will be unique and will require a different use of yourself. The miracle of our psycho-physical mechanism is that it is fully capable of adapting to the changing demands of the activities we are engaged in if we can just get out of our own way. What gets in the way is our habitual assumptions about what needs to happen at a particular moment. These assumptions manifest as sensations. These assumptions are illusions about the requirements of the task and our ability to respond to those requirements. The agent of this deception is our sense of feeling.

No matter how finely tuned your kinesthetic appreciation is, it suffers from three major inadequacies: It is never absolute, it is not objective and it is always a picture of the past. When you touch something hot, your senses don't give you an absolute reading of the temperature but rather a comparitive one. Hot actually means hotter. It's a reference to another event in the recent or distant past or to an imagined future. Your senses are not objective because we tend to divide sensation into pleasure and pain, good and bad, familiar and unfamiliar etc. and then seek out the pleasurable, the good and the familiar avoiding their opposites. This avoidance is particularly dangerous with regard to the unfamiliar.

Perhaps the limitation of sense perception that is most difficult to grasp is its lack of timeliness. Despite the fact that you feel something now, what you are feeling is actually something that has already happened. Although the gap between an event and your feeling it is small, the information you get from your senses, no matter how accurate, can't affect that event because it has already happened. This becomes apparent with regard to movement. Feeling the movement is the last thing that happens. First we have to have the intention to move, then we actually move and finally our kinesthetic sense tells us that we have moved.

Alexander said this about feeling: "When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won't want to use it." There is a form of guidance that is much more trustworthy than feeling. A "means whereby" you can prevent your habits before they actually happen rather than trying to fix them after they have occured. Alexander called it inhibition. Marjorie Barstow called it "constructive thinking" or "just a little bit of nothing" I call it Noticing and it is real easy to do, but first you have to be willing to stop making sense.

Doing Something Different

"Every time you are willing to acknowledge your thoughts and come back to the freshness of the present moment, you are sowing the seeds of wakefulness for your own future. You are cultivating innate fundamental wakefulness by aspiring to let go of the habitual way and do something different."

Pema Chodron

"You can do what I do if you'll do what I did." F.M. Alexander

I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the process by which Alexander made the discoveries that people have been experimenting with for over 100 years. In a certain way we all have to go through some version of this process as we learn from his work. Below is an abbreviated account of how Alexander discovered his technique of conscious control.

1. Alexander embarks on a career as a reciter of Shakespeare and other writers.
   
   
2. Early on he has trouble with his throat and vocal cords.
   
   
3. On one occasion he becomes so hoarse he can barely speak.
   
   
4. The rest and medication his doctors prescribed only work when he is not performing. Once back on stage his voice problems return.
   
   
5. Reasons that it must be something he is doing while performing that is causing the problem.
   
   
6. No one could tell him what it was. Decides to find out for himself.
   
   
7. Observes himself in a mirror speaking normally and reciting.
   
   
8. At first he notices nothing in ordinary speaking.
   
   
9. In reciting he notices that he was depressing his larynx, audibly sucking in breath, lifting his chest and hollowing his back, and pulling his head back and down.
   
   
10. Realizes these things also happened in ordinary speaking, but to a lesser degree.
    
    
11. Tries unsuccessfully to deal with each symptom individually.
    
    
12. Realizes they are interrelated parts of a single response pattern.
    
    
13. Determines pulling head back and down was the principal part.
    
    
14. Adds two mirrors in order to see himself in profile.
    
    
15. Observes there is an increase in tension everywhere when reciting.
    
    
16. Devises a set of directions{orders} to be done sequentially and simultaneously.They are: Allow the neck to be free. Head to go forward and up. Back to lengthen and widen.
    
    
17. Practiced giving directions for months without trying to “do” them.
    
    
18. Tried applying new directions while reciting, but reverted to old habits.
    
    
19. Realized that he could not use his senses to guide him because the information they provided was unreliable.
    
    
20. Decided he needed to continue directing consciously while reciting to avoid being directed by his "faulty sensory appreciation".
    
    
21. After working this way for a number of years the overall use of his body improved and he was able to recite without trouble.

Nicholas Tinbergen, in accepting the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973, said this about Alexander's process: "This story of perceptiveness, of intelligence, and of persistence, shown by a man without medical training, is one of the true epics of medical research and practice."

Inhibition and Consciousness

"We discover consciousness by inhibiting unconscious behavior. It arises in the gap. It is something that is there waiting, not something we create. And the nature of consciousness becomes very clear. Consciousness is certainly not something that you do."

Marjory Barlow
An Examined Life

Exposing Hidden Faults

It can be more useful to think of the Alexander Technique as an approach that exposes our hidden faults than to think of it as a method we can use to "get better". Moving with ease is how our organism was designed to function. However, over the years we have "customized" our bodies with excess tension that has become so familiar to us that it now seems completely a natural and inevitable part of everything we do. This tension feels so normal to that it is virtually invisible to us until we begin to experience pain or we are hampered during a challenging activity. Noticing exposes these hidden tensions by making clear to us when we are choosing our tension ridden habits over ease. We are always capable of moving with efficiency and grace. All we have to do is to become aware of when we are interfering with our intrinsic gift for adapting to change and then make a different choice.

Raising Your Allowance

If it feels like you're in control...Let Go
If it feels like it's taking too much time...Go Slower
Let your legs be down there
Let your hands seem far away
Let your legs be down there
Let your hands seem far away
If it feels like you know how it should feel..get numb
If it feels like you know what you're doing...get dumb
Let your legs be down there
Let your hands seem far away
Let your legs be down there
Let your hands seem far away

Stalking the Wild Habit

By Noticing you can set a "trap" for a bad habit. If you know that you have a habit of using excess effort in an activity, Noticing before engaging in that activity is like setting up a trip-wire that will trigger a flash of awareness the instant the habit enters the scene. We only accept our habits because they disguise themselves as the most useful response to the desire to get something done. Therefore, when they are exposed as the interference that actually prevents natural and easy movement, we are much more likely to simply let them go.

Noticing is a way to relax or rest your mind

Noticing is a way to relax or rest your mind. It's a way to simplify your thinking without limiting or narrowing your focus. It's like making the decision observe a spinning wheel by watching it's hub rather than trying to count the spokes. This change in your mental activity allows a deep and fundamental intelligence to come forward and participate more fully in your decision-making. This creates a more balanced and appropriate response to the changes at hand and it induces a sense of ease and confidence.