my ever-evolving journey of self-healing
through yoga and alexander technique

I identify as a queer femme lesbian cisgender woman. I currently use both she and they pronouns, as I am exploring both my femme identity and my identity beyond binary. I share this because identity is important in embodiment work. My experiences as someone who has lived in a female-presenting body since I was born are what brought me to this work, to reclaim the sacred territory of my own body. As a woman, there are many ways in which my ownership of my body had been taken away from me throughout my life, that I wasn’t even fully conscious of. I am an assault survivor, and I have consciously and unconsciously been influenced in many ways by the media and capitalism’s claim on women’s bodies. As a performer, I have found both incredible ownership over my body as a tool for performance and honest communication, but I have also been objectified, and felt voiceless and powerless to stories and narratives that did not reflect my values or my human experience. I have worked on that, and now I have a very different relationship and different boundaries around my work and what roles and stories I want to take on. I needed a process to reclaim my ownership, that I could use every day and carry with me for the rest of my life. Alexander Technique provided that everyday mindfulness practice that allowed me to restore my ownership and my empowered claim to my own body and voice in this world.

I began studying Alexander Technique because of my interest in embodiment, after being a yoga teacher for a number of years. But as I went through my teacher training, AT (and specifically some incredibly badass teachers I had - shout out to you Debi and Jamee!) transformed my feeling of safety inside my body and my sense of strength, certainty and empowerment in myself, my body, my intelligence and my gut instincts. I could listen to myself again in ways I had forgotten how to, or that had become unsafe for me. I re-established trust in myself, my inner voice and my ability to take care of myself, after I had some boundaries broken. I understood that the person who survived those incidents got me to be to where I am today, so I could both forgive her and thank her for surviving and bringing me this far, so my healing could continue.

How does my queerness affect my work?

My queerness makes me really aware of identity and how central our identities are in how we relate to our bodies. In that sense, my approach is very identify-sensitive, with an awareness that your body is many things: a living breathing biological organism, an animal whose primary goal is survival, a canvas for the self-expression of your identity, an outstanding super-tool that you use every day to achieve your goals, an emotional and artistic vessel through with you communicate with yourself and with others, a carrier of family and cultural history, and many more things… To borrow from Brené Brown, our experiences of our bodies are informed by our biologies, biographies, behaviours and backstories, so they will not be universal. My job is not to understand you, judge you, teach you or advise you. My job is to be present with you, listen to you, believe you, witness you, experiment and play alongside you in your self-discovery of your own tools on your own terms. 

In addition to a huge transformation in my sense of ownership and empowerment in my body, I began to notice other smaller habits that I had never been able to shake: chewing my fingernails, being late everywhere, having trouble going to bed… that I suddenly had strategies for addressing with the consciousness and mindfulness that I had previously only applied to my yoga practice and my work as a performer. My health and happiness skyrocketed when I realized my newfound ability to consciously experience and transform my habits that did not align with my core values.

For the performers:

This revolution also completely changed my work as an actor. I understood “presence” as a tangible skill and practice for the first time in my work. I understood how to create presence, increase presence and draw others into presence, by only using my consciousness and attention. I have applied the tools and principles of AT directly to my auditions to great success. This has allowed me to discover a whole new ownership, sense of self and pleasure in the audition process, which I love to share with actors in group classes and solo coachings!

I would like to recognize and thank the long lineage of AT teachers, whose insights built upon F.M. Alexander's initial work and who have generously shared their wisdom with me. They truly changed my life for the better. Thank you to Debi Adams, Jamee Culbertson, Tommy Thompson, Betsy Polatin, Galit Zeif, Belinda Mello, Bob Lada, Eliza Mallouk, Rachel Prabhakar, Aline Newton, Rachelle Palnick Tsachor, Susan Sinclair & Peter Grunwald.

I would love to share this life-changing work with you!

Holly