To move gracefully, start thinking of yourself as graceful

Do you think about how you move, or is it simply something that happens? Do you think about how you move through your day? Try right now. How do you think about yourself? How do you move? What’s the quality of your movement? What’s the intent behind your movement?

The intentions and qualities driving your movement exist whether or not you’re aware of them. They affect how you move and how you feel in your body. Very often, these intentions create pain and discomfort. Wonderfully, this means that if you change your intention and quality, you’ll change your experience. 

Begin by choosing how you think about yourself. Here are some words I tend to use when teaching the Alexander Technique to my students: graceful, beautiful, energetic, available, fluid, powerful. These are qualities I admire. I’ve found when a person inhabits these qualities, when those qualities are in their body, they move in a way that feels wonderful, more free, easy and powerful. 

You might be thinking, “But I don’t feel graceful. I don’t feel fluid. I don’t feel powerful.” 

You can’t wait to feel graceful all the while telling yourself you’re a klutz. It’ll be a miracle if you ever feel graceful that way.

Recently when working with a student on her walking I asked her to think of herself moving gracefully before she started walking. She turned right around and explained to me why she was not a graceful person. She said she didn’t feel graceful, that she was clumsy and tended to run into things and often tripped, essentially trying to prove to me (or to herself) why she couldn’t eventhinkof herself as graceful. 

But, here’s the thing! Being a graceful person doesn’t mean any of those things won’t happen. You can be graceful and still run into a wall. You can be a graceful person and trip. You can be a graceful person and have pain in your back. None of these things mean you can’t think of yourself as a graceful person. And the way you think you are influences who you are and specifically influences how you move.

Many of my students want to work on their balance. But when I ask a student to stand on one foot they invariably and suddenly get very tense, pull one foot off the ground and hold it up for dear life, literally as if their life depended keeping that foot in the air. God forbid that foot touch the ground again. And if it does touch the ground they’ll immediately whip it back into the air with more tension. All that tension makes balancing harder and typically makes a person more likely to fall, not less.

You’ll get a different result altogether if you instead start with what you’re thinking. 

If you try to balance and get very tense, you might be thinking that balancing is very important to master. You might be convinced that since you can only lift your foot for 2 seconds that must mean you have trouble balancing. And if you have trouble balancing you must try very hard, you have to get tense. 

No. Put that aside.

Start to think of yourself as graceful. Tell yourself to be graceful before you balance. If you let that direction into your psyche in an honest way your foot might again come off the ground for only two seconds but the way you move and the way you experience balancing will change. You’ll experience much more ease in the way you do it. You’ll experience more freedom and enjoyment. You’ll experience more fluidity and yes, grace. Being graceful when you balance doesn’t mean you can automatically balance for 5 minutes. Grace is a quality in how you balance. 

I encourage you to try this out today. Before the next time you stand up or before the next time you begin walking, think of yourself as a graceful or a powerful person. Think of yourself as a graceful or powerful mover. You are a mover. Watch what happens when you give yourself conscious guidance. 

Think about your movement. Think about the way you move through the day. What kind of quality would you like? Don’t worry about what you think is possible; that’s a trap that’ll keep you doing what you already do. Make it a quality, rather than a goal. A goal says, “I will balance for 5 minutes.” That’s not a quality. “5 minutes” says nothing about what your movement is like or how you’re using your body. Try out a quality. “I move gracefully. I move beautifully. I move fluidly. I move powerfully.” Those are all examples of qualities. Give yourself a clear statement of quality. Tell that to yourself, hear it and watch how it changes you as you move through your day.

You might have to remind yourself of this quality numerous times for it to have a powerful effect. It will happen. 

You don’t want to wait to feel like you’re graceful or beautiful or powerful all the while telling yourself that you’re not. That route will take a very long time, if it ever happens. Flip the order. Start with thinking that you move beautifully. That will influence how you actuallymove, which influences how you feel. You’ll soon get into a new positive cycle: thinking you move beautifully, which changes how you move, which then changes how you feel, which then reinforces your thinking that you move beautifully. 

Remember, clumsy is a quality, not an action. Running into a wall isn’t clumsy, it’s just running into a wall. Tripping is not clumsy, it’s simply tripping. You can trip or run into a wall and still be a beautiful mover. 

By the way, I’ve used these specific examples because even though I’ve been dancing, doing bodywork and mindfulness work for about 20 years I’ll still run into a doorway or trip on apparently nothing. It doesn’t mean I’m a clumsy person. It means I occasionally run into doorways. That’s all. I still get to be a beautiful mover, and graceful, and powerful. And so do you.

Try this out for one week. Each day spend a few moments in the morning specifically deciding how you move. Then at the end of the week check in with how you feel. Notice, acknowledge and celebrate what’s changed, even if it seems small. Small changes are more likely to stick and build into something spectacular. 

This is the beginning of changing the way you move and empowering yourself through your day and through your life. That is why I teach the Alexander Technique and why I love it. Through it you can build sophisticated and powerful tools of self-empowerment. You can positively influence the way you move in each moment and useyourbody to its fullest potential. 

If you need some extra help, let me know.