What is Reddit's opinion of How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique to Explore Your Mind-Body Connection and Achieve Self-Mastery?

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Would highly recommend a psycho-somatic technique that approaches “correcting” posture from both fronts. It’s called the Alexander Technique, and, while used more commonly by actors, singers, and performance artists, it offers a great toolkit for everything from how you stand to how you sit (and the transition between):

How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique to Explore Your Mind-Body Connection and Achieve Self-Mastery

The meat of the practice is visualization techniques through specific mental cues - not of the “chin up! back straight!” variety - but under the headings of “conscious inhibition” and “direction,” that are meant to not only improve posture and movement, but to break you out of conceptual ruts of how you imagine the very self that moves (much in the same way Betty Edwards’ book on drawing tries to make you “unsee” the bad symbolic representations of objects that have been conditioned in your mind).

I know this sounds like a bad, overlong “one weird trick” advert...but it really was thought-provoking info for me. The book I posted is a great introduction to the method, though they do recommend the best way to achieve mastery is through the aid of a hands-on teacher. That being said, if nothing else, the things it talks about does help to open up that ever sought after increase in creativity and lateral thinking.

Yes, I have that too.

Anecdote: Years ago I went to massage school, and we learned a quick-and-dirty assessment method for fibromyalgia. The method was just applying pressure to certain points on the body to see how many are painful, and if a certain percentage were painful it indicated possible diagnosis. Not a lot of pressure, just push your thumb into the spot. All of them hurt on me. And I was like, You mean there are people who don't hurt all over?

u/Glimmerlicht has some great suggestions. I would add two thumbs up for foam rolling as a good self-help method. A few minutes every morning makes a pretty big difference over time (even in the first few days or weeks), and it's cheap and easy and hard to hurt yourself with.

If you are into these kinds of things, Alexander Technique is also great for learning how to not tense your body. It's also got some aspects that are learnable from books. I like Missy Vineyard's book, How You Stand... and Barbara Conable's How to Learn the AT.

Lastly, learning tai chi takes a lot of commitment over time (and requires a teacher who really "has it"), but the practice has entirely changed my body and continues to do so. Among other changes, it's like I have a new neck.

Edited: Noticed after the fact that u/Glimmerlicht had mentioned foam rolling and modified my statement.

Alexander Technique. I learned a lot from Missy Vineyard's book, [How You Stand...](https://www.amazon.com/How-You-Stand-Move-Live/dp/1600940064). I noticed results right away, and the more I practiced, the more profound the results became.

I also find meditation helpful. I've done a handful of different types of meditation. The most relaxing by far, for me, was loving kindness (metta). I used this simple YouTube video/audio from Emma Seppala.

Edited for formatting.

Oh, yes! I was recommended this book on the technique some time ago. I found it pretty useful!

You could always do the <em>Two Glasses Exercise</em> and seek emotional stability...

But really, it sounds like you are constantly wrestling with your own state, gripping and churning it. As I suggested to someone else who is a bit thought-laden, you could experiment with expanding yourself so that, relatively speaking, your emotions become "smaller":

>Take moment, and imagine you are a "presence", that's what you really are, located inside your body. Now, expand yourself, that "presence", to fill your whole body - really feel yourself 3-dimensionally filling the whole space your body takes up. Then, expand your "presence" out to fill the entire room, in all directions - really feel the buzz of you being the entire space of the room.

What you're really after is not being swept away by impulses all the time. If you'd like to seriously explore that in a fairly grounded way, the best book is probably Missy Vineyard's take on the Alexander Technique: <em>How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live</em> (alternate link: Amazon.com). The idea of this is that it gives you your choice back; it's effectively "being the background space" in which your experiences arise, so that you remain detached from them and remain calm. (The post <em>The Imagination Room</em> points to a variation on that theme.) You might also find this article interesting, about repositioning "where you look out from" to remain more open.

Basically - and this is obvious I'm sure - you can't be someone who fights and argues and wrestles with the (apparent) world and have a stable existence. You are probably, in effect, constantly "wishing" things were different whilst in a highly emotional state. That's going to have effects, of some sort or another.