I had a great discovery this morning as I was taking my daily run.  I know that our head moves forward and up as we walk and run, my Alexander training has instilled that in my kinesthetic awareness.  However, I know this learning about my body through movement and discovering ease, flexibility and balance is a “practice” and just when we think we “have it”, we realize that the process is just evolving.  I think the awareness of my body as being in layers, and as I come to notice and be deeply connected to that layer, I learn something profound in how it relates to the whole and my movement; it then becomes my own. This morning when I let my head fall forward in this sort of relaxed way my pace picked up I became so much lighter my joints were open, my breath was easier…what a revelation! So now I have uncovered another layer to help me be more balanced in all that I do.  I could say it was unconscious and now is conscious and available to me.  These layers of deep tension and tightness come forward into your awareness over time, because they are unconscious habits, they hide below our consciousness until we decide to embark on the curiosity of discovering and changing. For me, there was an emotional piece, that somewhere in my psyche I thought if my head came forward that much (which was a miniscule amount), that I would fall forward, so I unknowingly tightened my neck muscles to keep from falling…what an absurd thought! As FM Alexander would say we don’t really know where we are in space we don’t know what our body is doing, this really gave me that awareness in a very deep way. I am beginning to think that the headrest in my new car may have given me a new awareness of the position of my head on my spine.  So change is good in that it brought me to a new way of relating my head to my spine, and that what I thought I knew was taking me to another layer of consciousness; and it showed up in my running.  I love this work, and being in my body with enhanced awareness of how I move in relation to the whole body is profound!