I am not a dancer myself but dancers often do visit Alexander Technique teachers to find more about how to work harmoniously with their bodies.
A few years ago I became interested in a dancer named Erick Hawkins, who was passionate about restoring flow and ease of movement in dance, he felt that ballet in particular was working against the way that the human body is meant to flow and even creating stiffness, here he is in graceful and wonderfully flowing ‘mid-flight’, he probably had less than a second to arrange himself like this after leaving the ground!
Erick Hawkins used a lot of imagery to help teach his concept of ease and flow, one particular image I feel is very useful for people who may be creating tension in their forearms. The wrist, hands and forearms are for many people where a lot of tension gets stored; modern life requires us to do many intricate tasks with our hands and when it doesn’t go as quickly as we would like or when we make mistakes we get frustrated, guess where the tension gets stored?
Erick understood this and so he asked his dance students to think of their hands and forearms as if they were like tassels, a little like the one below
He would ask a dancer to think of their forearms, hands and fingers and maybe even their lower legs transforming into tassels flowing in the air, perhaps even adding an imaginary breeze. ( If you are not a dancer you might prefer to think of waving your arms about on a summers day walking along grassy hills, allowing yourself to let go of the sensation of having fingers, hands and forearms and instead use your imagination to tune into the sensation of waving your tassel arms in the gentle breeze ).
If it is the first time you have tried to imagine this kind of thing it might take a little patience and experimentation but you may be rewarded with a realisation of just how much tension you are carrying between the two bones in your forearms, your wrists and fingers you may also come to realise that thought alone can alter the tone and tension in your body. You can explore the ambiguity of the tassels, the way they don’t all point in one direction but instead are dynamically spreading and weaving, creating a tone in your arm that contrasts with a more focused, targeted almost pointed sensation that you experience when you reach out with frustration or impatience for your keys or a pen to quickly write something down.
If this sounds a little “woo woo” (mental images changing the tone of your body) then remember every movement you make starts with a thought, it might be subconcious but every movement starts with your nervous system and your thoughts can have a dramatic effect on the way things happen in your body, whatever you are thinking your body is listening, if your mind is tense, if you have endlessly circling thoughts then your body will respond in a similar fashion.
A group of people in the dance community starting early in the previous century started playing with imagery, they called their study “ideokinesis”, as an Alexander teacher I find some of their imagery very useful to share with my clients.