Improve breathing with the Alexander Technique | Judith Muir

Many of the aches, pains, and stress we feel are brought on by the demands of our daily lives and too often we turn to painkillers or pharmaceuticals for relief.

The Alexander Technique is a hands-on educational method for improving physical and mental wellbeing. It teaches us how to recapture the ease, and freedom of movement that we enjoyed as young children.

I, Judith Muir is trained to teach you how to develop a wellness lifestyle that is easy to maintain on a daily basis. I use the Alexander Technique, Stretch and Breath Classes and Music-making to address the three broad areas that are embraced by a Wellness program - Body, Mind and Spirit.

Cost: Consultation $125. (90 minutes)
Lessons $105. (60 minutes) Sliding Scale.

To know more about the lessons, contact Judith now!!
Phone: (845) 677 5871
Address: 60 Eddy Road, Verbank, NY 12585

Alexander Technique for Accelerated Healing | Judith Muir

The Alexander Technique is a hands-on educational method for improving physical and mental wellbeing. It teaches us how to recapture the ease, and freedom of movement that we enjoyed as young children.

Alexander Technique helps in:
1. Alexander Technique: Better Balance, Better Performance
2. Alexander Technique for Riders: Improving the human/horse connection
3. Alexander Technique for Pain Management

More Information on Alexander Technique, contact Judith!
Phone: (845) 677 5871

Music- It’s never too late to start again!!

Many of us took music lessons as a child but stopped when we left school, went to college and life took over. Now more than ever, is a particularly good time to upgrade all those things that you learned as a kid so that your music-making can help enrich your life as an adult, so what are you waiting for?

Ahh… don’t say you are too old for learning music or that you will never be as good as your favorite musician. Remember, it is never too late to start again!!!

Learning how to maximize music’s deeply therapeutic power becomes a wonderful adjunct to our daily health and wellness programs. Listed below are some of the well-known scientifically proven benefits.

• Music reduces stress and anxiety
• Music improves our immunity and therefore general health
• Music decreases feelings of depression and loneliness
• Music enhances memory and recall
• Music alleviates pain and promotes physical rehabilitation

More importantly, you will have a lot of fun and enjoyment in the process. So if you think it’s time to get that item ticked off your bucket list, just go for it. In fact, as an adult, you will have developed a whole bunch of skills that make progress in your lessons so much faster, and deeply rewarding. Of course, this comes with the caveat that you may now as an adult have more responsibilities than you did when you were a kid!

You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Contact Judith now!!

Alexander Technique Classes New York | Alexander Technique to Improve Balance

Lessons in the Alexander Technique teach us how to stop and notice what we are doing to ourselves in response to a stimulus. This could be a thought, a sensation, or an emotion, often they are all connected. When we learn how to stop and notice, choices open up to us on how to respond. Over time applying this skill allows us to live a life of increased peace and ease. We are less at the mercy of richochetingaround like a ball in a pinball machine, from one thing to another.

F.M. Alexander refined his own awareness of his reaction to a stimulus, i.e. that of recitation, to such a degree that he noticed his neck stiffening. This in turn caused a cascade of tensions and compression. Stiffening his neck, pulled his head back and down, and compressed his spine. This was the original cause of him losing his voice onstage during dramatic recitations, and solving this problem led to the development of the work that we now know as the Alexander Technique. This was over one hundred years ago and lessons in the Alexander Technique are continuing to teach people how to take charge of their lives.

But what takes place during an Alexander lesson begins with increasing our awareness. An individual cannot learn to solve a problem unless they first learn how to “stop, think, and then act”.

Contact Judith Now!

Phone: (845) 677 5871

Sing play Music Outreach Programs | Music Classes for Autism

I offer one-on-one instruction using the Sing-Play approach for all my students, children, and adults, including those with disabilities.

My music teaching is informed by my training as a teacher of the Alexander Technique. I guide my students to help them adopt good breathing and postural practices, including the best way to hold an instrument, sit on a piano bench, and stand at full natural height.

I give Instruction in: Piano, Voice, Clarinet and Saxophone

Cost: $80 (60 minutes)

$60 (45 minutes)

$40 (30 minutes)

Sliding Scale.

Contact Judith

Phone: (845) 677 5871

Alexander Technique to Improve Balance and Coordination

 

Many of the aches, pains, and stress we feel are brought on by the demands of our daily lives and too often we turn to painkillers or pharmaceuticals for relief. I am trained to teach you how to develop a wellness lifestyle that is easy to maintain on a daily basis. I use the Alexander Technique, Stretch and Breath Classes and Music-making to address the three broad areas that are embraced by a Wellness program. Body, Mind and Spirit.

The Alexander Technique is a hands-on educational method for improving physical and mental wellbeing. It teaches us how to recapture the ease, and freedom of movement that we enjoyed as young children. Developed by actor F.M. Alexander in the 1890’s, Alexander Technique is the first mind/body approach developed by a westerner – and remains one of the most powerful.

Cost: Consultation $125. (90 minutes)

Lessons $105. (60 minutes) Sliding Scale.

More Information on Alexander Technique, Contact Judith!!

Pain Management: How Alexander Technique Lessons can help

 Did you know that your thought process can have a positive effect on your physical well-being? This is one of the skills you develop with the Alexander Technique, an educational method with over a hundred-year track record.

 

The Alexander Technique gives you a way to better understand how your body works. Through a course of one-on-one sessions with a certified Alexander Technique teacher, you will learn to:

• how to recapture the ease, and freedom of movement that we enjoyed as young children.
• how to release the stress so that it doesn’t compound your condition.
• return your body and mind to balance and gain a sense of control over your tension and stress responses.

Basically, The Alexander Technique empowers you to self-manage your conditions. It offers practical, proactive methods for dealing with the acute onset of pain and the challenge of getting through daily activities.

 

Read more...

 

To learn about existing classes or to schedule, Contact Judith

Sing-Play Way | Sing-Play Classes for Children | Judith Muir

 This is an integrated approach to music-making that fosters personal development as well as skill acquisition. It offers us a lifetime of enjoyment and satisfaction.

Sing-Play develops the ear, so no music notation is taught in the beginning.

We learn how to hear more accurately and be able to replicate what we hear, either vocally, or on our instrument.

We learn to trust that if it doesn’t sound right we are correct, as well as how to self-correct.

Sing-Play helps us to feel how music moves in many different ways, depending on the genre. We learn to play the rhythm of the words in songs and how moving as we play helps our music-making.

Sing-Play helps us to connect to the music inside us and bring it out. As we already hear the music it becomes very easy to master the specific technical aspects that each instrument has, so we are making-music that is fluent.

Sing-Play helps develop our memory for new songs and remembering songs from many years ago.

Sing-Play is an organic process, during which we often discover limiting ideas, or memories of what other people have said to us, and teaches us how to release them so that our music-making becomes freer and nurturing.

For more Information : Special Needs

Contact Judith Muir

How to Learn Tennis, Cookery, Piano and the Alexander Technique in Six Easy Lessons

The benefit of instruction…

The idea may be effective as a marketing strategy, but have you ever heard anyone play piano after their sixth lesson? In reality nothing is learned that quickly – except perhaps how to bake a cake. Yet even a chef would say that the cookery class shows you the basic techniques, but from that point on it’s a matter of practice, a matter of baking the same Victoria sponge a few thousand times before you’ll be performing reliably in the kitchen.

Learning tennis can also be described in a half dozen moves equivalent to the methods of baking. The ball may be sent across the court by a forehand, a backhand, a serve, a volley or a lob. But only a facile assessment by means of those prevalent reductions called “competencies” would be so daft as to pronounce the pupil a tennis player after a brief course of lessons encompassing the moves. Nor would we recommend that after being shown the procedures, the apprentice should simply continue practicing. Building the skill of ball placement needs guided rehearsals over many years. Wimbledon pros retain their trainers. And if Ian Thorpe needs a coach to guide him through the water, then we can all use a pair of good Alexander Technique hands to continuously refresh our manner of use.

The procedures for learning the Alexander Technique are as brief and simple in outline as those for baking or tennis. If in cake-making we say step one is: “First grease your tin,” then “First free your neck” would be the equivalent when our object is improved co-ordination. The remaining half dozen steps in AT are as plain, but they are learned more gradually as the pupil changes his or her habitual way of moving. You can go to cookery class and learn the basic techniques in a week or two, and thereafter hone your skills over dinners and tea parties on your own. But learning how to change the way you move requires more monitoring.

Because your kinaesthesia – your muscle sense that makes you aware of how much tension you are using – is desensitized by over-use, it is not possible to assess by means of your proprioception – the sense that tells you where the parts of your body are in relation to one another – the ways in which you are pulling yourself out of shape, and how you must set about rectifying things. In theory it is possible to learn the Alexander Technique on one’s own because, after all, F M Alexander did. But people who imagine they can re-educate their use without a teacher, have not recognized the genius of the man. He himself commented that, although it took him ten years to discover how to make the necessary changes for his larynx to function normally again, it would not take his pupils so long to heal themselves because they would have the benefit of his hands to guide them.

Read More Click here: Alexander Technique Lessons

Outreach

Outreach as the name implies, is reaching out to help others using your creativity – to lift their spirits.

Any of the creative arts can be used as a vehicle for this, music, dance, theater, photography, writing, art, poetry.

Embedded in this approach is the intent, that by reaching out to help others, you help them to want to reach out and help others. So what gets activated is a whole room of people reaching out to each other.

Music is a profound communication, and like a mother singing a lullaby to soothe her baby, using music to enhance some ones’ life is one of the greatest gifts that you can give. This is what is called outreach.

This idea of playing for someone else is a fundamental part of my approach to teaching music. The other person does not need to be present at the lesson. It is the idea of giving out with your music.

My students immediately notice the difference in what they are doing when they think of playing for someone else, versus trying to get the notes right. They then notice that it is much easier to sing/play their instruments and they enjoy what they are doing more. Therefore they want to make music more often.

I run several outreach programs at local senior and assisted living facilities, where I encourage my students to come so that they can experience how their music making has a dynamic effect on the residents. It will awaken a profound joy, a sense of well-being for others that will have you wanting to come back week after week. And like magic, week after week, your music – and your well being – will grow.

Read More click here: Music Outreach Programs

Alleviating Tech-Related Stress with the Alexander Technique

Whether a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop is your go-to favorite, there’s no doubt about it: technical

devices are a vital part of how modern society works, plays and communicates. Unfortunately, the equipment also is a major contributor of physical and emotional stresses.

The problem lies in the repeated and often-held positions people take for extended periods of time when the use technical devices, such as hunching over, leaning to one side, or hanging their head down, the latter leaving some people with what’s now known as tech neck or text neck – the back, neck, and shoulder strain caused by dropping one’s head to view a screen. Worse, the use of technical equipment often is tied to people’s careers, intensifying their use of the devices, which furthers tension on the body, causing pain and contributing to lower emotional and mental states.

To counter the tendency to lapse into an awkward position when using technical gear, it’s helpful to be mindful of one’s posture, especially when done as part of the Alexander Technique, a practice that was developed more than a century ago by a young Australian actor, Frederick Matthias Alexander, and is based on activating the basic principles that govern human functioning and well-being.

By teaching people how to increase their body/mind awareness, switch off patterns of stress and tension, activate beneficial postural mechanisms and connect with muscular activity, the Alexander Technique can help alleviate or prevent stresses associated with everyday movements, including those related to the use of technical equipment.

Read more click here: Institute for Music and Health