Chronic Pain, Emotions and the Body: How Somatics Can Support Healing | Alexandra Beller

Leigh Brandon (00:01.255)
Alexandra, welcome to Beyond the Pains. Great to have you on the show.

Alexandra Beller (00:04.322)
Thank you so much for having me.

Leigh Brandon (00:06.377)
Yeah, it’s really great to have you on. So you’ve worked as a dancer, choreographer, director, and somatic educator. Before we explore your approach to pain and movement, could you share a little bit about your own journey and what led you to the work that you do today?

Alexandra Beller (00:23.83)
And it’s been quite a winding road. but I think dance definitely as a kid felt like the one place where I felt quite whole and r really felt like I could understand myself and then I was had quite a lonely childhood, so like this feeling of being whole but also being visible was

very compelling to me, I think, in retrospect. You know, I didn’t know that when I was twelve, but and then I really just like powered away being a dancer. and I was I did not have a body type that was really acceptable in the dance world. So it was definitely like a fight and a climb and a like reject a lot of things that people told me were gonna happen or not gonna happen.

and I made it into a a beautiful dance company and had the chance to tour the world for seven years dancing. Pretty amazing, also hard. And somewhere in there I just really started feeling like there was more to say that I couldn’t say through somebody else’s work. I just needed to be creating my own work and so I left that to become a choreographer. And as I was choreographing I was teaching.

And I felt like I just wanted more infrastructure or scaffold or something as a teacher to just feel more like I knew what I was doing. And so I went to grad school and that didn’t really give me that. And then I did a program at the Labon Institute, which gave me a degree called a CMA, which is certified movement analyst, which allows you to look at the human body really.

any moving thing you can use Laban for. It doesn’t even actually have to be biological. but it was created to analyze human movement for meaning. So a lot of the field of nonverbal communication came from this work. and then a lot of different people came out of his work that created other forms like Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, well, Ermgard Bartaniev, and then Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, who developed

Alexandra Beller (02:50.057)
Body Mind Centering. Those both came out. Alexander Technique, Felden Christ were coming about at the same time, not through Laban, but they were contemporary. So a lot of that somatic work was happening at the same time, mid-century. So I got my CMA and that brought me into theater. But really it also brought me into like

So, you know, I’m working with actors and trying to get them to like r really feel in their body what a character might be feeling, which just led me into like, okay, what if there were no character? What if we were just like using this work to really just feel what we’re feeling? And that brought me into somatics. and I think a very long healing journey for myself also brought me into somatics and

I’ve always had an unusual nervous system, like a very high feeling system, both physically and emotionally. So I’ve always had this feels like a kind of resonance, like a sounding board. And I’ve always had this feeling with other people where there’s just a lot of information that comes to me from other people that I can feel in my body.

So just started learning how to, in a way, choreograph that energy so that like as it comes to me, I can craft it a little bit, shape it a little bit, bring it back to somebody else so that they can have an experience, and then their experience does that same thing. And that’s been really fascinating work. And then somewhere along the line, I started coaching other artists and their work. But essentially, I think even though I do so many

things that look very different, it feels like what I’m trying to do ultimately with everybody, whether it’s an actor in a play or a client who’s coming to me for a somatic idea, is to help people map themselves better for themselves. Like I don’t I’m not telling anybody about themselves, but I am trying to like almost like a little echolocation.

Alexandra Beller (05:10.845)
but sort of I’m sending out the signal and they hear it inside themselves and they figure out where they are from a little bit of that vibration or resonance from that signal. And I I’m saying it in a kind of ethereal way, but it’s actually quite pragmatic. A lot of the things I do are very pragmatic and actually cut through a lot of storytelling and even sometimes cut through emotion to just get to.

What can the body do that will change this thing? Because I definitely believe the body is everything, you know, and mine part of the body. And the most valuable information I experience is all from the body.

Leigh Brandon (06:01.257)
So, I guess there’s a couple of things. if someone’s listening to this podcast for the first time, can you explain to them in your words what somatic work actually is?

Alexandra Beller (06:14.795)
Yeah. well we have this body, it’s got a lot of information. That information doesn’t rest in conscious mind. And then we’ve got this beautiful conscious and subconscious minds. and that’s a lot of thought and that’s beautiful. And sometimes they don’t know how to talk to each other as well as they could. So

Somatics for me is a way to it’s sort of like couples therapy for your mind and body, where rather than like

I’m having a feeling, what is it? What is it? What is it? And then why? And what’s the story? And okay, now I have a st it’s because of this, and now I need to solve a problem in my life so I can feel better. Not that that’s not all so true in a way. And the body often has information and a way to process and metabolize feeling that we don’t have up here. So

You know, it could be as simple if somatics is even a new word for somebody, it could be as simple as like that feeling you get when your gut kind of grabs up and you have just, you know, like, I’ve got bad vibes or mm my gut told me not to do it, right? We have an entire neurological system in literally in the gut called the enteric nervous system.

And we think everything happens through the central nervous system, the brain, spinal cord, all our nerves. We have a thought, motored neurons, then sensory neurons come back, and we think that that’s the whole picture. But actually we have a hundred million neurons in the gut. And those neurons act and they cause the body to act. So some of our intuitive, instinctual, reflexive stuff.

Alexandra Beller (08:22.659)
that we do with the body, we’re not actually processing through the brain. And then it catches up. But you know, things like that all these things that we think of as physical cues. I have butterflies in my stomach or my chest is tight or I have a lump in my throat, those are the ways that the body starts to s raise its hand and say, I have something to tell you if you would be willing to listen. But it requires the mind to

control the listening because the brain is still the thing that decides what we’re where we’re putting our attention. And so if the brain says, Hmm, what’s that lump in your throat about? Let’s listen to that. Not let’s think about what’s going on, but let’s listen to that. What’s happening there? And in my experience, a lot of times the lump in the throat will become a thing that you say or will become

a thought that you have or a phrase or a mm a sentence or a gesture, you know, and that gives us more information. And so often the the body knowledge comes through movement. You’ll notice, you know, something’s happening with a hand or a foot or you’ve got a little thing that’s or you notice yourself doing a little something. what’s what’s going on? W why am I why am I rubbing my chest like that?

Let me pause and breathe for a minute.

And see if that place under my chest has something that it wants me to know. And in my experience, it always does. And then we can use the mind to catalyze that. What’s going on? What could that be? What you know, pull it apart. And sometimes it is about something I need to think about. And that’s great. I’m happy to think. Yeah, does that feel like that answers? Yeah.

Leigh Brandon (10:22.804)
So, yeah, so I guess to summarise what you just said and just to clarify my own understanding, what I heard was you can use the sensation of the body to almost access the subconscious mind.

Great. what happens obviously, you know I’m big into pain, what happens when chronic pain stops being experienced as a symptom and becomes part of someone’s identity?

Alexandra Beller (10:56.447)
Yeah.

Well, pain definitely becomes a filter for the way that we experience the world and and eventually it can become a kind of a a scaffold or a way that we think of the the way the world works, right? And I’ve I’ve had pretty long periods in my life of chronic pain. I I had

had three discs herniated when I was like thirty two from a chiropractor who did a bad adjustment on me and blew three discs out. And really ever since then, which was twenty one years ago, my body’s never been the same and a lot of things have happened, I think, from that original injury.

which have ended up in a C section and two hip replacements and paralysis on a leg and so there’s been a lot of things that have happened to me since that initial injury. So I have experienced a couple decades where every day I’m in pain in some way all day and certainly not as bad as some people live with pain. But one thing that I noticed is that there’s it

It’s it can become a little bit of a cage between you and the world. and I think there are a bunch of things that come from that cage. One is it just this feeling of separation from everybody else, except for people who are maybe also in chronic pain. And to some degree that’s true. Of course, none of us can truly know each other, understand each other. We are all in our own

Alexandra Beller (12:52.597)
lived experience and there’s no way, no matter how intimate we are, that anybody can know what it’s like to be us. So that’s true for everyone. But there is something about living with chronic pain that does feel like I don’t know that anyone can really understand what is what it’s like. That everything else feels less important in a way than this al you know, if you’re

Trying to take a test and there’s the fire drill goes off, but you’re not leaving the classroom and you have to just sit there and continue to take this test, and there’s a massive fire alarm going off with, you know, s sound and lights and but you just have to sit there and nobody else hears the fire drill. Everyone’s just sitting there taking their test and you’re like

How can we, how can we be expected to just sit here and do this? but because no one else hears the fire alarm, everyone’s like, what’s up? Just take your test. What’s what’s up? and it can be quite a lonely feeling, I think. And then there’s also this relationship we have with ourselves, with trust, where I think.

You know, when we’re just pushing through and pushing through and just sitting there and just, I’m just gonna take this test, I’m just gonna take this test, and I’m gonna ignore this fire alarm. But in your body, the fire alarm is not outside, of course. It is you and it is your body talking to you. And on a certain level, it is your body asking for something, even if there’s nothing that is possible to really do about the thing, right? Even if there’s no treatment or medication or

thing that can really solve the actual pain your body is saying, I need to be the thing that you pay the most attention to. And unless we, you know, have a very rare life, we can’t do that. We have to show up for work, we have to show up for our kids, we have to pay the rent and, you know, brush our teeth. And probably with chronic pain, you also have to do your PT or your med regimen or your supplements or your

Alexandra Beller (15:13.857)
physical therapy, you know, whatever. So there’s even more stuff to do. And I think that there’s a part of us that’s in pain that is like, you know, a toddler having a meltdown in a grocery store where they’re just like, no, I won’t, if you won’t listen to me and you won’t take care of me, I’m not doing another thing. And then we’re just dra dragging them around to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. And over time that relationship

With that toddler who is part of us gets quite wounded and it needs time and to slow down, to repair it, and to start making some choices where we say, Okay, you know what? I’m gonna put you first right now. We’re not going to the grocery store. Even though we have no groceries in the house, we’re not going to the grocery store. What do you want to do? And you know, for us that’s

whatever you call self-care, which is not necessarily like getting a massage or doing a facial right. It can be just taking some time to slow down and not be so rushed. It can be saying no to somebody or saying no to yourself or releasing a story that you tell about yourself or somebody else is telling about you. You know, it can be a lot of different things. But I think that that relationship with the pain is like

Two humans having a relationship and the way that we treat the pain creates that relationship. And if we think of the pain as I think of the pain as as a young child because it doesn’t have control over what it’s doing, it does not respond to logic, it you know has very primal and big feelings, and so

if I talk to my pain in a you know, if I think about talking to a toddler the way I sometimes have talked to my pain, like, okay, I hear you, but come on, let’s pull it together, okay? I get it, I get it, but it’s like this every day. Let’s can we just like move on? I get it, but that toddler’s not gonna trust you. So I think there’s a lot of rebuilding of trust that often needs to happen.

Leigh Brandon (17:40.009)
Yeah, one of the things that I guess sprung to my mind as you were talking there is, unless someone’s got a visible limp or something like that, a lot of people with chronic pain are walking around every day and the people around them have got absolutely no clue what they’re going through. And I think that can often be one of the most frustrating things for people with chronic pain.

And I think that frustration also makes the pain worse, right? Because it’s yet another emotion that’s being input into the nervous system. So it’s building up that sensitivity to pain.

Alexandra Beller (18:09.43)
Uhhuh.

Alexandra Beller (18:16.235)
Yeah. And it’s another person that’s ignoring you, right? Like the toddler’s throwing the tantrum in the grocery store and not only is the parent looking at them going, Okay, just I can’t right now, please get up but also people are just walking by and kinda looking at the parent and being like, What’s going on with that kid? Why is he such a why is she such a you know, why is she freaking out like that and judging

badly, right? Because you didn’t perform perfectly at work or you didn’t show up for something or you’re looking a little disheveled or whatever the thing is, right? so you get this judgment and you imagine that that toddler their sense of sadness and loneliness is quite compounded when there’s also people just walking by being like, I’m so sorry you have a kid like that, right? How awful for them. And

Or they just don’t even see them, right?

Leigh Brandon (19:17.067)
was interesting as well you used the analogy of a fire alarm because I use that analogy a lot with chronic pain because an oversensitized nervous system is like an oversensitive fire alarm. There might not be a fire but the alarm’s going off, right? So that was quite interesting. So, I I completely understand why…

Alexandra Beller (19:22.054)
Mm. Mm.

Alexandra Beller (19:33.58)
Right.

Leigh Brandon (19:43.958)
people end up identifying with their pain. So people might say things like, I have a bad back, I have a dodgy knee, I have fibromyalgia. What I try and get people to do is to say, you’re having an experience of back pain right now. To try and reframe it. But…

Alexandra Beller (20:03.065)
Yeah.

Leigh Brandon (20:07.251)
I understand why people end up identifying with their pain. How can identifying with their pain actually affect their path towards recovery?

Alexandra Beller (20:18.871)
Well, our our body is listening to us and what we look at becomes the the picture, right? if you walk into a room and there’s it’s pristine and beautiful, but there’s one corner that’s r filthy, dusty, you swept the floor and you didn’t have a dustpan and you swept all the dirt into one corner and you’re in that room and all you look at is that corner.

And you’re in this beautiful, pristine, clean room, and you’re just looking in that corner, you will feel that you are living in a filthy place. So some of it is focus and attention. And our body also is building up its identity based on the way we talk about it. So when we’re like, that’s my bad leg, your leg is listening to that. Well, it’s bad. I’m bad.

And, you know, just the way I mean, it works in the other direction too, when people are like, Well, you’re so good at da da da da da and then suddenly you’re like, the next thing you do where you have to do that thing, you’re like, yeah, I’m I’m good at this. And you you know, studies show that you perform that thing better when people have suggested that you’re good at that thing.

Even if you don’t have visible proof of that, even if that’s not something that’s come up before, I remember when I was dancing with Bill T. Jones and this fellow dancer said to me, in a quite offhand way, Well, you you’re the queen of balance. You can just stay on one leg forever. And I had never thought that before. No one had ever said that before. That wasn’t part of my like dancer identity. But it changed me forever, like

Every time I balanced after that, I was like, yeah, I’m I balance is my thing. And I had never thought of that before he said that to me. So, you know, when we’re saying whichever direction we’re talking to ourselves, if we’re like, My God, you are so resilient. I wish you didn’t have to be so resilient, but my goodness, how how beautifully you weather your pain. It’s

Alexandra Beller (22:34.441)
It’s it’s just miraculous. I can’t even imagine. or we’re like, man, you are just so broken. You’re just you’re just a puddle. and you know, our body just starts to follow that that story, I think.

Leigh Brandon (22:57.033)
Yeah, I mean another thing as well to consider, know, a lot of people think that pain equals tissue damage, but there’s lots of other things that can potentially trigger pain because ultimately our nervous system is hardwired to identify danger, right? And one of the ways that we respond to danger is pain. Like if you break your ankle,

Alexandra Beller (23:15.447)
Yeah.

Leigh Brandon (23:22.635)
you get pain in the ankle, your brain says, right, stop moving that leg, don’t put any more pressure on that leg because you’re going to do more damage, right? It’s there to protect us. there’s other things that could potentially cause pain as well. You’ve got things like inflammation that, again, people probably know about. But previous experience.

is one. So if you’ve had a previous experience, and again there’s good reason for that, right? If you was bitten by a snake once, right? It hurt. It’s teaching you to not go near a snake, right? It’s trying to protect you. But if you bend over once and your back hurt, you now think, if I bend over, my back’s gonna hurt, right? So there’s previous experience, but there’s also expectation. So…

Alexandra Beller (23:42.591)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Alexandra Beller (23:48.737)
Mm-hmm.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Right, right.

Alexandra Beller (24:07.661)
Absolutely. And we we know this from like love relationships or even friendships where, you know, somebody broke up with us or somebody used to do something that didn’t feel good in a relationship. And we know that when we bring that into our next relationship, it’s never positive. And when we’re like, you know, glitchy around somebody or we’re, you know, ver easily activated, but that person’s not doing the thing that the last person is doing. But

But the minute that it looks anything like what that last person did, we get mad at this new partner. And that’s not fair to that new partner. And it does not allow us to have a healthy relationship. And we’re absolutely like that. And what I found when I was in like three years of pre-hip replacement, hip replacement, pre-next hip replacement, et cetera, is that one night I I

I have a set I have a staircase in my house and to go from the living room to my bedroom you have to climb a flight of stairs. And I used to just dread it because it was just so painful to walk up that flight of stairs and I would go to bed really late because I just didn’t want to climb the stairs. And one day at night I was standing at the bottom of the stairs and I was looking up and I was dreading it and I felt how braced I was. And I was like, Okay.

I think that I’m doing so much bracing that I actually don’t even know how much pain I’m in because I’m causing so much pain by how much I’m bracing against the possibility of pain. So I’m gonna walk up this flight of stairs as a laboratory to try to find the metric or discover how much pain this hip joint is actually in if I don’t resist it.

So I’m basically gonna in a way invite the pain, and I don’t mean like more pain than there is, but I’m gonna be like, okay, I’m not resisting you. I’m submitting. I’m yielding. And I walked up the stairs really slowly. And I was like, okay, yeah, that’s painful. But actually

Alexandra Beller (26:32.247)
Quite a bit less painful than it usually is. Why is that? Because I’m doing so much bracing and tightening on my way up the stairs that my glute is is almost in spasm, my hamstrings overtight, I’m shifting my pelvis over to you know, all these things are happening. My lower back is tight, it’s pulling my QLS spasming my psoas. Like all these different muscular things were happening really because of fear.

And I was like, okay, what if I accepted this much pain and I just allowed it to be part of me and I accepted myself wholly right now, including accepting my pain.

And it I had to slow down to do it. There was no way I could just, you know, climb the stairs and get upstairs, which is what I usually did, and just sort of force myself up there. And in a way, this is the getting down on the floor in the grocery store and being like, Hey buddy, what’s going on? What’s up? It’s your turn. Talk to me. And you know, it took me probably like

four minutes to climb that flight of stairs and I would like shift my weight and then I would feel like what is it really like as I start to lever onto this leg and what is it like as I get my pelvis over that thigh bone. Okay, yeah, that’s where most of the pain is and what what does it feel like when I shift to the other leg and what does it feel like to lift that well that actually is when it lightens up.

And I just really started to listen to it almost like it was a song. It had phrasing. It had like an ebb and flow. And I l I listened to it without resistance. And that was a pretty transformative moment. And I certainly don’t always have time to do that. I don’t always take time to do that.

Alexandra Beller (28:41.217)
But it’s it was really amazing to experience that that’s there.

Leigh Brandon (28:52.318)
I don’t know if this is different from I’m about to ask you from what you’ve just explained actually but I know you speak about negotiating with pain rather than just trying to eliminate it. What does that look like in practice and why can constantly fighting against pain sometimes reinforce it?

Alexandra Beller (29:10.679)
Well, there are plenty of like real physical and neurological reasons why fighting against pain can reinforce it, you know. one of them is we’re not actually in conversation with the pain itself. We’re in conversation with the protective system. So, you know, this is very much what we also do emotionally. If you’re having a conversation with somebody and you’re super defensive, you’re not actually having the conversation, right? They’re not actually getting

To real you from real them. And whatever you think of as like this is a real conversation, they’re not having it because you’re so defensive that every time they say something, you can’t take it in, you can’t metabolize processes it. That means you can’t take accountability for something, have a feeling, share your feeling. That’s a real conversation. And if we’re like, Well, that’s what you do. Well, I didn’t, you know, well, that’s not a conversation. So I think the

The bracing on that that kind of spiritual emotional level with ourselves functions in a similar way. Physiologically, it often means that we have so much muscle tightness that we’re often choking off blood supply to certain muscles, which is gonna affect, you know, our oxygenation, it’s gonna affect our lots of things, right? And so at a physiological level, we actually are doing something. And

You know, there’s a a lot of studies that have shown that you can do MRIs on lots of different people with with and without back pain. And plenty of the people without back pain will have something show up on the MRI like a herniation or spondylosis, you know. And but we somebody goes in with pain and they go to get an MRI and they see that herniation and they’re like, that’s the reason, right?

But actually that exists in plenty of people without pain and plenty of people with pain go in for the MRI and they’re like, I don’t know, you look fine. And I’m not saying that a herniation doesn’t hurt. I know from experience it does. But I’m saying it’s not the beginning and end of the situation. And often emotional tension, things we’re not saying, are going to create physiological patterns that are real. It’s not

Alexandra Beller (31:31.83)
It’s not woo woo, it’s not j ethereal stuff. It’s not just energy, it’s like real body stuff. And so the negotiation with the pain feels like I need to let down my defenses like I would in a healthy conversation. I need to slow down like I would in a healthy conversation. I need to be listening as much or more than I’m speaking.

And the negotiation is sometimes I do have to show up for something or for someone while I’m in pain. And how do I do that without losing authenticity? Without just masking, put on a facade, buck up, pull it together, ignore yourself. How do you show up for other people that

in a moment when it’s like that’s not what your body wants to do without exiling or abandoning yourself. And sometimes I will have a real conversation, sometimes even out loud, where I’ll be like, I don’t want to do this next thing. I’m not feeling I’m not feeling resourced or I’m not feeling like I have the capacity and I don’t want to do this thing.

And sometimes I’ll let the part of myself that really doesn’t want to do it, that’s usually a little younger, go ahead and speak out loud. And I’ll hear a voice come out of my face that’s like, that’s not my adult voice. And you know, that voice is just like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to. And I just let that part speak out loud. And then sometimes I’ll speak out loud as well and be like, I know, I know.

You don’t wanna do that and that it feels hard right now. And sometimes I will make an actual negotiation. How about after it we make a nice cup of tea and we sit in the garden for 15 minutes before the next thing? Or ha with I have a hammock outside. Maybe we could go lay in the hammock for 15 minutes after. So sometimes there’ll be like an actual physical negotiation. Sometimes it’s just like I’m I hear you. I hear you and I know that you don’t want to.

Alexandra Beller (33:57.174)
And I I parent myself the way I would parent one of my kids that I was like, Yeah, but we gotta go to the grocery store and before we leave, they’re like, I don’t want to. And instead of dragging them there and telling them to shut up, which I would never do with my kid, I’m gonna take a moment, even if it affects the next thing, even if it means I’m late, you know, a couple minutes late to something, I hope that I will take the time to be like, Okay

Alexandra Beller (34:28.715)
All right. Okay. I hear you. We do need to do this and I hear you. You know. So I think that’s what I mean by negotiation.

Leigh Brandon (34:42.765)
Yeah, interesting. I mean, it’s funny, mean, sometimes I feel pain from time to time. I’m human like everyone else. I wouldn’t say I negotiate with pain, but I talk to the body part sometimes and just reassure it that it’s okay. That it’s actually, there’s nothing wrong with it physically. That’s just, you know, for whatever reason, it’s giving off, well, not the body part, the brain is giving off the signal that that body part’s in pain. And most of the time, within less than a minute, the pain’s gone.

Alexandra Beller (34:48.886)
Alexandra Beller (34:54.605)
Mm-hmm.

Alexandra Beller (35:07.425)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Leigh Brandon (35:13.025)
And I know there are people that probably think that’s crazy, but it works, so I don’t care if it’s crazy, right? Because it enables me to function normally. That’s really interesting. That’s a really interesting concept of negotiating with pain, but I completely get it, completely get it. Something that I know you’re into, that I’m also into, is infant development. the question I have for you is, how can…

developmental movement and the way infants gradually learn to organise their bodies help adults rebuild safer, more efficient movement patterns after pain, trauma or surgery.

Alexandra Beller (35:54.274)
Yeah, well, I know you know this, but for listeners, I will say that i in a you know for traditional development, let’s say there’s no developmental delays or disturbances in a you know, baby going into toddler and learning to walk, there are six stages that they go through. And those stages, we call them body organizations or developmental patterns, those stages are always in that order.

And that order is actually mirrored gestationally. So the the baby develops in the womb in the same series of patterns. And if you look back, it’s also the development of species. So if you go from like the amoeba to the human, it’s the same six in the same order. So each one, if we look at the the motor development, which is that like baby to toddler learning to stand and walk, if we look at that part of the development.

Each one of those stages also has a relationship with the world. So baby comes out of mom, takes the first breath, they’re in this pattern of breath. And then they start to just poke out a little bit and just like just enter the world and come back to their fetal curl, and just enter the world and come back to their fetal curl. So it’s just this little like, what’s me and what’s not me?

And that’s baked into the pattern because as a species, that’s what’s happening to us in that moment developmentally, where like, I’m a thing, and there’s things that are not me, and then there’s me and things that are not me. And that leads us into head tail, which develops curiosity and interest in both like the self and the not-self, but starts to develop a little more.

awareness and capacity for desire and that’s what turns baby over that’s what rolls them over their head tail connection flips them over onto belly which is one of the milestones parents are told to look for right and then they get onto belly and they start doing this rocking they they start seeing the world and they start developing some drive like ooh that’s over there how do I get there how do I get myself to that thing

Alexandra Beller (38:19.103)
And so that’s the pattern called upper lower, which eventually is responsible for a level change. So that’s what sits us up, and eventually that’s what stands us up. And then this little little body gets to standing for the first time. That’s exciting. And they still have that desire to get somewhere, but until they learn to move side to side, which is body half organization, they can’t free up a leg to take a step. So that ability to like shift.

From one place to another, learn balance and learn adaptation. We can’t learn to take a step, which is obviously responsible for that next pattern. And then they start, they can take one side off their body and they can toddle. They like do this little toddling from side to side, but it’s not very stable because it’s pretty binary.

Like this right half against the left half. What right or left, right or left. And of course, they fall all the time because they need this integration, this spiral, this cross-lateral development that allows them to bring their whole self into play. And every moment their whole self is involved. And those are the six patterns that bring us into walking. But every one of those patterns it has baked into it.

A certain kind of relationship with the world. So I was working with a client the other day and we were working on a kind of emotional thing and the way that she was describing it was she was working on on a sense of power, that she wanted to have more power. And when she felt like she had power, it felt like it exploded from her in a way that she couldn’t control, which felt to me like breath.

So was like, okay, let’s go into just breath and get into this. Let’s try to locate your sense of power inside breath. And then let’s see if we can evolve it while holding your power into core distal and see if we can like practice power in core distal and then in head tail. And then we got to upper lower, and suddenly all her power was drained from her body. Like she had been in this very powerful head tail.

Alexandra Beller (40:43.101)
movement and then we developed into upper lower organization and all of a sudden she was just aimless and wandering and drifting and all of her power disappeared. So this moment that was baked in that had baked into it this idea of drive and direction and I’m gonna go somewhere and I’m gonna change level, I’m gonna level up, right? She lost her power. So then we had a conversation about it, like

How do you feel about this idea of destination or goal or drive? And turned out her parents had like really tried to drill this thing into her, like, this is the most important thing. Drive, drive, drive. And she was allergic to it. And it felt traumatic to her. So we were then started talking about like how could you reclaim the idea of drive and let go of your parents’ idea for you?

And develop, I mean, you know, before that we talked about like, do you want drive? Because you don’t have to, right? She could stay in that place and be like, as long as she’s surviving and she’s enjoying her life, she doesn’t need drive. But she wanted it. So then we were talking about like what would it look like to reclaim drive. So we went back to head tail and started, you know, working on that transitional, that interstitial space between the two patterns where one is

starting to evolve into another. If you look at the development of species, it wasn’t just like, you have a lizard and then you have a monkey. You know, it’s like there are all these, you know, mutations and things that happen over millions of years and we work the same way in our evolution. Hopefully it doesn’t take millions of years. But you know that that interstitial space is where the the secret sauce is.

Leigh Brandon (42:38.702)
Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t want to go too off topic and I don’t want go into it too much, but I find it really interesting when there’s a lot of people, more and more people are coming out and saying, we didn’t evolve from apes. We weren’t part of that evolutionary cycle. I think, and I’m, listen, I’m open-minded, right? Maybe I’m wrong, but when you look at, you know, the work of people like Bonnie Brainbridge Cohen and Linda Hartley, you think, really? Like,

There’s so much that does line up that we are evolved from apes when you look at certain ages of fetuses look like all the other animals during certain phases. And then we follow those phases through physical development as well. I find it a little bit hard, but I mean, maybe I need to study more what these people are saying. But…

Alexandra Beller (43:07.735)
Yeah.

Alexandra Beller (43:17.268)
yeah,

Alexandra Beller (43:20.897)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alexandra Beller (43:26.454)
Mm.

Leigh Brandon (43:28.204)
The information I have is that, yeah, we clearly did evolve from apes. But I’m open-minded. Anyway, I want to ask you one more question, because I know we’re running out of time. So for someone who’s lost trust in their body, how can internal feedback such as sensation, breathing, and weight distribution help them reconnect with it? And what practical first step could they take today?

Alexandra Beller (43:35.533)
Yeah.

Alexandra Beller (43:52.322)
The the most important first step is to slow down because we’re all just moving too fast. And you know, unless you’re living in a like an undiscovered tribe on an island, you are part of a culture that is probably moving faster than your nervous system wants to move. And so there’s already a disconnect and a lack of consent that your body is going through most of the time.

Productivity culture, grind culture, capitalism, white supremacy, misogyny, et cetera, ableism, it’s all telling us that we should be a certain thing and we don’t feel ourselves to be that thing, and so we have to force ourselves into something and it’s always faster. So the very first thing is slow down.

Especially when it feels like, I can’t slow down, I’ve got too much to do, I’ve got this and I’ve got that, and I can’t slow. That’s exactly the moment that kind of urgency and anxiety about I have to is exactly the moment when we need to say, okay, stop.

Even if it’s just like fifteen, twenty seconds, just stop for a minute. Slow down and listen. What am I feeling? Like that’s the most pragmatic first step I could give anybody. And just that is gonna start to open up, they’re gonna start to see what their next step is. And it’s not the same for everybody. But to me, and it sounds overly simple.

Slow down. Hold on. And I have Aud and I’ve got lots of fast energy in my body. And my fast energy begets more fast energy. It’s like once I get into I have to, I have to, I have to have to. I can’t stop. It’s got a kind of inertia to it that just keeps spinning. So for me to like pause it.

Alexandra Beller (45:57.75)
And say, what’s going on? What are you feeling? What do you need? And then that goes into a lot of other areas when somebody’s asking you to make a decision. Take a breath, slow down. Especially if it’s a like yes or no to your time or your energy or your nurturing or your giving. And you’re, you know, especially if you’re a person who over functions, over gives, over pleases that moment when you’re being asked of something.

Even if it’s an email and you’re just like, Okay, I hit reply hold on.

Let me read that again and really imagine what it would be like to give them what they’re asking for. Let me take a moment to take that into my body. Let me look at this is something I don’t do nearly enough. Let me look at my schedule and instead of looking at the hours that are listed and whether it fits in between those hours, let me look at my schedule and like actually imagine myself, okay, yeah, I know how I feel after that. And then I’m gonna go right into that.

That’s gonna feel tight. And then I’m gonna, I haven’t eaten. And then I’m gonna, that’s you know what? It does fit in that hour, but I’m really not gonna wanna do it. How now let me renegotiate expectations with myself. Let me think about like what is this thing? What are the expectations of the other person? Do they feel right to me or do they can I disappoint that expectation? What’s the you know?

What’s going to be the effect on the relationship if I disappoint them? And I’ll like take the time to go through that, or I try to to try to rewire the automatic yes, the people pleasing, the overfunctioning. and slow down and just first ask me, which is my body, including my pain, what feels okay to you? What do you want to do? And

Alexandra Beller (47:59.66)
You know, then I’ll negotiate that with what I feel like this is really important, or that’s less important, or that could be punted, or somebody else could do it, or it you know, I don’t even sure it needs to be done. And slowing down lets those possibilities start to become more visible to me because I have such a knee-jerk thing of like

somebody da da da da da. Okay, I’ll do this. Okay. And it fits in my schedule. And it’s just like if I don’t slow down, I don’t start to see some of the outside the box possibilities. You know, like actually what if we let go of the newsletter? I feel like nobody’s been reading it. It takes three hours a week to write. I don’t feel like it’s getting traction. We’ve tried it for eight months. What if we just dropped the newsletter entirely and stopped producing it?

What if we try that for six months and see how it goes and maybe use that time for XYZ? And so I won’t have that thought because it takes, you know, it takes for me slowing down and really like thinking slowly through the pros and cons and other people and my needs and other people’s needs and the future and the past. And you know, it takes time to do that. And if your automatic thing is yes, slowing down.

To let the possibilities become visible, to renegotiate expectations with yourself and then eventually with other people. And sometimes that also requires letting go of a story that the world has told you about like what success looks like, or what a body should look like, or what beauty looks, what a relationship should, you know, how much money you should have or whatever. Because I’m like, yeah, maybe I care less about this thing than I care about.

Myself, you know.

Leigh Brandon (49:54.253)
Yeah, I got three things from what you’ve just said. Set clearly defined core values that you live your life by, which includes setting boundaries. And the third thing, remember that your yes has no value until you learn how to say no.

Alexandra Beller (50:04.205)
Mm-hmm.

Alexandra Beller (50:10.987)
Mm, mm-hmm.

Leigh Brandon (50:14.031)
Awesome, awesome. And what’s next for you, Alexandra?

Alexandra Beller (50:15.073)
Mm-hmm.

well I have a book releasing in about three weeks, which I took you know on and off, but it took me about twelve years to write, so that’s probably the biggest thing. And it’s called The Anatomy of Art, Unlocking the Creative Process for Theater and Dance, and it’s a book for artists that’s meant to be like you have a mentor in the room with you.

Leigh Brandon (50:28.771)
what’s it called and what’s it about.

Alexandra Beller (50:41.879)
But you are your mentor and you’re using the book in the way that I try to mentor people just as a resonant engine to help you map yourself, right? So that’s exciting. And then my eldest is going back to college and he’s got a chronic illness. So it’s been quite a a journey to get him to school. So that that happens in a week. I think those were probably the biggest biggest things on the block.

Leigh Brandon (51:08.975)
Excellent, excellent. And where can people find more about you? Where can people find you online?

Alexandra Beller (51:13.769)
My website’s got a ton of information and free classes and essays and link to the book and all of that, which is alexandrabeller dances dot org.

Leigh Brandon (51:25.259)
Alexander, thank you so much for joining me today and thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and experience. It’s great, third time lucky but we got it done.

Alexandra Beller (51:31.287)
Thanks so much for having me, Lee.

Ha ha

Leigh Brandon (51:38.209)
Excellent. So that’s it from Alexandra and me for this week. But be sure to tune in same time, same place next week on Beyond the Pain.