In this episode of Create the Space, we welcome Alexandra Beller, a visionary choreographer, director, educator, somatic practitioner, and former principal dancer with the renowned Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Together, we explore the body as our first home—and how movement, somatic awareness, creativity, and embodied listening can help us understand ourselves more deeply. Alexandra shares her journey from the professional dance world into a powerful practice of teaching, mentoring, healing, and guiding others through movement analysis, authentic creative inquiry, and body-based wisdom. We move through body image, resilience, artistic identity, nervous system awareness, creativity, empathy, and the connection between our inner landscape and the spaces we live in. We also explore how slowing down, listening to the body, and honoring our lived experience can become a path toward healing, self-trust, and transformation. For anyone interested in somatic healing, dance, embodiment, creative process, Feng Shui, body wisdom, nervous system regulation, or the relationship between our homes and our inner lives, this episode offers a grounded and deeply moving invitation to come home to yourself. Welcome to Create the Space.
Alexandra Beller (MFA, CMA) is a choreographer, director, educator, and former member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. As Artistic Director of Alexandra Beller/Dances, she has created over 40 dance theater works internationally. Her teaching spans Princeton University, Laban Institute, and global residencies. In theater, she’s worked Off-Broadway and regionally, with credits including Lincoln Center and A.R.T. Alexandra is currently writing two books: The Embodied Conductor: A Somatic Approach with Laban and Bartenieff (Release TBA 2027) and The Anatomy of Art (Bloomsbury, Fall 2026). She blends somatic practice, rigorous inquiry, and creative freedom to help artists deepen their process and unlock new possibilities.
website: www.alexandrabellerdances.org and book site: https://www.anatomy-of-art.com/, but if space and format allow,
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thelabanista
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8suG0TLGKqufov8IpqLrKw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-beller-0a56a57/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexandrabellerdances/
speaker-0 (00:01)
Hello friends, I hope you're doing so well on this beautiful day, evening, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, welcome. Today's conversation is with Alexandra Beller. She is a choreographer, a director, an educator, and a former member of the Bill T. Jones Arnie Zane Dance Company. She blends somatic practice, rigorous inquiry, and creative freedom to help artists deepen their process and unlock new possibilities. I really loved talking to Alexandra. We had a little...
reminiscing time about the dance world in New York City. And we really explore the body and the somatic experience of being human and how we can work with that to shift and change our energy. And when we're talking about feng shui, we're talking about the home as a larger body, right? So our own personal chi is the most powerful energy in our home. So it's so important to work on that layer as well. Welcome, Alexandra. I'm so happy you're here.
Good morning, Alexandra. How are you today? yeah, well, we were chatting a teeny tiny bit beforehand. We don't know each other at all, by the way, guys. So we're all going to get to know each other together. ⁓ And I know where you're talking to me from, at least. But let's just start with a little bit about who you are, all the biographical information to set the stage.
speaker-1 (01:02)
Hi. I'm doing well.
Okay, I currently wear a lot of hats, but they, to me, are all connected by a through line.
⁓ that I choreograph and direct mostly for theater. ⁓ I teach as a guest in a lot of higher universities and grad programs. I run an education company called Alexandra Beller Dances, which used to be a performance company. But when I transitioned my creative life into theater, my dance company became really a place where I produce workshops.
⁓ I teach something called Laban and Bertini F it's a movement analysis system and a kind of biomechanical efficiency. So I teach that and that has led me into working one-on-one with clients. So I see private clients for mentorship and body care. And I'm writing two books and I have two kids.
speaker-0 (02:20)
So you're just kind of bored. Time
just drags on,
speaker-1 (02:24)
chill
and I drink iced coffee and lay in the hammock.
speaker-0 (02:29)
That's so interesting. So I don't know if my podcast people, and you certainly probably don't know this, but my background is actually kind of dance. I went to college much to my own chagrin. I did not want to go to college, but I eventually ended up in college and I wanted to be a circus performer, right? So I was like, well, what's going to help me as a circus performer? Dance or theater? And the theater department was super intimidating at the college that I went to, which was Bard College in upstate New York.
So I decided to be a dance major. So I have a dance background as well, though I was always kind of just trying. But when you said LaBonde, immediately, tell me a little bit more about that. I'm curious. We will go into all different areas. And it's so cool how you're taking dance and doing it in this really unique way to help people. It's all very interesting. We'll get into it, guys. So I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm sure you all are, too. But let's talk a little bit about that, too, like how that.
What was your origins? Ballet, modern? Tell us everything.
speaker-1 (03:29)
Yeah, OK, so ⁓ I'll just give a quick reference for Laban. He was an Austro-Hungarian choreographer and ⁓ musician and philosopher. And he wanted to make a system of notation for movement the way we have one for music. So, you know, a composer can write a score and then leave the planet and we can perform that score, you know, having never heard it exactly as he wrote it or she. But let's be honest.
⁓ And he wanted to make, Laban wanted to make a system of notation for movement that was similar. The notation system itself is not what I do, but what he had to do to create that notation system was analyze every bit of human movement towards meaning. And that's the important part for me is that what we're analyzing for is...
how humans read each other. So a lot of his work became the work of nonverbal communication, ⁓ something called action profiling and movement pattern analysis, which is another way to analyze the human body. Some of it became what is now the field of child psychology and how they analyze developmental movement. So that's a pretty amazing field, and it ended up being incredibly helpful for my work with actors.
⁓ For myself, started, ⁓ I went from form to form in dance because I didn't have a traditional dancer's body. mean, traditional dancer's body, like I was nine. But still, I was bigger than what they thought a nine-year-old should be in a dance class. So they didn't treat me well. ⁓ So I thought, ⁓ you know, that's because I'm at the Gram school. I'll go to Joffrey. So then I went to do ballet, of course.
you know, anybody could have told me that's not going to be better. So then I went to jazz and that was better. And I was taking classes. was, you know, 15, 16 years old in New York, taking classes, open classes with 20, 30 year olds. And it was the eighties that I was taking classes with people who were like, you know, the Janet Jackson dancers and the Madonna dancers. And I was like, that's all I want to do is, you know, be in music videos with Abdul and Janet Jackson.
but I felt like I didn't quite have my technique together. So I went to college to go get feel more trained. And then of course, when I went away to college, I became a weirdo and you know, a weirdo dance theater, modern dancer. And I was lucky enough when I graduated to pretty quickly get the job that, you know, everyone said I would never get, which was a big company position in a big dance company.
which was Bill T. Jones. And so I toured with him for seven years. ⁓ of course that was a big road shift and a big surprise for me because growing up in dance, everyone had said like, I mean, you can dance for fun, but you know that you have no chance of having a real career in dance because you don't look like a dancer. And they were not incorrect.
I did not look like a dancer that had gotten a job in a big company to date. But, you know, there's always a first person. So, you know, I was the first woman to get a ⁓ major company position in this country without having a thin body.
speaker-0 (06:59)
Wow. My mind is spinning because part of me is down memory lane with you because I used to, as a teenager, go to, you know, to Stapps and Broadway dance some of it.
speaker-1 (07:11)
Yeah, those were my places that when I say I was studying with Madonna's dancers, it was at steps. Yeah.
speaker-0 (07:17)
above
fairway market on the Upper West Side. And I remember I had this, you know, I want to talk a little bit about the body thing because I have this, I had a similar experience. you you guys can't see us right now, but we have somewhat different body types, I would say. However, we're both not rail thin ballerinas with, I don't know what your feet are like, but mine aren't perfect. ⁓ And I was more of like a, I had like a gymnast build. Like I was strong and, ⁓ you know.
and not flexible. That was my Achilles heel. I was not flexible, could not do a split to save my life. I somehow became a circus performer and forced my body into doing that, but I have the injuries to prove it, because I'm not naturally built that way. I'm just going to share this really ridiculous memory, because it's kind of funny. I always, and that led me into a period with my own body, and I have this crazy memory of being in the Broadway Dance Center locker room, which was fun, and this rail thin, and guys, so.
for those of you who didn't grow up going there, you would, like you said, you would be in class if you were 15 with people that were in their 60s because it was just an open school. And this 60 or something year old woman, she must have been 50 or 60, just eating with this teeny tiny fork, eating this can of tuna, like out of, know, eating tuna out of this can and she was thin. And I thought to myself like, that's what I should be looking like to be here. So how did that affect you? Like, did you come out?
somewhat unscathed, was that very hard? mean, from where you're sitting now, it sounds like a triumphant experience. However, I'm sure there were moments that weren't, so.
speaker-1 (08:53)
Yeah, and in some ways, I think I'm actually only now as I've hit menopause, actually able to
make make this space to listen to actually some of that old material. Because I think career-wise and then family-wise, I've just been like, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, gotta keep going, gotta do the next thing, da, da, da, da. And I think, you know, from when I was a kid and, you know, pretty much just burying a lot of that material and shame and embarrassment and anger and...
hurt feelings when I was a kid, know, at the way teachers would look at me or not look at me or talk to me or not talk to me or, you know, the different kind of insults that I felt to my system. ⁓ just, I believed at the time that the strong thing to do was to like, I'm not gonna let it affect me. Nobody's gonna see me, know, nobody's gonna get me down. I'm just gonna like.
dance from my heart and I'm gonna like lay it all out on the stage and they can all go to hell. And I don't think I ever really went back and looked at that material and healed it and repaired it and had some real feeling for that kid who was really hurt and ⁓ abused by people who were supposed to take care of her.
And so now I feel like things have shifted. I can't say that things have slowed down, but I am just slowing down as I can inside menopause because it's a necessity. some of that stuff is coming up and some of it's coming up in therapy that I'm doing and just feeling back into some of that time.
that I've been doing and being like, wow, I never really had that full experience of myself back then. was so adamant that I could just push forward and be so strong and nobody could get me down. And so I actually think I'm kind of dealing with it now.
speaker-0 (11:23)
That's so interesting. Yeah, it's interesting how, you know, how our individual animals, like, take this and inhabit it, you know? Like, what I'm sure a different person would have said, like, yeah, I was barely eating and I was just kept trying to fit in and, like, your person was like, you know, F you, I'm doing this, you know? So that's so, so interesting. And I understand and appreciate and think it's super important to highlight,
it does take slowing down to deal with those things, right? And that's when those things feel safe in our bodies to come up. yeah, that's really, thank you for sharing that. all right, let's, so you go to school, you dance in this company, which is amazing, and I'm sure difficult. And tell me how you started to do the work you're doing now. Like how did that transition go from just being a performer to
you know, being more of a teacher and practitioner.
speaker-1 (12:24)
Yeah,
well, my choreography was the thing that was the bridge. So while I was a performer, I was noticing, I mean, I was often noticing in rehearsal that I would have an idea and be like, we should, no, that's not, this is not my job.
speaker-0 (12:38)
Not my pay grade, yeah.
speaker-1 (12:41)
you know what, nope, nope, nope, you should go choreograph something yourself. So I did, I started choreographing a bit while I was with Bill, but then I really had the bug to choreograph. And then paired with, I really was tired of a touring life. I'd been touring for seven years. I wanted to be able to.
have a romantic relationship and have a home that felt settled and be in one place. And then I also really wanted to choreograph. So I left the company when I was just before I was 30 and it was like three weeks before September 11th in New York. So it was quite a thing to leave and then feel like that those were all my people. I didn't have like a ton of friends outside the company because I was with them all the time.
then they were off touring and I was like, my family's gone and we're in total crisis. But that aside, I left and really hit the ground running in terms of creating work and I was just choreographing and making and trying to tour and writing grants and performing. And that was quite a while. And while I was doing that, I was teaching and really falling in love with teaching. But I felt like
I don't have as much scaffold for teaching as I want. I was a really good intuitive teacher, but I felt like magical things would happen in class and I didn't really know why. Like I was like, what did I do? did I do? Great, what happened? And I didn't feel like I had any structure or ability to like consistently know what was gonna do what.
speaker-0 (14:14)
Hmm
speaker-1 (14:25)
And I really wanted that because I loved teaching, it also, I had a lot of imposter syndrome with it and it felt insecure. So went to grad school, like a low residency grad program. And that just didn't do it. And that's when I found Laban, which is this system for analyzing human movement. And so I felt like that was going to give me, and it did, it totally did. It's such an open system where you can
all of your own aesthetics and goals and interests, it doesn't tell you any of those things. It doesn't dictate any kind of style or quality or anything like that. It just gives you a way to talk about it. ⁓ And not diagnostically. It doesn't give you a way to talk about it the way we talk about, say, mental illness.
I think there are lot of beautiful ways we talk about mental illness, but we also do this like labeling that sometimes pigeonholes people and Laban doesn't do that to movement. It just is like this totally neutral field, which, you know, I feel like suddenly I feel like that would be such a beautiful way to deal with our mental health if we actually just had this, you know, like.
an INFJ, know, like a Myers-Briggs thing, but like way more comprehensive and you had like 50 things and it's like social things and executive function things and anxiety things and perspective and optimism. And you just had this, you know, kind of three-dimensional profile of your inner landscape rather than like, you've got depression, anxiety and your OCD and your, know, and those things can be helpful, but.
I also think they can be reductive and sometimes limiting. I really appreciated learning about my neurodiversity and it has really helped me know myself and map myself better. And I noticed with clients sometimes they feel ⁓ reduced by diagnoses that they receive. And sometimes our work together is to bring them back into their fullness and
their sense of being able to define themselves.
speaker-0 (16:41)
Interesting. And what do people, you know, what do people normally come to you for? How do people come to you like with your one-on-one work and things like this? How they find you?
speaker-1 (16:54)
It's so
many different things, honestly. ⁓ Some people come to me for kind of what feels like at the moment, a purely physical thing. I don't think anything's purely physical. So, you know, we quickly discover that this thing that you've been feeling in your dance practice where you're having trouble with this hip is actually... ⁓
you never really got that head-tail connection in your developmental movement. And so we're gonna go back into that. But when we go back into that, we find that there's actually an aspect of like, you didn't really get cradled as much as you might have when you were little. And there's a real sense of longing in your back body. And we start to work on that. And sometimes some real emotional material comes out. And then suddenly your head-tail connection comes back online and we can progress. you know, it can be really physical work like that.
people come to me around their pedagogy. One higher education professor came to me and she's like, I just have been like getting some feedback from students and I'm surprised by it and it's not positive and I really wanna figure out like what's going on with my teaching and.
or I'm sick of my teaching or I'm sick of the way I make art. I'm tired of doing things the way I do them. I wanna do them in a new way. Or I don't know what I wanna do with my career. I'm not happy in my job. I have this other, I don't know what to do. Should I apply for tenure or should I like go off and be an artist? And can we talk about my options? ⁓ So sometimes it's more like career life stuff. Sometimes it's real embodied stuff. To me, it's always gonna.
touch the body in some way. And if I'm sitting down on a Zoom with somebody really talking about their career path, we're not necessarily working on old maternal loss material, right? At the same time, I'm always gonna be checking in with them about their intuition and their sensed experience of things and where they feel things in their body and what their fear is about this
path versus that path. So I'm still always gonna be at least in some way asking the body to help us make decisions. And then there can, you know, there's, I do live sessions, but I do a lot of virtual work. So in the live session, sometimes there's touch, you know, if that's part of our agreement and feels useful to the person, ⁓ just in terms of like being able to help like.
hold the bone or give a little bit of feedback about directionality. ⁓ Sometimes people will come to me post injury to try to heal something. But again, there's going to be emotional material in there because injuries are so tender.
speaker-0 (19:45)
Yeah, absolutely. And it just really makes me feel like how often, you know, I feel this way a little bit about my work and I'm curious if you feel this way about your work. Or you're just, I'm speaking the first person. That's one of my pet peeves. I don't know if anyone knows this about me, but when people, everybody does this and it's just a cultural thing, we all speak in the you, right? But I always try and catch myself because actually I'm talking about myself here, not you.
often feel about my own work, you know, someone will be sharing something they're going through. And I'm thinking to myself like, just wish I could get into your space and help you work with your space to support what's going on. Like, I'm curious if you feel that too of like, just wish I could help you get into your body because I feel like they're both things that people often don't go right to, right? It's like, give me the manifestation practice, give me the supplements, give me the diet, give me the, you know,
whatever, give me the therapy even. I'm not knocking any of these things, by the way. These are all wonderful things, but I do feel that there's this fundamental nature to what you're talking about of, I can't remember who said this quote, but the issue is in the tissue, right? And it's this, ⁓ I'm doing an infinity. Yeah, exactly, it's this infinity-like thing where it's like.
speaker-1 (21:03)
symbol.
speaker-0 (21:10)
things in the body feed how we feel, how we feel feed the things in the body, right? So it's just, you know, I'm sure it's sometimes frustrating, you know, that there's not as much. I mean, I think somatic experiencing and somatic work is like coming online a bit more now, but it's just starting to break. Whereas I feel like you and I probably feel like the sort of the fundamental nature of what you're talking about.
speaker-1 (21:37)
I feel hyperbolically about the body. mean, hyperbolically to the level at which there's all of this traumatic material happening in the whole world. I mean, I can stick to this country right now, but of course, cross any ocean and we are gonna find more of similar trauma.
of humans hurting other humans and humans not being able to live with other humans. And really, I just think it's humans not being able to live with ourselves because we are separated from our authenticity. And if we were like really in our body and we looked at another human child, whether that child was another culture, another color, another religion, whatever, we'd be like,
That's a whole human being and like an innocent little human being that I don't want hurt and I can feel that in my body. I don't want anybody hurt. But we're so detached from our bodies. I think that level of empathy is just gone from a lot of bodies except when they're in close.
energetic proximity to people. Like they have that kind of empathy for the people that they can see with their eyes right in real space, which is like their family, whatever it is, their church, you know, their neighborhood, their school. ⁓ And that's it. Anybody that they can't like see and touch, they're not feeling that kind of empathy for because the body's just not resonating, you know, at that deeper level.
And I don't mean to get too woo about it, I. But I do feel like if we, you know, my kids ask me like, if you could like make one change or, you know, some like, would you rather question that just like empathy, if we could just like drastically dial up the empathy in every human body and the sense of self like. And, you know, of course, like once we have a sense of ourselves, we also need some kind of vehicle to deal with shame.
speaker-0 (23:18)
Go, go woo woo.
speaker-1 (23:44)
because that's the next level of like why I think we're hurting each other so much. Especially right now in this country, I just think we're acting out a lot of shame cycles. And we can talk for ages about the sociological reasons and the religious reasons and all the different reasons why we have so much shame in our bodies. But I think in this country and a lot of other countries,
the education system pretty quickly, like at around age five, just shuts us off from our bodies. there's, unless you go seeking it out, our culture does not reinvest you in your body. It may like give you access to it in these very specific, like you can go work out, do martial arts. Maybe you can get into some kind of like,
more artsy practice, you know, like that's a little weird and sexual and, you like, so like five rhythms or ecstatic dance, that's already going too far, But even those, they're great, they're cathartic, they will give you some connection, but like there's so many levels of deeper work to actually, you know, sit inside shame and say like,
Yeah, this is part of me too, that's okay. I can walk around with this and I can allow people even to experience part of this and at a certain point it'll dissipate because it doesn't do well in the light. Shame doesn't do well in the light. And I just think if we could be doing that work, I'll just say as a country, I won't speak for the world, but.
we could dissolve some of this BS that we're dealing with right now with the intolerance for other people and lack of being able to live gently and kindly with other people having their autonomy.
speaker-0 (25:56)
100%. And what this brings me to is something that I'm super passionate about, which is, I don't love this word, I'm going say it anyway, balance, because, I mean, there's no such thing as balance. I don't believe you can actually live a balanced life. I think that's crap. know, there's seasons of life where different things are more prioritized than others. But the balance that I'm referring to is I'm not really against technological advancement on like, know, intellectual level. But what I do think is really important is that
And what I am trying to do in my work and in these conversations is help people understand that the further we go with that, the more we have to go back to nature, right? The more we have to connect with our bodies, which is nature. We are nature, right? We are animals. We are part of nature. Technology isn't really part of nature. So, you know, we, I am with you. It's like the more...
further we go along down the path that we're going on, the more we need. The more we need sun, the more we need feet on the ground, the more we need breathing, the more we need dancing, the more we need our bodies. So I really hear you and I really agree. And I think it's so cool and beautiful that you've had this flow in your career of like, you know, and I relate because I was a performer as well and I went in a different, you know, a different direction, but in a similar way, it's like,
I really think that everyone, adults, children, should be forced and should have, it should be paid for them and found for them to take like an improv class or a clown class or like some sort of movement class because they're, in my opinion, is no more confronting thing than an improv or clowning class. Like it is so confronting.
speaker-1 (27:42)
The thing is, like, we wouldn't have to force anybody to do anything if we stopped forcing them to sit still and look ahead and be quiet when they're five and six years old. That is exactly what children are doing, you know, by.
by the nature of them. And if you look at babies, just like, their eyes are wandering, their heads are wandering, their mouths are hanging open. And they're not that much different when they're five. They've learned to pull themselves together a little bit, but still they're just like, what's that? What's over there? Why is this? And that's how we're meant to develop. That is our natural emotional, social, spiritual, physical evolution. We're still discovering tactily
and experientially, and then at about five or six, which is, mean, five or six, that's so little. It's such a tender little age where like, sit down, don't talk, your eyes in front of you, don't touch, don't make noise. And it's like prison. And, you know, even really great, my kids benefited from some really great New York public schools and I'm really grateful for them.
And still, like, ⁓ 100 % this happened to them. ⁓ And I think unless you, you know, have the privilege and opportunity to do some, really, you know, Waldorf-y, like, we're in the woods barefoot and learning about earthworms, then pretty much all the kids are getting this same, and I'm going to say trauma, same trauma. And it's actually physically a lot of what I work on with adults is... ⁓
something they work on in something called Alexander technique, is like freeing the head from the spine is a big thing that I work on somatically with people in Barton. And I can't describe how challenging it is for adults to truly let their head release from their spine. And then what happens once we're able to do that? Because if you just think about it, like anatomically,
speaker-0 (29:26)
So I'm gonna cut this, but.
speaker-1 (29:53)
you've got this brain and your brain goes into your ⁓ cerebral spinal fluid, your spinal cord, and it's housed by this dura, which is like a sack, right? And that's going down the middle of your spine and that's feeding every nerve in your body. And then of course there's blood flow going up to your brain, which is of course such a central part of our.
It is our consciousness and central part of everything that we do. There's a lot in the gut, but there's a lot in the brain. So when we're just squeezing off a little bit of that connection between the brain and the rest of the body, whether it's like the oxygen going up to the brain or ⁓ what's coming down from the brain through the central nervous system. And we're just like squeezing it off just a little bit.
It's such a profound ⁓ place that we control ourselves. And when I am working with clients to try to get them to stop controlling the relationship between their head and their spine and to actually let their head have free roaming release. It's a very profound thing for a lot of the systems in their body.
speaker-0 (31:14)
That's really cool. And are you open? You can say no. Are you open to in a minute or two doing like a little somatic practice with us? I think that could be so cool. We'll do that in a bit guys. So don't go away. ⁓ See what I did there. ⁓ Just kidding. Sort of. But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about kids because I have a two year old and you know in our community here where I live on Long Island, there's a lot of different quote unquote schooling options. And I use quote unquote because
I know that people talk, call it school starting at 18 months, but it's just strange to me because I'm like, are they really going to school when they're 18 months old? I don't know. But anyway, that's just a thing for another day. So whatever school. And, you know, I really didn't know that I'd be thinking about that at two, but I am. And so, yeah, I'd love to just you talked a little bit more about that. But I think, you know, what is mostly true is like you said, it's like a profound
privilege to have the choice not to put our children in whatever education is available to us, right? A choice that probably a majority of people just don't have at this time for whatever reason. So I'm curious, sort of, I'm assuming your kids are older than two, because you mentioned like five and six. ⁓ Are they like in their, how old are they?
speaker-1 (32:34)
My eldest is 19. Oh wow. Is in college. And my youngest is about to turn 14. Oh wow.
speaker-0 (32:44)
Wow, cool.
Okay, so this is a very appropriate question. So what did you do being so aware ⁓ and having them go through this experience? Like, was there things you did at home to sort of counterbalance that experience, things you talked about with them? Like, any advice you have for parents who are listening to this and being like, yes, but my hands are tied, they have to go to this kind of education.
speaker-1 (33:06)
Yeah, well, I will say that my awareness of it burgeoned over the period of time, because 19 years ago, I didn't know all this. Though my first baby was an emergency C-section, and I was enough in somatics at that point to get him a little bit of developmental support. So ⁓ I had this amazing dance movement therapy. ⁓
No, she was a body mind centering person, BMC person, ⁓ which is about developmental movement. And she ran a baby class on the Upper West Side. Parents, mean, I'll be honest, moms would come with their little like sort of zero to maybe 10 month old babies. I don't think anyone was walking. Everybody was, you know, like creeping, crawling. And she would just help you with like
speaker-0 (33:44)
⁓ cool.
rolling around, yeah.
speaker-1 (34:03)
milestones, you know, we would just look at the babies and she would, it was both ⁓ educational, but you know, definitely therapeutic for the actual kids. And she'd do hands on work with a baby in the middle of the circle. And, you know, she would say, okay, like, you know, try this with your baby and here's a toy and have them reach out, but then push their heel bone and you can feel this little bit of resistance when you're pushing their heel and you want to feel like you push it until their tail starts to go and.
So we'd be working all hands on with our own babies and she would do little hands on work with your baby. So I did know to do that, which was nice. ⁓ I don't think, you know, I knew certainly didn't know what I know now, ⁓ but our home was like a dance party home and it was like, you know, sing them to sleep home. And it was like definitely a feelings at the dinner table and you know, like.
not a lot of rules in the house, lots of free space for expression and and hopefully like space for their feelings. And obviously, as with everybody, was, you know, not the mom that I would have loved to have been at every moment of my mothering. So, you know, I can't say that, like, I always did this and always made space for their feelings. But, you know, I I do think maybe compared to
some households, they had a lot of space to express themselves and be real and not agree with things and be angry about things. And so hopefully that that did something. They do both appear to me to be. Quite embodied teenagers, and they're both, you know, white boys right now, straight white boys, you know, so.
there is that pressure for them to contain and compress and, you know, be tough and all that stuff. And I see it and I hear about it from them. And I do feel like in a lot of ways they have managed to have something else happening for themselves that's about authenticity. They both have a real softness to them too. ⁓ And
⁓ empathy and ability to read a room. So I don't know exactly where it all came from. And I'm certainly not taking credit for all of it. You know, I definitely saw things that they were born with where I was like, all right, I don't I that's you. Cool. You definitely like are some kind of spiritual ⁓ magnet creature. So I'm not taking credit for it, but I do feel like it's been a
speaker-0 (36:42)
That's
speaker-1 (36:57)
a life where they did have space for expression. And I think that that has helped to some degree.
speaker-0 (37:04)
Yeah, thank you for that. And I really agree. And I also just want to assure all the parents out there that like you said, we're all doing our best, right? And my daughter's really into water right now. And it's like, ah, stop spraying the house with water. So it's hard. It's hard to.
to be the type of parent that wants to give them freedom to be themselves and to be creative. And also like when you're going through this like intense water play phase of like everything being wet all the time. So I feel you. Thank you for that. All right. Well, I want to get into this somatic thing, but I'd like to end with that. before we do that. So yeah, here's a warning, guys. So if you're driving, pause this podcast and come back and finish when you're not driving.
If you're doing anything else, just bookmark this so that we're going to do a little something at the end. But before that, I want everyone to know what's the best way of people are like, man, I need this, or I just want to know more about you, or I want to be in your world. How do people connect with you?
speaker-1 (38:11)
I have a pretty robust website. So I think most of the channels to find out more about I'm writing two books, I've got a bunch of courses. I teach live workshops. All of that is on my website, which is alexandrabellardances.org. And if you forget the whole thing, Alexandra Beller will, you know, bring me up.
speaker-0 (38:33)
Yeah, and just so you all know, as always, it'll be in the show notes. You do not have to write that down. You can just click in the show notes. All right. Well, so can we do this little like quick five minute or whatever minute thing? I'm going to just let you take it. Take it from here.
speaker-1 (38:46)
Awesome. So ⁓ if you're listening, you can either lie down or you can be seated, but you want to be somewhere where you feel comfortable and at least a good part of your weight can relax and sink in somewhere. I would invite you if it feels comfortable to put hands on your front body somewhere, maybe your chest, heart, belly, solar plexus, somewhere on the front body.
If you're lying down, that can be some weight from the front body moving into the back body. And if you're seated, hands on the front body can just be pulling a little bit of that weight of the heart downward toward the gut, toward the pelvis, toward the floor, feet, earth.
And we'll just for a moment take a few breaths at whatever level volume feels good to you. It doesn't need to be deeper than usual, but just feeling the body growing and shrinking around your breath. Feeling the bones shifting on each half of the breath. The whole body is changing. So just listening to the change that happens as you take in the space.
and feeling the change that happens when you release yourself back out into the world. I sometimes like to notice that as I take the breath into my body, I'm taking the room, the space into my body. My body at the same time is expanding out into that space. And as I release my breath back out into the space, my physical body actually retreats.
So even on each half of the breath, you're doing both this taking in and offering out. And just feeling that ecosystem of inner and outer as we're breathing. And then starting to tune in in particular to the skull, which is resting on the spine. And if you're seated, you have this vertical orientation.
can feel some of the muscles that we're using to hold the head still. And just little by little, we're listening to the work of those muscles holding the head a little firmly against the spine. And we're just seeing if any of them might be interested in pausing their work to control.
So as we're continuing to breathe, we're listening to the control between the skull and the spine.
And we're just making invitations. There is nothing to fix. There's no goal, no destination. Not trying to change anything. We're just listening and making invitations. If you like, you could let go of another ounce of control.
And while we're listening to the way the head and the spine talk to each other, I like to think of it as the head and the spine having a more consensual conversation with each other. And we're just eavesdropping on that conversation. As we're eavesdropping on the conversation between the skull and the spine, we can also check in with the jaw.
which often feels like it's part of the skull, but really is this separate joint, the mandible. And we're also listening to that joint for the possibility of releasing some of the control. So we can think about relaxing the back molars away from each other.
Relaxing the base of the tongue and the roof of the mouth.
Relaxing the opening to the throat.
And then feeling the hollows of the head relaxing. So the nostril, which goes through this hollow space of the sinus over the top of the skull, down the back of the skull, back into the throat, like a hook.
can listen to the ear canals and how they relate to that jaw, tongue, throat, sinus.
Even the eye sockets are a hollow in the face. So we're listening to these hollows and how they connect us to the world. Consensually, we take in what we want to take in.
And then checking in again with the skull, the weight of the skull and seeing if any of that control that we're still exerting might like to just pause for a moment. Just a little bit less control, letting go of a little bit more. Only as much as our whole system feels ready to do. And we're releasing any judgment about how this should feel, how it should turn out.
what the outcome should be. Just succeeding at this by listening.
And we're feeling how the skull and the spine are having this conversation. And maybe we can start feeling a little bit of the effect of that conversation all the way down in the pelvis. And if you're sitting in a chair and your head maybe got a little bit wobbly during this, then you can feel that the spine maybe has just a little bit of a sneaky serpentine.
movement, maybe it wants to just pull a little bit to one side or arc a little bit forward. Maybe the head and the spine are having a little sneaky conversation and maybe the spine wants to start just sneaking around a little bit. And then you can start feeling that right in the middle of the pelvis that the tail is doing this movement.
and the pelvis might start moving and that might start moving the shoulder blades and the back body is having a little experience and can just be in this drifty, sneaky, wandering dance, letting the head continue to have this experience of just riding on top of the skull instead of directing us.
And inside this little dance, if the eyes had been closed, we could try to open the eyes and see if we can keep the softness, the wanderiness, and start to let the eyes just wander with no agenda around the
Not necessarily attaching to anything, but just letting the eyes take...
A wandering, drifting feeling that jaw is slack and relaxed, tongue is relaxed, throat is relaxed.
Taking one...
larger than usual breath to bring this little exploration to a pause and just seeing how you feel and if anything came up.
speaker-0 (46:59)
Thank you.
Hmm
Yeah, that was really beautiful. I've never done anything like that, to be honest. And I just think it was so interesting to personally feel like the edges for me of like, absolutely not. No, I do not want to let go there. Thanks, but no, you don't have to. You know, I'm sitting, I don't have a back on my chair. My body was like, no way, not letting go. You're going to fall. ⁓ And just really noticing like feeling.
feeling my spine in a different way. That was really awesome. Thank you so much for that.
speaker-1 (47:39)
And I think that that noticing of no is one of the most important parts. And I think ⁓ one of the issues that I take with some of the, when I say like more toxic positivity oriented somatic influencers or practices where you're like, and then you let go and you'll feel this and your cortisol do this and you'll feel that. And I know they're trying to sell something, but.
they're making this expectation of how you're going to feel. And I think that that's quite coercive. And really what we're doing is just creating an opportunity to feel what is including and honestly, especially your know. And one thing that I've been learning in my own somatic practice myself is that there
I still am trying to push myself to a goal sometimes. Relax. And it's like, OK, that's not it. That's not it. It's feel. Feel what is, including I'm distracted. I'm resistant. I'm tense. I'm in pain. OK. Nothing has to change.
speaker-0 (48:37)
Ha ha!
Yeah.
speaker-1 (48:53)
There has to be consent of the whole system and it can't be just one part of me that drags the rest of me forward because that's what I'm trying to heal from. It has to be my whole body, all my parts have to consent to this moment which usually means I need to go slower. I need to slow down because there's some part of me that's not ready yet. Okay, that's okay. I'll slow down. You know, the same way that...
At the grocery store, hopefully before your toddler has the meltdown, you start seeing the sign and you're like, you know what? There's nothing that I'm going to do at this grocery store that's actually as important as you feeling safe and seen right now. So even though it's inconvenient for me and even though it's going to change the course of my day a little bit, even though I wish it were a little bit different and this is derailing some of my plans and my to-do list, I'm going to stop.
I'm going to slow down. going to get down on the ground with you. And I'm going to be real. And I'm going to let go of what I was hoping I would get done. And I'm going to have a human moment with you. But we have to do that with ourselves too. And those parts of us that are saying, no, no, I'm not. don't want to need to be heard. And we can't bully them into relaxing or healing or repairing. have to say, ⁓
Babe, yeah, sure. That makes so much sense that you don't want to. Yeah, that's okay. I'm just gonna sit here with you while you feel this much. You don't need to do anything that you're not doing, but I'm just gonna sit with you here and we'll just be together while you, you know, while you sit in your no, that's fine. I'll sit in your no with you. And then, you know.
Usually the no becomes like, maybe like a little bit. Okay, great. You don't have to, but if you want a little bit, I'll sit with you with your little bit. maybe it's a little bit more, you know, and you're just sitting together the way hopefully in your like highest parenting moments, which is not always. Hopefully in those moments we're able to really just sit with our kids and let them be real and not expect a certain kind of behavior or outcome or.
you know, response to us because they're just whole human beings. But, you know, we have all these parts inside of us that need that same kind of kindness and compassion and patience. ⁓ we often are in this positivity oriented thing being like, you know, you were like, take the pill and do the thing and do the workout and put it down and show up for the class. you know, there's nothing wrong with any of the aspirations. There's nothing wrong with any of the practices.
But if we're bullying ourselves and doing it, they're not doing, we're not full, we're not whole, you know, because part of us being dragged around like the toddler in the grocery store. And, you know, I'm not saying never push any part of ourselves to challenge, you know, towards healing. Sometimes it does take a little bit of umph. Sometimes it takes a little bit of bravery or a little, you know, resilience. And also sometimes the work is to say,
I'm canceling that appointment this morning. I'm gonna stay in bed. I don't want to and I'm not gonna.
And that's my work today is to deal with the fear that I'm not valuable if I don't show up for people or I'm not, people are gonna leave me if I don't do what I said I was gonna do or do more than I said I was gonna do. If I don't over function, I'm not gonna be worth being around. And you know, like that's the stuff that needs to be listened to in those moments where it's, you know, that's part of the no. And part of the no to like.
staying in bed and relaxing is no, I'm not gonna, people are gonna leave me and bad things are gonna happen if I don't, you know, do all the things and make my value in the world and be productive.
Okay, I hear that fear, but I'm also gonna choose to stay in bed, because I can tell it's the right decision. And I'm gonna sit with these feelings.
and they're not comfortable, but I'm gonna sit with them for a little while and just talk to them, be like, you know, what do you, what do you think is gonna happen if you cancel this networking meeting that you had today? What do you think is, you know, and it can be a CBT thing where you're like, what do you think is the worst thing that's not gonna happen? And then, you know, you can take it down the line of the logic, or you can also just like sit with the body and not necessarily attach.
the words and the story to it. think they both work for different types of people and different neuro types. For me with a neuro diverse brain, sometimes the logic and the CBT doesn't move things. It needs to be my body where I'm like, I'm feeling this anxiety about canceling. I'm like feeling a lot of panic.
And then I just like, you know, put my hands on the body or put my hands on the panic or I can move or dance or sigh or sound or speak nonstop or do some practice that lets go of it and hopefully move it and sit with it.
speaker-0 (54:32)
That was so beautiful. just, I feel like that was like a channeled moment right there. Seriously, I don't know. ⁓ Yeah, I don't know if I really want to interrupt that as much as just to say how powerful and, you know, really, I hope that you all listening can allow that to sink in because I certainly needed that. And that is my work right now. A big part of my work is
If someone reflected to my husband and I, I don't know, you guys are always going somewhere. And I was like, yep, we are, we are scheduled folk, you know? And I am aware of what that could be doing to my two-year-old. Like I, you know, for me, yes, but also for her of just like, we gotta go, we gotta get there. You know, we have a thing, have a da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And I'm sure that that comes from me experiencing that in childhood. Like I have memories of that, right? So it's so...
Yeah, we're not going to get it perfect and there are going to be the times where we're rushing them out of the house to get to the XYZ. But making space for these moments, I think can be so powerful because it doesn't have to be all perfect, right? But just making space for these inner toddler moments of like, okay, we're going to slow down. We're going to look at these 87 rocks in the driveway before we get in the car.
speaker-1 (55:52)
Yeah. And you know, as painful as it can be with a toddler to, to slow your roll, you know, and it can be painful because we're like the engines going and we're like, about the thing or the rock or the Thomas drain or the worm. But it really is one of the best lessons they can teach us to be like, nothing's really going to change if you slow down, except that.
you're gonna have access to yourself and you're gonna be able to hear things that are not able to speak at the tempo you're moving right now. know, think parts of you that are not gonna run after you to tell you how they feel, that are only gonna tell you how they feel if you slow down and you get on the floor and you look at them and you stay still for a little while. Like a cat that went under a house, you know, and you're trying to coax them out, you're not gonna coax them out by, you know,
yelling at them and trying to tug on them. It's like it's only if you slow down and take the time to really get on their tempo and feel safe.
speaker-0 (56:58)
Oh, okay, we gotta go. Thank you, Alexandra. Thank you so much. This was really impressive and amazing. guys, we will talk to you soon and you can have all the places to connect with Alexandra. Okay,
Okay, let's get into some feng shui today. So I just taught a workshop this weekend locally at Mandala Yoga, and we were really talking about spring and spring energy and the wood element. And we did a couple of rituals in the studio. was a really, you know, with this workshop, my goal was to give people a hands-on embodied experience of feng shui, a living practice of it and not just talking about it. And I think that's so important. And one of the...
things that I introduce in this class is one of my favorite definitions of this wisdom, which is breaking down the two words. So fang, wind, shui, water. So when we're working with our homes, we're working with both of these energies. We're working with fang, the wind energy, which is energy that we cannot see, but that we experience the effect of. cannot see wind, but you can experience the effect of it regularly, right? A tree falls down, your hair blowing in the breeze.
So there's this energy moving through our home, which is energy we don't see, but it has an effect on our space. We're always working on this level. And this is where ritual comes in and cleansing the home and these more energetic, more transcendental practices that are a big part of feng shui. Then there's shui, which is the energy of water when that translates to water. And that is energy that we can both see and
feel the effect of, right? So we see water and we know and watch the effect that it has on our lives. If we spill water on ourselves, we are wet. This is the more mundane work of arrangement and where things go, elemental work, all sorts of things like this that we are physically moving and doing in our homes to optimize the energy of our space. So one of the questions I always get asked, almost always, every single time is,
Is it bad to do X, Y, Z? Or should I have my bed in this position? And we can absolutely talk about that, for sure. It's a big part of a one-on-one consultation. However, if you're just starting out with feng shui, one of the best ways to really sort of understand this wisdom and start to embody it is to just take a moment to see how your space feels. Enter your space like a guest. What's the feeling in the space? What's the energy of your space?
When you come home, do you feel stressed? Do you feel like, thank God I'm home? Do you feel, what is the feeling? What do people say? What do people say when they come to your space? ⁓ And what words would you evoke to describe your own home? This is a really powerful exercise to start to understand the energy that we are living in, breathing in every single day. All right, friends, thanks so much for being here. You know where to find me. The best place to connect is on Instagram.
and send me a DM, shoot me a message. If you have a moment to rate this podcast, if you like this conversation, share it with a friend. It helps so much to let other people experience this as well. Thank you so much and I will see you next time. Bye.