Where Attention Goes, the Body Follows! IMA : PrimalAlexander™ Étude Zero
Before you read another word, try something. Right now, wherever you are, scan your body for tension. Find a place that feels tight — your shoulders, your jaw, the back of your neck. Name it silently. Now find another place. And another. Hold all of that in your awareness. Then, slowly, raise your arms into the air and bring them back down.
Notice how that felt. Heavy? Effortful? Like lifting against something?
Now do the opposite. Let go of those tension points and instead get curious about where there’s ease. Notice a place in your body that feels relatively relaxed — not perfect, just less tense. Notice another one. And one more. Now raise your arms again, just as slowly.
Something probably felt different that time. Lighter. More fluid. Less like work.
Nothing physically changed between those two attempts. Your muscles are the same. Your skeleton is the same. You didn’t rest. You didn’t warm up. The only thing that shifted was what you were paying attention to — and yet the movement itself changed.
Your body is not a machine your mind rides around in. They are in constant conversation, and you have more say in that conversation than you think.
Why this happens
Your nervous system doesn’t draw a clean line between perception and action. When you direct attention toward tension, discomfort, or threat, your brain responds by bracing — subtly activating muscles, increasing background arousal, preparing your body as if for effort or danger. This is not imagination. It is a measurable, physiological response to where you place your focus.
The field of interoception — the brain’s ongoing mapping of the body’s internal state — helps explain this. Your brain doesn’t simply receive neutral reports from your body. It actively predicts what the body will need and shapes its responses accordingly. Prime it with signals of tension, and it predicts more tension. Prime it with signals of ease, and the whole system relaxes its background grip.
Try it properly
The experiment works best when done slowly and deliberately. Here is the full version, which you can use anytime and share with others.
Round one — Tension scan
Sit comfortably with your hands resting on your thighs.
Find a place in your body where you feel tension, tightness, or discomfort. Name it internally.
Find another such place. And another. Let your awareness fill with these sensations.
Keeping that awareness, very slowly raise both arms — over a count of five, one thousand at a time — until they are overhead. Then bring them back down.
Notice everything about how that felt.
Round two — Ease scan
Return your hands to your thighs.
Notice a place in your body that seems relatively easy, calm, or comfortable. It doesn’t need to be perfectly relaxed — just easier than others.
Find another place that seems easy. And one more. Pay attention to the ease that you’re experiencing.
Now raise your arms again — same slow count of five — and bring them down.
Notice the difference.
Most people feel a marked difference. The second lift tends to feel lighter, smoother, more voluntary. Some describe the arms as almost floating up on their own.
What this is really about
This exercise is not a trick, and it isn’t relaxation in the conventional sense. You didn’t breathe deeply, count to ten, or visualize a beach. You simply redirected your attention — and your nervous system reorganized itself around that new direction.
This is the core insight: attention is not passive observation. It is an active force that shapes what we experience and how we move through the world.
In chronic pain research, this principle underlies approaches that teach patients to notice what doesn’t hurt, rather than cataloguing every sensation of discomfort. In performance psychology, it informs how coaches cue athletes — toward what the places that are working easily. In PrimalAlexander™, you just did the simplest incarnation of IMA, using a change method I call CuriousThinking™.
IMA is the first of the PrimalÉtudes™, a series of daily routines that, along with working in activity, are the foundation of the “homework” my students do between the group classes I teach online at PrimalLearningNetwork™.
PrimalAlexander™ is a hands-free approach to the Alexander Technique that uses inhibition and curiosity-directed attention to help students to release habitual patterns of excess tension so that they can move with greater ease, power and effectiveness.
The practical implication is straightforward, if not always easy: before a difficult task, a hard conversation, or any moment that asks something challenging of your body, where you direct your attention right before moving has a powerful effect on the quality of the movement. Scanning for what is wrong will prime your system for effort and resistance. Scanning for places that seem easier — even slightly, even imperfectly — will prime it for ease and lead to a much more coordinated and effective performance.
You won’t always be able to choose your circumstances. But you can, with a little practice, learn to choose what you pay attention to within them. And that, as it turns out, can change things quite a lot for the better.
Very cool!
Amazing effect - effortful spread on 1st lift of arms versus light easy feeling on 2nd lift & ease stayed when I sat back resting my arms on my chair arms. Spot of mild pain at the top of my spine disappeared.