 do you ever think about your posture? Do you begin or end your days with any kind of pain or tension? Well, you can begin to change that today with this video. I'm going to be interviewing Grayson Harris Young. I'll give you his background in a moment, but he's going to be showing us some mindfulness and guiding us towards relieving that kind of pain and tension in our bodies and becoming more friends with our bodies. So let me share with you his bio and then I'm going to bring him on. So Grayson's company is called Whole-Bodied Coaching and there's going to be a link in the notes of the video to more information. He creates regular content on his Facebook page, for example. And Grayson's all about learning how our bodies work so that we can have a better relationship with ourselves. Grayson is a mindful posture and movement coach and a certified Alexander Technique teacher. And he specializes in helping people overcome chronic pain and tension. He creates regular content to help people be best friends with their body and maintains a private practice in San Diego. He can also do consultations virtually via video chat. And Grayson is a client of mine in my group coaching program. Grayson, great to have you here. Hi, George. It's great to be with you. Yeah. So I'm really looking forward to what you're going to share today because I know that it can help me as well. So what is one of the biggest misconceptions people have or myths that they have about how do we feel good in our bodies? Yeah, absolutely. The biggest myth that people have about how to feel better in their bodies is that they believe that they need to do more or that they somehow themselves are not doing enough or are enough themselves. So almost everybody that comes and works with me, typically the people who come and work with me, they've worked with a whole bunch of different practitioners in the past, but almost all of them have at one point for another been given exercises and stretches and things like that that they're told that they're supposed to do to make themselves stronger. And the issue with exercises and stretches and things like that is, and they're fine, there's nothing wrong with them. But they often don't really touch on the underlying problem, which is how are you actually coordinating your body? How are you actually holding yourself? What are your habitual patterns of tension, things like that? And the assumption that somehow we're too weak or that we need to be doing more often gets in the way of that because when we start to do a whole bunch of exercise or we start thinking about our strength, we start to think that we need to actually hold ourselves tighter. And it can be very counterproductive to the actual experience of living in your body in a way that feels good to you. Yeah. And so I guess one of the things I grew up learning from my dad about good postures, you know, chest out, you know, kind of next straight and like puffed out, that kind of. So is that, is that good posture? No. But that is the most common thing that people think about posture. So if the most common misconception about generally feeling better in your body is that you're too weak, the most common misconception about posture is that it's something rigid that takes a lot of work that oftentimes we're too weak to be able to do because if you do that, if you lift your chest and you pull your head back like this, and you do this, and I invite anyone watching to try this on right now, really do your best posture. If you do this for more than, you know, 15 seconds, you're going to start to notice something, right? For many people, it's going to be fatigue. For some people, it's going to be pain right away, but it's not sustainable. And the truth about good posture is that it's something that should be effortless. Good posture is about allowing your body to function the way that it's meant to. It's using it to its best effect. And very clearly, this is not to your best effect, right? If you were to think about a wild animal doing that, the only time a wild animal might lift and puff themselves up like that is if they were bluffing for a fight, right? If they were faking something to make themselves look bigger. But then if you were to actually watch them and they had to get into a fight or they had to run away, they would never fight like this. They would never run like this. It's completely ineffective. And in fact, that's where some of this bad posture stuff comes from. It comes from a fight or flight response. So in our lives, we experience a great deal of stress. And unlike wild animals, our stress is chronic, right? We have to deal with social situations. We have to deal with bills. We have to deal with business, family, whatever the stresses in your life are. And they're around us all the time. But our bodies and our brains evolved to deal with stress differently. We evolved to deal with those momentary fight or flight responses. And we don't have that anymore. So we often don't actually have the opportunity to let go of that innate response, whether it's to puff up or to actually tighten and bear down. And it becomes something that flies under the radar. It becomes an unconscious habit and those things accumulate over time. And so we end up with all of these underlying patterns of tension. And we're not usually even aware of them, except that they make us feel bad. So with posture, one of the most common things people do, right, is they tend to be collapsed forward in some way, right? But what we think of this, excuse me, what we often think of when we notice ourselves collapsing down is we think, oh, I'm not doing enough work to pick myself up. My core is too weak or my back isn't engaging. But the truth is, you have muscles in the front of you. And those muscles are actually active here. They're closed and they're pulling you down. And when we wrench ourselves up into quote unquote, good posture, that's actually one muscle group fighting another muscle group. It's co-contraction. So when you're not releasing that thing pulling you down in the first place, no wonder it's exhausting to sit up straight because you're literally fighting yourself. Wow. That's interesting. And it makes me think about how this idea can apply, of course, I think about business and marketing. It's like there's this thought about posturing. It's kind of like puffing ourselves up to make ourselves look bigger or more advanced than we might actually be. And that creates tension. It creates tension and it creates stress and it's not natural. And it's not natural for movement and flexibility and kind of responding more gracefully to situations. It's just not as effective is the truth. Yeah. That's right. And so let's talk about tension. So what is muscle tension? I mean, I think that's one of the things that you talk about with your clients work on. What is muscle tension? And is it a good thing, bad thing? How do we work with it? Yeah. So all muscles can do is they can contract and they can relax. That's all they do. And so there's nothing wrong with muscle tension. If we didn't have muscle tension, we wouldn't be able to be upright. We wouldn't be able to move. It would be ridiculous not to have muscle tension. The issue is when we have unnecessary muscle tension. And particularly when we have muscles that are tense, that are not meant to be doing that work, especially all of the time, which is most of us. And we all have our different problem areas, but most of us fall into that in one way or another. And the thing with muscles though, is that they don't have a mind of their own. They only do what your nervous system tells them to do. They only do what your brain tells them to do, what your mind tells them to do. And this isn't always a conscious thing, because a great deal of your coordination and your thinking is unconscious. But it can be a conscious thing. And that's how you can start to get ahead of muscle tension. So if we start to accept that muscles don't have a mind of their own, and there's something we can maybe do about it, then we have to start to think about how do we think in order to change our muscle tone? So to go back to the example of slumping forward being pulled down, one way that we often think of trying to release muscle tension is we basically pull on the other side. That's what we're just talking about. So we might lift ourselves up here and somehow that's supposed to lengthen these muscles. But actually muscles can be tight and fight each other and do it for quite a long time. And it doesn't really work. It's also why some stretching is not very helpful, because it's possible to stretch while still contracting muscle. So I can make this a lot of work to just lower my arm, or I can do it quite passively. And you can probably even see a quality difference to that on the camera. So if we go back to this example of being pulled down, and if we think, okay, first, I'm not going to do my normal thing, which is to pick myself up. Because if we do this, we've already lost. So the first thing to do is to pause and notice our habit that we have in response to the habitual tension and let that go. So this is just where my body wants to be right now. Fine. All right, I don't really want to stay here, but what do I do with it? What do I do with this muscle tension? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to think about it. So I'm literally going to think to myself, what would happen if I let the front of my body release? And immediately I start to breathe. And I get a little bit lighter. And I'm going to think to myself, what if I allow myself to be upright? What if I just let myself come up? And all of a sudden, I've let go of most of what was pulling me down in the first place. And so I've righted myself naturally. And that's basically how we can learn to change muscle tension. But to go to the principles of how we think to release muscle tension, probably everyone who's watching, maybe you too, George, has been told at some point, don't, don't worry, don't stress. Stop being anxious, you know, any of those things, it's like, don't think of an elephant like you do it. It's not very helpful. So it's not very helpful to think don't be tense, right? That's not something that's very actionable. It's not very manageable to do. And in fact, normally makes us more tense and more frustrated that we're out of control, which then just makes things worse, comes a feedback cycle. So instead, we want to think to ourselves with directions. We want to give ourselves things to not exactly do because what we're actually doing here is undoing. But we want to think of things that allow us to undo. So directions, like literal directions like in space, like I want to go up. But I'm just thinking them, I'm not going to make myself go up. That's the, that's the trick you have to observe. What happens if I just think about it versus me making it happen? And to some people, it sounds a little, you know, a little airy fairy, a little woo woo. Well, it's, it's interesting what you said because it's what you're saying is that our thoughts are more connected to the movements of our body than we realize. Yes. And that when we, it's like, instead of having to be so kind of consciously moving everything, it's like we're, we're one between our thoughts in our body and we're just, right? Yeah, exactly. One metaphor that I use sometimes is our bodies are more like flying a really fancy giant airplane, like a 747. So a pilot in a 747 is not controlling every aspect of that plane, right? They have access to all of these different instruments and controls and they, they get all of the information coming in from their, their senses, but really they're just making sort of executive decisions and the plane mostly takes care of itself. And if the pilot of a 747, we're trying to micromanage every little part of flying that plane very quickly, they would at least become exhausted if, if not fail entirely, right? You need that instrumentation. And it's kind of the same with our brains. We, we actually can't just control every little muscle and make every little thing happen how we want it to. And if we do try to do that, it very quickly becomes exhausting. It's much less effective. And instead, what we have to do is use our minds, use our brains to consciously direct ourselves, but not try to micromanage it, not try to control it. And what I was just saying about it feeling a little bit airy-fairy is it sounds that way, but it really isn't because again, our muscles only do what our brains tell them to do. And if we're going to use our conscious thought to direct things or at least if we're English speaking, our brains speak English, right? If we tell ourselves to do something with words, that's comprehensible to the lower levels of the brain. And it's because it's specific, it's something they can actually, the lower levels of the brain can actually try to do as opposed to something like don't be tense, which isn't an actionable phrase for the brain. So overall, I mean, as we go through our day, how do we be? How do we move with more ease? Yeah, it's back to those same principles that I kind of mentioned before. It's the ability to first become aware of what you're doing, right? To notice the habits that you have, both the underlying habits of tension and your response to those things. And then to be able to press pause on it so that you can give yourself a new direction. And it sounds a little complicated. It seems like how could I possibly do that in my day to day life? But in fact, it's just a momentary thing of, oh, I just noticed I wasn't breathing. Oh, and I tensed up a little when I noticed it. What if I let that go? Excuse me. And I let something go indeed. And look, there I'm breathing again, right? It's actually quite quick. And if we just throw out these little thoughts of direction of even something as simple as what would it be like if I was a little easier right now? And we just let it land, right? It can make a big difference, especially when you start to notice how often you're preoccupied with the things that are going wrong in your body. So it's not just the magic of that thought. It's also the replacement of the thought of, oh, my shoulder is really bothering me. So when my shoulder is really bothering me, what would it be like if I, instead of starting to pull it, which is not helping anything, if I let that go? And I think, oh, what would be easier in my body? Oh, there I let something go, right? And so I'm a little less focused on what's going wrong. You know, what's amazing is I woke up this morning with a bit of forearm strain for the pain. And when you just said that, I was like, oh, what if I was more easy about this? And like, I feel like the pain went away because I feel like I've been fighting it all morning, kind of like consciously and subconsciously fighting them, like, oh, this is not right. And I must do something about it. I must stretch it or something in this way. And just having you guide us through the moving with more ease, it's like, oh, doesn't have to be that strained. And that's just incredibly common, is the truth of the matter. Yeah. And with my clients, again, many of them have, you know, really serious pathological issues. And yet by shifting their attention and their coordination, the symptoms of those pathologies can often be greatly reduced because so much of it comes out of how we're perceiving pain, how we're responding to it, how we're trying to fight it. And it's not always the most effective solution. So when I introduced you, we mentioned the Alexander technique, right? Tell us about that. Some people may have heard of it, and a lot of people haven't. So what is the Alexander technique? And you are a certified, you know, practitioner of it. I am. Yeah. So to become a certified Alexander technique teacher takes three years of postgraduate training. So it's pretty significant training. And it's one of these things that has just sort of flown under the radar over the last like hundred years. And our profession is a little bit to blame for that. We're not the greatest communicators often. But what it is, is basically the most effective way of changing habits of how you're coordinating your body that's ever come around. And the research, the clinical research that exists around it is really supportive, especially for issues of chronic pain. Yes. Well, that's great. And what is, you know, like how does, how does somebody use it? Or is that, yeah, give us a bit more picture of like, if, so people learn that technique with you, like in private sessions, how does that work? Yeah. So typically it's taught in private sessions one on one, although there are different models of teaching coming out, group classes, remote things done digitally, things like that. And it's fundamentally an educational process. So it's not really about a practitioner, like me or somebody like that, trying to fix you. So much as it is about teaching you how your body works and how you can coordinate that yourselves. So those principles that I mentioned of awareness, inhibition or pausing and direction, that's basically the Alexander technique. And it's, it's very simple to talk about that way and a little bit harder to put into practice. And so it takes a little bit of time to learn how to do it and to apply those things in your life and feel like you have some real mastery of it, which is why support from a teacher is very helpful. Yeah, absolutely. So tell, tell, tell us about what kind of client you work with, who should work with you and how, how do people work with you? Yeah. So I already mentioned many of the people that work with me have already seen a variety of people. So I work with a lot of people who are sort of at the edge of their hope with things. And, and then I also work with people who are sort of exceptional performers, musicians, actors, Aikido black belts, folks like that, who are really looking to take their performance to the next level. But the truth is, this is, it's transformational for people just in their everyday lives. And so I would love to take it beyond just the, the hope of last resort and the extreme of, of the edge of performance, more to just everyday folks who are, you know, having trouble picking up their kids and grandkids who are worried about being able to get up and off the floor when they're older, who are, you know, experiencing that, that pain that you described in the morning when they, when they go to type in their keyboards and they wake up stiff. And it doesn't take that much to make big changes, especially if you compare it to, and there's nothing wrong with these things. But if you're somebody who goes for a massage every week or every couple of weeks, and it's great if you really enjoy that massage, but if you're doing it just to keep yourself going, learning how to change those things that are underlying can give you such a great grasp of control over, over your life and your body. Speaking of massage, I don't go as often as I would like to actually, but none of us do. But is it, is it, is it a good, I mean, of course, there's different types of massage, but any, any opinions about that, I mean, guidance on, you know, what type which might look for what, what could be dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So in general, massage is fine to good, right? If you like it, great. And a lot of people get a lot of really wonderful relief from massage, they, it feels really wonderful to them. And that's, that's perfect. The issue comes when you become dependent on it, and dependent on it in a way that you don't like, right? As far as types of massage to avoid, I, I'm personally a believer that if massage is extremely painful, it's really probably not doing you many favors. But besides that, if it's something that you enjoy, then, you know, go, go all in. The one exception to this that I will add is self massage. So self massage can also be perfectly fine. But if you're somebody who is in a, who's dealing with a lot of pain or a lot of tension, and it's one of the main ways that you're trying to resolve that. In fact, when you, if you've got one of those like hooks or something, when you're, when you're doing that all the time, you can actually be making things worse because you're starting to sensitize yourself to the, to the pain and the experience of that. And so sometimes if people are really sort of addicted to that kind of self manipulation, sometimes it's helpful to, to back that off and see if it's really helpful or not. Right. That's a good point about the sensitization, because I have had kind of like back massagers, you know, and it's like, yeah, it's like, you kind of get used to more and more pressure and exactly. So one of the things I want to talk about is your, your, your content, you know, you, you put out some great videos on a regular basis. And one of the characters in your videos is, is Max. Yeah, this guy back here. That's awesome. So I love that you have this kind of partner in your, in your videos. So I, I encourage folks to go and check out your Facebook page and watch some videos. So you work with people virtually as well, but you, you are in your offices in San Diego, California. So people can, if anyone is local or ish can work with you in person, but you work with people virtually also. And how does that work? You want to talk about that a bit? Yeah, I do. And it is a bit different. So in person, I can use my hands to provide information and guidance. And when we're digital, all I can use is my vision and my, and my words to help provide guidance. So it, so it really is a different experience. That said, so I would say that the work that I do in person is probably better than the work that I'm able to do digitally. But the difference that it can still make in the ability to coordinate is, is massive, right? So if the ideal thing would be if I could find a colleague for somebody in their area, I would love to be able to send them their way and maybe provide other support around that. But for many people, that's not possible. There really aren't very many of us. And so in that case, it is possible to do training with people where I'm able to observe what they're doing, provide feedback, because that that's the biggest thing actually is that we're often not aware of the patterns that we have, or we're not able to be aware of the way that we're thinking and how that's coordinating us. So it's helpful to have outside feedback. And I can do that remotely. I don't know if that answers your question exactly. Yeah. So people should contact you anyway, and you'll, you can either refer them or you could work with them virtually. Yeah. The most important thing to me is that people are taken care of. So I came to this work myself because of really debilitating chronic neck pain. And I know, I know how powerful it is for people. And I also know how I know, I know what it's like to live in that place. And so it's most important to me that people are taken care of. The other way that people can work with me is I do live videos on my Facebook page and I'm more than happy to answer questions either live or in the comments after the fact. Obviously it's not always enough. Sometimes people need more individualized attention, but it's a really good starting place. And people often get kind of surprising, even surprising to be benefits from that. Well, I believe in investing in oneself. And this is one of the, you know, in physical health and well-being is one of the best investments we can make because it translates into everything else. So yeah, it is a good investment in my opinion. And it's worth it. So, Grayson, thank you for sharing with us today. And I hope if anyone is watching and finds benefit or finds this interesting, definitely check out Grayson's website. I'll hop that in the notes of the video. Actually, let's actually say it. Spell it out. Spell it out. Anyway, it's whole bodied. Actually, what is your URL again? It's whole bodied.com. Whole, okay. W-H-O-L-E bodied. B-O-D-I-E-D.com. Yeah, easy. Okay. And then, of course, the, the Facebook page, which is where you put most of your content is Facebook.com slash whole bodied. So, same thing. All right. Thank you so much, George. Yeah, thank you.