Aaron Alexander – An Introduction To The Align Method

Content by: Aaron Alexander

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week, I’m excited to welcome Aaron Alexander from The Align Method to the podcast. Aaron is a pioneering manual therapist and movement coach, founder and creator of the Align Method, author of the Align Method book, and host of the Align Podcast, which has ranked #1 in Nutrition on iTunes.

Audio Version

Some questions asked during this episode:

  • Do we need to spend time in the gym to build a resilient and functional body? (11:00)
  • Can you recommend any key movements that we should all integrate into our day? (13:30)
  • What Can We Expect to Find in Your Book The Align Method? (31:30)

Get more of Aaron Alexander:

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The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.

Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.

Full Transcript

Stu

Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition. And welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long lasting health. Now I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do. Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We are into whole food nutrition and have a range

[00:00:30]

of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay. Back to the show.

This week, I’m excited to welcome Aaron Alexander to the podcast. Aaron is a pioneering manual therapist and movement coach, founder, and creator of The Align Method, which offers a modern movement guide for a stronger body sharper mind and stress proof life.

[00:01:00]

In this episode, we discuss the core principles of The Align Method, cover key movements that we should all integrate into our day and talk about how we can use light to optimize our health. Over to Aaron. Hey guys, this is Stu from one 18 Nutrition, and I am delighted to welcome Aaron Alexander to the podcast. Aaron, how are you mate?

Aaron

I’m well, I’ve got my little flex bar thing here. I’m twisting as we’re conversating. It’s not-

Stu

[00:01:30]

Well, we’ll certainly get into that a little bit later for sure. But first up all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work. I would love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Aaron

Also, my background is manual therapy predominantly and then crossed with a lot of training of various different sorts and started off with, or started a podcast about seven years ago called the Align Podcast. And was it the integration of various different experts,

[00:02:00]

ultimately, mainly around conversation of the mind body intersection in relationship. It’s kind of a focus, wrote a book called The Align Method a few years ago, and that’s essentially filling in the gaps of a healthy movement lifestyle in your daily life. So instead of movement being like a thing that you, or fitness being a thing that you do, I’m much more interested in the

[00:02:30]

way that you are, and making it be something that’s part of the way that you interact and communicate and understanding how to get the most out of your breathing patterns and visual patterns and your human experience as a movement experience. That’s really what the line method educates people on, and I’m still trying to figure it out myself, frankly.

Stu

Yeah. Work in motion. Well, that was really why I was super keen to chat to you today. And it was essentially The Align Method of just in terms of those core principles.

[00:03:00]

What are they? If you had to, if I jumped to an elevator and we had a 15 seconds, we were going up to the top and I said, “Well, tell me about The Align Method.” What would you say?

Aaron

Well, the easiest like baseline elevator pitch is making fitness, who you are as opposed to a thing that you do. So the awareness that as you’re standing here breathing, observing, reading, walking, whatever your body’s continually understate of construction. So as you are

[00:03:30]

moving through the world, you are essentially the engineer of the structure, the muscular, skeletal, cellular, hormonal expression. And you’re imprinting yourself with your actions and your thoughts as well. I would say because thoughts and form actions. So as you’re standing here in the elevator with me right now, there’s some pressure on your feet. That’s this is going beyond elevator pitch. Now this is podcast territory, but as you’re standing here in elevator [00:04:00] there’s pressure on your feet, that’s causing electrical stimulus and around the bones and the connected tissue that are experiencing that pressure, it’s called piezoelectric effect or piezo electricity.

And that is catalyzing the either development of the connected tissue in the bones around that space or the breakdown have the connected tissue and the bones around that space. You’re also setting the length of your connective tissue. You’re continually going through a process of more fancy, unnecessary

[00:04:30]

language, but it’s fun to talk about of lengthening or shortening of your muscle cells. There’s a process called sarcomerogenesis or [inaudible 00:04:40]. Sarcomerogenesis being the production of muscle cells and the lengthening say in your ankle. So your [inaudible 00:04:48] or any of that. If you’re continually in a high heeled shoe throughout the day, you will literally shorten those cords in the back of your leg

[00:05:00]

to match your environmental conditions of always being in a partially [inaudible 00:05:06] position. So you’ll structurally change the shape of your body based off of the environmental conditions that you exist within which in this case would be the shoes that you’re standing on inside of this elevator.

So it’s just, like fitness is just so interesting. And so when you start to unpack the layers of it’s like, “Wow.” Like every moment really is an opportunity to

[00:05:30]

create change. It’s whatever version of change you want and so it’s The Align Method is presenting the opportunity to have some sovereignty or autonomy of the Picasso that you want to create. You’re literally creating a piece of art right now, as you’re sitting here listening to this [crosstalk 00:05:50] or whatever.

Stu

No, I like it. And just even the thought [00:06:00] process around the shoes, it’s absolutely fascinating. I mean, I wear these things, so they’re just little minimal zero drop wide toe box. But even [crosstalk 00:06:14]

Aaron

Yeah. They’re good too. Yeah. Vivo [inaudible 00:06:20] Xero Shoes. Xero Shoes a little kind of so looking, but they do the job. It’s just having a shoe, sorry, [00:06:30] I interrupt you. But having a shoe that’s flexible, flat, but also kind of [inaudible 00:06:34] that’s the kind of the intersection. And oftentimes some of the shoes that are like healthy for your feet. They’re also [inaudible 00:06:43] that I’ve used before, it’s kind of like a form of contraception.

Stu

[crosstalk 00:06:48]. That’s right. Don’t go near that [crosstalk 00:06:51]

Aaron

From getting here around [inaudible 00:06:53] of the opposite sex.

Stu

Yeah. No, totally. So would [00:07:00] you say it’s almost like pulling us back to childhood where we were barefoot, where we were twisting and running and crawling and swinging and hanging and doing all this stuff that then seemed to be conditioned out of us as we became, I guess, almost sanitized towards this new living in cubicles and gym passes, et cetera.

Aaron

Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with cubicles and there’s nothing wrong with maternity. There’s nothing wrong with pharmaceutical drugs. There’s nothing wrong with [00:07:30] any, it’s all just a bunch of tools. There’s nothing wrong with your cell phone, nothing wrong with your computer, your couch, your chair. It’s all just a bunch of tools.

Stu

Yeah.

Aaron

And so if you placed a child who hasn’t been indoctrinated with the story of how they’re supposed to be, or how they’re supposed to think, the concept of shame has never even like graced their mindscape to date. Shame will have an effect on posture patterns or posture [00:08:00] expression. Place that person, that hasn’t kind of been institutionalized in the way that they’re supposed to be as an adult, who they think they’re supposed to be, how they think they’re supposed to stand. What’s okay. Is it okay to like play in public? Is it okay to like squat? Is okay to sit on the ground? Is it okay to see a tree and like decide like, “I’m going to climb that tree.” But there’s a time in your life where that was just okay. There was nothing wrong [00:08:30] with it. It was actually applauded and supported.

And so that creativity of the way that you exist in your body, that’s something that every person has. So if you start to kind of like summon that child-like wonder from yourself, which is totally viable. That was the function of writing The Align Method and in some part there’s a chapter all on like the physiology of play and the neuroscience and play and such.

[00:09:00]

But if you can kind of summon that part of you, then suddenly you get placed into these same modern boxes and containers, and you can be creative within them.

And you’re like, “Wow.” As you’re in that space, maybe it’s okay to like, stretch your [inaudible 00:09:17] a little bit or stretch your hip flexors out a little bit. I’m do like a little lunge here. Maybe I’m, “Oh man, I’ve been boxing. Man. Like I love boxing.” So I want to get like that torque in my hip, I’m going to drop focus on really being able to drive [00:09:30] my right hip, because I’m going to throw a hook and then I’m going to drive my left foot across because now it’s just playing with that experience of existing in your body. But most people, if you look around, they’re just kind of sitting and waiting.

Stu

Yeah.

Aaron

And then it’s sitting and waiting and looking into their phone and more sitting and waiting and looking at their phone and then they’re doing a thing. And then they’re sitting and waiting and looking at the phone. It’s just a lot of wasted moments. And like waste is a relative term. It’s just a lot of [00:10:00] moments that could have been maybe more developmental towards something that feels better to exist in like a more, I don’t know, comfortable physical experience or more creative, physical experience. So I’m just pushing back on, I’m not pushing back, but I think sometimes it’s easy to villainize modernity is like the problem of everything, but it’s like, no, no. It’s not any, it’s never the thing. It’s just, what’s the preset, what’s your perception behind the thing? Because any situation [00:10:30] you can engage with in a, I think a pretty healthy approach. I think.

Stu

So. Do you think the key to building then a resilient body, a functional body can easily step outside of a regular gym. So we don’t need this gym pass. We don’t need to think, “You know what, I’m going to go to the gym Monday, Wednesday, Thursday do three, four, all body workouts.” Things like that. I can do all of that [00:11:00] outside of the establishment?

Aaron

Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. The gym, like I have a buddy called Kelly [inaudible 00:11:07]. He did the forward for the book and I just did a podcast with him a few days ago.

Stu

Yeah. We’ve had him on the show. He’s a great guy. Definitely.

Aaron

Oh cool. Yeah. So, we’ve talked like at nauseum about this at this point. But the gym, his analogy is he relates it to like being classical ballet. So you go to the gym to reinforce these classical archetypal [00:11:30] positions to just understand mechanics of like, “What is inter abdominal pressure? How do I stabilize my spine? How do I create a connection for my foot, through my hips, through my torso, out into my shoulders, out into my hands. How do I start to come in and create the functionality and range of motion in my toe hinge in my ankle and my knees, hips, spinal [00:12:00] segments, shoulders, et cetera. So that I can go and play. And just when I, when I walk, or when I’m having a conversation with someone, when I’m just hanging out, when I’m doing my sport, when I’m working.” Whatever it may be. It’s a restorative process.

So sometimes it takes coming back to the drawing board and saying, “Cool, you’re not quite ready to play.” You came out of the box ready to play. [00:12:30] And now you’ve kind of been twisted and turned and pinged and stuck and stiff and rigidified in these different joint segments. So now let’s go in specifically, create the range of motion and the space and integrity and the intelligence in that area. And now let’s get you back into playing, but it’s the playing and playing doesn’t need to be like playing kickball. Playing could be just being creative and having a conversation with somebody.

Playing could be [00:13:00] hanging out at your home and whatever, reading in a creative fashion, whatever, just like incorporating more of this zest for life in your day to day. So how do we get the person to the functional baseline so that when they move through the world, it’s a restorative process, as opposed to one that it’s like perpetuating a forest fire inside your joints.

Stu

Yeah, exactly. No. Well, that’s kind of what we all want. [00:13:30] I think. So in terms of these maybe core foundation and functional movements that you think the majority of us could benefit from, and I’m talking about things like the swap maybe the hang, what would those be? What should I be doing or at least practicing doing every week or every day to want to meet my goals, to be essentially strong and painfree?

Aaron

[00:14:00] Well, I would probably attempt to even remove the concept of a should, which you already probably knew I was going to go there with that, but, so how do we get your existence in this, like celebration of your incarnation in this body for 80 years or whatever? This is crazy that you just are in a body right now. It’s like, “Whoa.” It’s wild.

So how do we make [00:14:30] it so that it’s actually something where it’s like, “Okay. Let’s just cut the shoulds out.” How do we start to make this be a little bit more of like, “Wow. We’re here.” Stop bogging ourselves down with like another to do and another should and another guilt and like, “Oh man, I’d feel better about myself if I did that thing, I should do that.”

Let’s just wipe that off of the table. Yeah. And then so now, [inaudible 00:14:58]. Now [00:15:00] let’s tap into some places of like you individually, what lights you up? What do you enjoy? What makes you feel good? If you’re like most biological organisms being in sunshine probably is supportive for your well-being. Getting some movement, going for a walk with some level of regularity, just circulating your fluids, and that catalyzes this cascade of pharmacology in the form [00:15:30] of like opiate and [inaudible 00:15:31] and all the different things that people reach out for drugs. Just you doing a couple pull ups on a tree branch or going for a walk or maybe going for a run, doing some interval training if you’re inspired to do so. But let’s just say, “Go for a walk.”

It literally starts to catalyze those endogenous chemicals that make you feel ways that people spend billions of dollars each year to feel. So that would be the starting [00:16:00] point would just be like, “What makes you feel good?” Let’s just figure, just be with that. And then from there, I’d say just from a general functional movement baseline, I’d say it would be supportive for you to walk with regularity. That’s one of the deep into that in one of the chapters, in the Align Method book and The Align Method program, and all that, like the mechanics of walking and all that. But then the other thing, like you mentioned, get a pull up bar in your home would be something I’d [00:16:30] recommend, just get your arm up over your head every now and again, and have a hang what’s going to happen with that is it’s going to decongest decompress all that connective tissue in and around your central nervous system, your spine, your vertebra, your discs, your intercostal muscles, the space between your ribs, your lung tissue, the heart tissue, the pericardium, the connective [00:17:00] tissue.

That’s all throughout that torso, all of your organs, just having a moment to like, “Oh, just let it kind of open and decompress just with gravity.” You didn’t need to do anything. And if you have a pull up bar and you’re a common place, a common door where you walk through, you’ll reach up to it when you walk through just organically. It’s not a to-do list. It’s not, “Okay. I’m going to do 50 pull ups a day.” Or something like that. It’s just there. Some doorway that you walk through with regularity, [00:17:30] you’ll probably just be invited to do it. So it’s not a to-do list. It’s just like, “My environment shifted a little bit. Now I get healthier just by existing in a more shapely environment.” There’s other things as well. But I feel maybe you should say something.

Stu

I think-

Aaron

Like a lot-

Stu

No. People don’t want to listen to me. That’s for sure. It’s all about you. You mentioned, even just the walking as well. And I’ve been making a conscious effort just to move [00:18:00] more just to see what happens because I track stuff. I like to track stuff. I wear an aura ring and that tracks the whole way of stuff. And just over the course of this year, we’re in April now. So for the last four months, I’ve just been walking more and tracking what happens as a consequence of that. And it’s profound because sleep quality goes through the roof, like deep sleep, more so than anything else, heart rate [inaudible 00:18:29] comes up.

[00:18:30] All of the markers are swinging it in the right direction, just through walking a little bit more. And I think then just by the nature of better sleep, you feel better when you wake up more energized. So you want to do all this other stuff. So I think it’s definitely love what you’re saying about just walking, because oftentimes people would think, “Oh, got to do high intensity training, got to pull the sled in the gym or I’ve got to do this, that. I’ve got all this stuff to do in my busy life.” But a walk around the block can do so much, of which [00:19:00] I never realized it could do until I actually just started to track and just have a look at the numbers. So I’m interested about that for sure.

Aaron

Yeah. I learned recently one of the girls that works with me on my team. So we do like online programs and we’re launching a free subscription in the next week. So we can share the link for that. It’s completely free. It’s just like community thing. But she has a history with doing [00:19:30] therapy. And so she has a background around doing various different forms of therapy. And she said, I just learned this day. I don’t know if this is actually correct. But she said that in therapy terms, she would refer to this base level of work with people called tier one interventions, which is essentially coming back into just like baseline, how people live.

What’s their home life environment. What’s their environmental experience. What’s like the baseline intervention. [00:20:00] So we can come in and just make this person’s existence a little bit more conducive for mental health. And that’s pretty much all I focus on. Align Method is like full tier one intervention. So how can we make it to this so that it’s just like the pool that you exist in. Like if you’re in, I’ve done a podcast with Bruce Lipton and he’s like-

Stu

Yeah, we’ve had him as well. Amazing guy.

Aaron

Oh cool. He’s great. Yeah. I love Bruce. Yeah. So I went out to his place [00:20:30] in California and I think it’s Santa Cruz, something like that, spent the day with him. It is like a really just amazing experience for me because I like looked up to him since I was like 15. But in his work, working with cells, cellular biology, one of the things that he’s suggested in lots of different places, probably on your podcast as well, is that if you want to change the cell, you don’t really do anything to the cell. You just change the constitution, the environment, the cell’s in. Yeah. [00:21:00] So you focus on the Petri dish. You want to change the cell focus on the Petri dish and so much of modern fitness health recommendation is treating symptoms. And you are really focusing on the cell, do this to the cell, do this to the cell.

I don’t personally hear enough about these like tier one interventions because they’re not that interesting and there’s not a lot to sell with them. [crosstalk 00:21:27] like you’re saying a large part of a person’s [00:21:30] experiencing pain. And I just got off a podcast episode with a guy called Dr. Adrian Lowe, who he’s like one of the world’s preeminent pain science, researchers, experts, et cetera. And I’m trying to draw these very like specific mechanistic explanations from pain out of them. And it really just comes back to like story, stress, perception, story, stress perception. And so a person, if you have [00:22:00] regular activities or anchor points that are like purgative in a way, I do my little meditation thing. I do my breathwork thing or I go for a walk or I skip rope or something that’s not stress inducing.

Stress inducing, we have these, they’re like Trojan horses in the right word. But we have these certain activities that we think on the face are stress reducing, but they’re actually is stress inducing. [00:22:30] An example of that would be taking your phone out and scrolling through notifications.

Stu

Yeah, totally.

Aaron

It feels like you’re taking a break. It feels like you’re like, “Oh, man, I’m just so winding down.” But what you’re telling yourself at a physiological level is you’re actually focusing in and you’re also probably collapsing your postal patterns to send another indication that there’s a lot of contention around the whole postal feedback conversation, being like Amy Cuddy stuff, superwoman pose, all that stuff. [00:23:00] But let’s just play it out and assume there’s some truth to the way the positions that I form my body into have some relevance, the way that I think and way I feel.

There’s lots of different research to suggest that it does. But there’s also lots of counter research suggesting like, this is hard to replicate in all bunch of [inaudible 00:23:20]. I come more from the side of like, look at any UFC fighter ever walking into a ring. When they’re coming into a ring, there’s this postal, [00:23:30] they’re not going to come into the ring like they lost, unless they’re about to lose. Look in any person walking into a date, a person presenting in a board meeting, like just anecdotally. How about anecdotal?

Stu

Yeah. Anecdotally.

Aaron

Anecdotally.

Stu

Yeah. That’s it. I don’t know why I’m-

Aaron

Anecdotal. Anecdotally. That sounds stupid.

Stu

Sometimes words just do out the bat. It’s true.

Aaron

[00:24:00] Dumb word, anecdotally. Anyway, anecdotally speaking, just notice in yourself when you feel good, your posture changes. When you feel afraid, what does your posture do? When you feel sad, what does your posture do? So all of those positions, if you were to look at a human or a primate holding a cell phone and you didn’t have any context for what was happening, they’re doing important cell phone stuff, no context for that. You just see a person hunched over forward head posture [00:24:30] and they have this, they’re just looking like in this melancholy way down into their phone, but you don’t know it’s a phone. They’re just take the phone out. You just take a still frame of that image, just like a silhouette. You would presume the person is sick, depressed or super tired.

Stu

[inaudible 00:24:46] totally. And we use the phrase devolving because you, remember that very famous image of cave man as he walks he gets taller and prouder and [00:25:00] your shoulders back. And of course now we’re hunched and we are stooped and we’re almost for forgiving and staring into this little [inaudible 00:25:09].

Aaron

And then who knows why people are statistically on an annual basis becoming more depressed and more anxious? And more, I mean, I only like saying the word, but suicidal. Suicidal ideation, self harm, obesity, [00:25:30] statistically speaking, we have greater access to everything that would cause health, wellness, prosperity, all the things.

Stu

100%.

Aaron

And statistically speaking things are going the opposite direction.

Stu

Yeah.

Aaron

So I don’t, I mean, I’m not like bold enough to suggest what it is, but I have some hunches and I think that one of the spokes in that wheel is certainly in movement and you could potentially venture into [00:26:00] the shape of our movement. Is your only means of creating some circulation in your body hunched or in a bike or doing something that doesn’t really, it’s kind of a novel stimulus that in all of your ancestry never really existed [crosstalk 00:26:17] feel intuitively that there’s probably some value in kind of replicating some of the baseline movement patterns and lifestyle [00:26:30] habits that your physiology has rode upon for like the entirety of history.

So just tapping back and one of the most basic things is just taking a walk, getting adequate sunshine, getting a little cold every now and again, getting a little hot every now and again, creative problem solving, there’s a storm coming. I got to build shelter, community, connecting with people in a deep, meaningful way. The longest longitudinal study done in Harvard started like 1926 [00:27:00] or the thirties or something really long time ago suggests, still running, suggests that relationships and community and meaningful relationships, particularly the most meaningful indicator for health and longevity.

So as you go into your phone and go into your nuclear family and go into your box and figure out sovereignty and autonomy and do it yourself, and it’s like, yes, love that. And whether [00:27:30] you realize it or not, your biology is dependent on connection with other people. So I think that those are just, it’s just who you are. It’s like pretty, it’s hard to get out of that. It’s like, all of your history is riding on this stuff. So it makes sense to kind of put some intention to-

Stu

Totally.

Aaron

And that back in.

Stu

Yeah. And hopefully physical connection, because as you mentioned, I mean, we’ve never had the tools available to us to be able to connect in so many different ways. We’ve got [00:28:00] the biggest and best encyclopedia in the world in our pockets. And unfortunately, most of us just browse YouTube and we’ve all done it. Right. It’s the biggest distraction.

Aaron

It’s unfortunate. It doesn’t need to be unfortunate.

Stu

But oftentimes it’s used in that way. That is unfortunate.

Aaron

It’s just who’s using who.

Stu

Yes.

Aaron

Are you being enslaved kind of, sort of by at least like an indenture servant by large [00:28:30] corporations called the Facebooks and the YouTubes. And there are probably all just the same entity at this point. That’s they are working in their laboratories with the smartest people on the planet to capture your attention as a commodity.

Stu

Yes. Exactly.

Aaron

And so on the other side of you expending all of your attention into cat videos and people dancing in [00:29:00] a way. Like that was your attention. That’s the most important thing that you have and you’ve expended that in these. You’ve squandered it in a way, not because you’re a bad person, not because you’re lazy because you’re a human, and that’s exactly what those corporations are doing. I’m not mad at the man. I’m not mad at the deep state. I’m not mad at YouTube. They’re just effective. Like they just do a good job at what their goal, like they are successful in their [00:29:30] intention, which is to capture your attention at all costs. If you’re up at 3:00 AM scrolling through your Instagram, they are winning.

Stu

Well, they’re certainly making money. [crosstalk 00:29:42]. Yeah. They’re serving you

Aaron

A way for you to be literally scrolling the whole entire day. That would be, I don’t know for sure if that would be, because they’d eventually lose you because you’d like die or something, but it’s that fine line of how can we get as much attention from this person as possible [00:30:00] without them dying? That’s the game.

Stu

Yeah, no you’re absolutely right. Boy. Oh boy. Oh dear. I’m sure they’d serve you. Yeah. They’d serve you ads up until the point that you die. I’m sure there’d be a coffin service or something that you’d be interested.

Aaron

Yeah. And it’s not something that we need to victimize ourselves about. It’s not something that we need to be mad at anybody about. It’s like, I mean you can stand back and applaud like, “Wow. Well you killed it. That’s like [00:30:30] really impressive. I’d love to learn from you on how I can be a more effective with, I don’t know, raising my family or anything. You guys’s capacity to have us have a goal and carry that out step by step and build a whole organization. It’s like amazing.”

Stu

Yeah. I’m not sure-

Aaron

Now, how do I come from a place of not of victimization, but more of like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Wow, I can see it for what it is and I can engage with it because there’s some [00:31:00] really meaningful videos out the there and meaningful podcasts out there and things that actually inform my life. And so I’m using the system as opposed to me being used by the system.” That’s the whole game. That’s the whole thing.

Stu

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I’m just mindful that we’re kind of coming up on time for you as well. But if people, obviously, there’s a whole section in there about mindset clearly that you’re dialed into and have no doubt covered in more detail. [00:31:30] Is that part of The Align method book? Will people find more on that or is it more to do with your podcasts, your blogs and articles and things like that?

Aaron

Yeah. Well, so yeah, there’s a chapter in the book about mindfulness and then there’s another chapter. It’s mainly how mindfulness informs your postal patterns or shape of your body. And then there’s another chapter about how your postal patterns informed your perceptions and your personalities and your mindfulness [00:32:00] because it’s a two-way street.

Stu

Okay.

Aaron

So yeah, there’s some tips in there for sure. And I think the big thing would just begin to pay attention. That is mindfulness. Mindfulness doesn’t need to be this really spiritual crystal laden thing. It literally could be your standing in the elevator doing your elevator pitch, telling somebody about what your book is or what your idea is or whatever, and just noticing [00:32:30] the temperature of the elevator, noticing the ambient noises or sounds in the elevator.

Stu

Yep. Just being present.

Aaron

Do you consider them noises or do you consider them sounds? Because your perception and language informs your reality. It’s just the beginning process of understanding and when someone says a word start to notice, “Oh, how does that word make me feel?” Maybe start to notice facial gestures. So when someone says a thing notice, oh, interesting. They looked away when they said that or [00:33:00] they kind of like held their breath when they said that, or you could not just kind of notice their hips kind of veering towards the door. Or they just felt really like satiated, like just content there’s this moment of contentment. Everyone knows what contentment looks like. You don’t need to define it or joy or any of that. And so paying more close attention to the people in front of and then imagine what will that do to open up a more interesting [00:33:30] dynamic in conversation. And maybe from there that opens up into someone saying, “Wow. No one’s really like noticed me the way that you do. I think I love you.”

Stu

Oh my, what?

Aaron

All you did was you paid attention. They’d never been really listened to. So what does that do for the quality of your day? It’s not just, you were mindful on a mountain someplace. You can bang right now, as you’re listening to this, [00:34:00] how do these sounds make you feel? How’s the pacing of our language make you feel? How’s the tone of our language feel? How do these ideas make you feel? As you’re taking a walk, notice the pressure underneath your feet. Notice, did you know what’s… Where does my body feel good? Most of our life is [inaudible 00:34:16] where does my body suck? Where do I suck? Where am I not enough? Where do you feel good? If you don’t feel a part of your body, it probably means it feels good. It probably means it’s working.

Stu

Yeah. Interesting.

Aaron

A handful of, well, one girl [00:34:30] particularly called Tamar Galler. She’s like the dog trainer of Tony Robbins and Oprah and all sorts of different people. She’s super sweet, lovely human. One of the things that she suggested to me that I align with is in dog training, typically we focus on what the dog’s doing wrong, and so we just wait. But if the dog is just hanging out, just being a good dog, it’s a great time to like reward the dog for just hanging out and being chill. [00:35:00] Like, “Man, you were chilling so good right now. This is a good chill.” Like any that. So we put so much of our energy toward what’s wrong. So that’s another opportunity for mindfulness. Just notice where does your body feel good and see where that goes.

Stu

Fascinating conversation. You are clearly a thinker and be very keen to point our listeners to your book as well, The Align Methods. So [00:35:30] just mindful then of your time. I wanted to jump into the book more, but I think perhaps maybe we’ll be able to do that in the future at some stage. But if people wanted to dig in a little bit deeper and enjoyed what we’ve spoken about today, where could we send them to order, read the book, listen to some of your podcasts, read your articles, et cetera.

Aaron

Yeah. Well, something that I’m excited about is we’re creating a community [00:36:00] where I’m involved in. I’ll be doing videos monthly and taking questions and things of the sort. So that’s completely free. So people are interested in getting more information around conversations like this and kind of like a storage house where I’ll be putting things of this sort that’s @alignpodcast.com/community, spelled like the word community and [inaudible 00:36:30] book, [00:36:30] Align Method, wherever you get books, if you’re interested in this, it’s like the compendium of most of the stuff that I think could be interesting around these conversations. And I think that’s it, really.

Stu

That’s awesome. I’m really appreciative of your time. And hopefully we’ll be able to connect it some stage down the track as well to jump into the new stuff at some station.

Aaron

Yeah, man, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

Stu

Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.

Aaron

All right.

Aaron Alexander

This podcast features Aaron Alexander from The Align Method. He is a pioneering manual therapist and movement coach, founder and creator of the Align Method, author of the Align Method book, and host of the Align Podcast, which has ranked #1 in Nutrition on iTunes.
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