Teacher's Class Narrative 02
PrimalAlexander™ - TheCoachingClub™ 2025
Part 1: The Circle Opens
Mio starts out with the simplest of directives: “We’re just collecting info and we’ll see.” He wasn’t referring to any data in a scientific sense, but rather to the unfolding sensations, observations, and little awakenings that arise in the body when you pay it a particular kind of attention: ...a curiosity about ease and what’s happening to that Ease.
They start with TheCyCle™, a simple almost meditative activity that uses the phrase “Where else…do I seem…to be Easing…a bit.” along with counting and holding each finger in turn.
The finger-counting serves as a bridge. It's simple enough that the body doesn't strain to execute it, yet complex enough that the mind can't wander too far without you noticing.
They do an assortment of mostly simple movements where each repetition is an experiment: wondering...What happens to me when I do this? What happens to the Ease in me as I do the things I do?
The purpose, though, isn’t the movement. The purpose is the awareness of the movement. Or more precisely: the awareness of what effect the movement is having upon your experience of the Ease in yourself.
In one of the activities they do what seems to be a body scan. Why a body scan? Because interference grows in the unnoticed.
Bringing attention systematically from crown to toe is an exercise in using Ease to create an experiential baseline of flow and then observing what affect thinking about each body part in the scan has upon that flow.
The word “zero” simply cues curiosity. It’s a reset point. A reorientation orchestrated in the movement centers of the brain that respond by releasing unnecessary tension.
This whole first part of the session was not about getting anywhere in particular. It was all about coming back. Coming back to yourself. Coming back to noticing. Creating an experiential set point that will make it possible for you to be completely objective about the quality of the choices that you are about to make.
Part 2: Sleeping Position, Pillows, and the Myth of the Perfect Setup
It was Dani who asked the first question. “I have an inquiry,” she said, as if unsure whether the question belonged in this class. But it did. “It’s to do with sleeping position.”
Dani described tightness—specifically on the right side, up into the occipital area. She referenced an interview she’d heard, where a man advocated back-sleeping with a special pillow designed to restore the natural curve of the neck.
“Was he selling that pillow?” Mio asked, dryly.
“Yes,” Dani admitted, smiling.
Mio went on. “The best way to protect your sleep is what you do during the day—with your thinking and your body.”
Not posture. Not pillow. Not special angles. But thinking.
This wasn’t a dismissal of comfort. It was a reframing. Most people change positions while they sleep.
Trying to micromanage the perfect alignment during unconscious hours is like trying to choreograph your dreams.
What matters most is the prelude to sleep—what happens during the day and in the last moments of wakefulness.
Rather than hunting for a sleep product that will fix your discomfort, ask a different question: What do I do with myself before I go to sleep?
Do I ruminate? Do I brace against tomorrow? Do I replay tension from the day?
Or do I give myself three minutes of noticing? Primal Alexander does not promise perfect sleep. But it offers something more durable: a way to prepare for unconsciousness with conscious grace.
That is not a trick. It’s a skill, a discipline and a form of kindness. It’s a way of using your conscious mind to prime your natural autonomic functioning in order to promote a natural sense of ease, efficiency and perhaps even deeper, more restful sleep.
Part 3: Nora’s Story and the Art of Coming Back
“What else is on your minds?” Mio asked, opening the circle again. Nora stepped in, her voice calm, but her words trembling with a deeper revelation.
She had been teaching, speaking, leading a class. Everything had been going smoothly—until she got excited. She was telling a story, something meaningful, and suddenly she realized: she was gone.
Off and away. Lost in the excitement. “I was just out there,” she said. “And then I thought—hang on, Nora. Come back.”
This was not a crisis. This was a milestone. The ability to notice when presence disappears is not a failure—it’s a key achievement.
Mio reminded her of “The fact that you could make a distinction between when you’re in and when you’re out is excellent.”
What followed was a cool breakdown of internal drift and recovery. Mio outlined it step by step:
You're present. You're easy. You’re engaged.
A stimulus comes. Distraction. Excitement. An idea.
You begin to drift.
Ease diminishes, usually slowly.
At some point, you notice.
Now you have a choice: return or continue drifting.
That moment of noticing? That’s the power point. And the more you practice, the sooner you see it. What used to take hours to recognize now takes seconds or less.
Nora asked: “Is there a way to tell a story with constructive thinking?” She could manage it one-on-one. But with a group, she found herself swept away more easily.
Mio invited her to try again. To tell the same story. But this time, to prioritize Ease—not what you think the audience is thinking.
Nora began.
“I was devastated to hear that my musical god had died,”
The room softened.
Mio gently slowed her down, asking her to pause between ideas. “I was devastated. [pause] To hear. [pause] That my musical god. [pause] Had died.”
Each break was a chance to return to ease. And, paradoxically, the story became more connected and much more expressive.
Nora admitted something raw: pausing was hard. Letting her voice be heard was hard. “Somewhere, I feel like I shouldn’t be making a sound. I should just be listening.”
That old programming, that childhood silence, had shaped the way she spoke even now. “Taking pauses is incredibly confrontational for me.”
Mio met that honesty with his own: “That’s good to know. Now you can use it. Listen to what’s happening within you as you speak—not just to what you’re saying.”
They tried again. Nora spoke. She paused. She allowed. And with each pause, she returned— to the ease, within herself. Those pauses resonated with deep feeling.
A rich expressiveness that moved us and totally took Nora by surprise.
”That didn’t sound like me to me but somehow it rung so true”
When Nora paused, when she gave herself time, her voice carried depth. She didn’t perform the story as much as the story performed her.
Constructive thinking, in this context, is not about controlling every word. It’s about choosing what you prioritize. Noticing what the act of expressing is doing to you. And giving yourself the chance to be true to yourself so your voice can speak your truth.
It was that simple. And that profound.
Part 4: Dani’s Voice and the Child Within
Dani’s voice entered next. Not in a rush, but gently. Hesitantly. She acknowledged that what Nora had shared resonated deeply. “All of what she said really applies to me too.”
Then she shared the setting: a family gathering, familiar and charged. “There’s a particular trio—me and two relatives—and I feel like I don’t have a voice.”
She described the sensation: speaking quickly, trying to get a word in, feeling that no one was curious about what she had to say. In that dynamic, her words lost their weight. Her voice lost its grounding. “Maybe I don’t value what I have to say, because I don’t feel anybody else does.”
The group listened. Mio invited her to explore not just the memory, but the felt sense of it.
“Imagine the situation,” he said. “What happens to you as you think about it?”
Dani paused. “I feel like I become a child. Somewhere where I was maybe six or seven.”
She could sense the shift—not just emotionally, but physically. “It’s something to do with my eyes. I feel like I want to cry.”
Mio didn’t rush her away from that vulnerability. Instead, he offered the next step: “Where in your body do you feel less of that? Where do you notice even a little bit of easing?”
She answered: her diaphragm. Then her jaw. Then her breath.
With each naming of ease, her voice softened. The adult returned. Not as a mask, but as a presence. This wasn’t performance. This was reclamation.
Instructional Insight: The Body as Barometer of Belief
This was not just emotional healing. It was embodied recognition. The feelings that arise in old dynamics don’t exist only in the mind. They have a footprint. In the jaw. In the solar plexus. In the very shape of how we speak—or stay silent.
Dani’s exercise was a demonstration of the core practice: we don’t fight the discomfort. We notice it. And then we shift our attention—not to escape it, but to re-anchor in what is also true. Ease coexists with discomfort. Always.
By identifying the areas where she wasn’t tense, Dani expanded her sense of self beyond the emotional trigger. Her voice softened. Her body relaxed. Her adult self returned.
This is the quiet alchemy of Primal Alexander™. We don’t resolve our childhood patterns by reliving them endlessly. We soften them by remembering who else we are right now.
Once done she didn’t need to be louder. She simply needed to be more present.
Mio pointed out that this practice could be extended. “If you know you’re going to see them, you can rehearse the situation. Think about past moments, notice the spark of reaction, and come back to ease. Do it again and again. Then, when you’re actually there, you’ll be more resourced.”
This is not fantasy. This is rehearsal. The nervous system learns through pattern. The more you practice returning to ease in imagination, the more readily you’ll find it in life.
Dani ended by saying, “I’m really ready now to explore coming back to myself.” That readiness was not intellectual. It was cellular.
She had already begun.
Part 5: The Power of the Group and the Ongoing Return
As the session began to wind down, the atmosphere was anything but diminished. There was a fullness in the space—a collective settling, like a field after rain. The group wasn’t drained. It was ripened.
Claire, who had been quiet up to this point, spoke up with calm care. “Dani,” she said gently, “I just wanted to ask if you felt complete. You didn’t get to speak much, and I wondered if you still needed time.”
It was a simple offering, but powerful. The kind of gesture that only emerges in spaces where people are really listening—not just to words, but to presence.
Dani responded with a soft certainty: “I think I said everything I needed to say. I’m really ready now to explore.”
There was a brief silence—not awkward, but integrated. The kind that happens when a group has come into rhythm with itself. Not everyone had spoken, but everyone had contributed. There was listening in the air.
Then Mio returned with one of the most liberating insights of the session: “Nobody’s watching us. Nobody cares.”
He didn’t mean it nihilistically. He meant it as freedom. The belief that people are constantly judging us—that old internal surveillance system—is mostly fiction. And when we believe it, we become small. We abandon ease to defend a self-image. And the cost is presence.
One participant affirmed it joyfully: “That was probably the biggest breakthrough of my entire life. I used to be so self-conscious. And then one day I realized—nobody’s paying attention to me. They’re thinking about themselves.”
The whole group smiled. Laughed. Exhaled.
Instructional Insight: We Learn Best Together
The session closed on a note of shared recognition. Everyone could feel it. The power of the group had done what solo practice rarely can: it mirrored each participant back to themselves.
As Mio said, “We need each other. We can do it alone, but it’s a lot harder.”
This is perhaps one of the most essential lessons in Primal Alexander: embodied learning is personal, but it is not solitary.
When we witness others returning to ease, we not only remember that it is possible for us too, we imitate them on the spot.
When we speak from that place, we grant permission to everyone else to meet us there and we do. We humans share experience so deeply that it is mind boggling.
Each person in the group had contributed something vital—Nora with her pauses, Dani with her honesty, Claire with her kindness. And Mio, as always, with his radical insistence that this practice is not just a method. It’s a way of being.
“You force me to pay more attention to myself,” he said. “More than I would if I’d been doing anything else and I thank you all for that!”
That was no small confession. It was the closing circle of the work: teacher and student, both returning to themselves, in the presence of each other.
Teaching Point: Connection as Practice
This is the unsung layer of the kind of work: we don’t just practice alone. We practice individually in the context of others. Their presence changes us. Their resonance deepens our listening. Their honesty stirs our own.
And in turn, our willingness to stay with ourselves—no matter the stimulus—invites them to do the same.
In the final moments, someone brought up a puppy in the neighborhood. A light story. A breath of ordinary joy. “So fresh,” someone said. “So excited about people.”
There was laughter again. And a deeper kind of presence. Because in this circle, even casual things landed differently. They weren’t distractions from the practice. They were part of the practice. Invitations to stay soft, stay open, stay listening.
And so the session ended not with a final word, but with an invitation. To keep noticing. To keep returning. To trust that the path back to ease is always available—and often closer than we think.
Part 6: This Is How We Learn
Not with grand gestures. Not with rigid rules. Not with forced stillness or perfect form.
We learn through noticing.
We learn by catching ourselves in the act of drifting—and returning. Again and again. Not because we failed, but because we remembered. Because something in us whispered, “Come back.”
That whisper is the soul of this work. It doesn’t shame. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t demand perfection. It simply invites.
Come back.
Come back to your ease. Come back to your breath. Come back to your whole self—the one underneath the habit, the role, the excitement, the fear.
Primal Alexander™ doesn’t give you new movements. It gives a way to optimize the space between them. It offers you a moment—between the thought and the reaction—where tenderness lives. Where freedom lives.
It’s not about fixing. It’s about allowing. Not about achieving neutrality, but reclaiming agency. Not about abandoning emotion, but feeling it without being thrown off center.
And it’s not done alone. It’s best done in the presence of others. In laughter. In silence. In the awkward courage of “I don’t know.”
This class was a place where people became mirrors for one another’s return.
So, what is this work?
It’s not posture. It’s not performance. It’s not even awareness.
It’s practice.
The kind that never ends. The kind that deepens with every breath. The kind that meets you in the middle of your life and quietly asks:
What happens to you all day long when you’re doing all the things you love and hate to do? Who do you become? Where do you go?
This is how we learn.
This is how we teach each other.
This is how we come home.