 About the Author:
My name is Alexander Burday, I am a speech-language pathologist, embodiment coach, and person who stutters. My purpose as a man, clinician, and coach is twofold: I have become obsessed with my missions: To lead people who stutter to fearless and free expression in order to become the person they are supposed to be, all of the time, without the guesswork, speech tools, and wasted time. To help people learn to live from their core self, through embodiment practices. To get out of the head and into the body and to show up in life as powerful, authentic, and on purpose. To move from surviving and functioning to thriving. |
In this video I talk about my experience with stuttering, how I experienced a number of different evidence based approaches as a child and teen, and ultimately decided to find a path that worked best for me, something I believe we should all do if we feel that there is something missing from what we’ve been given. Given the notion that we all seem to have a unique experience in relation to stuttering I believe that we should have access to an approach of working with and on ourselves that is more attuned to the unfolding of our path, rather than prescribing a path for us to take.
The things that have helped me to the greatest degree are rooted in embodiment practices. The greater awareness that I have developed of my body and how it feels and interprets, judges, and orients itself toward or away from sensations and experiences, the more connected I feel to what is actually going on inside of me. The more I understand and feel safe to be with all of this, the more I really get to know why I am the way that I am and what are the factors that reinforce me staying committed to that way of being.
My mission is to be able to learn my body, nervous system, and psyche well enough to be able to hold the increasing demands of life and show up in the face of them grounded, fearless, and driven to act by knowing my purpose and intentions. This skillset is invaluable and supports me to continue to grow and level-up throughout all areas of my life. I see the degree to which I am fearless and empowered to communicate as a person who stutters as the baseline for how I am progressing, but certainly the more I get into this work the more I see how it permeates all areas of my life, thus allowing me to “Be Seen and Heard.”
Thank you for this wonderful piece! I love this idea about how you wanted to “craft your own way to deal with stuttering”. I love that mindset because it gives us all the courage to do what we think is best for ourselves and gives us the ability to control the narrative. I am going through this reflection myself as I get deeper and deeper into improv and seeing how much I want to embody so many of these principles of improv into stuttering and how I mentally approach this subject and life in general.
Can you be a little more specific about what your approach is when you talk about connecting your physical body and mind to your stuttering? I was trying to better understand exactly what your philosophy / methodology is for how you approach this so would appreciate more clarity!
That’s beautiful that you have a vision for yourself. It’s even more empowering to have the tools to bring the embodied was of BEING into your actions and how you are. Having fun and playing with it is the most liberating part. You get to choose and you don’t have to bring any undesired pressure into this process. It’s simply learning who you are not and who you are by trying it on, and having the awareness to discern what feels correct in your body.
The simplest way I can express the philosophy is that if a person cannot actualize the version of themselves that they are wanting, or better yet, know deep down in their bones and their soul that they are supposed to be, then the nervous system does not have the capacity to hold that way of being. It’s a process of building greater capacity in the nervous system to not revert back into patterns of smallness, holding, hiding, contracting against life, and instead move towards life with these new ways of being (i.e., being more expressive, being seen and heard with your stutter in all situations, choosing to connect with people that you truly want to be around) by having greater capacity to stay in the discomfort in the body of these moments when they do arise. It’s a building process through putting stress on the body with intention. Pain or discomfort with purpose is very useful it builds greater capacity to hold more energy. Learning to create a more balanced nervous system is the other pillar. By training the body to be more regulated as a default allows for greater access to skills, intentions, and clarity.
Building capacity and regulation. Over and over and over again.
Methodology is rooted in strong breath work, yogic/kundalini exercises, physical fitness, cold water exposure, and other ways to create the sensations in the body that feel like a stretch and then practice regulation with regulating and resonance breath work, meditation, environmental modifications, sound and other modalities. The best part is that all of these techniques are essentially free, so you don’t need to buy anything or pay for any physical thing, but having a therapist or coach is highly skilled in delivering these is absolutely a massive efficiency boost.
This is so fantastic (as usual)! Thank you for sharing this perspective. I just so appreciate your attitude towards stuttering and, in general, towards embodiment, healing, and life. Keep doing what you’re doing and being who you are. Those who get the opportunity to be in relationship with you learn and grow from you showing and sharing your authentic, embodied self (I know I have!). 🙂
Best,
Tiffani
Thank you Tiffani.
My curiosity has been my greatest ally on the path towards becoming more of myself. Every book, practice, workshop, seminar, webinar, group, and retreat that I’ve chosen to explore has been out of my souls desire to feel more aligned with who I know I am. The conditioning and the trauma that happened to me directly and that was passed down from my family made it feel insurmountable at times to truly decondition my-self so that I could rebuild from my core. It is a constant devotional practice to realign and reprogram, but it is the most fulfilling journey I can imagine.
Much love,
-Alexander
Thank you, Alexander, for this informative presentation. I really like the idea of expressing ourselves “without the filter of fear”. This is a key lesson for us.
Hanan
Hey Hanan,
Thank you for taking the time to watch the video. I’m curious if you feel OK with sharing where you are at in your process with this paradigm of fear filtering your expression. How have you made progress on your path to reclaim energy from fear and funnel it back into authenticity?
-Alexander
Hello Alexander,
Thank you for writing about your experience as a person who stutters. Your approach to stuttering is so enlightening. The body and mind is such a huge part of healing your whole being, so to hear you say that this approach is the one that best works for you completely makes sense. As an SLP, were you able to use any of the strategies you learned to incorporate into your approach?
Trayo,
Thank you for your reflection. I do feel that this has been the best thing for me on my path. I learned a lot about the anatomy and physiology of the speech machine and the human being in general which was very helpful and set me up to really catch on and understand my body and my nervous system better when I started going into the world of embodiment. Certainly there are some things that I learned as a client in speech therapy and in my graduate study as an SLP that helped me to shape and modify the tension in my body and to become more aware of my breath, but my honest opinion is that the depth with which our field goes into the body, feelings, emotions, and embodiment is barely even scratching the surface. It was very frustrating to me how surface level we cover these things in our line of work, so it appeared that my frustration alchemized into curiosity and drove me to learn and practice more in depth. I would also say that general understanding of social communication, body language, and nonverbal communication was and is helpful to have a broader view of a communication interaction. I think that a lot of times people who stutter are wrapped up in their feeling states, fears, anxieties, projections, and hyper vigilance around stuttering that we miss out a lot of key information that is being sent to and from us. So, to have a clinical understanding of the nature and patterns of communication that people engage in I believe has been very helpful for me and is certainly something that I apply with my clients.
I hope this helps! Reply if you want to go further into this discussion. I am happy to do so.
-Alexander
Hi Alexander!
Thank you for sharing your story! It was very lovely being able to hear your journey on becoming a SLP. I am currently studying to become and SLP. Do you happen to have any advice for me on my own personal journey of becoming a SLP?
Thank you,
Angelica
Angelica,
Thank you for taking the time to watch and share your reflection.
There are so many things that I could share about the journey, but without thinking too much about it and just letting the most true thing for the moment come through, I feel compelled to share with you that each person that you work with is a person. Really look into their eyes, notice how they breathe, the quality of their voice, the energy that they run through their body, to appreciate all of it, and to reflect on your own embodiment from moment to moment if possible. Practice being in the moment/ Practice being as present as you can. Practice being in your body the whole time. Inevitably you will fail at this, we all do, but that is the practice. To be as grounded and in the now as you can be. Nothing else matters.
Best wishes to you,
-Alexander
Hi Alex,
Thank you for sharing your experiences. I remember you from the St Rose days. 😊
I am so glad to hear a SLP state how frustrating it is and has been that speech therapy does not dive deeper into the real complexities involved with stuttering.
I remember when I took a stab at therapy for the first time in my late 30’s. I didn’t last long. I felt frustrated and stymied by graduate student SLPs who seemed only focused on helping me obtain fluent speech. That’s not what I wanted or needed. I needed affirmation that it was ok to stutter, but more importantly, some help with peeling back the thick layers of shame I had built up through years of hiding my stuttering.
I was disappointed that it didn’t seem important to teach and mentor future therapists about the need to have a holistic approach with clients and an understanding of how counseling can be so much more life changing than learning tools to become fluent, which to me felt like more ways to be covert.
I stayed for a little over a year and prided myself on recognizing that it was better to walk away and find more meaningful support. I found a wonder psychotherapist for who really helped me heal and also see that attempting to hide stuttering had also led to avoidance of other areas of my life: dealing with feelings, being vulnerable and engaging fully in life.
You seem to have quite mastered that. What kind of feedback have you received from people who stutter that you have worked with in this full embodiment view?
Pam
Hello Pam,
Great to see your name pop up here in the comments. Thank you for taking the time to check out the video and leave your reflections.
My reflection is that this lack of depth is a symptom of the way that our culture operates as a whole. It’s not the fault of speech-language pathology, but I do feel the immense frustration with their lack of willingness to understand that the surface level practice simply isn’t enough.
I am grateful to be able to follow my curiosity and go deeper, much deeper, and to come back up with a lot of wisdom and gifts to share.
The feedback from my clients has been tremendous. Many people are not prepared to go so deep, and I have a lot of compassion for the fear and weariness of doing so, but my hope is that more people will feel the call to do this work. It feels a bit strange to some folks at first that I don’t talk too much about stuttering, but we always weave what we are doing back to that point. It’s a lot of fun to practice this way.
Thanks again for your reflections,
-Alexander
Hi Alexander!
I am a graduate student studying to be a Speech-Language Pathologist. I have been in the school setting as an SLP assistant since 2012. I admire you and your courage to speak about your personal experiences with stuttering. I love that you are giving your time and energy to help those around you. I love that the field of speech pathology is a field where we are constantly learning. I enjoyed listening to your video about your experiences. Thank you so much!
Leslie
Leslie,
I appreciate your feedback and positivity. I’m curious if there is anything in particular that piqued your interest.
Best wishes to you going forward on your journey.
-Alexander
Alexander,
Thank you for responding back to me. Are you asking what piqued my interest in this field? If so, I am a lover of children and I knew early on that I wanted to work with students. I went to college with the idea of going into teaching lifeskills/structured learning. My niece who born prematurely around the same time spent some time in the NICU. I learned about speech pathologists at that time as she had difficulty feeding and swallowing. I found that this field had different settings you could go into and I chose to study communication disorders. I fell in love with the idea of helping someone find their voice to communicate. Thank you for the well wishes. I graduate this May!
Hey Alex!
I’m an undergrad student studying to become an SLP! You’re experiences have further broadened my knowledge about this field! I wanted to know what prompted you to study and become an SLP? Were there any challenges that you faced that you felt were unique to you?
Hey there,
The short version of my WHY is that I needed a therapist that I did not think was available to me, so I needed to become that person for myself first and foremost. I had formulated a hypothesis that if I become and SLP, learn all of the ins and outs of the field that I would be able to give myself the best therapeutic experience possible. I was wrong to think that going through a graduate SLP program would prepare me in the way that I wanted, but I was correct in trusting that the choice to become and SLP would lead me down a path of self actualization that I was previously not on.
The challenges that I found were that I wasn’t learning the things that I really wanted to learn in graduate school. It was incredibly frustrating to me to have spent so much time, money, and energy on studying things that to me were not aligned with my future goals. The other factor was that my schooling did not prepare me for entrepreneurship and private practice. It was set up in a way where the end results was to find a job somewhere. These challenges were irritating at the time, but they informed me that if I want to figure out something I need to communicate and be more diligent in getting the answers and opportunities that I’m looking for. To expect that a system would provide me with everything that I wanted as an individual is foolish. The system is there to get you the requirements that you need to do the things that you want to do. That’s the foundation, that’s the bare bones infrastructure. Everything else is up to you to figure out, which is overwhelming times, but truly empowering.
-Alexander
Hi Alex! Thank you for sharing you experience.
My name is Muna and I am an undergraduate student in communication sciences and disorders. I’m thinking of becoming SLP!
What is something you wish you knew before becoming SLP? What advice do you have for someone who’s trying to be SLP?
Hey Muna,
Thank you for reaching out. The only advice that I think is appropriate is to really sit with, meditate on, and go into deep self-inquiry about WHY you want to choose into this line of work. What are your unique gifts that you need to give to the world in order to feel a deep sense of purpose and connectedness to who you are. I’ve met a lot of people who go into education and therapeutic fields because then are nice people and want to help, but they feel very ambiguous in why they are choosing their particular profession. Given the workload, time, energetic, and financial commitment to going through with becoming an SLP I think it’s critical to understand if you are truly aligned with your choice. If you are, then there is no advice other than to always trust yourself, learn yourself deeper, be curious, keep an open heart when it gets hard, and never lose sight of the fact that you are serving humans.
I hope that reaches you well,
-Alexander
Hi Alexander,
I am a SLP undergraduate student who does not have a stutter. I am scared to work with clients who stutter as i may not know the best tips and therapy to provide for them as I have never needed it.
I am very happy to see a person who stutters work as a SLP, as I know there are many people who are hesitant to receive therapy from someone who does not understand the struggles of stuttering. Do you believe you can be more understanding and provide better treatment than a SLP who does not stutter? In addition, how do your clients respond toward the embodiment therapy method?
Thank you,
Desiree
Hey Desiree,
Thank you for taking the time to watch my video and share your reflections/questions with me.
I think the tragedy in what I’m hearing you say is that you’re looking the stuttering as something that you do or do not have and by virtue of that if you classify yourself under those parameters you’re somehow different from the person sitting across from you.
Sit with that for a minute before you keep reading.
My thoughts are that our system of therapy, regardless of what type of therapy it is, has made itself so much more complex and complicated that need be. Perhaps some of this is financially motivated, (i.e., graduate school and medical school are astronomically expensive) and person some of it is ego based, but most of all it’s such a disembodied way of approaching people and their growth and healing from life’s challenges and circumstances.
What was truly disappointing to me when I was a graduate student was that my professors and clinical supervisors would look to me with answers to questions about course content and clients. I was enrolled in this program receiving a very expensive and exclusive education given how small our cohorts are, and I was being looked to as the expert. I would still get questions wrong on my tests and and I think I even received an A- in my graduate fluency class which is hilarious to me.
My point of sharing this with you is that I don’t believe any of it really matters. Get rid of everything that you feel you need as a clinician in order to prove to someone that you are somehow qualified because you follow their rules and standards that were never meant to satisfy everyone at a level of depth that true healing and growth occur.
If you are a human being and you understand how chaotic and crazy it is to be human on earth, AND you’ve taken the time to learn about the human condition and are capable of holding a safe and powerful space for another person to go into the depths of their condition regardless of what it is, you are qualified to work with a person who stutters.
My clients absolutely love what I do. My mission is to bring it to as many people as I possibly can before I die.
I think my incessant curiosity and willingness to go deeper and deeper is what makes me feel that I am more understanding and provide better treatment. BUT I have friends who are not SLPs, but who are coaches or just deeply embodied people and when I talk to them about my work with stuttering they immediately get it. They don’t need to sit in a classroom for 6 years to get what I’m talking about, and they can embody it with their friends, children, clients, and selves. The prerequisite is not to be an SLP who stutters, but to be an embodied person .
Much love,
-Alexander
Hi Alex,
Thank you for sharing your story and experience in your video. I’m currently working towards becoming a speech-language pathologist. Is there any piece of advice you could share from your experience? Also, I enjoyed reading when you said, “The things that have helped me to the greatest degree are rooted in embodiment practices” can you give an example of an embodiment practice you do? Thank you, and look forward to your response!
Best,
Liz
Hey Liz,
Thank you for watching my video and sharing your reflections. I would encourage you to read through the other questions/answers in the feed so far as I’ve given out a lot of insight that you may find helpful.
Something else I could add to your inquiry about my experience is that I’ve always listened to myself, the nagging questions, the deep curiosity, the some times insatiable parts of me that aren’t satisfied by the information that is available to us through our course of study. I’ve always kept digging deeper and deeper into the things that have kept me up at night or left me feeling like I wanted more out of a session or period of time with a client. Any job or practice becomes diluted in some ways when you get into the field. All of the circumstances of people’s lives get in the way of getting to the root of what is true and what needs to be addressed with clarity and precision. I give a lot of time and energy to not letting that happen so that I can help people get the results that they truly want.
Embodiment to me is anything that helps me delve deeper into understanding HOW I am being, what it feels like to be that way, and what is contributing to me being that way. I look at it as a step deeper from mindfulness. Mindfulness is being aware of what you’re doing and paying attention to the sensations that you feel whilst doing something. To me embodiment is then saying, OK this is how I’m being and how I’m feeling, but is it how I truly want to be? Am I being the person that I know I want to be and that my soul is begging for my body to act out in the world. If I am not, then why am I not being this way? What is my embodiment when I enter a room or people that I don’t know? Am I present in my body, am I choosing to breathe deeply into my diaphragm, and I showing the world that I am alive and regulated? Or am I the embodiment of something different?
These practices can be anything and everything, I specifically do a series of breathing exercises that also involve movement, creating intense sensations in my body and then sitting with them to feel how my nervous system responds to their intensity. Building greater capacity to hold the sensations without trying to find a way out of them through distractions, fidgeting, removing them, etc.
-Alexander
Hi Alexander!
I loved reading about your journey. The mind body connection is important in every part of life. I am studying to become a speech language pathologist. Is there any advice you can give to me as a future clinician when I work with PWS?
Hey,
Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect on my share. The deepening of my mind-body-spirit connection has been one of the most expansive journeys I could ever go on. I think the best advice I can give someone who is going to be an SLP who does not stutter is to not get overly caught up in your own lack of ability to fully understand what stuttering is like as a person who stutters and to become very clear with the person you are working with about what the vision/mission is. You don’t have to follow a specific path for treatment if you are not an expert, you just need to be able to relate to people, feel people, and be grounded and regulated in your own body so that you can form a safe and collaborative relationship with the person you’re working with. Don’t rush into projecting the things you’ve learned in school onto someone before you really feel them and know what they want. That goes for any age really, with kids you want to build relationships and feel into who they are, with adults you want to do the same, it will just look different in the way you do that, but the goal is the same.
I hope that reaches you well,
-Alexander
Hello Alexander, nice to meet you!
I think it is amazing that you’re a Speech Language Pathologist. I’m taking a fluency class at my university, and we just finished doing a voluntary stuttering assignment. We had to stutter in 2 different situations 1.)face-to-face and 2.) over the phone. It was an amazing experience because, as future clinicians, we’re taught to provide empathy, NOT sympathy, to clients. It helps me understand more about PWS and its psychological aspects, i.e. anxiety, not wanting to speak as much, nervousness, etc.
I want to ask where do you see yourself 5 years from now? What do you hope to accomplish within that time?
Best,
Nataly
Nataly,
Thank you for sharing your experience and taking the time to indulge in mine. My quick opinion on what you shared is that you can be sympathetic and empathetic. Sometimes people have a miserable and traumatic experience and sympathy might very well be warranted, but it doesn’t turn into coddling someone and keeping them stuck and small in their box of hiding and avoiding. I think that it’s critical to think and feel for yourself, to not just listen to what other people tell you to do as a clinician, to make mistakes by being vulnerable and open, to ask questions and to really connect with people about their experience. You’re never going to get it right all of the time just playing to one side of something.
Anyway I digress. May mission is to lead people who stutter to fearless and free expression in order to become the person they are supposed to be, all of the time, without the guesswork, speech tools, and wasted time. There are 70 million of us, my goal is to reach as many of those people as I possibly can with my work of embodiment and returning the nervous system. Right now I am serving one person at a time, over time that will bee tens to hundreds and quite possibly even thousands of people at a time. I think that I can help really change the narrative about how stuttering therapy can be provided to turn people in grounded purposeful people with a huge capacity to live epic lives.
I hope this reaches you well,
-Alexander
Hey Alexander,
Your video was incredibly inspiring to watch! Although I am not a PWS, I can truly resonate with your message. As a human being, I think it’s important to be comfortable with who you are. Of course, everyone has their struggles. Based on your beliefs and your message, my question is, how can a future SLP include the mind-to-body connection in speech therapy? I am in my undergrad studying to become an SLP, and would love your input on how to advise future clients. Thank you!
Hey,
Thanks for your reflection and your question. The only thing I can say is that you have to BE embodied yourself in order to help someone else do it. It’s terribly tricky to teach people something that you is not in alignment with how you are being. People can see and feel right through it and it’s very frustrating for people to be told to be mindful, relaxed, aware of their breath etc. if the person telling them to do it is not being that way. So, I encourage you to curative a daily practice that will evolve over time as you learn and go and grow, that is rooted in mind-body connection so that you can truly share the gifts of these practices with someone else as an act of love and embodiment rather than as an exercise that may not land and stick with the person.
The thing that I see a lot of people struggle with is that they talk to and teach clients in a way that they wouldn’t teach themselves. We are all just people, think about how you would want to be taught something and then learn how to do it, teach yourself the thing, watch videos, go to classes, read books, teach yourself and get taught by other people and then just try the same things with the people you get to teach.
I hope that reaches you well,
-Alexander
Hi Alexander,
Thank you so much for sharing your story! I was truly inspiring. I am currently in graduate school to become a Speech-Language Pathologist. I enjoyed learning about your embodiment practices. Every PWS should be able to “be seen and heard”. I was wondering how your own experiences as a PWS has influenced the way you approach sessions with clients?
Thank you,
Allison
Hey Allison,
Thank you for taking the time to reflect on my share and to ask your question.
There’s a lot of complexity and nuance in the way that I approach sessions with clients. I’ve listened to so many PWS and people in general who are looking to grow, heal, and become more of themselves talk about how they want more from their experiences. I think what makes a clinician a master of his/her craft is that they don’t just follow the “blue print” or a specific step by step procedure to helping people.
I think if you want to become a master at what you do you have to go deep, you have to be willing to sit in the silence, to feel all of the feelings, to get into the taboo, the scary, the uncomfortable, the mysterious and explore. I was always frustrated by this work as a client because every stage in my journey from a young child to a college student the therapists were all doing the same things. I felt that there was no precedent set for me to run the show, to be fully human, to decondition myself from a lot of the ways that life and society shaped me and to recondition as the person that I wanted to be.
It’s funny to me that in most of my sessions I don’t spend a ton of time actually talking about stuttering and little to no time working on actually speech. We work on embodiment, we work on self-awareness, we work on connection, we work on empowerment, we work on building a stronger and more regulated nervous system. All of these things lead to growth that carries over to how we interface with other people and the world.
I hope this reaches you well,
-Alexander
Hi Alexander,
Thank you for sharing your story. It’s empowering how a learning your body can make a difference in your life. “Express yourself without fear” I love that. At what point did you realize you were able you express yourself without that filter of fear? And how much has that impacted your life today?
Hey there,
Thank you for taking the time to listen to my share, provide your reflections, and ask your question.
I realized how much fear was in my body at a young age. I did not have the language to express the quality of my body, nervous system, and thoughts, but the feelings were palpable. Fear ran the show and everything that I did was a reaction to fear, even if I was behaving courageously or exploring outside of my comfort zone, I was always so aware of the fear in my body. I only recently determined that this paradigm of removing the fear from my body first, ridding the filter of fear was available to me through deeper and deeper self-inquiry and meditation.
Fear is obviously a biological necessity that has allowed our special to survive and overcome all sorts of chaos and disorder. BUT, in the modern world, there is not place for fear when it comes to authentic expression. I think that fear in that way has become obsolete and is not useful in any way shape or form. Granted, there may be consequences for expressing yourself without that filter, some people might disagree, feel some type of negative emotions, and may respond in a way that seems like a conflict has resulted. I think that this is exactly right though, in order to really get the truth to come to the surface we have to be willing to say exactly what feels true in order to move forward appropriately.
I don’t believe I am completely there yet, but it is a mission of mine now, so it is always in my field to acknowledge when fear has entered the proverbial chat, and dismantle it, set a bounder with it, and move forward in a regulated system with the embodiment of a man who speaks his truth with confidence and with an open heart.
This is an absolute game changer.
Best,
-Alexander
Hi Alexander! I enjoyed watching your video. I am sorry to hear about how your teacher asked you to not present. I agreed with you saying that everyone has to find their own path and what works for them. Everyone is different and has different thoughts and needs.
Hey,
Thanks for taking the time to watch and to share your reflections. I agree with your sentiment of each person having their own unique thoughts and needs. I also feel that because we are all human, and we all run the same systems in our bodies, that we have a universal connection and NEED for deeper embodiment, capacity of the nervous system and regulation of the nervous system. BUT, many people are afraid to actually state and claim their needs and desires and so they never get them met because nobody else is asking for them. So, we spin around in this system of working on surface level or misaligned goals that don’t result in too much growth because we are skirting around the truth. It’s time to do better for everyone.
Best,
-Alexander
Hi Alexander,
I loved your share, and thank you for your candid and empowering story. I am frustrated that you were subjected to adverse treatment from someone whose literal job description is to build and construct their students in a positive direction. I loved your usage of the phrase “to be seen and heard.” My therapist gave me the terminology, “I have the right to take up space,” which applies well to this context and to people who stutter in general. You have empowered me with your video and provided me with additional tools to do so with PWS, both as an aspiring speech-language pathologist and as a human being who desires connection just like the rest of us. I guess my question is, how can I recruit others into this mindset in a clinical setting and as a good communication partner in general?
Hey there,
Thank you for your thoughtful reflections, I appreciate your taking the time to share. You absolutely do have the right to take up space. Thank you for sharing that, I said it aloud to myself three times and it felt really good in my body to say those words.
How can I recruit others into this mindset in a clinical setting and as a good communication partner in general? The best way I know how to recruit someone to do anything is to BE the model of it myself so that people notice and feel it from me. I invite people through my body and my embodiment and when I notice that they are communicating to me in some way that they resonate with me then I move into discussions, shares, and offering to teach. It’s all about being the example in my opinion.
Thanks again,
-Alexander
Thank you to everyone who took the time to watch and read my shares and those of you who were willing to engage with me through leaving a comment. It means the world to me to be able to share my skills, gifts, experiences, and wisdom with the world. It is a huge honor to contribute to the world of stuttering in the ways that I am able to. My passion for embodiment and empowerment permeate all aspects and walks fo life, but I feel based on my own path and supporting other people who stutter on theirs, that there is some big juicy magic in realm.
Thank you again, sincerely,
-Alexander Burday