We were lucky to catch up with Patricia Angelin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Patricia, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

I think one of the biggest trends we are seeing – I think even seeing in the world – has to do with the post-COVID global anxiety and because we are directly working with the neuroscience of Human Emotion, we’re in the front lines in dealing with this world anxiety experienced in individual persons. This reality, it seems to me, is creating a need for authenticity – a hunger for that which is Real. People want to experience what is honest and true and not simply performative. People are beginning to be more alert to what is highly staged. I find that the popularity among young people of phrases like “touch grass,” or the trending phrases a year ago, “very mindful, very demure,” show us that there is a cross-cultural drive that is toward what is simply human.

For us, this is an opening. Because producing this authenticity is what we do by helping people discover with accuracy their own genuine emotions and to be able to accurately observe the emotions of others. It’s a huge gift for everybody. It’s important! For each person, no matter what field of endeavor a person is engaged in. The management and regulation of our emotional lives enhances everything we do and who we are. And the trend is that the emotions out there are huge and hard to manage. The romantic poet, William Wordsworth, called it 200 years ago, “the world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our power. Nothing we see in nature, that is ours: a sordid boon!” People are so busy that they don’t know how to sort their own or other people’s emotions. And Alba Technique is the cure.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Alba Technique empowers you to identify, create, and manage real emotion using only your body.

What sets us apart absolutely is that our work is with the whole person in a new way. There is a lot of talk out there, and one of the buzzwords is “breathe.” The thing is, people don’t know how. We teach people how. Our students discover the specific body patterning that produces the emotions by producing them through breath and posture and tensions in small and large muscle groups. We assist our clients in finding “the space between.” The late psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said “the last of the human freedoms [is] – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” In order to be able to choose we need to understand what’s happening emotionally or we get totally bound up in our emotions. Our work takes advantage of the amazing plasticity of the human brain to rewire itself to healthy emotion. Thus giving our students the freedom to choose their attitudes. To choose how to respond to what people do to us. “Between stimulus and response. there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” This is profoundly true, creates amazing resilience, and ultimately joy in daily life. That’s what we do. A new student, who is a financial professional, said to me yesterday, “You use the word ‘whole’ I think it’s true but I would say this work is ‘wholesome’ and that’s different. But they are both true. ‘Whole’ and ‘wholesome'”

At Alba Technique, people learn to work with themselves, with their temperament, with their mind, with their body. As I like to say “It ain’t therapy, but it’s therapeutic.” Whether a person approaches this in a weekend, which we offer 5 times a year in NYC, or in the weekly in-person class on Tuesdays also in NYC, in the Qi Gong 8th Breathe Element offered Mondays on Zoom, or the gold standard held annually in Ireland at the National Opera House the last week of July, persons gain a very real advanced emotional intelligence. It’s accumulative over time. It gets better and better. It’s always a gain.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Word of mouth. Out of everything I have ever done in my long life, Alba Technique is the most purely experiential. What I mean by this is unless a person does it in their unique individual body mind, there is no grasping it. It’s truly physical. So when people come and take a class, they have amazing discoveries that are surprising. The client has personal “ah-ha” moments that nobody else could predict. It’s awe-inspiring because it’s a direct link to the paradox that we are each totally unique, irreplaceable, and unrepeatable and yet… we’re doing these universal body patternings that produce connectivity within ourselves and to each other. It’s truly amazing and fun! And then, the student goes away and tells someone else about their amazing experiences. That’s how it seems to work. Because there is not a book you can read or a white paper or even a video that can teach this. It’s totally new. And it’s amazing.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I already had a decent track record as an actor in theatre, radio, some film, and voice-over, particularly long-form narration which is basically what Audible does now. It was finding the holes in what I couldn’t do as an artist that when I met the neuropsychologist Susana Bloch, and experienced a tiny piece of her work in Chicago in 1994 I experienced a pathway in front of me toward filling in my own missing puzzle pieces. I experienced true emotional neutrality for the first time in my life. After an equally profound and immediate body experience with one of the body patternings. Those back-to-back experiences of going into an emotion that was very strong, very imminent fully systemic from my toes to the top of my head and then to completely have that body feeling removed was astounding. I realized how important such experiences are for the world. Consequently, my first tagline, derived from the ancient Greek Delphic Oracle, “Know Thyself” became the watch-phrase. After working with myself and my own body mind, directly with Susana Bloch for a number of years, I was asked to teach. I realized my next watch-phrase needed to be, “First, do no harm.” Because this work is a direct line to people’s neurosystems, a direct line to the limbic systems of the brain that I needed to be very gentle with Susana Bloch’s work as I expanded it from myself to other people. And because many people had already seen, in my own life and in my own acting, how resilient, confident, and flexible I was in professional situations a base of trust was already there because the people who came to me had already seen what I could do myself and wanted to learn how to do it themselves. At this point, I am absolutely trustworthy and authoritative in my field.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.albatechnique.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/albatechnique/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlbaTechnique
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alba-technique/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@albatechnique

Image Credits

Alba Technique Studio