I do a monthly Q&A for students of my course. Here is a question from September 2026, and an edited version of my answer.

If habit feels fine just because it is habit, how do we notice it is not fine? Does open awareness often suffice to reveal it, or is its felt fine-ness baked in so we just notice in consequences or some other way?

This depends a little on what you mean by 'fine', because you use it in two ways. In "feels fine", it means familiar and right, or so unremarkable that it doesn't register at all. In "not fine", it's a judgement about results. So I'm taking the question to mean: if a habit feels right, how do we notice that it might be unconstructive? Is open awareness enough?

Let's take the habit of slouching as a worked example. It's very likely that for most of a slouch, you are on autopilot, at least with respect to the slouch. Your slouch is largely invisible to you, because it doesn't feel like a slouch while you're deep in it; what it feels like is working or watching TV. The moment you notice a slouch is the moment your awareness expands away from whatever is driving it so that you're able to notice it as a slouch.

There is a danger in this moment of noticing though, because you might immediately judge your slouching as bad and decide you should have good posture. What happens then is another fixation on your image of what good posture is like. This activates a new autopilot so you pull yourself upright until your feelings match whatever you think 'good posture' feels like.

In traditional Alexander Technique, the move is to notice that you are pulling yourself down, and to then inhibit that downward pull (stop doing it, rather than do something else instead). It's the chronic downward pull that's invisible for most people, and your body will naturally lengthen and seemingly float upwards once you stop habitually pulling yourself down.

This comes with presence: the further into presence you go, the less likely it is that you're running these habits that push and pull you around. That constant downward pull is a deep autopilot for almost everyone, which is why Alexander Technique teachers, who can help you stop doing it for perhaps the first time in your adult life, can guide you so quickly towards presence.

This is a big part of why I teach an 'experience-first' approach. You often can't notice your habits, at least not at first, but you can notice how your experience changes moment by moment and start to get curious about what habits might be influencing it. You can then start to look for more objective data, i.e. information that comes from outside of your feelings.

To answer your question directly, your direct access to presence moment by moment is a kind of internal barometer about how 'habitual' you are. The problem is that you will frequently forget this barometer exists exactly when it matters. That's one of the skills we're training.

The consequences you mention are external data that force their way into your awareness. Pain might be evidence of habitual misuse of your body. Getting a bad performance review at work might be evidence of habitual rushing through tasks. Getting into an argument with your spouse might be evidence of habitual over-focusing on your needs to the detriment of theirs.

One of the benefits of this work is that you can start to notice this kind of external data before it becomes such a bad consequence:

• "I notice I'm pulling down, I could inhibit that" — before pain starts
• "I notice I'm getting comments on the quality of my work, I could explore why" — before the performance review
• "I notice my spouse is short with me, I could get curious about what's up" — before the argument

Just remember the link between autopilot and certainty. Autopilot-shaped habits usually don't feel like habits, but like truths about the world.

• Rushing doesn't feel like rushing, but like there isn't enough time.
• Gripping doesn't feel like gripping, but like the thing you're working on is extremely important.
• Judgement doesn't feel like judgement, but like someone or something is wrong and bad.

If you want to surface these habits, it's likely you'll need to start holding your assumptions much more lightly. The moment you question strongly held assumptions you'll move towards presence. If your assumptions are somehow load-bearing for you and you really want them to be true, you'll slide right back onto autopilot, because you dislike what your experience is like when your assumption isn't true.

The game is to notice, stay in and expand that spacious moment in the middle, because it's from there that you'll be able to see, think, feel and act more clearly.