An Alexander Student's Story - Part IV

Here's what Leela feels the Alexander Technique has done for her. I haven't included her whole list, but I think this will give you an idea -

1.My muscles DO obey instructions from my brain.
2. Practising the AT allows me to do everything I want to do or have to do such as lift buckets and move furniture, but in a way that the body was designed by nature to do. Now every mundane activity is an adventure for me because I am learning to do it in a new and more efficient way.
3. It's all about stopping and "coming back to quiet" before doing anything, taking time to think before I make a conscious choice to react or NOT to react. This has greatly curbed my native impulsiveness and improved my interaction with other people.
4. The AT is an ongoing process. It is not confined within a time frame. It is not like putting in one's sentence in the gym for an hour each day, and then forgetting about fitness till the next day! I have the rest of my life to practise what I have learned and gradually allow my life (and my mind) to evolve and improve instead of looking for immediate results.
As I said, this is just a selection of the ways in which Leela feels the Alexander Technique has helped her. And she ends -
AT has been like giving myself a gift. At long last I am learning to focus on myself in a way that is good and right. After a lifetime of doing everything fast, of racing against against everyone and with myself, I am learning that the sky will not fall down if I stop and think before I act or speak or do ...
"Ask not that your load be lighter; ask rather that your back be stronger," I read recently. To which I'd like to add," Absolutely! But also learn the Alexander Technique!"
I enjoyed reading her account tremendously because it gave me another view, so to speak. Some of the experiences she had are fairly common, but there were others which are uniquely hers, born out of her life, and the kind of person she is. Not to speak of that fascinating dream she had, which seemed to mirror the process she was going through!
That's why I always ask people to start a journal when they start their lessons - it gives a record of their unique journey, and it shows them that things have indeed been changing and developing in them.

An Alexander Student's Story - Part III

Here's the dream that Leela had -
In my dream, I am trapped in a very small space and unable to move. It is a narrow passage where the ceiling is so low that I have to bend double and cannot straighten up even though my back aches abominably; or I am climbing up a steep staircase or hill with a heavy load on my back; or I am trapped in a car and the lock is stuck; or I'm in a cramped elevator which is stuck and I am unable to get out.

At this point I always get up with that familiar back ache and I am unable to sleep again. Perhaps it is my body's way of signalling that I have been is the same position for too long and that it's time to turn and give my back a rest. This fact alone I have found interesting enough, but something even more interesting happened.

One night when I was about half way through my classes I had that dream. This time I was a tourist trapped in a dark underground cave along with a lot of other people with no way out. I was hemmed in by a crowd of people and the hard stone walls of the cave and my back was giving out. This is the point where normally I would have woken up in agony. This time though, I did not wake up at all. Still in the dream, one of my fellow tourists pointed to a wide, bright and airy passage that none of us had observed. We all made our way to that passage in a nice orderly sort of way and were able to get out into the open air where the sun was shining and and the sky was blue and everything was right with the world.

That was the first time I slept right through the night and woke up at a normal time without any back pain at all.
While I was asleep, had my brain sent directions to my muscles to release? Had they obeyed? I will never know.
I'm going to devote one more post to this. I'd like to include a random selection of the benefits that Leela feels she got from her lessons.
What struck me is that she got something out of the Alexander Technique that transformed her life without making any dramatic external changes. There's something magical about that!

An Alexander Student's Story - Part II

You've met Leela -
The story continues...
It is no wonder then that for many years I have been suffering from serious upper and lower back ailments which have forced me to be almost bed-ridden or completely house bound for weeks at a time. What's more my hip area had become all crooked; anyone could see that I was quite misaligned and I had been so for many years. My lower back was prone to frequent spasms causing pain and immobility, all probably from the wrong, albeit unconscious use of the body. Scans and countless visits to doctors confirmed a couple of herniated discs and mild atrophy of spinal muscles.
Surgery was considered but so far has been avoided. Apparently it is a condition that "cannot be reversed but only managed." Managed how? With rest and exercise.
Rest? What was that? I did not do "rest"!
Then I happened upon an article about the Alexander Technique and soon after, I read a book on it. It made a lot of sense to me.
After reading the book twice through, I longed to learn the Alexander Technique but thought that classes were available only outside India. I contented myself by reading and researching the AT on the internet.
They say in our philosophy that the intensity of the search determines the appearance of the teacher. In other words, "When the pupil is ready the teacher appears."
Leela's search must have been really intense because not only was I living in Bangalore, where she also lives, but I worked in a place not five minutes drive from her flat! She came in for a taster and promptly signed up for 15 lessons.
Read on...
In the first lesson I was asked to request my neck muscles to release but not to DO anything - simply allow the release to happen on its own. I was puzzled. What in the world was "release" and would my muslces obey? Why should they? I did not think they would.
After the first couple of classes, I began to actually feel that sense of release though some of the time I had to ask myself if I had only imagined it. For the first time I understood how liberating it could be to let go. It was quite a new and heady feeling! Of course the release was barely perceptible at first but gradually my awareness became stronger; I also noticed that the interval between my asking for the release and the actual release became shorter.
The hard part was still to come.
When I felt the release I was delighted and when it disappeared I was left with a good deal of disappointment. Learning to recognise the release (which my teacher helped me to do) and let it go instead of trying to hold on to it was a hard to understand concept; so is "not doing" rather than "doing". As hard, if not harder, especially for me, is to not look for results but to allow things to happen or not happen in their own time.
For the first time in my life I know what it is to be able to release and relax, to really enjoy it, even if it is just for those fifteen minutes while lying in semi-supine.
One day Leela came in and narrated a dream she had had the previous night; I found it really intriguing -
But I think I will keep that for my next post ...

An Alexander student's story - Part I

I usually don't ask my pupils to give a written account of their experience with the Alexander Technique. This is not because I doubt that they have anything of value to say - I know each of them has. It's because I also know that for most people, writing is a chore, and given the busy lives that most of us lead, I'm reluctant to impose any extra burden on them. So I usually content myself with making detailed notes of any observations they make during the course of their lessons.
So you can imagine how delighted I was when one of my pupils actually said that she was writing out an account of her AT journey, and would I like to look at it? It was a bit long, she warned.
Long! That sounded like exactly the kind of exhaustive narrative I wanted. I begged her to send it to me as soon as she had finished writing, checking, editing and so on, and that she did.
I found it so fascinating that I asked her permission to put it on my blog, which she very generously gave.
I don't want to interfere with her own voice by retelling her story, so I'm going to post excerpts, in instalments, for people to read. It's quite possible that her experiences may strike a chord with your own; in that case, please do share - similarities as well as differences.
First of all, meet Leela -
I believe that the world is divided into two types of people, the Type A person and the Type B person. I am a classic "A type", impatient, goal-oriented, competitive, restless, irritable, impulsive, hard on myself and a perfectionist.
I am known to cluck with impatience and grab a task out of the hands of somebody who, I think, is doing it too slowly or incompetently and do it myself. Faster! I have to arrange the magazines on the coffee table in order of their size, shoes must be paired and put away, and no matter how late at night, every single teaspoon and glass must be washed, dried and stored in its rightful place before I can sleep.
As for being competitive, I have to win every game of scrabble that I play and I feel very dissatisfied if I cannot complete a crossword puzzle. Swimming is my favourite form of exercise and the only thing I am permitted to do because it is low-impact exercise. In the pool I find myself swimming faster when I hear somebody drawing level with me and try to get to the other end sooner than he/she does!
It is not without shame (after all this is a "warts and all" true confession) that I admit this: when I hang out laundry to dry and catch sight of my neighbour doing the same, I speed it up and take childish pleasure in completing the task before she does! The lady I am competing with is, naturally, blissfully unaware that she is in a race!
I am a compulsive list maker. I cannot function without making lists. I plan not just my day but my week and when I have finished the list I have for today with time still left over, I start on tomorrow's jobs!
I never ever take breaks, going from one task to another without ever sitting down even when my back aches. I say to myself, "But this recipe asks me to stir continuously, so how can I stop now?"
Come to think of it, this is a metaphor for the way I live: I "stir continuously"!

The Inner Massage

I owe this idea to one of my pupils - she remarked how we go to a spa or clinic to get a massage, and leave feeling rejuvenated. But very soon all that delightful ease is gone and we're back to square one again.
Whereas with the Alexander Technique, she said, we can be giving ourselves an inner massage all the time. It needn't ever stop - and if it does, we can pick it up any time we like.
That's very true. We do carry around an enormous amount of underlying tension - that's our default state. I call it 'default holding', because at some level, that's what our muscles are doing.
Holding on. All the time.
We carry this into our work, and the pressures there, which for most people are enormous, pile on even more tension on our default state. That's what we pick up, and try to get rid of with massages and similar treatments. The other holding, the underlying one, we don't even register as tension.
But if we learn the skill of releasing whenever we want to, we can learn to shed first this external tension, and over time, we can access the lightness which at the moment is inaccessible to us. That brings in a qualitative change in ourselves and the way we respond to situations.
Once we change the way we respond to a situation, we change the situation itself.
Not bad for a simple massage!

Lying Down is Hard Work!

A couple of my students have recently commented on how tired they felt on the day they had a lesson. They said it hesitantly, almost apologetically, as if they had no business to feel tired after half an hour spent lying down or sitting down in a chair and getting up from it.
That's a very familiar feeling, and a very familiar response to the feeling.
Alexander teacher trainees typically might comment, if asked what they did in class -
'Oh, nothing much, we just sat and stood up a couple of times, and then we lay down for some more time while the teachers worked on us. Then we had a break; sat and stood up some more and lay down some more.
I'm wiped out - I have to rest!'
There is the understandable view that since an Alexander class doesn't involve - usually - any strenuous movement, there really is no reason to feel tired at all. But we forget that during the lesson, we are continuously giving instructions to our muscles to behave and respond very differently from the way they have been behaving and responding so far. Instant by instant, we are stripping away layers of habitual behaviours which have an impact on muscles we are not even conscious of. The tiredness here is not confined to the outer muscles - it is more subtle, and very very deep.
We should be gentle with ourselves in this process of relearning the old natural way of using ourselves. Allow ourselves to rest and recuperate.
Even more important, we need to not push ourselves into some imaginary level of achievement. We need to unquestioningly give ourselves all the time we need to assimilate and use the new information we've taken on board.

Alexandroid

This is a term - and a state - that I came across early in my training. It's also a stage which most Alexander students pass through at one time or another, whether they're training to be teachers or not.
It's characterised by an obsession with the way you are holding yourself, and a paranoid reluctance to make any movement, in case you tighten. So you develop a tendency to keep yourself very upright as you walk, continually giving directions for the neck to release. There is also often a tendency to turn with the whole body to look at something to the side, instead of turning just the head like any normal person. Hence the name, I guess!
Sitting down and getting up is done solemnly, with due consideration to stopping, directing, and letting the head lead the action. Sitting is always with an upright posture, with both feet on the ground, and the hands placed on the lap. Directing, you may be sure, all the way.
I began to do a rethink when I heard a possibly apocryphal story of Alexander students who went to the Sistine Chapel and lay down on the floor to look at the ceiling.
Excuse me?
I thought the Alexander Technique was meant to open up more possibilities for me, not narrow down the few I have. If that's the case, it should free me up to do the things I need to do and want to do. That made a little more sense, and so did the relaxed - released? - attitude of my teachers, who encouraged me to look, not just at what I was doing, but also how I was doing it. This doesn't mean that we pay no attention at all to our posture in sitting and standing. There are certain positions in which it is easier to release. If you are sitting balanced on your sit bones, it is definitely easier for you to lengthen and widen, especially in the beginning, than if you were sitting forward, or behind them.
But we need to be aware of two things -
One, that it is quite possible to be tight even while balanced on your sit bones, and
two, that some one who is skilled at the Alexander Technique can release while balanced on the sit bones,behind them, or in front of them.
The best thing to do, probably, is to pay attention to the posture, and the best way to sit, or stand, or do anything, but also to constantly keep learning to direct and inhibit in unusual and challenging situations.

Back from Mumbai

I thought I would get the time to post at least a couple of blogs - unfortunately I couldn't.
It was a good trip - I got to work with people who were really motivated to learn, who asked questions and expressed their doubts and confusions. That challenged me to really think so I could satisfy them with my answers. I hope I did. Also got some contacts which hopefully will work out in the future. Some carefully directed action, judiciously laced with inhibition, seems to be called for!
On my return, I got a call from an old pupil who wanted to come in for a lesson -
I'm constantly thinking about this, he said, and I'm feeling that everything I do is wrong.
I'm thrilled! I said, Carry right on directing, you're right on track!
I don't think he's forgotten what he's learnt, or suddenly, inexplicably, lapsed. I think it's just that he's coming up against some use patterns that he's really comfortable with, and his system doesn't want to let go.
I remember walking along the sea front in Brighton, some weeks into my course, miserably feeling that I had forgotten how to walk, that everyone was looking at me in astonishment at my strange, awkward way of walking. I really,truly felt that I didn't know how to lift my legs and move them so as to take a step. Only the realisation that I did have to get home somehow made me continue. And all the time, of course, I could also see that actually no one was looking at me at all; everyone was happily engrossed in their own business - or pleasure. A very weird feeling.
Absolutely convinced of the complete wrongness of my being and doing, and at the same time, realising that I looked as normal as anyone else.
Of course, I never for a minute considered throwing it all up and going home. I'd decided even before I got to Brighton that I was going to learn this, come what may.
But if I had wanted to give it all up, I think the other interludes would have persuaded me otherwise. The sudden, unexpected moments of walking - floating - along the street, feeling everything working smoothly, with an intelligence and harmony of its own. I didn't have to do anything - it was all doing itself, and life didn't have a greater joy than this.
Of course, after a few moments, I tried to grab it and hold on to it, at which it immediately vanished. But I'd had the experience, and seen what was possible. That alone would have kept me going, if I'd had any thought of giving up.

Releasing into Tightening

Most people feel a heady sense of lightness and ease after their lesson - even a first lesson. So did I.

I had my first ever Alexander lesson at the hands of a visiting teacher because there were no Alexander teachers in India at the time. I had to drive across the city through traffic choked roads to get there. During the lesson I didn't have any epiphanies; perhaps I was too preoccupied with trying to make sense of all the new information I was getting. But I drove back across the same traffic choked roads with a blissful feeling of effortlessness, as if I was being carried along by the current of a river. In words familiar to all Alexander students, 'I wasn't doing anything - it was all just happening.'

An experience like this can be a powerful motivator to pursue this strange discipline. Understandably, we want to experience this again and again. Make it our default state if possible.

So it can come as a rude shock when the initial phase of releases is followed by what seems to be relentless tightening in the muscles. We know our shoulders are tight, we direct for release, and frustratingly, nothing happens. It begins to feel as if learning the Alexander Technique is a never ending process of getting our noses jammed against the next level of tightening.

It's helpful to remember that we are usually holding several layers of tensions, and letting go of the outermost can bring the inner ones to the surface. Also that the new information we're asking ourselves to process is, more often than not, directly contradictory to the way we've been doing things up until then.

I remind my pupils, when they complain of feeling tighter than ever, that they have been carrying this tightness around for the whole of their lives. The only difference is that they didn't know they were carrying it - and now that they do, they don't like it. Naturally.

The best response to this is to give ourselves an encouraging pat on the back for being able to register the tension, then continue to direct and inhibit without worrying about when a release is actually going to happen.

It's Different!

It's very exciting to be starting out on a new venture, but one of the downsides is that there are so many factors to balance that some of them tend to fall by the wayside occasionally - as happened with my posts.
What helped me get back is a comment from one of my pupils:
'My only suggestion is keep directing into the blogs, it will work at some point!'
An apt suggestion, indeed.
So here I am, directing away -
and again, inevitably, I got back to the question of why the Alexander Technique constantly fascinates, frustrates, but refuses to let go of me.
Well, it's a nice middle point between 'Just go for it', and 'Everything is illusion, give it all up.'
It doesn't stop me from wanting things, but it shows me a different way of getting them without damaging myself in the process.
It doesn't encourage me to run blindly after them, to grab, hold, grip.
In fact, it encourages me, after making it clear to myself what exactly I want, to drop it and pay attention to something else instead. Strangely enough, I often end up getting not only what I asked for, but also an indefinable quality of ease and effortessness.
But the Alexander Technique doesn't work to a time table.
Deadlines are something I am learning to drop - very difficult!
I have to learn to ask, and get out of the way.
It may happen -
now
at some other time.
Or
something else may happen
nothing may happen for quite a long time
a whole lot of things may happen all at once.
It doesn't need a special time, or a special place.
The best time to use it is now, and the best place is here. Wherever I am, and whatever I happen to be doing at the moment, the Alexander Technique slips right into it, and infuses a whole new quality into it.
After some time you don't do the Alexander Technique, it does you, and you go along for the ride.