Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep...

And then I tighten my head on my neck to pull it back and down into the pillow...
Draw my shoulders in...
Take a firm grip on my hips and knees...

And then I'm all ready to have a good refreshing sleep.

Sounds strange, but it's a reality that sleep isn't as refreshing and relaxing as we imagine it is. It has the potential to be, yes, but a lot of the time we take our deeply held tensions right over into sleep. Which is probably why we often wake in the morning feeling bleary and heavy headed.
This is a really tough one - what can you do about tensions which surface after you've gone to sleep?
I've found that spending some time directing for release in the neck, the shoulders, and other joints helps to quieten everything down so there's presumably less of a tendency to seize up after I've slept off. Certainly I wake up feeling fresher and more rested than if I'd just gone off, unreleased, to sleep.
A lot of the time, however, it seems just strange to compose myself to sleep in that way. I didn't realise that in the beginning; I'd direct and release one particular time, and then forget all about it for the next week. This, because I'd got used to lying in bed going over and over the day's happenings and slipping into sleep from there. So that seemed the proper way to go to sleep. The other was okay for a change, but it just didn't seem right to be doing it every day.
Strange - it would seem that we all desire ease and restfulness, and we'd grab every opportunity to have it - and then it turns that what we want is not so much ease and restfulness as the comfort of familiarity. Even if it's ultimately damaging and unsatisfying.

Stand up Straight? It's Not That Simple

Who has good posture?

Why, that's easy - someone who's standing straight and tall. Someone who is holding themselves upright.

Someone who's bent over

can't possibly have good posture - surely that's obvious.

Marjorie Barstow was one of the first group of teachers who was trained by Alexander himself. You can see her here in this video on teaching children - it's not about teaching children the Alexander Technique, it's about teaching a teacher of children how to use the Alexander Technique in her work.

But what you'll probably notice immediately is how stooped Marjorie is - and you'd think -

'What - a teacher of posture, her? No way!'

But that was exactly what she was - and teacher of a whole lot of other things too, because as people who have some experience of the Technique know, it's not just about posture.

We forget that though it's ideal for someone to stand up straight, hold themselves upright and so on, it may not always be possible for them to do that. They may have a genetic problem - or may have had an accident -that affected their spine. Or they may, as Marjorie did, suffer from osteoporosis, which is a condition that leads to thinning of bone tissue and consequent loss of bone strength. The stoop that you see in the video is one of the effects of osteoporosis, and not a consequence of a lifelong habit of stooping. So in her case, good posture comes with the way she manages her condition. Anybody else would have been incapacitated - not her. Towards the end of her life, she used to teach workshops where she worked for 6 hours a day - for 7 days straight!

So the outward appearance may not always mirror the inner reality.

Nevertheless - whatever the problem, Alexander Technique skills can be used to make sure that we don't compound the difficulties caused by it, by contracting and pulling down.That's a usual, and understandable, way of trying to defend ourselves from the pain and discomfort of whatever ails us. But in fact, keeping free and releasing upwards actually helps muscles and bones to cope in the best possible way with the difficulties imposed by the problem; and if healing is at all possible, it speeds up the process of recovery as well.

You can have a look at other videos of Marjorie here. Don't forget, when you check them out, to observe her 'posture' in her younger days.

And this is the quote at the head of the page - There isn't anything either right or wrong when dealing with co-ordination. There are degrees of movement. Life is really moving from one position to another. We never stop and say, "This is right--this is my posture, this is the way I ought to be". If we do that, we're stiff trying to hold that posture. It isn't natural for our bodies to be held in positions. - Marjorie Barstow, quoted in Practical Marj

Mind the Gap

Awareness, and how to encourage it, and how much of it to encourage, is a big part of my life nowadays.

I spend a lot of time and attention in trying to increase and sharpen my own awareness - of things happening inside and outside of me -and a lot of my students' lessons doing the same for them.

So I found this article -The Illusion of Attention - really interesting.

Now before you make an exasperated noise and go on to google it -

stop.

Check this out first -

Basket ball awareness test ...

and then go on to The Illusion of Attention

I won't add anything more because I don't want to give away the point of the experiment, but even those of you who are familiar with this experiment might have an little surprise when you do the basket ball test.

It immediately interested me because I connected it with our forgetfulness of ourselves when we're immersed in our tasks, routine or specialised - and of course, one of the important points of the Alexander Technique is that it is precisely this forgetfulness that creates problems for us. So lessons aim to sensitise us to what's going on in ourselves so we can stop damage before it happens.

The article suggests that our supply of attention is limited, and so this kind of unawareness is bound to happen. I agree - only I wonder - have we really reached the limits of our awareness, or could we extend it a little further in our functioning?

Could we expand a sense of the whole - of ourselves, of our environment - a little more? Do we really have to work with the extreme narrowness that we usually sink into?

It's something that each of us can explore for ourselves, in our daily lives - how we can enrich our lives by simply being aware.