The Alphabet of use

It's very difficult sometimes to talk about the Alexander Technique to someone new to it.

They ask - "Who's it for?"

and you answer - "Well, everybody."

And they ask - "What can you use it for?"

and you answer - "Um... for everything?

Which, for most people, is so general as to be almost completely meaningless.

So it's useful to think about it as a kind of alphabet that you learn.

An alphabet of use, that you can then employ in as simple, or as complex a way as you like.

Just like when you learn the abc, you can use it to read a notice on the wall, a newspaper, or Shakespeare.

It's entirely up to you.

The Alexander Technique - Energising or Exhausting?

I found some very interesting blog posts as I was doing the rounds of my favourite AT blogs a couple of days back. A couple of them dealt with something I've experienced when I was training; I've had comments about this from my pupils as well.

It has to do with the issue of the deep fatigue that often hits students of the Alexander Technique shortly after they start lessons. This is all the more galling because in most accounts of the Alexander Technique, a lot is said about how using less tension in our actions actually makes us more energetic - we're able to do more, we feel full of life even at the end of the day, and so on.

Then we start lessons, and find we have barely enough energy to drag ourselves to bed each night.

I wrote about this in my post Releasing Into Tightening where I described how disheartening it can be when we suddenly plunge into fatigue from the initial euphoria of habitually tight muscles releasing.

Alexander teacher Jennifer Mackerras in her blog post "You Let the Tiredness Out" - Fatigue and Alexander Technique describes the same thing, and gives what she believes could be the reason behind this debilitating exhaustion felt by so many AT students. The fatigue is short term, and part of the total process of letting go of what we actually don't need.

On a heartening note, Maaike Aarts describes the positive changes that have come into her life since she learnt the Alexander Technique. The pleasure she finds in all the actions of her life, especially the small, supposedly minor ones - standing in line at the supermarket, washing the dishes, little things that we normally don't deem worthy of our attention. "The Alexander Technique is something you put into practice while doing everyday things..." - something which I can never tell my pupils often enough.

I often remember the story of a man who went to a very famous hermit to find a cure for his ailments. The hermit listened to him patiently, and finally said, "I can help you. But first you need to decide whether you want to be healed, or just relieved of pain."

When we start lessons, we usually have very powerful muscular habits, the result of years of accumulated tensions, to deal with. We really shouldn't be surprised if, along the way, they show up as an increased sense of tightness, discomfort, or fatigue.

The Space Between the Spaces

One of the most common assumptions that people who come for lessons make is that the Alexander Technique is meant to be practised in peace and quiet.

If only we were so lucky as to have peace and quiet to practise the Alexander Technique, or anything else we put our minds to!

The sad truth is that for a lot of us, life is a series of actions - of duty, pleasure, social obligation, leisure, professional obligation ... the list could go on for ever.
We step into our day in the morning, and are instantly sucked into this round of work and leisure.

The proportions of each could vary for different people, but the elements remain the same. Even the leisure isn't leisurely - it's scheduled, and limited to a certain time and duration in the day.

When we want to get that sense of large and leisurely expanses of time, we go away on holiday to get it. If we're lucky.

So people come for lessons and go away thinking that the skills that they have learnt in the lesson are something to be used when they have an idle moment.

Since most of them don't have many idle moments, they end up not thinking about what they've learnt until the time comes round for the next lesson.

So it's a good idea to start our Alexander practice with the thought that this is going to become an integral part of life - personal, social and professional. We don't need to immediately start applying it to everything we do, all the time, but we have to have the intention.
That is important because that's what's going to set the tone of Alexander work in our lives.

We keep the intention of using Alexander skills during meetings, or performances, or presentations; we don't divide our day into

'Times I can use Alexander'

(when I'm sitting quietly/drinking a cup of tea/reading the newspaper/doing nothing in particular)

and

'Times When I Simply Can't Think About It, Ever'.

(when I'm about to leave for work/when I'm running for the bus/when I'm in a meeting/when I'm talking to my boss/doing the important things in my life)

We can start by using the relatively quieter moments of the day to think about release. When we're waiting for the bus, for instance. Or browsing in a shop. Waiting in line for tickets. TheAlexander Moments .

These are the little pockets of quiet that we miss out on, because we're so caught up in the general busy-ness all around us.

But well used, they could help us when we have to go in to face an angry boss, or tackle a difficult presentation, or finish a hundred different things before running to catch the bus to work.

Boil the Frog Slowly

The title of this post is to do with an account that I heard as a child about how you can kill a frog by putting it in a pot of water and then gently increasing the temperature of the water to boiling. Because the temperature is increasing slowly, the frog keeps adjusting to it until it's too late.

I never liked it - I couldn't imagine why anyone would take all the trouble to work out this particularly cruel way of killing a poor frog.

But reading this post today - Your Back Pain is Killing Me! suddenly reminded me of this story.

We're very frog like in this respect - we adjust to slowly increasing levels of pain until it reaches unbearable levels, and by then the injury that the pain was signalling has probably reached a critical stage.

Funnily enough, the opposite also applies.

We adjust to slowly decreasing levels of pain until it's all gone, and then we forget that the pain was ever there.

As an Alexander teacher, I've always found this fascinating -

how people would come in for lessons with fairly acute wrist or shoulder pain and then a few lessons on, the pain or discomfort would have gradually lessened... to the extent that I've had some of them look blankly at me when I asked them, 'How's your wrist/shoulder now?'

This is fantastic, if we can remember not to go back to doing the things that brought on the pain in the first place!