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.

Tone vs. Tightening

One big Alexander hurdle - how to have your muscles engaged and working well, but not use unnecessary effort and energy in the process.
All my pupils have had this problem, whether they were aware of it or not. I had it too when I started training.
You're standing, being worked on, and the teacher says, ' Ask your neck to release'.
You do, and don't feel any change. But she says, ' Great!' leaving you with the suspicion that she is just being nice, and that you're actually lousy at this.
Part of the problem is that we're not used to paying such close atention to our bodies. So many of the shifts and releases that happen simply slip through our awareness, like little fish that swim through the spaces of a net.
But another aspect of the problem is that we confuse tone with tightening, and think our muscles are tight, when in fact they're only using the appropriate effort required for the action being done. So if we're standing, and we ask our muscles to release, it doesn't mean that all our muscles go completely floppy. That would just make us end up in a heap on the floor.
No, it just means that the extra effort we're putting into that action melts away, leaving us using just the right amount of effort that's needed.
This melting away of the extra effort often goes unnoticed, especially if we're at the beginning stages. That's when we feel that our thoughts have had no effect. Naturally we feel confused when the teacher beams, 'Well done!' at us!
But as time goes by, and our kinaesthetic awareness sharpens, we learn to recognise when release has taken place, whether we're moving or standing still. We experience the pleasure of having our muscles working smoothly and freely, centred and purposefully engaged.
Best of all, we get that extraordinary feeling of effortlessness, the sheer pleasure of the action having done itself.

Investing Time

Someone who comes in for Alexander lessons comes prepared to invest a certain sum of money. But there is something else, something much more scarce that they have to be prepared to invest, if the lessons are to work, and that is Time.
That's what nobody has enough of these days.
Babies seem to be born with watches strapped to their wrists, and a cell phone in their hands. Children's lives are structured and timetabled down to the last nano second. Even having fun has to be productive, and train you to be confident, a better manager, improve your leadership skills, your risk taking capabilities, your decision making abilties...
Along with the shrinking of the open spaces, the spaces in our minds have shrunk as well.
In the middle of all this, along comes the Alexander teacher, who seems to be a relic of the past.
Stop, he says.
Take your time.
Be aware.
Give your directions, but don't push them.
Let them work.
Allow your body to adjust to the totally new situation you have just created.
Let the new balance happen in your body.
I can't tell you how and when it it going to respond.

To someone immersed in an atmosphere of schedules and deadlines, familiar with - 'by the end of 3 months, we would have achieved 1,2 and 3...' this kind of vagueness may sound unacceptably waffly.
It happens to be the truth.
You have to be prepared to invest, along with a definite sum of money, an indefinite amount of time to allow the Alexander Technique to work in you. It would help if you mentally prepare yourself to invest your entire life.
This doesn't mean that you resign yourself to a long hard slog for the rest of your life, and then see the results when you are on the point of departing from it.
You start seeing the effects very soon, but the process never stops. There never comes a point where you can say, 'That's it, I've got it now, I can move on to other things.'
No, it stays with you for the rest of your life, like a benevolent Old Man of the Sea.
This can seem very daunting too, because it seems like you're stuck with all this effort of sustaining thought, and direction, and letting go, and all the rest of it, and it looks like just one more bit of slog added to all the bits you've already got.
But the delightful thing about the Alexander Technique is that it's not about more effort, but less. Not about trying harder to achieve something, but about achieving it without trying.
And it gets easier as you become more attuned to yourself, quicker to catch yourself tightening, quicker to release - until one day you realise you've just gone through a very tense scene, but at the end of it you are still calm and collected...
It all seems so right and inevitable and simple that the only possible response is, 'But of course...!"