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!

This is a video of Professor Nikolas Tinbergen's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Professor Tinbergen shared the 1973 Nobel prize with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch for their work on the organisation and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns. He was, with Konrad Lorenz, a pioneer in the field of ethology, which is the study of animal behaviour with emphasis on the patterns that occur in natural settings.

This clip belongs here because he devoted about 10 minutes of his acceptance speech to describing the Alexander Technique and the effect it had on himself and his family.

He also talks about the manner in which Alexander came to develop the Technique, calling it '...one of the true epics of medical research.'

Listening to Tinbergen, it is difficult not to marvel at the intelligence and tenacity of this man who, without a degree in science, medical or otherwise, and without any background in scientific research, set out to solve a problem which his doctors could not address.

What's more, he did it too.

This is an experiential video of the Alexander Technique - there's a mosaic of voices speaking about the way they experience it, and what it's done for them. There's a musician, a politician, a computer professional, a retired person... a range of people who found that the the technique gave them a new freedom and ease.




What struck me was what one of them said - that he wasn't really used to going to a lesson to learn something, and then doing nothing much more than sitting and lying down.
It's a deceptive emptiness, of course, because what you learn in the sitting, standing and lying down can transform your life.
I always feel that what really attracted me to the Technique was this idea of the right thing doing itself - which seemed to imply, for me, that I didn't have to do very much.
Being incorrigibly lazy, that, of course, was one of the most delightful possibilities I could think of!

Song and Dance

This isn't strictly about the Alexander Technique -

On the other hand, what isn't about the Technique?

Kumarji Sings Kabeer

The song and the dance, the freedom in the voice and the body, go together. That is the kind of freedom that is available to all of us -singers and dancers or not.

If only we'd refuse to settle for less.

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.