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.

The Little Things We Do

Alexander Technique Connection

This is a link to a website about the Alexander Technique - it gives the usual information about the Technique, the teachers at this particular centre, and so on.

What is really interesting is the illustrations and the photos they've used. On this particular page, there are three sketches of a woman in profile, and they show very clearly what happens when you stick your head out in front of you, when you retract it back into yourself like a snail, and when it's poised normally (which may not be very usual) on your neck.

In the first sketch you can see how, as the head sticks out, the back of the neck is shortened. The strain in those muscles doesn't remain there, it spreads across the shoulders and down the back. And of course, it would pull the shoulders in, compressing the lung space and affecting breathing. You might have observed this yourself in habitual computer users - the computer screen has a malignant magic that sucks you into itself as soon as you sit down in front of it.

The second sketch is an over-correction of the tensions you see in the first. The chin is retracted into the neck, squashing the neck muscles and compressing the vocal cords.

The neck isn't shortened - in fact it's artificially stretched so that there's a long line of tightening from the neck up into the head and down into the back. It gives me a headache just looking at it. That's what someone who's trying to correct the mistakes in the first sketch would do.

You can (eventually) arrive at the third option simply by leaving yourself alone and letting the head, neck and back work out their own balance. However, some kind of awareness is necessary because otherwise the chances are that you'd simply go back to the most familiar tension pattern. So - no effort, no pushing and pulling, simply asking for a release in the muscles of the neck, and then staying quiet, allowing the response to arise on its own. You'd probably feel a bit strange without the old comforting tensions pulling at you; perhaps a sense of emptiness, something missing, and you'd have to resist the urge to go back to that familiarity and stay with the sense of strangeness.

The home page is also interesting because it has a series of photos of actions that we usually 'mis-do'. They're routine, everyday actions, and all of us have done most of them at some time or the other, usually badly.

One little reminder, however. It's entirely possible to do these things mindlessly, with the outward semblance of correctness. They have to be accompanied by the awareness of release, of allowing your muscles to use just the right amount of 'tone' they need to do whatever needs to be done.

Re-learning Movement

http://tinyurl.com/3sbha4o

The human body is built for movement and activity, not to sit still for hours. Not to speak of sitting still for hours, all cramped up.

But we have lost touch with our innate facility for grace and ease so completely that even when our lifestyles involve action, we tend to do it badly, and damage ourselves in the process. We don't know how to use ourselves well and do all the things we need to do and want to do. It seems we need to go back to educating ourselves in a very fundamental way, in things which we did instinctively and easily when we were very little children. Things that we did in innocence, we now have to relearn to do with skill and conscious control, so that we can use it in our lives, to tackle more and more challenging actions if we so choose.

This is especially relevant in professions such as sport and performance where we need to be constantly honing our skills; if we didn't, we'd stagnate and our skills would die.

The actor, the singer, the athlete - their work demands that they constantly push themselves to go further, raise the bar. Anything that helps them to do that is a valuable tool. But -

What we forget is that we don't all have to be athletes or performers to raise the bar for ourselves. We can do that in our daily lives, without changing them in any dramatic way. Start with little challenges, without worrying about the big ones, and who knows where they may lead us? Life then becomes the endless opportunity for exploration and learning that it was when we were really little, and everything was new and exciting.

http://tinyurl.com/6gaqvcs

The Power of Posture

http://tinyurl.com/655dcyk

This is an interesting account of a study which was carried out on the effect of posture on the sense of power that people felt in themselves. While it would be simplistic to conclude that posture by itself can solve all problems, it would equally foolish to go completely the other way, and insist that it has nothing to do with feelings of confidence or authority. The relationship between your feelings about yourself, your response to the things happening to you and around you, and the way you hold yourself, isn't a one way street. Each feeds into the other, creating a continuous cycle of stimulus and response; it may be a cycle that reinforces your feelings of inferiority and lack of control, or of power and the sense of being on top of things.

The study seems to suggest that the effect of posture trumps even that of being given a title of power such as manager, or of (relative) powerlessness such as subordinate. Regardless of the title they were given, people who had assumed postures of power responded with the power affirming options in situations that were suggested to them. Thus, given a choice of speaking up first or staying silent, those who had taken postures or power tended to choose to speak first, regardless of whether they had the title of manager or subordinate.

As the article suggests, parents, teachers and sergeant majors have always been nagging their charges to 'Stand up straight! Shoulders back! Stomach in!' and so on. The study seems to prove that they may have been right.

But of course, I have to have my Alexander take on this.

The people who have impressed me most are usually the ones who had the easy posture of power and kept it without seeming to try. Not push, not bluster, not an in-your-face aggression - but a comfortable easy sense of themselves. And they weren't all in positions of power, either.

Those who tried never seemed to pull it off, and more often than not, had to resort to bluster and shows of power to get things done. They may have got things done, but they didn't convince.

I've also met several people who were in positions of power, but had rounded, diffident shoulders and a hesitant gait. Some of them were looking for a way to get themselves into postures of power because they had been told that that was holding them back from progressing in the organisation.

I could see very well that there was no way they were going to force themselves into the kind of 'good' posture that would presumably bring them the rewards of high office. Holding oneself in a posture that is not natural to you is difficult - no, nearly impossible - and damaging. It only means you have an additional layer of tension over the one you have already accepted as natural.

Instead of adding to it, you actually need to let go of it, so that the natural dignity of the human body can reestablish itself.

This doesn't just translate into a posture of power in the board room - it translates into an unselfconscious grace of being that operates everywhere. The authority in the board room - if you happen to be in it - is just the cherry on the icing.

The Knot in the Gut

One of the most memorable discoveries I made after I started learning the Alexander Technique was the presence of fear in my life.

There really was no apparent cause for it at that point - I was thoroughly enjoying my training, I'd got interesting work to do that paid for all my living expenses, I'd made wonderful new friends... in short, I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and into my day every morning - no matter what the weather - and that, for the UK, is saying quite a bit!

But then, through all of this, there was also a layer of tension at a very deep level; it surfaced, I think, simply because other, more superficial tensions began to drop away; that was great, because I realised that it was possible to live with a simple and uncomplicated pleasure -if only I could get rid of this clutching in the gut!

That was when I began to get a dim idea of just how much unnecessary fear we cart around. I thought around to all the people I knew, friends, relatives, acquaintances... anyone I could think of, and they were all living with this deep and diffuse apprehension that wouldn't let them enjoy their lives.

All of that terror, and where was it being held? Of course in the body! In the neck, the shoulders, the hips, the guts, in deep insidious knots that makes sure you are nicely tightening and shrinking. As I discovered, it wouldn't go away just because I was asking it to - and this was the point where I really felt I'd hit a wall.

This was the baseline from where I was living - under all the pleasure, pain, excitement, sorrow and all the myriad emotions that make up our daily lives, there was this layer of nameless dread; it surfaced as my habits began to change, and was just there -that knot in the gut, a solidly physical presence that kept me from living life as completely as I wanted.

But the real revelation for me was not this - it was the fact that this was the way I'd been living all along - this fear filled, apprehensive quality defined my life, and I hadn't even known it!

Then, of course, I can't help thinking -

What else do I not know?