…on my 40yr relationship with the Alexander Technique

What is this technique, the primary control that F.M. Alexander describes as he recounts his steps in discovering it? He said: “anyone can do what I do if they do what I did” As alexander teachers we are warned away from using alexander jargon with students. But what words to use?

Some people call it primary governance or true and primary movement. Are these not just more jargon? The meaning submerged and drowning in an intellectual idea. I suppose the word is not the thing and what we are describing is more a kind of sensory motor experience. A feeling- no that’s not it. Often what we feel we are doing with our modern stress affected bodies is not what we are are actually doing. It’s different from the way we accomplish anything. It’s not a doing but more of an allowing. Only as we pause in our interference of our anatomical design can it emerge. In fact, the more we chase it the farther away it recedes.

AT Teacher, Bruce Fertman relates this experience to those luminous stars we paste on the ceiling of a child’s room that light up once the electric light is turned off. Something has to be turned off before we can engage primary control. Turn off - Alexandrian inhibition? We refresh the page.

Then what happens? a light deliciousness spreads through us as muscles lengthen and we seem to rise up out of a contraction we were not aware of before. Moving is easier. It’s obvious to witness not only to the trained eye but to anyone watching and there we are: easy, more present, more awake, more alive, more approachable, more able to make rational decisions for action. The world looks different to us. It’s more 3 D brighter. And most of all, there is time and space for us to choose what comes next: what thought, what action, what decision, what response. This happening is not one thing first and then another. Alexander describes it: once learned it becomes “one a a time, all at once”

How did all that happen? What did we do to make that happen? We must have done something: tried harder, worked smarter…something. But try again and where did it go. Try harder: nothing but effort. Did it slowly emerge incrementally step by step? No, this happening is a result of a thought based decision, a neurological on/off switch. Like a light switch we turned effort off and there is ease. Like the ceiling stars.

GO FOR IT

The Alexander Technique is an indirect procedure. It all about the how we do what we do… but not in ways we are familiar with. I remember a course once in administration and management where we learned to set goals, determine objectives and detail actions steps to reach those goals. It was a “how” to accomplish what we were bent on and how to teach others to realize our organizational interest. We were learning an engineered design that called upon every skill we had learned to date from the first grade to graduate school. A direct line from desire to accomplishment.

But Alexander Technique is different. It is an Indirect procedure. FM Alexander was bent on avoiding the hoarseness that plagued his performances. In his scientific observations of how he was using himself to speak, he described his frustration. What he was doing wasn’t working. He saw that he was using himself in the familiar ways he knew … ways he had learned to do anything. He had gone for it head on and had met with a major road block to the change he was seeking. He called this going for it: “end gaining”. We might say: seeking to achieve our goal without recognizing how we are going about it. My own childhood struggles with speaking fluently gave way when I stopped trying so hard to achieve smooth speaking and learned a technique of sensory based awareness that opened up the “factory installed” neurological pathways that I had been interfering with.

So Alexander work has been for me a study of how we are going about it…. How we use our Physical and Mental Self - how through withholding definition, we learn to give ourselves the space to choose how to respond to whatever is happening. Using the Alexander Technique is an indirect procedure where first you recognize, through a refinement of inaccurate sensory perception, how you are interfering with your exquisite design. Then you learn to inhibit habituated thoughts, feelings, actions in order to access ease throughout your entire physical mental Self. No longer buffeted by emotional gusts or habituated unthinking opinions based on feelings, you find this work has become just the way you are now. Everything is easier.

HANDS

I am told that in order to play the piano your hands must be relaxed. That is, not tense, not held, laid back. Relaxed is one of those words Alexander teachers avoid. Too often relaxed gets lost in translation to collapsed. My Alexander/piano teacher notes gently that my hands and wrists are a bit stiff. She often says “can you do less“ - less effort. But there is so much to do to play, so many things to hold in mind and execute.

So as I look at my hands when I play - fingers curved and held to come down on the right intervals or out flat and reaching, I tell my students you can only move in ways you think you can move according to the map you have constructed of how parts and pieces move. This week I notice that I am trying to move my fingers from the the little crease underneath at the junction of my palm. But wait - my anatomy book shows the joint is at the knuckle below and above. Fingers move at the joint and the two creases occur in the movement. I have been trying to move my finger from the creases. Moving a finger from the knuckle is different - oh.

Hands and fingers are for grasping and manipulating. Babies are born knowing how to grasp - a reflex built in and ready to go, survival served. There is nothing to grasp at the piano - nothing to manipulate. Only a meeting of the keys with a shared intention to make a musical sound. There are thousands of sensory receptors in finger tips that refer back to the entire organism creating tone in the fingers and ease in the playing. Maybe I could use my hands to play the piano in line with their anatomical design for sensing touch and movement and explore what happens.

Bruce Fertman speaks of hands-on/ hands-off. He says ”can you handle something as if it were alive?” Tommy Thompson in my teacher training program focused on developing sensitivity with hands as a required competency for Alexander teachers and worked to share his amazing skill. Yet, hands are for doing things - very useful. Hands-on are working hard operating in survival mode, unconscious - grabbing, holding, intent on not dropping. What can you do with hands-off? Maybe listen, communicate, approach, connect, accomplish. Yes also accomplish with hands-off. Maybe I will explore today using my hands to accomplish in off-mode when I can think of it. When I am forced to wait - turn them off. Could I even turn them off in the rests when I play piano.

“LIFE CALLS US TO MOVE”

Sometimes a teacher says just the right words that land on us and stick. This from Penelope Easten. It depends on how we move how much life we get to experience. Not only ease grace and endurance, although these are key, but also how bright, how 3D, how luscious and tasty this experience can be. She says dogs don’t have to think about “letting my neck be free.” Their bodies trot along happily after their heads without a thought. Alexander said “the head leads, the body follows”, but he despaired of getting his students to use their reasoning to change how they used their bodies. Later he found he could show them with his hands and we all took up the use of hands to teach the Alexander Technique.

So I am getting it - how the sensory awareness we are trying so hard to achieve is demonstrated so beautifully by animals; but we have taken up residence in our heads to such a degree that having gained this amazing consciousness, we have lost the animal’s ease and grace. We all move toward something - something we see, something we smell ( like dogs) something we hear, taste, or touch. It’s how we connect with what we are after. And we are learning through more current research that these senses are neurologically interfaced with the movement centers in our brains. And the vastly complicated and speedy messaging that is happening all the time throughout our body is ready to do the bidding of our senses as long as we use them. So as I really look at that book I want from the bookshelf and move toward it using my eyes to see it, the book shelf, passing the couch on the way, I notice oh - this is easy - I started off without effort and without a lot of conscious direction. Movement just happened. Our enviro-psycho-social-physical bodies self organize and move successfully toward our desire - like our furry animal friends.

WalKING EXPLORATION

The best part about exploring is making a discovery. Alexander students are encouraged to explore their movements in hopes of discovering ease but more often find just more of the tightness or pain they wish to be rid of. Pain signals are loud and insistent - a default position from repeated messaging. Looking for and finding ease is not easy. So different metaphors are suggested to tease out associations that may be not so apparent to our frantic exploring minds. Metaphors can be visual, artistically derived, i.e. the kinesthetic lure of pulsating sea grass in the ocean, all delightful ideas and engaging for while until no longer distracting us from the default and we seek out another metaphor.

What I have learned is that ideas must be embodied to be useful. How to embody something: is to raise our senses to an unaccustomed level of importance - more important than a thought. What if I really understood, that is, kinesthetically experienced my shoulder joint ( upper arm into shoulder girdle) facing more to the front than to the side. What if I understood that holding my shoulders back as in “stand up straight” is actually interfering with the anatomical design of the body: pasting my arms to my sides and pulling on my neck. Penelope Easten suggests imagining strings pulling elbows out to the side resulting in hands facing back and shoulder joint facing more forward. When I explored that pull while walking I discovered my neck was suddenly free of the cramping my “stand up straight” posture was causing. Discovery made: resulting in a new map for an old territory. Embodied.

On Constructive Thinking

Mio Morales AT Teacher, says in answer to the question “how often during the day do you do Constructive Thinking?”: Now and again, he says: Now, when I remember (forget) and Again, when I forget (remember) . Yes. I write it here to remind myself how moment to moment and all of a piece life can be. And easy, too.

Our Only Chance / The Use of Self by FM Alexander:

“My record shows that the further I progressed in my search for a way to free myself from the slavery of habitual response in “doing”, (which I had created for myself by trusting to the guidance of my unreliable sense of feeling) the more clearly I was forced to see that my only chance of freeing myself was, as a primary step, to refuse to give consent to my ordinary “doing” in carrying out any procedure…”

The Best Kept Secret

How is it that The Alexander Technique is so little recognized as the meta health prevention modality focused as it is on how we interfere with our evolutionary design at our own peril; our misuse causes illness and imbalances in every part of our selves. Students of the Alexander Technique have trouble putting into words just what it is that has created what they have experienced in their bodies and minds, their identities and habits, their ease and effort. Some have made it simple as Bob Lada likes to say “Alexander Technique is how we do what we do and who we are while we are doing it.” Alexander himself took volumes to describe how he had observed himself to discover the human being’s capacity to make changes in long standing habits and reactions. He saw this ability as the next best thing in evolution maybe saving us from another world war disaster.

My suspicion about why so much gets lost in translation is exactly that - the translation between an experience and description of that experience in words fails - like the “wish you were here” postcard you might send describing a sublime sunset over the ocean on Cape Cod. ( I know I give away my age , nobody sends postcards anymore. It would likely be a post on Facebook) Alexander work is a right brain experience. Barring metaphors we have come to rely on left brain equipment to describe it in words. The map ( the leftbrain virtual representation in symbols) is not the territory ( the right brain experience in 3-D time and space - the warmth of the sunshine on my face in that fragrant meadow).

And most of us suffer from a world immersed in virtual reality that calls upon sequential symbolic processing to understand it. So know that when you encounter the Alexander Technique you are entering an unfamiliar place, a right brain sensory rich world. Very little in the modern computer driven world will have prepared you for what you will meet even though your right brain was factory installed before you arrived here. So the right brain is your equipment by right; it just needs to be uncovered. The work to do that is full of ease and pleasure once you experience it. You will not lose your left brain ( very useful ) in the process. Your experience of the world will merely become more balanced and rich.

PAIN

Pain is so distracting. It commands our attention alerting us to a malfunction in the system. Do something it says - fix this now! After 3 months, pain becomes officially “chronic pain”. It seems to have settled in, shifting from the sensory motor areas of the brain to the amygdala and hippocampus. Once in this location, the threat detector comes on line stirring memories and emotions to a state of arousal. Excitatory neurotransmitters increase, inhibitory neruotransmitters decrease, immune cells drive inflammation. The nervous system is imbalanced, alarm bells keep blaring even when there is no threat. Now pain is no longer protective.

To the rescue: our brains are designed with neuroplasticity. Neurons that fire together wire together: this is neuroplasticity in action. Soothing and rebalancing the whole nervous system alters the structure and function of the brain. Attention and intention are key: you create new neural connections when you can change body movements and produce and enjoy periods of calm. As you come to quiet and direct your attention you change your nervous system. Neurofeedback practitioners call this state: alpha waves predominating. These are the basic skills available with the Alexander Technique and embodied conscious movement in action. More ideas from Penelope Easton: The Alexander Technique: Twelve Fundamentals of Integrated Movement and Les Fehmi: The Open Focus Brain.

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