Alexander90210

More photos here.

Alexander teacher Betsy Polatin writes:

I have taught this technique to thousands of students all over the world, and people often ask me, “Should I swim? Or do Pilates? Or yoga?” I answer, “It’s not so much what you do but how you do it.” For example, in your yoga class, when you do any type of back bend, whether “Cobra” on the floor or “Sun Salutation” while standing, you want to be sure that you lengthen your spine first and then bend your whole spine, not just your lower back. This way you are using one of Alexander’s principles, lengthening, to improve whatever exercise you choose to do.

The Alexander technique doesn’t call for extreme measures that lead to unattainable results. Rather than only paying attention to your body through exercising for one hour a day and then slumping and ignoring your physical patterns for the other 23 hours, the technique teaches you to bring awareness to your movements throughout the day. You can incorporate simple tips throughout your daily routine to help you achieve your wellness goals.

You can do awareness exercises that bring conscious attention to how you’re using your body while moving or while staying still.
You can monitor your upright stance as you run errands or take an evening stroll.
You can pay attention to your feet on the floor as you sit at your desk throughout the day.
You can determine if you are using unnecessary effort in simple tasks such as brushing your teeth or pressing down the keys on your computer.

Alexander teacher Dan Cayer tells Robert Rickover: “I developed a repetitive stress injury in my mid twenties. I went from being a healthy young man within a few months to not being able to type at all on my computer because of severe pain. I couldn’t hold a book for a year and a half or carry a bag. I was using my toes to dial my phone. I was disabled and unable to work. I tried a lot of different treatments and therapies and the Alexander Technique was a consistent thread throughout those years helping support my recovery.”

“I slumped. I didn’t have good posture while I typed. I was under a lot of stress. I was applying to graduate school to be a writer and was unable to type or read for two years afterwards.”

“I would rise up early in the morning and write for an hour and a half before work. At work, I used a computer. Then I’d come home and either write or do more reading. I was at the computer a lot and there was a lot of intensity there. I had a stressful time at work.”

“I didn’t know how to do the things in my life any differently than the way I had been taught. I didn’t know how to sit differently, how to use my phone differently or carry my backpack differently. So I either had to not do those things at all or I was having to do them and be in incredible pain. The Alexander Technique was an inroads to learn how to be different. It was calming. My nervous system was constantly elevated from stress. I had a worker’s compensation case. It was hard being in my mid-twenties and not know whether or not I’d be able to use my hands again.”

Dan writes on his blog: “Powered by self-flagellation, I pinball back and forth between slumping and overarching. This is physically exhausting and disappointing since I never arrive at the ideal of ease uprightness brandished on the cover of yoga magazines.”

Robert: “Whatever our habits have been, no matter how bizarre or distorting, they do tend to feel right to us.”

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I have many strong opinions, but I try to go through vast swathes of my life without any conscious beliefs.

According to F.M. Alexander, all beliefs are unnecessary muscle tension. That idea does not have to be 100% true to be interesting and useful. Think about how many strong beliefs you have when you are most relaxed. I suspect very few. Strong beliefs go hand in hand with increased body tension while letting go of beliefs accompanies a letting go of body tension.

I find it fun to walk down the street without any beliefs. I find it fun to go to work and to leave my beliefs at home for a few minutes or a few hours. When I teach Alexander Technique, I try to let go of all my beliefs except the ones in the classical principles of the Technique.

I find that as I live my life, my beliefs tend to weigh me down, so over the past few years, I’ve tried to let go of the ones I don’t need.

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I was about nine months into my Alexander Technique teacher training when my girlfriend of the time noticed that when I walked, I tend to be ball up my hands in fists.

Many nervous people have tics. They squint, furrow their brows, scratch their face, play with their hair, anything to distract themselves from the fire inside.

Sixty four minutes into this video, Alexander teacher Rebecca Tuffey tells a singer with a nervous tic: “You might find that is something you can change once your body is more quiet. If the house is on fire, can you do nuanced things? Are you singing Mozart? No, you’re trying to deal with the emergency. It’s like that in our nervous systems.”

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Here are the traits of mindfulness: “Acting with awareness, being nonjudgmental, having emotional equilibrium (“nonreactivity”), labeling and describing with words the internal world, and self-observation… Mindfulness meditation promotes our nine middle prefrontal functions: bodily regulation, attunement, emotional balance, fear modulation, flexibility of response, insight, empathy, morality and intuition.”

I suspect Alexander Technique, a form of mindfulness most often practiced in the western world, promotes secure attachment.

We all respond to the turbulence of life in one of three patterns — anger, sadness or fear. Angry people turn their frustration on to others, sad people become obsessed with rejection and abandonment (me!), and fearful people become obsessed with their fears. We can’t completely lose our patterns but we can lighten them through therapy and Alexander Technique and other modalities and we can find new possibilities.

Nick writes: Recently I noticed I was developing eyestrain, and my work involves heavy amounts of staring at computer screens. Using my LM knowledge I realised that I was ‘looking at’ the screens – like ‘me’ was buried somewhere inside my head looking through my eye sockets. So I shifted the way I did this work, so that the screens were part of my ordinary, everyday presence in the room – less a looking-at the screens and more them just being there in my visual field, in my ordinary presence in the room.

David Gorman responds: Yes, Nick, I’ve worked with a lot of people in this sort of territory. Sometimes it is as you’ve described — the person is using their spatial attention as if “they” are are way back in themselves and so they are separated from what they are doing which is way out there, and sometimes it is that they have their spatial attention so pulled out of themselves that “they” are way out in space with what they are trying to do, far from their actual “body”.
Here are two quick examples of the latter: one is the person gets so “into the program” when working at a computer that their attention is right in the screen and they have “lost” themselves entirely (this often leads to neck and shoulder strain as the head gets pulled forward towards the screen); another is when someone is trying to understand something in a class, workshop, lecture, etc. and they think the knowledge is over there in the teacher and they are trying to “get it” (again, they will end up physically pulled forward, brows knitted, and usually with a palpable sense of strain).
The way we use our “attention space” (as I call it) directly organizes our co-ordinations, our posture, and affects all levels of our functioning.
Like the opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, there is one general way of using your attention space that allows good functioning, but there are many different ways of using attention space that lead to various different sorts of poor functioning.
It seems (and this won’t surprise you, Nick) that the most optimal functioning is when we are “present” in the moment and centred in an open and expansive field of attention. On the other hand, we begin to negatively affect our functioning whenever we narrow our attention off in any direction (especially if “trying” is also involved) — narrowing out of ourselves in space, narrowing back into ourselves to feel or change our feelings, narrowing off to the past or to future moments, or narrowing off into fantasy and day-dreams…
I wish to stress here that it is the narrowing that is the problem part of it. It is certainly possible to carry out any of the above — paying attention to things out in front of us like the computer screen, lectures. etc., or to notice inner experiences when they come our attention, or to think about past events or future implications and so on, just so long as we fully remain present in ourselves and the space around us at the same time…
There’s more on this “attention space” territory in a recent article written by one of my apprentice-teachers, Marion Day, and myself, called “By Intention Alone” — read it atwww.learningmethods.com/by.intention.alone.htm

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David Gorman (a veteran Alexander Technique teacher who developed LearningMethods.com, writes:

Of course, all of us who have had many experiences of change through the Alexander Technique know that a change in your manner of use does affect your mental and emotional state and your thinking. But the operative word is “affect”. A change to better use “may” affect your outlook, at least for a while, but if the underlying way of seeing the world and seeing yourself has not changed then no amount of Alexander “experiences” are going to free you from what it feels like to see the world and yourself the way you do.

The best you might get is a temporary change each time as you ride the feeling of the changed coordination you get in lessons. But as soon as your old way of experiencing the world and understanding the world creep back in, you’ll be right back in the same reactions and responses…

Normally, of course, Alexander teachers do not attempt to find out how their pupils are thinking about themselves and their lives and their relationships, etc. (except maybe for how pupils are thinking about thoir necks). That is “psychological” stuff and is left to therapists, etc.

Yet, without finding out the ideas people have about themselves and life, how can you understand why they feel the way they do? Or even why they are in the sort of physical coordinations (that we call “use”) they are in?

I think many times we have it backwards. We think that if we change the use we will change the thoughts and feelings (it’s all one unity, isn’t it? and it doesn’t matter which way you “get in”)…

But if you were feeling a bit down one day, you’d probably have a use that was ‘down’ and heavy. If you then found out that you’d won the lottery your use would immediately change to one of up and joy and delight. What we call our “use” is our response to the situations we are in and how we interpret them. As our interpretations become habitual so too do these responses.

It does not work the other way. If you could go for a lesson and became freed up and out of your heaviness. You’d probably feel lighter, and you might feel more joy and even delight, but you would not automatically win the lottery. In fact, you’d probably do what most students do, you walk out of the lesson feeling pretty good until you got back into your life which you still see the same way and therefore will still respond to with the same “use”. The only change is that now you’d probably be trying to keep or get back that wonderful light and “up” feeling to help you cope.

There are a small percentage of AT pupils who are able to take insights from their changed use in the lessons and see themselves and the world differently, but as Walter Carrington said one day as i was discussing this sport of thing with him, it is way less than 5% of people. And my own teaching experiences totally concur.

However, it is also my experience that once we can help the pupil uncover the way they see things (their “reality” — at least what they think reality is like) and help expose the misunderstandings and misattributions they are suffering under, then they no longer believe that things are that way. As it stops seeming “real” to them, they stop reacting that way. And as they start having a reliable appreciation (accurate interpretation) of the way things are, they start to experience things the way most of us do.

In other words, it is not a case of poor use or unreliable sensory appreciation. It is a case of Unreliable Reality Appreciation.

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If you want to learn something, I ask you to stand up and to walk around the room for 30 seconds juggling three imaginary balls while taking care not to bump into people or furniture. If you don’t want to learn anything, please stay seated, stay stuck in your habitual ways of doing things, after all, they have served you so well, why would you want to understand yourself better and do a damn fool thing like learning?

Now, what do you notice in your body, in your thinking and in your emotions as you tried to juggle imaginary balls as you walked around? How would you compare that to what you were thinking and feeling a minute ago? Does it serve you to increase your awareness and alertness or are you better served staying slumped and stuck in your habits?

The Alexander Technique is about waking up.

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From Daniel Siegel’s book:

Our instinctual survival responses to fight, flee, freeze, or even collapse may become activated on the low road and dominate our behavior. The body’s response may reveal these old instinctual reflexes in automatic patterns of response, such as tightened muscles in anger, an impulse to run away in fear, or a sense of being numb and immobilized. Becoming aware of our bodily sensations is a first step to understanding the experiences of the low road.

Making a conscious effort to alter our bodily reactions on the low road can help to free us from the prison of these ingrained reflexes. The brain looks to the body to know how it feels and to assess the meaning of things; thus, becoming aware of our bodily reactions can be a direct and effective means to deal with low-road immersion.

Alexander Technique would help with this.

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I never cease to be amazed at how intrusive and clueless people can be (starting with myself). In an Orthodox shul, there are sections for men and women and yet many people ignore this, particularly the insane. If you don’t join with people and tune in to them before you talk to them, you’ll often say things that are intrusive or inappropriate. You might presume an intimacy that is not there. The other night, I saw this 70 year old guy turn to a girl he did not know and the first thing he said was, “What gives you greatest pleasure?” The girl got embarrassed and said, “That’s a very personal question.” The guy meant well. He wasn’t trying to bring up something sexual. He was listening to her talk to somebody else about her life plans and college plans, but he didn’t tune in to her before opening his mouth to help. If truly you want to help people, and not just intrude on people, you first need to join with them and tune into them before you “help.” If this guy had been in a state where he was preparing to catch a ball thrown to him, he would have been less likely to make this type of blunder. He would have gotten out of his head and out of intellectualizing about reality and he would have started living in a way that would bless him and those around him.

You have to have a deep level of rapport with somebody before you can ask him an intense question like, “What gives you the greatest pleasure?” That’s not the first thing you can say to somebody. You have to earn the right to ask such questions.

I notice many people prefer to say and do whatever it is they want to say and do without taking the effort to become alive and alert in the present moment and to take into account the varying states of those around them.

A great way to reach a place where you can tune in to those around you is to be as alert as you need to be to catch a tennis ball. When you play catch, you get out of your mental and emotional and physical ruts and become alive in your kinesthesia. You become receptive to the world around you. You pay attention to different possibilities. As you become alert, you tend to drop your habitual slumping habits and move up in your body and as you do this, your mind becomes calm and alert and you sense your own possibilities for movement and you better take into account the possibilities of those around you and you start living in the moment rather than getting stuck in the past or dreaming about the future. A good Alexander Technique teacher can show you how to live in an alert way rather than in a habitual way so that you are alive to possibility in yourself and in others.

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