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* Fashion designer Celia Birtwell says: “The Alexander Technique, which helps with posture and balance. Many years ago, my back was very painful due to poor posture. I was sceptical, but it sorted out my problem after a few months.”

* Elise Eberle: “Her entire body and every movement in it carries the weight of all the horror Mercy has been through. I had the chance to speak with Eberle at the “Salem” press junket last month and ask her how she prepares for such a daunting task put upon her body. She spoke of The Alexander Technique and releasing tension in her body (in a way, she’s releasing her own tension to fill our own bodies with tension). “Being aware of your body is such an important thing,” Eberle said, “It’s important [to understand] where your body is and how you can use it to your advantage. I love physical acting. It’s a pretty perfect role and I’m so blessed to have it.” This girl knows what she’s doing and it is the most stunning thing to watch.”

* NEWS: A MARRIED schoolmaster has insisted he did not grope young boys and was simply using the Alexander Technique to help them relax.

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Alexander Technique

Evidence: The latest and most comprehensive study published in the British Medical Journal showed the Alexander Technique can reduce back pain by a staggering 85%, offering more significant long-term benefits than having a massage or standard medical care.

How it works: Students learn to recognise, understand and prevent the consequences of poor postural and movement habits. By improving postural tone, co-ordination, mobility and balance, they experience a significant reduction in back pain. Dr Al-Kashi says: “In one particular study, the benefit was not only sustained up to the 12-month follow-up but continued.”

Cost: A course of 20-30 sessions, at around £40 each, is normally recommended. Contact the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique ( stat.org.uk ) for your nearest practitioner.

Success rating: 5/5

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From the book How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously*: Based on the Proven Principles and Techniques of Debtors Anonymous:

It is simply letting go of an old way of doing things in order to embrace a new one. When you admit that you have a debting problem, when you surrender to that, you become willing to let go of your old perceptions and behaviors, which resulted in deprivation, pressure, and unhappiness, and in their place embrace new ones, which bring about freedom, ease and thriving.

From the Alexander Technique perspective:

Inhibition comes from the Latin for restraint and in Alexander Technique terms, has nothing to do with repression.

In physiology, this term refers to the restraining of an organic process, or the prevention of its initiation by neurological or physiological means (Penguin Dictionary of Psychology)

In the Alexander Technique, the term refers to a learned process, in which a person chooses to stop or inhibit a habitual reaction to a stimulus. This allows the individual a moment’s pause, in which to choose whether or not to respond to the stimulus and if so, how to perform an action in response.

As Alexander stated:

‘all those who wish to change something in themselves must learn… to inhibit their immediate reaction to any stimulus to gain a desired end’ and in order to stop falling back ‘upon the familiar sensory experiences of their old habitual use in order to gain it , they must continue this inhibition whilst they employ the new direction of their use’.

F M Alexander ~ The Use of the Self p. 115

He also put it more simply when he said to a pupil who he was teaching:

‘Like a good fellow, stop the things that are wrong first’.

F Matthias Alexander ~ Aphorisms p.47

In other words we learn to

Stop ~ Think and Direct ~ Then Move

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Two of my favorite topics over the past few years are attachment theory and the Alexander Technique.

Elizabeth A. Buonomo is a psychotherapist and Alexander teacher. She writes in the Spring 2015 issue of the AmSAT Journal:

Many of Alexander’s concepts have corollaries in attachment theory. First, the Alexander Technique is, in part, a method of movement regulation. The teacher assists the student to use inhibition to interrupt old habits in response to a stimulus and to allow for more choice; the student is then taught to direct himself to move with reduced muscle tension in new and more functional ways. Mental health professionals talk of emotional regulation, the ability to have reflective awareness of the feelings associated with painful triggers to our past and to respond to them by substituting other ways of thinking and behaving so that new patterns can be created. Sound familiar? The long-term effect of both movement and emotional regulation is to lower reactivity and induce a greater calm in response to a stimulus. Importantly, movement and emotional regulation occur in relationship with the therapist or Alexander teacher, who is required to have done extensive personal work so as to serve as a model and to have greater regulatory capacity.

Second, both Alexander Technique lessons and psychotherapy sessions positively rewire brain patterning by building new neuronal pathways. Research in neuroscience has informed us that the brain is plastic and that it is capable of new learning due to new experiences even in adulthood. We know that healthy mother/infant bonding is critical for brain development, but that adult brains are also flexible. A trusting, safe, and empathically attuned relationship with an Alexander teacher or a psychotherapist can positively change neural circuitry.

Third, psychotherapists and Alexander Technique teachers are interested in the reciprocal influences of patient/therapist and student/teacher dyads. Contemporary models of psychotherapy have debunked traditional notions that any impact the therapist makes on the client is the client’s transference. Instead, they see the patient/therapist relationship as co-created with each inevitably impacting the other; the therapist must be open to acknowledging either openly or in supervision his/her participation in conflicts and enactments and to see them as part of the ongoing treatment.

In the Alexander Technique, there is a similar phenomenon: When we experience the student not responsive to our touch and direction, we look to our own use to find greater freedom in ourselves, which inevitably results in release in the student. When working with a student with challenging patterns, we are likely to become disorganized, which then negatively impacts the student in a dysfunctional loop. Our job is to find our good use again. Alternatively, when working with experienced students, we facilitate their freedom and openness, which then flows back to use so that as teachers we can feel that we are both giving and receiving a lesson.

The concept of mutual impact is reminiscent of mother/infact interactions… When the interaction between a mother and infant is attuned, the baby is expansive, relaxed and bright. If the interaction is going poorly, the infant is tense and cries often. Ideally, the mother uses her skills to soothe, absorb, and modulate the infant’s distress. One of [Beatrice] Beebe’s most exciting findings is that mother/baby attunement is not immediate, but rather cycles through a pattern of match, mismatch, and then rematch. Similarly, in Alexander Technique lessons, the teacher and student are continually moving through a pattern of good use, tension, and then renewal of good use in an effort to calm the student’s response to the stimulus.

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S3E9 of Orange is the New Black:

One girl: “It’s like less than magic and more than a hug.”

Another girl: “It’s the armor you put on every day, the armor that it takes to get through every day, it gets heavier and heavier as you live your life, especially in here, but when you look at Norma, you can take that armor of because it is safe. You’re safe. And you’re crying because it feels so good to take that armor off. And you realize how tall you can be without it, how light.”

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POST:
Close your eyes for a moment and notice how tense they are. Do your eyelids close easily? Are your eyes darting around behind them, or are they fixed in place?
Place your palms over your eyes for several moments. The contact of your palms and the darkness of having your eyes covered will help them start to recover.
Once your arms start to get tired from being held up against your face, let them rest by your sides.
Allow your eyes to open and expand your gaze all the way out into the periphery of your vision.
Take a few moments to think about allowing your neck to be free. Just think about it, though. Don’t move it around and try to stretch it out.
As you think of your neck being free, allow your head to be poised on the top of your spine. If you are lying down, allow its weight to be supported by the books underneath it.
Allow your whole torso to soften and widen and deepen.
Allow your arms and legs to ease out away from your torso.
Notice the state of your eyes once again. Are they as tight and as gripped as they were? If they are, don’t worry about it. Come back to allowing yourself to be generally softer and freer.

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In a podcast, veteran teacher Robert Rickover says to fellow teacher Mark Josefsberg: “One answer is that the student got what he needed, so why come back for more lessons? I’ve had students who had a specific issue that was bothering them and it was quickly sorted out with some basic Alexander work and often within a few minutes.”

Mark: “Most of the time, students that make dramatic changes return but there’s a percentage who don’t.”

Robert: “When we help people to change their patterns and we do it by engaging their thinking and observation skills about themselves, they are forced to confront something that might not be comfortable — that to some extent, they were responsible for their previous issues (pain or discomfort). For some people, it is not pleasant to confront that. I tell my students that they are responsible for themselves. There is a wonderful quote in the old comic strip Pogo — ‘We have met the enemy and they is us!’ You could look at that as good news or bad news. It could be bad news in that you have to own up that at some level you were responsible. On the other hand, it also tells you that you have the power to change it. There are some people for whom that responsibility is scary and they just may leave for that reason.”

Mark: “I came into the Alexander Technique for extreme neck pain and when my teacher told me I was responsible, it was incredibly empowering, uplifting, and powerful. Because finally it said I could do something about this and that felt great to me.”

Robert: “Alexander work does ask people to see things about themselves more clearly and some of those things, they may not be too crazy about.”

“I’ve had students who’ve come with specific conditions that have names and they’ve been diagnosed and they are sometimes active members of support groups for those conditions and I’ve had examples where the condition changed dramatically and quickly with some Alexander work and the student comes back for a second lesson but the thing they came for has faded out and they don’t want to talk about it much any more. It could be because it undermines their identity in that group.”

“Your identity or your social network is disrupted if you no longer have symptoms that that network is based on.”

“It doesn’t have to be a social network of other people with that condition, it could be a social network such as a marriage where part of that relationship has shifted to one spouse looking after the other because of their condition. If that condition changes for the better, then there is some rearrangement that has to go on in that relationship.”

“Another reason is that though student has great results, there is something about you, the teacher, that they can’t stand.”

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The fastest way I know to reset my physiology is to let go of all of my beliefs for a few seconds. When I do that (often by picturing myself as a cheetah on the savannah looking for prey), I inevitably find myself letting go of unnecessary tension in my face, neck, shoulders and back, and I usually find my mood lifting, I feel a new buoyancy, and my surroundings and my perspective seem different. I let go of all of my resentments and fears when I let go of my beliefs. I am born again.

When I let go of my beliefs, I am living in awareness rather than judgment. Both states have their place, but my default mode is to be in judgment and I am better served by living in awareness when I don’t need to be in judgment.

Another path to this place is to deliberately free myself of unnecessary tension. When I let go tension in my neck, face and back, I simultaneously let go of my beliefs and my judgments.

If I am not noticing new things in the world around me, I’m likely stuck in judgment and cognition, imposing my beliefs on the world around me, living top down, and not being open to reality.

When we are disturbed, it is inevitably because we refuse to accept reality. Usually this means we have armored ourselves with unnecessary body tension and harmful beliefs. When we let go of the unnecessary body tension, we usually let go of unnecessary beliefs. When we let go of unnecessary beliefs, we usually let go of unnecessary body tension. When you are free in your body, you are usually free in your mind and vice versa.

When you play catch, you are in the moment, living in awareness and not in philosophical judgment. You can’t judge the merits of free trade and catch a fast moving ball at the same time. You can’t think about the mechanics of salvation and efficiently swing a golf club at the same time. The more you are weighing your beliefs, the more body tension you will, and the less effective you will be at catching balls, playing a sport or in any form of performance that does not demand believing.

My beliefs are always available to me. They flood back when I stop deliberately releasing them. There’s nothing wrong with belief, but getting stuck in belief means getting stuck in increased body tension and less living in the moment.

It’s like the Set Aside prayer of the 12 Steps:

God,

Please help me set aside

everything I think I know

about myself, my disease,

the 12 steps, and especially You;

So I may have an open mind

and a new experience

of all these things.

Please let me see the truth.

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For more than four years, I have been going to 12-step rooms for my various emotional addictions. I’ve noticed that you can usually tell where someone is in his recovery by his body language. Those in the throes of addiction are distraught, slumped, tense, defeated, racked by anxiety, fear and pain. Those is recovery tend to be buoyant, happy, and upward directed. 

I notice that resentment always manifests in added muscular tension. You can gauge how much resentment someone is carrying just by looking at him. A resentful person is locked and loaded in their body, their neck and back and face are tight. They’re like a loaded gun, ready to go off at any time.

About three years, I worked the 12 Steps and was able to let go of all conscious resentment. I still get mad at times, but this rarely lasts more than a few minutes. I use my brief bouts of anger as a fuel to take action to protect myself, to overcome my passive nature (the result of nearly 30 years of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), but my anger never lasts more than a day iMessage for Windows As a result of not holding a grudge against anyone, I have more freedom in my body, my thinking and my soul. I would say that 90% of the time these days, I am happy, joyous and free.

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