An Alexander teacher emails: “Alexander Teachers Spend Raucous Afternoon Validating Each Other” is really excellent writing. How the hell did you keep this kind of righteous commentary stuffed for three years of training? Did no one suspect that they had a “suicide bomber” in their midst?
Why Is Change So Slow In Alexander Lessons?
When I started taking Alexander Technique lessons in 2008, I became frustrated that change was so slow.
I remained frustrated for a couple of years until I finally felt at ease.
In this podcast, Alexander teachers Robert Rickover and Eileen Troberman discuss the rate of change.
A 20 year old kid asked Marj Barstow why did he have to keep coming back to workshops. Why couldn’t he just get it more quickly? And Marj told him, your body couldn’t take it.
Eileen: “People can not change fast.”
“We recognize ourselves by our tension. Our tension patterns are what feels like us to us. Without that, we don’t feel like us. It takes a while to realize that that is not us, it is just tension.”
Did Fred Astaire Get Bored?
In this podcast, Alexander teacher Amy Ward Brimmer talks to Robert Rickover about how the Technique can help with boredom.
Robert: “One aspect of boredom is not being in the moment and self-aware but being in some other state.”
Amy: “Whenever I’ve been aware and in the present moment, there’s always been a whole lot going on. Boredom is being disconnected from the present moment. Boredom is the way we shut off.”
“Whenever I’m bored, I’m collapsing. I’m pulling down and in on myself. Alexander work gives me the opportunity to wake up and to notice how am I breathing?”
Robert: “I notice kids fiddling in a bored way with their iPhones or electronic equipment. They’re trying to find something to engage them. They often exhibit the worst aspects of their posture at that point. Curled over.”
Amy: “Kids lying around the house will say, I’m bored.”
Robert: “Just look at their bodies when they say that.”
Amy: “Just completely slumped. Almost defeated.”
“My response as a parent to that ‘I’m bored’ complaint is to offer activities. That never works.
“Boredom is a form of resistance to what is.”
Robert: “If you look at Fred Astaire in movies, he’s totally present. It would be interesting to ask Fred Astaire if he ever got bored.”
How The Alexander Technique Can Help You Learn A Foreign Language
Robert Rickover tells Harriet Anderson: “When learning a foreign language, there are pronunciations that are usually foreign. I wish I’d had Alexander lessons when I was taking French in high school. It would’ve saved me a world of grief.”
Harriet: “First, as learning to learn. Learning a transferable skill. Learning to unlearn and learning to relearn. When we learn a foreign language as adults, we’ve been imprinted with our mother tongue. So it is important to unlearn the muscle patterns which make for specific pronunciation.
“The Technique can help us learn new muscle patterns to make new sounds.”
Fear Makes You Contract, Love Makes You Expand
When you’re afraid, you tighten up. The contraction will start in your neck and then spread to the rest of you. You compress, make yourself smaller, less of a target, and go into some version of the fight-or-flight reflex.
When you’re afraid, it will be hard to reach out to others. Your touch will be less pleasant. Your verbal and emotional expression will be curtailed.
By contrast, when you love, you expand. You swell up and take your full space in the world. The neck frees up, the head releases forward and up to take a poised relationship to your spine.
Conversely, when you pull down and in on yourself, you’re going to have more access to the emotions of fear, hatred, sadness and depression. By contrast, when you expand into activity, you’ll have more access to the emotions of joy, love and tranquility.
Every emotion requires a particular alignment of the body. When you use your muscles in a certain way, certain emotions are readily at hand while others are out of touch.
It’s not that emotions, thoughts and muscles are connected but that they are all part of the same thing — you. Your brain is part of your body. What you think affects the degree of muscle tension. Your emotions, thoughts and muscles are constantly affecting each other.
You can take the path of love to expansion or you can expand into love. Or you can lose consciousness of yourself and slip into pulling down and into depression.
Practicing Massage Requires Good Body Mechanics
In this podcast, Jano Cohen, an Alexander Technique teacher and Massage Therapist in Philadelphia talks to Robert Rickover about ways the Alexander Technique can help Massage Therapists.
Jano: “Practicing massage is an athletic endeavor that requires good body mechanics. In a lot of massage training programs, they teach people how to use their bodies well, but not in the sophisticated way the Alexander Technique offers.”
Robert: “I’ve worked with massage therapists and noticed an over-use of hands, shoulders and arm muscles.”
Jano: “When you allow your whole body to be behind each movement you make, it’s a lot less effort.”
Robert: “There’s a pretty high burn-out rate in that profession.”
Jano: “When people are tense, their joints are often stiff and they can’t listen to what is going on in somebody else’s body. People react to that tense touch by stiffening. So there’s a lack of movement back and forth.”
“When people get help with Alexander Technique, there’s an improved flow in the body. Your touch is much softer and more sensual. When you touch someone that way, they receive a soft sensual touch and are able to relax. The practitioner can hear more and listen deeper into the body. When there’s a block or armoring in the body, it’s harder to hear what is going on but with soft hands, you can penetrate that armor with gentleness and before they know it, they’re already releasing and following.”
Robert: “I’ve noticed that massage therapists tend to lose awareness of themselves and it all goes into their client.”
Jano: “Massage, like Alexander Technique, is a partnership. The client is contributing to the partnership. To help the client, the practitioner must be the best they can be, but also for themselves. You do not need to give up yourself for the other person. This is a boundary issue. Whatever you do in life, it’s important that you stand your own ground and that you care for yourself. It’s a modeling for the other person. It’s also a way of meeting the client as a full self.
“If you degrade your own body and forget about yourself while you work with someone else, that does not help them. It does not bring them into the world in a better way.”
“The way you think about yourself comes across to the other person. When people come to practitioners, they often have transference issues from their parenting. Maybe they’re in a job where somebody is dominating them and they’ve come to expect this from a person of authority.
“An Alexander Technique teacher is not a separate authority but a person offering a facility, not dominating the other person. They’re teaching the person that they can come to the partnership in a safe way. A partnership where there’s less and less tension and people are more open and connecting to each other in a flowing, organic way that does not require force or manipulation or domineering.”
The Anatomy Of A Panic Attack
Are there places you can’t go in case you have a panic attack? Are there things you can’t do for fear of panic?
A few Alexander Technique lessons will help most people to let go of panic attacks.
I had a girlfriend who could not go to courts or hospitals for fear of a panic attack.
“If you’d free your neck and think up, you wouldn’t have a panic attack,” I said to her.
My advice did not go over well. She just got mad at me.
It’s always easier to get mad at others rather than to take responsibility for your own situation.
So what happens when you have a panic attack?
The first thing that you notice will be a flooding sensation of fear, but you won’t get this without certain physiological responses to a stimulus.
If your neck is free and you have upward direction through your torso, in other words, if you are buoyant, you won’t be disabled by fear. To truly experience fear, you have to tighten and to compress your neck and to pull down and in on yourself. As you tighten up and compress, shoving your anxiety into your gut where the bile will likely flow up in reaction to your clenching, you’ll be flooded by fear and other unpleasant symptoms such as a racing heart.
With your neck and torso tight and your shoulders hunched, your lungs will have less room to expand and breath will become more difficult.
By contrast, if you refuse to tighten and to compress your neck, and instead expand into activity, your torso lengthening and widening and your face free of compression and your limbs loose, you’ll be tranquil. You won’t be a drama queen. You won’t need to demand that everybody pay attention to you and submit to your emotional and physiological blackmail.
Wikipedia says: “First, there is frequently (but not always) the sudden onset of fear with little provoking stimulus. This leads to a release of adrenaline (epinephrine) which brings about the so-called fight-or-flight response wherein the person’s body prepares for strenuous physical activity. This leads to an increased heart rate (tachycardia), rapid breathing (hyperventilation) which may be perceived as shortness of breath (dyspnea), and sweating (which increases grip and aids heat loss). Because strenuous activity rarely ensues, the hyperventilation leads to a drop in carbon dioxide levels in the lungs and then in the blood. This leads to shifts in blood pH (respiratory alkalosis or hypocapnia), which in turn can lead to many other symptoms, such as tingling or numbness, dizziness, burning and lightheadedness. Moreover, the release of adrenaline during a panic attack causes vasoconstriction resulting in slightly less blood flow to the head which causes dizziness and lightheadedness.”
Do You Lead With Your Jaw?
When life is not what I want, I feel a huge emotional need to clench my jaw. I just want to grind my teeth. I’m frustrated and I have to express this frustration through body tension.
That’s one of the principle ways I know myself — through my layers of body tension. As I’ve learned to let them go over the past few years, I’ve journeyed into a new land and found a new me.
Jan Batty gave a radio interview on the Alexander Technique: “Think about how many millions of times we nod our heads. How we nod our head either frees the spine or brings more tension. When most people nod their head, they lead with their jaw. If you do lead with your jaw, even gently, you create a whole pattern of tension through your body, just like pushing down on a rubber ducky under the water in the bath tub.”
“If you let the desire for the movement to come from the top of the head, that allows a beautiful sliding and gliding on your top joint, which is between your ears.”
“Most people nod their head starting from the jaw, tightening the neck… When you add this body tension, you’re taking away from your emotional availability to life and creating anxiety and extra stress.”
“Decide to receive with our eyes. Sight comes to our eyes. We receive into deep pools. Instead, we push our eyes out to see or to think. That stiffens our whole body. If we only received the image into soft eyes and let that feed our whole body kinaesthetically, that would turn around how we function through the day. The interference is staring or holding or tightening or over-working in the eyes.”
“Notice what happens to yourself when you do that.”
“I didn’t tell a student that if he continues with this, he’ll find a lot of things in his life begin to change. He told me, ‘I’m noticing that when I’m in class and I’m sensing myself with more ease, my learning is changing. I’m appreciating more things. I’m noticing things that are beautiful. I’m relating to my friends differently.’”
How To Read A Book Comfortably
Before I took Alexander lessons, I never thought about the way I read books. I never thought about my sitting mechanics. I never thought about the strain of holding a book up.
Nuitsmani comments on one of my videos on how to sit: “When reading a book (or writing) I put my book (or journal) on the table. And so I need to bend my head down. Is it a right thing to do? Or should I bend from my hips while keeping my head aligned with my back?”
I would recommend putting the book or journal under some pillows on your lap. I use three pillows.
I also read standing up, allowing my book to rest on the back of my chair.
The Power Of Negative Directions
Robert Rickover writes: Most of us create excess tension somewhere in our bodies. If you have a pretty good idea where you’re habitually tightening up – could be your shoulders, your chest, your pelvis, whatever – you can use it for the little experiment below. If you’re not sure where to put your attention, put it on your neck.
Now walk back and forth across the room. When going in one direction, walk as you usually do. When you walk in the other direction, softly think “I am not tightening my (neck, shoulders – whatever region of your body you have chosen to experiment with)”.
The “I am not” part of this phrase is very important, but feel free to experiment with other words that mean something like “tightening” – maybe tensing, squeezing, compressing or any other similar word you like. Feel free also to experiment with other activities you do – speaking, chopping vegetables, whatever. Simply alternate between your usual way of doing them, and gently adding this self-directing phrase.
And remember a key word here is softly – whichever version of the phrase you are use is best conveyed to yourself without any pressure, detailed instructions or expectations.