Alexander90210 – Page 8 – Alexander Technique

The Emotional Need To Tighten

When my life is not as I wish, I feel an overwhelming need to grip or grind my teeth and to create other forms of body tension.

I often feel so frustrated and angry with my life. Usually I feel morally compelled to not lash out at others (unless they remind me of certain folks), so instead I just tense and compress myself.

I often wonder about the stories behind my students’ body tension patterns. I am somewhat aware of some of my own.

I have no psychological training (but have been a patient in psycho-therapy for about six years).

I am terribly curious about exploring this with my students who want this exploration. I might gingerly ask if there’s a story behind a particular type of tension. What do you fear coming up if you were to release this tension? How does this tension serve you? Do you notice under what circumstances this tension arises?

Virtue As Acceptance Of Reality

I’m reading an e-book by David Gorman on the virtues.

He makes the point that patience is the absence of impatience. And what is impatience? It is a refusal to accept reality. It is a refusal to accept that things are moving more slowly than we would like. Life is not living up to our expectations.

When this happens, we all tend to tense and to push. We compress and we try to hurry. You can’t try to hurry and not tighten up. If you were to resolutely stay poised, you could not be frantic.

As long as we believe that our beliefs about what should happen are more real than what is happening, we are going to be impatient. We’re going to tighten and compress. And we’re going to hurry.

The true meaning of impatience is that our beliefs are out of alignment with reality and we are not experiencing life in the present moment but trying to force life to align with our beliefs.

We should take the feeling of impatience as a wake-up call that our thinking is out of alignment with reality. Impatience is just part of the learning process.

If we learn to accept reality, we will lose our impatience, and we will stop unnecessarily tensing ourselves and those around us.

It makes no more sense to practice patience than it does to practice good posture. Instead, by letting go of the way we unnecessarily interfere with ourselves by trying to impose our unrealistic beliefs on reality, we will naturally let go compression and take up our full space in the world.

When we try things and they don’t work out as we wish, we get frustrated. The feeling of frustration is a wake-up call that our ideas about what steps will bring about a particular end are not accurate. Our beliefs are not matching up with reality.

When you understand the meaning of your feeling of frustration, that unpleasant feeling goes away. Once you get the message, the messenger leaves.

When we are deliberately being dishonest, we usually feel lousy. We’re afraid and nervous and tense and calculating.

So why then are we dishonest? Because we expect to lose something important to us if we are honest.

How hard it is for you to be honest is a measurement of how much you want what you want and don’t want what you don’t want.

If it would be unacceptable to lose something and intolerable to endure something, we will be dishonest to avoid those unpleasant states. So we make up a form of reality and try to get others to accept it.

We reject life as it is. By contrast, if we were to accept life as it is, we’d feel little desire to be dishonest. Honesty simply means accepting reality just as the absence of frustration and impatience also means the accepting of life as it is.

So what keeps us from accepting the truth? Our unreal ideas about what should be.

No matter how strong our beliefs and how eloquently we can state them, we are all still forced to live in reality.

By refusing to lie and to rush, we can see ourselves as we are and accept other people as they are.

“If we look at how things work with curiosity rather than trying to distort them to suit ourselves, how could we feel guilt or shame? We’ve done nothing wrong.”

PS. I don’t think of devious people as moving elegantly through life. If you’re constantly lying, you’re inevitably going to develop weird compression and tension patterns. Just think of Richard Nixon.

Live In Response, Not In Reaction

My Alexander Technique students usually want out of their pain as fast as possible. If they have a sore neck or tight shoulders of a gimpy knee, they want a fix pronto.

But these pains are only symptoms for what is really going on — a refusal to accept reality.

When we accept what is, we don’t rush. We don’t get impatient. We don’t get frustrated. And we don’t lie. And when we don’t do these bad things, we don’t feel guilt and shame.

I want my students to accept that the pain they feel when they type at a computer or when they walk down the block or when they sit in a chair is primarily a symptom of a lack of coordinated use of the self. When you’re moving elegantly, most of these pains don’t occur. But you can only move elegantly when you accept reality and stop rushing and trying to immediately fix things.

David Gorman writes: “What did happen when I actually inhibited my monstrously powerful habitual urge to react to the feelings of the symptom was very, very different than I expected. After a moment of intense awareness of narrowness and restriction (during which I had to choose again not to react), an expansion filled me up and the strain and tension disappeared.”

Will Exercises Improve Your Posture?

According to fitness coach Belle Badell, “the idea of the chest pop is to squeeze the back muscles and then squeezing the upper abs. …Press the back muscles in and downwards. Press and release. If you ever wonder how Shakira does it, this is the trick.”

I notice Belle tightening and compressing her shoulders and neck as she does this exercise. If people imitate that, they’re likely to feel lousy and have less free movement.

If you’ve got distorting tension patterns that cause bad posture, I doubt you’re going to improve by doing this or any exercise. You’re just going to ingrain the habit of adding more compression to your back, shoulders and neck. That’s going to diminish your breathing and your emotional and physical freedom.

The idea of exercises to improve your posture holds that you can just add layers of corrective procedures to undo the damage of interfering tension patterns. The Alexander Technique instead focuses on letting go of those interfering tension patterns so that you can move more easily. You learn to undo rather than to do.

Shakira has beautiful use of herself and I doubt it is because of the chest pops outlined above.

What’s The Training Difference Between An Alexander Teacher And A Yoga Teacher?

A typical yoga teacher has taken a course of about 200 hours, often done in 12-hour stretches on weekends.

An Alexander Technique teacher trains for three hours a day, five days a week, 36 weeks a year, for three years (a total of more than 1600 hours of training).

A massage therapist has training of about 500 hours.

Training to teach pilates requires about 300 hours.

Feldenkrais practitioners train for about 800 hours. Again, much of this training is done in long stretches of eight hours or more. By limiting daily training to three hours, Alexander Technique teacher training is of a different quality than these other modalities. On average, the Alexander teacher spends much more time and money on his education.

Reb Moshe Sat Up Straight

When I mention the Alexander Technique to people, they often stiffen and push themselves up in a rigid way. “Is this good Alexander Technique?” they often ask.

No, it is not. You’d be better off with your habitual slump, I often answer.

Sitting up straight and standing straight is not Alexander Technique. More often than not, it is not good for you. The back and neck have natural curves in them.

There is no good way to sit. All sitting is bad. Some ways of sitting are better than others. Sitting without back support is usually a much better way of sitting than using back support because it forces your back to work a bit and therefore the muscles there don’t get as soft and the average bloke won’t slump as much.

Orthodox Judaism tends to create more sitting than the average life and as a result, Orthodox Jews tend to be more slumped than the average Joe. It’s rare to find a rabbi who sits, stands and moves elegantly.

Which brings me to this:

This past week marked the yahrtzeit of HaRav HaGaon Moshe Feinstein, zt”l. As noted in my last essay, Art Scroll published last year a revised and expanded edition of their biography of Rav Feinstein entitled, “Reb Moshe” by Rabbi Shimon Finkelman…

“One afternoon, Reb Moshe and Rav Shlomo Heiman sat for a while ‘talking in learning.’ When their discussion concluded and Reb Moshe left, Reb Shlomo turned to Rav Dovid Bender and said, ‘Do you know why Reb Moshe is becoming a gadol hador? Because his back never touches the back of his chair while he learns.’

“Decades later, Rav Binyomin Kamenetsky accompanied his father Reb Yaakov to a meeting of senior roshei yeshivah. During the discussions Reb Yaakov repeatedly referred to Reb Moshe not by name but exclusively with the title Rosh Yeshiva.

“When asked on the way home by his son Binyomin to explain why he directed his remarks in this manner, Reb Yaakov’s answer was direct, ‘Have you ever seen Reb Moshe lean back in a chair?’

How The Alexander Technique Can Help With Menstrual Cramps

A lot of women feel cramping in their stomach when they’re on their period.

In this video, Marjorie Barstow helps a woman move out of the unnecessary clenching that exacerbates such pain:

I get so impatient watching these slow-moving Marjorie Barstow videos. And the more impatient I feel, the more I tighten.

Try to notice your own reactions to these videos. They’re filled with good information. If you’re too impatient to watch them comfortably, take a look at your own reactions and see if they’re serving you. See if you tightening in your impatience. What happens if you let that go?

I’ve never had menstrual cramps but I’ve had a lot of stomach aches. At least I did before I learned Alexander Technique.

A few years ago, I wrote:

“Do you have any thoughts on stomach aches?” I ask my Alexander Technique teacher today.

“When do you get them?” he asks.

“When I start worrying. I find myself clenching.”

“Well, what would you say to a friend with this problem?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d say that you’re probably moving down when it happens, pushing your stomach down, playing a loop of worrying thoughts, and you’re probably tipping your head back. So the solution is to flow up. You’re too smart of a guy for this. You know this.

“Why do people throw up when under stress? Because they push down, they tip their head back, they catastrophize and the bile flows up.”

History Of The Alexander Technique

A few months ago, I did this interview with Jeroen Staring (gnirats@hetnet.nl) via email:

How has the Alexander community reacted to your work? Is there a certain type of mind that reacts with interest to your work and another type of mind that reacts with horror?

That is an interesting question, difficult to answer though. I am pleased to see that several individual AT teachers are interested enough to order a copy of my dissertation. That is a great step, since the book is heavy (1.6 kilograms), therefore expensive to have it sent from The Netherlands, and it takes a lot of time to read it. It pleases me even more that these AT teachers, after more or less struggling with the facts reported, embrace the findings.
On the other hand there seems to exist a kind of rumour among AT teachers not to get involved with my work. On the whole, the majority of AT teachers do not show any interest at all. Viewed from my side it is a riddle to observe that what I have unearthed remains without consequence within AT teachers circles.
For example, I discovered several published 1949 letters to the editor of The Literary Guide and Rationalist Review and one published 1954 letter to the editor of The New Statesman and Nation —all by Alexander’s pen, totally unknown to AT teachers. I wrote about these letters in my dissertation. This year, Mr. Jean Fischer, a Danish AT teacher living in London who possesses a copy of my dissertation, published a new edition of his 1996 “Articles and Lectures” book — a collection of F. M. Alexander texts (inspired by my 1993 Dutch book De eerste 40 jaar uit het leven van F. Matthias Alexander, discussing Alexander’s early, pre-1910 writings). But the 1949 and 1954 letters written by Alexander which I unearthed are not in this new 2011 edition, according to Fischer’s website ( consult this website through the following link).
Is it because Alexander reverted to his 1910 Man’s Supreme Inheritance eugenics?
Perhaps, but it appears that Fischer also did not include a pamphlet which F. M. Alexander co-authored with his brother A.R. Alexander which I discovered in 2003 in Sydney, Australia.
If true, I just cannot understand why newly discovered texts (by me) should not be published in a book pretending to hold all these texts. Is it because I discovered them? Now, that would be a strange way of handling historical material: unprofessional, and completely incomprehensible to scientists.
Or does Fischer’s website not include finds I made, but the 2011 edition of Fischer’s book does? Nice riddle, isn’t it?

Now I’m reading a new book — CHANGING HABITS: The Power of Saying No. A personal view of the Alexander Technique for musicians, music students and their teachers by Malcolm Williamson.

On page 24, is this footnote: “I was summoned out of class by Walter to meet Joan Evans and her daughter, Jackie, in his living room late one morning. They were concerned that, with my being editor of the Society’s newsletter, I might give publicity to Jeroen Staring’s privately published book (Staring 1996). Apart from containing unfair personal bias and inaccuracies, the two were anxious that it should not detract from their own forthcoming book about the Alexander family’s history (Evans, 2001).”

Let Your Head Go Forward And Up, Dear

“Alexander Technique teacher Galen Cranz talks with Robert Rickover about our heads and why there are considerably more complex than most of us tend to assume, and why it’s important to understand these complexities. Galen is also a Professor of Architecture at the University of California and the author of The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design.”

Galen: “I noticed that most of the English teachers said, ‘Let your head go forward and up, dear.’”

“Then I got introduced to ideas in cranial-osteopathy and that the bones in the head move. You can float them apart on the dura.”

“I began to think about taking the occipital bone back and up and let the frontal bone release forward and up. If you allow the opposition between these bones, uprightness is a byproduct.”

“Cerebral spinal fluid doesn’t have a heart to pump it. It has to rely on the movement of flexion and extension.”

Robert: “When I was training, I don’t remember anyone saying anything other than ‘the head’, as though it was a solid unit. There wasn’t much of an idea about any internal movements within the head.”

“Anyone who has cranial-sacral work knows that there’s movement because you can sense it.”