Alexander Technique – After the Appetizer

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ID-100147916I’ve recently had the chance to do a little informal research on the following question:  What are the specific topics people explore once they’ve gone to an Alexander Technique website and had a little taste of what the Technique has to offer?

A few weeks ago, I created a new site, Alexander Technique Express, to provide a quick and mobile friendly version of my main page, The Complete Guide to the Alexander Technique.  Most of the visitors to this new site get there because they used their smartphone to go to the Complete Guide and were automatically re-directed to the new site.

As you can see below, on this new site, I present a relatively small number of categories to choose from.  Before reading any further, take a look at the choices and write down what you think are the relative number of visits for each one.

Screen shot 2013-03-29 at 2.22.20 PM

Now compare your numbers to these statistics:

For every 100 people who got past the home page and clicked on General Info, 89 clicked on Posture, 63 on Pain, 23 on Breathing, 20 on Music, 18 on Performers, 18 on Fitness/Sports and 5 on Links.

And…42 people clicked on Find a Teacher!

Bear in mind as well that some visitors clicked on more than one category.

(60 people clicked on Support/Contact – but this number is misleading because visitors from all my websites are now directed to this page.)

These results are biased towards people on the go – people who surf the web with smartphones.  This is an important, and rapidly growing demographic. At present they account for about a third of all visitors who initially go to the Complete Guide – up from about 20 percent a year ago.

And they about to become the mainstream. Most internet observers predict that smartphone searches will account for more than half of all searches in another year or so and before long most web searches will be done from smartphones.

Did their choices surprise you?  They did me a little.

I knew Posture was a hot topic but I was surprised that it out performed Pain. I had greater hopes for Musicians but was happy that Breathing performed as well as it did.  I was heartened by the high proportion of visitors who actually wanted to find an Alexander Technique teacher.

How did these numbers compare to your estimates?  Can you see some ways to use this information in the positioning of your website and other promotional materials? What other categories do you think would be good to add to the site?*

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* One category I considered, and eventually dropped for the time being was “Stress” – mainly because it’s everywhere in the Alexander world.  I also considered “Self Improvement” but couldn’t find the right material to flesh it out.  I also suspect that it would not be a popular one.

Image courtesy of rakratchada torsap / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

 

The Alexander Technique: A New Approach to Mind-Body Unity

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Albert Einstein

No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. – Albert Einstein

No one would deny that we ourselves enter as an agency into whatever is attempted and done by us. This is a truism. But the hardest thing to attend to is that which is closest to ourselves, that which is most constant and familiar. And this closest ‘something’ is, precisely, ourselves, our own habits and ways of doing things…

It is, however, one thing to to teach the need of a return to the individual man as the ultimate agency in whatever mankind and society collectively can accomplish…it is another thing to discover the concrete procedure by which this greatest of all tasks can be executed. And this indispensable thing is exactly what Mr. Alexander has accomplished. – John Dewey

Albert Einstein is well known to all of us. John Dewey was America’s most famous philosopher. He founded the school of philosophy know as “pragmatism” and he was also very influential in the development of American education during the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, he is often referred to as the “father of American education.”

F. Matthias Alexander teaching John Dewey

But just who was the “Mr. Alexander” that Dewey apparently held in such high esteem? And what did he do to merit Dewey’s praise?

“Mr. Alexander” was F. Matthias Alexander (1869-1855), an Australian by birth, who lived most of his life in London. He was the developer of a method of teaching people how to change harmful habits of posture and movement – habits that prevented them for operating at their full potential. His method continues to be taught today and is commonly called the Alexander Technique.

It might seem strange that a philosopher would be so taken by a process that seems mainly to do with the operation of the physical body. After all we don’t usually attach great philosophical importance to the activities of our chiropractor, massage therapist or physical trainer.

When Dewey and Alexander first met in New York during World War I and had a series of lessons with Alexander, the most immediate results were dramatic improvements in his breathing, eyesight and in the flexibility of his ribcage. Before then, Dewey had always been a very cerebral person and considered his body to be just something needed to keep his mind functioning.

But before long Dewey come to realize that there was a great deal more to the Alexander Technique than improved physical functioning, as important as that was. In his book Freedom to Change – The Development and Science of the Alexander Technique, Frank Pierce Jones relates an interview he had with John Dewey in 1947:

“(Dewey) said that he had been taken by (the Alexander Technique) first because it provided a demonstration of the unity of mind and body. He thought that the demonstration had struck him more forcibly than it might have struck someone who got the sensory experience easily and quickly, because he was such a slow learner. He had always been physically awkward, he said, and performed all actions too quickly and impulsively and without thought. ‘Thought’ in his case was saved for ‘mental’ activity, which had always been easy for him. It was a revelation to discover that thought could be applied with equal advantage to everyday movements.

“The greatest benefit he got from lessons, Dewey said, was the ability to stop and think before acting. Physically, he noted an improvement first in his vision and then in breathing. Before he had lessons, his ribs had been very rigid. Now they had a marked elasticity which doctors still commented on, though he was close to eighty-eight.

“Intellectually, Dewey said, he found it much easier, after had had studied the technique, to hold a philosophical position calmly once he had taken it or to change it if new evidence came up warranting a change. He contrasted his own attitude with the rigidity of other academic thinkers who adopt a position early in their careers and then use their intellects to defend it indefinitely.”

In my own work as an Alexander Technique teacher, I find that physical and mental rigidity often go hand in hand. You can verify this for yourself by taking a close look at people you know and comparing the ease of their physical bearing with their openness to new ideas.

There are exceptions of course – often very dramatic ones, too. But this kind of observation provides evidence of the mind-body unity Dewey spoke about, and which was emphasized by Alexander.

Today, Alexander Technique teachers continue to stress the connections between the way we think about how we sit, stand and move, and the manner in which we actually perform these activities. When we learn how to be precise in our thinking about what we want to happen, the physical results follow automatically.

What you think is what you get.

As with John Dewey, the immediate benefits are often primarily physical in nature. Indeed many people initially take Alexander lessons because of back pain, stiff necks and shoulders and the like. But over time they sometimes discover other, more subtle, benefits of the sort Dewey found.

And for some, these unexpected benefits turn out to be the most valuable.

Misconceptions about the Alexander Technique

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When the subject of the Alexander Technique comes up in conversation, I’ve found that people who have heard about it often have a very distorted idea of what it’s all about. This is not surprising because the Technique is concerned with the quality of how our bodies function as we go through life. And for the most part, our culture tends to emphasize what we do rather than how we do it.

Here are some of the most common misconceptions about the Alexander Technique I’ve run across:

1. The Alexander Technique is a type of physical therapy designed to take care of conditions like back pain, stiff necks and shoulders etc.

It’s certainly true that many people take Alexander lessons because they are in pain and have been told the Technique can help them. And a great many are helped. But Alexander Technique teachers are very careful to present our work as being educational in nature; we teach people how they can become more sensitive to messages their body is sending them, and how they can respond in a useful and constructive manner.

Put another way, we show our students precisely what they are inadvertently doing to themselves that gets in the way of their natural functioning – and then how they can sit, stand, move and perform their daily activities without unnecessary and harmful tension in their bodies.

Relief from pain often comes about when this excess tension is released, but an Alexander Technique teacher has no way of predicting just how and when this will occur – or, for that matter, offer an absolute guarantee that it will happen.

Sometimes, in fact, a pupil has “therapeutic” benefits they never anticipated. They may have come for lessons because of back pain and discover that their asthma symptoms have abated.

2. The Alexander Technique is really only for performers.

Again, it’s true that musicians, actors and dancers constitute a sizable proportion of Alexander Technique students – perhaps as many as half for some teachers. And Alexander teachers often teach in schools of music, drama and dance.

But the Technique has always been used by people from all sorts of occupations. Among my current students is a carpenter, a dentist, a massage therapist, a university professor and an accountant.

Performers are attracted to the Alexander Technique because the quality of how their body functions directly influences the quality of their performance. Also many performers, especially musicians and dancers, are in pain because of the demanding nature of their work.

But we are all have to “perform” activities as we go through life, and while we may not be judged as immediately and as closely as a dancer or singer, the manner in which we do things still has a great influence, for better or for worse, on our overall health and well-being.

3. The Alexander Technique is not something to consider if you’re an older person – habits of posture and movement are too deeply entrenched to change after a certain age.

It’s true that it’s easier to change harmful habits when you’re young. In fact, F. M. Alexander, the developer of the Alexander Technique, felt that the best place to teach his method was in the early grades of school.

On the other hand, most children are not particularly interested their posture and co-ordination. In part this is because the harmful habits they may have acquired have not yet caused them pain or discomfort. Also they have so many other things going on in their lives that posture or movement patterns usually seem pretty far down on the scale of things to be concerned about.

In fact, many Alexander Technique students are not particularly young. Professor John Dewey (the philosopher and “Father of American Education”) was almost 60 when he had his first lesson. George Bernard Shaw, the great playwright, was 88! I presently have a student who is in her late 70’s who has, for the past few months, been rediscovering what it means to play the cello with ease and joy.

4. Learning the Alexander Technique takes a long time and is expensive and difficult.

It is true that some people – like myself – become so interested in the Alexander process that they take lessons for years and even go through the intense three-year training process to become a teacher.

It is also true that the Technique asks you to think about yourself in ways you are probably not used to. But the basic principles underlying the Technique are very, very simple. Indeed, the Alexander Technique has sometimes been called “applied common sense” applied to the body.

Most people get the help they need to make significant changes in a few weeks or months – it’s not something most students study for years and years.

The cost of an Alexander Technique lesson is usually on a par with the cost of a massage. In addition, some teachers offer group classes which brings the cost down significantly.

So if any of these misconceptions has deterred you from exploring the Alexander Technique, take a lesson or two and see for yourself what this century-old method can offer you.

***

If you’re an Alexander Technique student or teacher, I’d love to hear how your concept of the Technique changed once you started having lessons.

Flexibility in Five Minutes a Day

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In her book, Life and Death in Shanghai, Nien Cheng describes her life in China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Because she and her late husband had worked for a foreign firm, her home and all her possessions were confiscated by the Red Guard, her daughter was tortured and then killed, and she was imprisoned and held in solitary confinement for six years. Ms Cheng was in her fifties when all this happened.

Conditions in prison were terrible and several times she came close to death. Describing one on her lowest points, when she barely had the strength to stand, she writes:

“…I thought that if I was going to survive the Cultural Revolution, I must discipline myself with physical and mental exercise. Inspired by my own resolution, I stood up rather abruptly. Dark shadows almost blinded me, and I had to sit down again. But from that day onward, I devised a series of exercises that moved every part of my body from my head to my toes, and did them twice a day. At first the exercise exhausted me, and I had to interrupt it with frequent periods of rest. Also I had to avoid the prying eyes of the guards, as exercise other than a few minutes of walking in the cell after meals was forbidden. Nevertheless, I managed to exercise each day and after a few months recovered my physical strength somewhat, as well as my feeling of well-being.”

Several years later, the political situation in China shifted and Ms. Cheng was released from prison. Despite all the hardships she had been through, her health quickly improved. Her friends commented that she looked much younger than her actual age. Eventually she moved to the United States.

It was fascinating for me to read about Ms Cheng’s system of movement exercises because it closely parallels a procedure described in the book How to Learn the Alexander Technique – A Manual for Students by Barbara and William Conable. This book emphasizes a procedure the Conables have named “body-mapping” – essentially a systematic process of exploring on your own body precisely how the major joints and muscle groups work.

This is not the sort of study one usually associates with anatomy – what I think of as “anatomy at a distance”, that is learning about the human body without relating it to the body of the student who is doing the learning. Nor is it at all like the detailed study of cadavers done in medical schools.

Body-mapping is all about the practical application of basic anatomical knowledge to yourself as a living organism, learning about how you function at rest and in movement.

In their book, the Conables write:

“In recent years some (Alexander Technique) students have expressed a longing to do flexibility work but have assumed they couldn’t devote enough time to it. To one of these students I said one day, ‘Well, you could do worse than simply put your joints through their range of movement each day.’ He came back a week later and said, ‘I did what you suggested and it was amazing.’ “What was that?’ I asked. ‘Put my joints through their range of motion each day.’ He showed me how much flexibility he had gained in a week doing that, and we began to systematically play with the idea. Sure enough, it works like magic and takes only about five minutes a day, with no necessity that the five minutes be consecutive. The student simply begins with the joint of the head and the spine…rotating the head and tilting, then moves on the the jaw…then on to the ribs, moving them at their joints with the vertebrae by taking a good breath. Then the student moves all four joints of the arm structure and the hand joints. Then the spine, bending forward, backward, to each side, spiraling, and twisting. Then the hip joint, knee, and ankle and the foot joints. That’s it. Done correctly this routine increases flexibility faster than anything I know, and I have wondered and wondered why. I now think two factors contribute, first the quality of attention brought to the movement, which is the kind of attention that makes it possible for the body to learn from each movement. Second, some of the movements are ones that many people rarely make, like rotation at the upper arm joint with the shoulder blade and rotation at the hip joint. The body seems to delight in these movements and the availability seems to free the joint.”

If you’d like to become more flexible, the experiences of Ms Cheng and of Barbara Conable’s students point to a simple, efficient and effective way to achieve that goal.

Image courtesy of Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Nirvana in your Neck

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I was chatting with some friends over dinner, attempting to explain the basic principles of the Alexander Technique. I spoke a little about the importance Alexander teachers attach to having a free neck so that the head can easily balance on top of the spine. If a person’s neck is tense, it tends to upset that head balance, causing harmful repercussions throughout the entire body. Releasing that tension is basic to releasing those harmful effects.

“Nirvana in your neck!” said Nancy, one of my friends.

I’d never heard it put that way before, but it nicely captures an important aspect of the Alexander Technique.

F. Matthias Alexander, the developer of what today is called the Alexander Technique, was certainly not the first person to talk about the importance of the neck. The Bible is full of references to stiff-necks:

Exodus 32, verses 9, 10: The Lord said to Moses, “I see this is a stiff necked people. Now let Me be, that my anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them…”

Deuteronomy 9: verses 13 and 14 “I see that this is a stiff necked people. Let me alone and I will destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven…”

Jeremiah 7, verse 26: “They stiffened their necks, they acted worse than their fathers.”

There is even an explicit reference to the postural effect of being stiff-necked In Micah 2, verse 3: The Lord says, “I am planning such a misfortune against this clan that you will not be able to free your necks from it. You will not be able to walk erect.”

A stiff neck does indeed make it impossible to have a natural upright posture. It also creates a situation in which the work of supporting the whole body is wrongly distributed. Important functions such as breathing, blood circulation and digestion are placed under enormous strain, reducing their efficiency.

In some translations, “stiff-necked” is translated as “stubborn” which is accurate as far as it goes, but unfortunately takes us away from the physical quality inherent in the original Hebrew: kashe-oref – kashe: hard; oref: scruff of the neck.

There are also many examples in our everyday language that suggest an intimate connection between bodily attitudes and inner states of mind. We speak of a “spineless creature”, “having no backbone”, “losing our heads” and being “level-headed”. The word “attitude” itself can refer to both our outlook on life and to the physical orientation of our body.

Alexander discovered the importance of the state of his neck quite independently of all this. Working entirely on his own in late 19th century Australia, he set out to solve a voice problem he was experiencing.

He set up several mirrors that allowed him to view himself from various angles as he spoke. It didn’t take him long to notice a tendency to tighten his neck when speaking – indeed, to tighten his neck when he just thought about speaking. He also noticed some other patterns that came into play – pulling his head back and down on his neck, restricting his breathing, gripping the floor with his feet – but it turned out that the neck pattern was primary. He discovered that if he could prevent his neck from tightening. the other dysfunctional patterns dissolved.

This proved to be an extremely important discovery on his part, and not just for it’s beneficial effects on his voice. Any activity he performed – standing up from a chair, walking, whatever – was done more efficiently when he remembered to free his neck. It was useful to let his attention go to other parts of his body too, but the condition of his neck turned out to be the most important single factor in bringing about a change for the better.

Teachers of the Alexander Technique today continue to emphasize the head-neck-upper torso relationship and students often are amazed at what a difference it makes when they learn how to prevent harmful tension from forming in their neck. Students often report feeling much lighter and freer and are able to move through life with fewer physical restrictions.

Getting in touch with this “nirvana in your neck” can change your life for the better in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Here’s an audio interview about “stiff-necked” people in the Bible from Body Learning Cast, the Alexander Technique Podcast:

Image courtesy of anankkml / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Taking a Stand with Awareness

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A few years ago, I happened to have two students who were both quite tall and who had lessons scheduled one right after the other on the same morning.

Jack (not his real name) was in his late thirties, not very athletic, and was the director of a local charity. Bill was a former college football player in his mid-twenties who now worked as a computer programmer.

Jack was a classic “sloucher”; he typically sat and stood with his shoulders pulled down into his chest, his head poked forward and down. Bill tended to over straighten his back in an exaggerated “at-attention” style often seen in the military.

Both men came for Alexander Technique lessons because of back pain. Jack had been told that surgery was his best hope and Bill relied on weekly visits to a chiropractor who could help him with his symptoms but not with the underlying pattern that was causing those symptoms.

It was a fascinating experience for me to work with these two students over a period of several months. When I first gently guided Jack into a less slumped posture, his immediate reaction was: “I can’t walk into my office looking like this!”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because people would think I was arrogant!”

It turned out that Jack had been quite tall for his age most of his life and that somewhere along the way he’d got the message (from his parents? teachers? playmates?) that taking up his full size would give others the impression he was trying to act superior. His personally was by nature fairly quiet and unassuming and I suppose he didn’t want to deal with the challenges he thought his natural posture might have invited.

Bill was quite a different story. During his first lesson, I asked him to go into a slouch. With a little help from me, he was able to let go of some of his overly stiff stance. It was by no stretch of the imagination a slouch -although it felt that way to Bill. His immediate reaction was that this new way of standing was quite unacceptable – “I feel like a wimp!” was his reaction.

It turned out that his father was an ex-marine and a policeman. When we took a look at photos of him, and of Bill at various points in his life, it was clear that he had copied the military bearing of his father – as had his two older brothers.

Both these men had adapted postural patterns that were quite harmful over the long haul. And while it was fairly easy to coax them out of those patterns for a short period of time, their perceptions about these charges strongly encouraged them to revert back to their habitual patterns.

They illustrate something that every teacher of the Alexander Technique encounters: A person’s habitual patterns of sitting, standing and moving often feel “right” and any change – even one that is clearly beneficial – feels “wrong”.

You can probably think of people you know who have quite pronounced irregularities in their posture that everybody around them can easily notice – perhaps standing and sitting in ways that are very asymmetrical, of with very slumped shoulders, with one shoulder carried much higher than the other. Yet the chances are good that those people are completely unaware of their patterns.

With Jack and Bill, one of the ways I was able to help them “recalibrate” their self-perceptions was to stand them in front of a full length mirror, with a second mirror positioned so that they can see themselves from the side. I would then help them to release the extra muscle tension they were using to hold themselves in their habitual ways of standing and take a look at themselves sideways, imagining they had never seen this person before.

It didn’t take long for them to clearly see that their sense perceptions didn’t match their visual observations. After a few lessons, I asked them to make those same changes on their own in front of someone they trusted – in this case it was their wives – to get additional feedback, which confirmed their observations with the mirrors.

Both Jack and Bill had lessons over a period of about 4 months and by the end of that time, both had let go of most of their postural “holds”. Neither complained of back pain anymore. But some of the most rewarding changes occurred in other areas of their lives.

Jack found that his new physical bearing was not seen as arrogant at all, but did seem to encourage greater respect from his colleagues. Bill discovered that he was now perceived as being much more approachable. One of his co-workers actually told him that she used to be terrified of asking him for help but now felt comfortable doing so.

The next time you’re in a clothing store with mirrors set up letting you see yourself from the side, spend a few minutes taking a fresh look at yourself. Drop any concern about the usual reasons for using a mirror – your hair, your make-up, the fit of your clothes – and just take in the way this “stranger” stands and compare it to what it feels like.

You might make some very important and useful discoveries about yourself!

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Cupid talks about the Alexander Technique

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A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to interview Cupid about his experiences with the Alexander Technique.

Me: Cupid, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me.  I know you’re busy at this time of year, gearing up for the special demands on you for Valentine’s Day.

Cupid: No problem, Robert – I’ve had such positive experiences with the Technique that I love sharing them with everyone I meet.

Me: What prompted you to take Alexander lessons?

Cupid:  Well, for years I’ve noticed that my speed and agility were not what they should be.  Those are both critical for my job – I am always having to sneak up on people very quickly to shoot an arrow into their heart – and the problem was getting worse.  One day I started thinking about my early life and realized there was something I had long forgotten: I was born from a silver egg!

That’s what got me interested in the Alexander Technique.

Me: The silver egg?

Cupid: Yes, the silver egg.  You see I started thinking about being confined in that egg, and how it might have led me to compress my body.  And that I might still be doing that a little bit unconsciously.

Well, one bit of research led to another and I learned that the Alexander Technique is one of the best ways around to learn to let go of harmful, habitual, unconscious, habit patterns.  Like self-compressing.

Me: Did you find that lessons successfully helped you with your self-compression pattern?

Cupid: Absolutely, right from the first lesson.  I know that sometimes it take a few lessons to start really “getting” the Alexander Technique, but in my case there was so much overall release, so quickly, that I was hooked.

I had my first lesson about half a year ago and now I can do a good deal of self-decompressing on my own.  That’s the wonderful thing about the Alexander Technique: there are specific ways of thinking, and simple procedures, you can do yourself.  You don’t need to keep going to a teacher.  At the moment, I still find a lesson every few months can be useful, but I don’t imagine that will last much longer.

Me: That’s an amazing story Cupid!  I wonder if the Technique has helped you in other ways?

Cupid: Well, I have to do a lot of arrow shooting.  And it has to be done quickly and accurately.  While my aim was still pretty good before taking lessons, I was getting a lot of pain in my wrists and arms and sometimes even in my shoulders.  I realize now that these were signs of Repetitive Strain Injury.

The Technique helped me to hold my bow up and pull my arm back more easily, with less extra strain.  Over time, the pain has pretty much all gone away.

Me: Are there other ways the Alexander Technique has helped you?

Cupid: Yes, but they’re more subtle and harder to describe. Of course you know I’m blind and I have to hit a victim’s heart to get them to fall in love.  So I am heavily reliant on my other senses and I do feel they have improved with Alexander lessons, but in ways I cannot really understand at this point.

I also feel I have more energy, but it’s not easy for me to describe or quantify.

Me: Cupid, thank you so much for this interview – I’ll make a point of posting it on Valentine’s Day.

Cupid: That would be lovely Robert!

 

 

The New Physical Education

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One high-school subject stands out above all others in my memory: Physical Education. I detested everything about PE, from the endless runs around a large undeveloped property near my high-school to Friday afternoons in the gym where we played “murder-ball”, our own sadistic version of dodge ball.

I quickly learned that if I kept a low profile, and was discreet in minimizing my participation, I could still get by with a grade of “B”, or at worst a “C’. During the outdoor runs, I would disappear for a few rounds into a shallow ditch behind a row of hedges, out of sight of the gym teachers. My murder-ball strategy was to pretend I was hit early in the game when there were still so many players in the game that nobody noticed.

For me, PE seemed a boring and unpleasant waste of my time. So when I heard a National Public Broadcasting program about the “New Physical Education” movement, I listened with great interest.

The first part of the program described one important aspect of the New PE: fewer competitive activities (dodge ball was cited as a prime example) and more activities that emphasize personal achievement such as rock-climbing, kick-boxing and Tai-Chi.

So far so good, I thought. While rock-climbing and kick-boxing probably would not have appealed to me, I think I would have enjoyed Tai-Chi, and probably benefited a great deal from it.

But then, in the second part of the program, the whole question of evaluation and measurement was introduced. How are kids in the New PE programs to be graded?

One approach, already in use in one Seattle school, involved attaching tiny heart rate monitors to the children during class. Then, when the class was over, the teacher could check the read outs and determine just how much effort each child had made, and grade accordingly.

So much for minimizing strategies of the sort I had perfected!

But there is a far more serious issue at stake here: This kind of measurement mirrors and reinforces the preoccupation of most adult fitness programs with the quantity of activity performed, rather than the way participants use their bodies while performing those activities. We tend to be interested in how many laps we swam, the amount of weights we lifted, or the speed of our runs rather than how well we used our body in performing those sports. In other words, quantity rather than quality.

To see what this leads to, take a look at any group of runners or joggers. You will probably see tight necks, hunched shoulders and painful expressions on many of their faces. These runners may be getting a cardiovascular workout, but in the process they’re putting a lot of unnecessary and harmful pressure on their bodies. No wonder so many people who begin fitness programs drop out after a few weeks, often due to pain or injuries.

Of course it’s important that children engage in vigorous physical activity; we don’t want them to grow up to be couch potatoes. But making “effort” the primary basis for grading students – even if it’s as easy as reading a heart monitor – does our children a great disservice.

What makes this particularly sad is that we now know how to help people improve their movement quality. The twentieth century saw the development of numerous somatic therapies and teaching methods that have proven effective in helping people of all ages perform all their activities, from everyday ones like walking and using a computer right through to vigorous sports, with greater ease, efficiency and safety.

The method I know best, first as a student and then, for the past thirty years as a teacher, is the Alexander Technique. It has a long history of helping people with stress-related conditions like back pain and stiff necks and shoulders and it is often used by musicians, dancers and actors to improve the quality of their performance.

The Alexander Technique is taught by specially-trained teachers, but some of its principles could easily be included in PE classes. Take for instance the Alexander-related process that has come to be known as “body-mapping.” This approach includes learning, on your own body, just where important joints are located and how they function.

It turns out that most of us have serious “mis-maps” of our own body which cause us to move in ways that attempt to reinforce those incorrect ideas. For example, many people think their hip joints are at waist level when, in fact, they are located far lower on our torso. Correcting this mis-map is quite easy to do and almost always results in much smoother bending, walking and running patterns.

Another method that can easily be taught to children (and adults) is the Up With Gravity process, a simple way of using the power of gravity to release tension and lighten up.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the New Physical Education programs included teaching these kinds of useful self-knowledge to our kids so they could go through life using their bodies as nature intended? And look back on their PE experiences with fondness and gratitude?

Image courtesy of Vlado / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

Narcissus and Alexander – Reflections on the Origins of the Alexander Technique

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Beside the pleasant pool Narcissus lay
And bending over, quenched his thirst, to find
Within his heart a thirst of different kind…

Narcissus the Greek

Narcissus was an exceptionally beautiful sixteen-year-old Greek boy, hard and disdainful, who scorned everyone, including the nymph Echo who had fallen madly in love with him. But Echo got her revenge: one day Narcissus lay down beside a pool and, seeing his own reflection, was so smitten by his beauty that he fell in love with himself.

Narcissus never discovered that he was only looking at a reflection. He tried to clasp and kiss it, but naturally was unable to do so. Frustrated and tormented by not being able to possess the object of his desire, he grieved and grieved. When mourners came for him, even his body had disappeared. All that was left of him was a flower next to the pool.

This is the first recorded reaction to seeing one’s own reflection – a pretty depressing story, to say the least. But now let’s fast forward a few millennia and shift our attention away from the cradle of western civilization to a distant outpost of the late l9th Century British Empire. For it was in Australia that a historic man-mirror encounter of quite a different sort was taking place. How did it compare with Narcissus’ sad tale?

Alexander the Australian

Frederick Matthias Alexander was an exceptionally talented young man from Tasmania who spent a great deal of time looking at himself in a mirror. One can easily imagine his friends and colleagues becoming concerned about this odd behavior: “Fred just stands there in front of that damned mirror for hours on end. Can’t even get him to come down to the pub for a beer anymore.” “I know. Yesterday, when I stopped by his rooms, he was having an intimate talk with his reflection. That voice problem of his has gone to his head.”

Alexander eventually left his mirror and his homeland and moved to England. No doubt some he encountered there also thought him a bit strange – in a harmless sort of way of course. Others saw genius in the man and attached great value to his discoveries. They read his books, gazed intently into their own mirrors, and gladly paid good money for lessons in his Technique. A few of them devoted their lives to furthering his work. This pattern continues today, almost sixty years after Alexander’s death.

Narcissus became world famous. His story is perhaps the best known of all the tales of ancient Greek mythology and his name has become synonymous with self-love and self-centeredness. Alexander, on the other hand, remains comparatively unknown, although his name too has crept into the vocabulary of his followers. One early American disciple suggested that the President and all members of Congress ought to be fully and completely “Alexanderized” before they assumed their duties. Students of his method sometimes speak of “doing their Alexander” and at time accuse each other of being stiff “Alexandroids”.

Alexander teachers and students can occasionally be accused of narcissism – when our legitimate Alexandrian emphasis on paying attention to ourselves slips over into obsessive self-interest. But for for the most part we continue to use mirrors, and other tools for self-observation, in a discerning and reasoned manner. This is something Narcissus was simply not able to do. He was overcome with self-love, and in no condition to bring his critical faculties to bear on his predicament. “That poor chap was simply not in communication with his reasoning,” Alexander might well have declared.

Unlike Narcissus, who wanted to merge with his reflection, Alexander used his mirror as a means of distancing himself from his faulty sensory awareness. In his own “creation story” – Chapter I of Use of the Self – Alexander systematically brings his mirror into play at each step of his quest. While Narcissus lost his human form and was transformed into a flower, Alexander used his reflection to gain accurate information about himself in order to fulfill his human potential. Indeed the mirror proved to be his principle tool for learning the truth about his behavior, and about the effectiveness of the attempts to make useful changes in that behavior.

As far as we know, Alexander was the very first person in history to use a mirror in that way. He forever changed the relationship between man and mirror and that in itself is worth reflecting upon.

Notes:

The opening translation comes from The Metamorphosis of Ovid – An English Translation, by A. E. Watts, University of California, Berkeley (1954)

Most interpretations of the Narcissus myth treat Narcissus as a deluded and tragic figure. A very different interpretation has been put forth by Thomas Moore in his best-selling book, Care of the Soul, Harper and Collins, New York (1992).

A fascinating account of our historical relationship with mirrors is provided in The Mirror and Man by Benjamin Goldberg, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville (1985) and in Coming to Our Senses, Morris Berman, Simon and Schuster, New York (1989).

Learning how to Stop

Body Learning Blog Posted on by

A STORY:

“A man enjoys life. But it isn’t perfect. He sometimes experiences
pain, frustration, and suffering. For a while he gets along okay.
But the suffering builds over time, over a number of years. The
suffering becomes a major intrusion in his life. He exclaims,
“Something has got to change!”

“He goes to the wise man and explains that, although he was okay with
life for a while, more and more it has been growing on his mind that
he’s not happy with the way things are, and that he’s really quite
sure now that something has got to change. “Could you help me to
change?” he asks.

“The wise man says, “Thank you for coming to me. You did the right
thing in coming here. And now I will give you my advice: change
nothing.”

THE END

When I first read this, a part of me thought to myself, “Well, being a wise man seems pretty simple. Maybe I’ll take up the profession myself. All I’ll have to do is tell people seeking my wisdom: “change nothing” and my exulted place in society will be assured. I might be able to make more money too!

But as a teacher of the Alexander Technique I had to admit that the wise man’s advice was pretty profound. In my field I often work with people who have come to believe that the solution to problems with their physical functioning lies in trying to do something different – to just change something.

Take the field of posture, for example. Some people believe, or have been told, that their posture is poor. Sometimes they’ve been warned that they face potentially serious health risks – perhaps due to the restricted breathing that often goes along with poor posture. Or, for older students, the greater likelihood they’ll loose their balance and fall with potentially serious results. Maybe they’ve come to realize that poor posture just doesn’t look good, that their personal or professional lives are being adversely affected.

They want to improve their posture and, more often than not, are quick to demonstrate just how they might go about doing just that. Someone who is a sloucher, for example, will demonstrate “standing up straight” by lifting their head and chest, probably in very much the way they did as children when a parent or teacher told them to “stop slouching, stand up straight”.

This procedure was effective at getting the parent or teacher off their back – at least for the minute or so until they returned to their old pattern. But it did absolutely nothing to improve their posture. All that happened was that they rearranged the harmful tensions in their body into a different, but equally dysfunctional, arrangement.

Professor John Dewey, the American philosopher and educational reformer, had a fair amount of experience with the Alexander Technique. This is what he had to say on the subject of posture:

“Of course, something happens when a man acts upon his idea of standing straight. For a little while, he stands differently, but only a different kind of badly. He then takes the unaccustomed feeling which accompanies his unusual stance as evidence that he is now standing straight. But there are many ways of standing badly, and he has simply shifted his usual way to a compensatory bad way at some opposite extreme.”

In my Alexander Technique teaching practice, I’ll often ask a new student to simply notice, as best he or she can, what’s going on with their head, torso, arms and legs and to do this without making any changes. Just notice – nothing more. I’ve hardly ever met a student who was able to actually follow this instruction at first – to simply observe his or her self, without making some sort of instant change in their way of standing or sitting. These changes often involve quite large movements of the student’s head or shoulders, for example.

And yet this sort of simple “just noticing” is precisely what’s needed as a first step in learning how to make a useful change in their posture so that they don’t end up with a different way of sitting, standing or moving badly.

In the field of posture – and indeed in all areas of our lives – we need to become conscious of our habitual patterns of behavior in order to reason out how we can best make changes that will actually improve our situation – we need to “just notice” without making immediate, reflexive, changes that prevent us from sensing what we were doing before we made those changes.

A final note: The wise man did NOT say, “Give up. Your problems will never be solved. You might as well resign yourself to having them forever. Don’t waste your time being interested in improving your situation.” No, he merely said, “Change nothing.” The advice is very, very simple, but not always easy to follow.

As another wise man once said: “You need to know where you’ve been if you want to know the best place to go next.”

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net