What is the Alexander Technique?
From Cathy:
“That is so 19th century!”
I recently had the opportunity to take an excellent class about acting. The teacher was very good.
And I left amazed and somewhat dismayed because the language of the teacher, and the language of my mostly younger fellow participants perpetuated a way of talking that has been demonstrated to be “false” for over a century. It is not true and not possible to “get out of your head” or to only “get in your body”.
We are whole. We are whole. We are whole.
It is well past time to cooperate with human design in a way that insists on nourishing our integrated self.
My teacher, Marjorie Barstow (1899-1994), first graduate of F.M. Alexander’s first teacher training course, sometimes said “It’s just too simple for you” when asked about the Alexander Technique.
And it is simple. We have a design for living that involves how we move through our days—and the quality of everything we do improves when we are cooperating with that design.
When my daughter was six, someone asked her what the Alexander Technique was and she said “oh, it just means you don’t have to scrunch up your neck all the time.” (The same daughter has more recently stuck her head in a colleagues' lab and said “you know, you don’t have to scrunch up your neck to weigh algae.")
That information about the head and spine is the key to renewing cooperation with how we are made to create our daily lives. Learning a process that gives you a way to consciously cooperate with that design is the heart of the teaching I do.
Some people study this process because how they are moving in their lives is causing pain or anxiety, some people come to it because they have reached a “plateau” in performing arts, sports, or communication, some come because a friend told them they " needed" it. Whatever the reason for learning the Alexander Technique, everyone who studies it leaves with more freedom of choice in how they approach tasks, and a life-long ability to optimize the quality of their actions in the world.
Following is a more detailed description of the Alexander Technique.
An Introduction to the Alexander Technique
The Alexander Technique is a psychophysical learning process using conscious thinking to restore coordination and/or prevent mis-coordination in human functioning. What F.M. Alexander (1869-1955) observed empirically, is that the relationship between head and spine in movement is a key factor in vertebrate coordination—a fact that has subsequently been verified scientifically. Whenever a vertebrate goes out of optimal coordination, the system compensates with excessive work in the relationship between head and spine. Frank Pierce Jones, a Tufts researcher who studied the Alexander Technique, says in his book Freedom to Change:
F. Mathias Alexander discovered a method (a “means-whereby”) for expanding consciousness to take in inhibition as well as excitation (“not-doing” as well as “doing”) and thus obtain a better integration of the reflex and voluntary elements in a response pattern.
The goal of the Alexander Technique is to teach people to restore an optimal relationship between head and spine, and, when necessary, replace faulty concepts that cause the mis-coordination, what Alexander called “mistaken beliefs”, with more accurate, constructive concepts. The results of this process include greater flexibility and grace in movement and speech, clarity of thought, and for many, absence of physical pain and stress patterns. Again from Jones:
The Alexander Technique opens a window onto the little-known area between stimulus and response and gives you the self-knowledge you need in order to change the pattern of your response—or, if you choose, not to make it at all.
It is in this miniscule moment of time, the “area between stimulus and response,” that true honesty and creativity can emerge. As long as our responses are mitigated by habitual, unconsciously driven mis-coordination, both what we think and what we express fall short of what is possible.
The causes of mis-coordination include but are not limited to:
· imitation of family patterns
· imitation of teacher/mentor patterns
· mistaken ideas about anatomy and physiology
· learned patterns (e.g., from sports, music or other training) that are misapplied to another activity
· attempts to use muscular contraction for tasks that do not require muscular contraction
· mistaken concepts about thinking
· compensation for injury (possibly compensation that is no longer necessary)
· trauma
· emotional armoring
· learned misuses, what F.M. Alexander calls “cultivated habits”
· “electronically-raised” concepts of thinking/moving
John Dewey, a long-time student of F. M. Alexander and advocate for his work, championed it as the scientific method applied to human behavior:
After studying over a period of years Mr. Alexander’s method in actual operation, I would stake myself upon the fact that he has applied to our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and about our acts exactly the same method of experimentation and of production of new sensory observations, as tests and means of developing thought, that have been the source of all progress in the physical sciences….
The sequence of teaching and learning the Alexander Technique involves analysis of behavior in relationship to the goal followed by synthesis of a constructive conscious plan for change and accomplishment of the desired end.
In a recent workshop in Osaka, it occurred to me that using the Alexander Technique is an exercise in kindness to myself because it prompts me to choose to use my full resources in whatever I am doing. My most current one-line description of the Alexander Technique emerged:
The Alexander Technique is constructive, conscious kindness to ourselves, cooperating with our design and supporting our desires and our dreams.
“That is so 19th century!”
I recently had the opportunity to take an excellent class about acting. The teacher was very good.
And I left amazed and somewhat dismayed because the language of the teacher, and the language of my mostly younger fellow participants perpetuated a way of talking that has been demonstrated to be “false” for over a century. It is not true and not possible to “get out of your head” or to only “get in your body”.
We are whole. We are whole. We are whole.
It is well past time to cooperate with human design in a way that insists on nourishing our integrated self.
My teacher, Marjorie Barstow (1899-1994), first graduate of F.M. Alexander’s first teacher training course, sometimes said “It’s just too simple for you” when asked about the Alexander Technique.
And it is simple. We have a design for living that involves how we move through our days—and the quality of everything we do improves when we are cooperating with that design.
When my daughter was six, someone asked her what the Alexander Technique was and she said “oh, it just means you don’t have to scrunch up your neck all the time.” (The same daughter has more recently stuck her head in a colleagues' lab and said “you know, you don’t have to scrunch up your neck to weigh algae.")
That information about the head and spine is the key to renewing cooperation with how we are made to create our daily lives. Learning a process that gives you a way to consciously cooperate with that design is the heart of the teaching I do.
Some people study this process because how they are moving in their lives is causing pain or anxiety, some people come to it because they have reached a “plateau” in performing arts, sports, or communication, some come because a friend told them they " needed" it. Whatever the reason for learning the Alexander Technique, everyone who studies it leaves with more freedom of choice in how they approach tasks, and a life-long ability to optimize the quality of their actions in the world.
Following is a more detailed description of the Alexander Technique.
An Introduction to the Alexander Technique
The Alexander Technique is a psychophysical learning process using conscious thinking to restore coordination and/or prevent mis-coordination in human functioning. What F.M. Alexander (1869-1955) observed empirically, is that the relationship between head and spine in movement is a key factor in vertebrate coordination—a fact that has subsequently been verified scientifically. Whenever a vertebrate goes out of optimal coordination, the system compensates with excessive work in the relationship between head and spine. Frank Pierce Jones, a Tufts researcher who studied the Alexander Technique, says in his book Freedom to Change:
F. Mathias Alexander discovered a method (a “means-whereby”) for expanding consciousness to take in inhibition as well as excitation (“not-doing” as well as “doing”) and thus obtain a better integration of the reflex and voluntary elements in a response pattern.
The goal of the Alexander Technique is to teach people to restore an optimal relationship between head and spine, and, when necessary, replace faulty concepts that cause the mis-coordination, what Alexander called “mistaken beliefs”, with more accurate, constructive concepts. The results of this process include greater flexibility and grace in movement and speech, clarity of thought, and for many, absence of physical pain and stress patterns. Again from Jones:
The Alexander Technique opens a window onto the little-known area between stimulus and response and gives you the self-knowledge you need in order to change the pattern of your response—or, if you choose, not to make it at all.
It is in this miniscule moment of time, the “area between stimulus and response,” that true honesty and creativity can emerge. As long as our responses are mitigated by habitual, unconsciously driven mis-coordination, both what we think and what we express fall short of what is possible.
The causes of mis-coordination include but are not limited to:
· imitation of family patterns
· imitation of teacher/mentor patterns
· mistaken ideas about anatomy and physiology
· learned patterns (e.g., from sports, music or other training) that are misapplied to another activity
· attempts to use muscular contraction for tasks that do not require muscular contraction
· mistaken concepts about thinking
· compensation for injury (possibly compensation that is no longer necessary)
· trauma
· emotional armoring
· learned misuses, what F.M. Alexander calls “cultivated habits”
· “electronically-raised” concepts of thinking/moving
John Dewey, a long-time student of F. M. Alexander and advocate for his work, championed it as the scientific method applied to human behavior:
After studying over a period of years Mr. Alexander’s method in actual operation, I would stake myself upon the fact that he has applied to our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and about our acts exactly the same method of experimentation and of production of new sensory observations, as tests and means of developing thought, that have been the source of all progress in the physical sciences….
The sequence of teaching and learning the Alexander Technique involves analysis of behavior in relationship to the goal followed by synthesis of a constructive conscious plan for change and accomplishment of the desired end.
In a recent workshop in Osaka, it occurred to me that using the Alexander Technique is an exercise in kindness to myself because it prompts me to choose to use my full resources in whatever I am doing. My most current one-line description of the Alexander Technique emerged:
The Alexander Technique is constructive, conscious kindness to ourselves, cooperating with our design and supporting our desires and our dreams.