THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE – WHAT IS IT?
by Franis Engel
The Alexander Technique teaches how intention and habits affect physical coordination and learning capacity. It takes its name from Frederick Matthias Alexander, (nicknamed F. M.) 1869 – 1955, who originated it during 1891-1901.
WHAT IS IT FOR?
The Alexander Technique educates the sense of kinesthesia or proprioception. This sense is used to internally calibrate bodily location, and to judge the effort necessary for moving. Alexander Technique teachers believe that humans have a built-in proprioceptive blind spot. People design habitual responses of movement and learning when faced with repetitive or important circumstances. Adapting is mostly a learning advantage, because new habits can be added onto previously trained skills. The serious drawback to adapting is that most habitual remedies are purposefully designed to disappear and run automatically in the background. Even if those habits were intended to be temporary compensations, usually no provision was made for stopping them. Over time, the sensitivity used to judge effort becomes flooded from accommodating too many opposing purposes. People forget which movement habits they have taught themselves to do, often only continuing to add more. These frustrating mysteries encourage resignation, along with loss of balance, stiffness, old injuries, social ostracizing or even a verdict of a lack of talent. According to Alexander teachers, giving up troublesome activities are not required if a learner is willing to change their old ways of doing them. By preventing these sorts of small cumulative stresses, many painful health concerns related to limited movement ability can be mitigated, improved or completely outgrown.
WHAT ARE IT'S BENEFITS AND USES?
The Alexander Technique has broad applications. It is required curriculum in the performance schools of music, acting, circus, dance, and some Olympic level sports training. It's remedially used for gaining full recovery of balance and ease of motion, for stuttering, voice loss and speech training, to unlearn and avoid repetitive stress, and to cope with dwindling mobility as in for people who have Parkinson’s disease. Because self-image is linked to postural carriage, it also has an indirect positive influence on personal confidence and social standing, depression, phobias, and anxieties. It is regarded by the UK National Health Service to offer alternative complementary management for back problems. Students report freer movements, increased objectivity and descriptive ability, improved awareness, balance & and gaining an experimental attitude for choosing new responses. Commonly, adults gain height
The immediate effect of Alexander lessons can feel very unusual. Lightness, fluidity, and many unusual metaphors illustrating effortlessness are commonly reported. Gradually, perceptual ability expands to simultaneously encompass many complex factors necessary to sustain the first fleeting freedoms experienced during lessons. Beyond the time it takes to learn, Alexander Technique can be practiced while doing any other activity, fitting into busy schedules.
SOME ORIGINAL PRINCIPLES
Many of the principles of the technique are unique concepts. You’ve already read how kinesthetic sensitivity tends to disappear from continuous repetition. Alexander’s term for this concept was Debauchery of the Senses, but behaviorists now call that Sensory Adaptation. A required ingredient to get results from experimentation is a readiness to welcome what is unfamiliar. Since what is really new feels odd, this is how newly emerging, easier possibilities can be noticed instead of being prematurely eliminated or missed entirely.
The most original principle Alexander discovered is termed "Primary Control." Its long-term importance in structural function is just now being scientifically studied in movement gait research laboratories. This is this key answer that emerges when habitual limitations are removed.
The principle of Primary Control teaches that the neck and head relationship leads quality of motion and response – and this determines the success of results for good or ill. Learning from faded modeling, guiding and example, students "free their neck, so their head can move very slightly forward and up" towards expanding their stature. Students learn to continue following this subtle initiation of motion with the rest of their body as they go into action.
Another unique, foundation concept is a specialized use of the word "Inhibition." This term means to recognize and prevent habitual limitations, used for choosing, allowing or discovering a new way. Exactly how to do this positive inhibiting varies with each Alexander teacher's experience. Building a more constructive "means whereby," suggesting, sidestepping, stalling, tricking, slowing or boring the old habitual routine - anything is fair game if it can strategically get the old habit to disengage and relinquish control.
When used with these principles, coordinating any additional intentions of thinking or acting will tend towards improvement.
PRINCIPLES USED TOGETHER
These principles can be recombined and expressed in a myriad of ways. Additional principles and terms exist that are not mentioned here.
The "activity" teaching model begins with an experimental task. The student briefly identifies their wishes and previous problems. The teacher asks strategic questions detouring how a student usually prepares to respond. The next step might be to suspend or actively prevent previously known urges to answer the goal, using “Inhibitory” techniques. A way that integrates the Alexander principle of guiding “Primary Control,” is taken for a spin. Results are noted and described. In evaluating, the presence of relative ease is the signal determining success. In keeping with Sensory Adaptation, customary kinesthetic orientation that previously "felt right" is compared to results; differences reveal unnecessary assumptions. A similar process is practiced again to integrate the desirable discoveries.
No matter how often the learning process is used, an excitement for tapping the unexpected continues because the student learns to recognize gradual, unlimited progress. Ideally, motivation tends to increase for tolerating and even enjoying the unfamiliar. A characteristic of elusive unpredictability is what makes Alexander Technique beyond description for many.
LEARNING TIME DRAWBACKS
For personal practice of the Alexander Technique, teachers recommend twenty to forty private lessons or classes. The effect of private lessons with a teacher should be immediate. Most students are slow to reliably sustain the effects of lessons on their own, because it's difficult to influence what cannot yet be perceived. Speed of learning seems to depend on motivation to shed outdated habits, frequency of lessons and availability of support from other students.
In difficult cases, habits seem to possess defensive self-preservation - as if a person’s old habit fears its uselessness. Alexander’s work addresses these tricky, sophisticated & complex issues of the substitution strategy.
Once freed to change, advanced students find that motives for why they choose their desired criteria have become more flexible. Of course, sampling a number of teachers is advisable, although teachers usually do not determine any criteria beyond the most physical, reasonable and functional.
HOW ALEXANDER IS TAUGHT
A pupil’s motion is often guided by the teacher with specialized hands-on modeling, usually with a very light touch, during a repeated action of the student’s or the teacher’s choice. The teacher gives subtle indications of “Direction,” timing and coaching that the student follows. Depending on the causes of limitation, structural posture may or may not improve, but freedom of movement, and most often economy of motion always will improve during a lesson.
For part of the lesson, some teachers have learners ie on a table, so the student can experience the principles in action without having to pay attention to maintaining balance. “Working on oneself” while lying semi-supine with knees up is taught as a way of taking a break during the student's workday. In groups, students often watch each other, in turn, taking shorter lessons. Group explorations of the principles are also sometimes taught.
Unlike many similar self-improvement regimens, the Alexander Technique is not a series of exercises. Teachers do not lecture. Instead, students learn specific inter-related governing characteristics from direct experience, the example of others, questioning and personal experimentation.
To take improvements away from lesson time, dedication and attentive experimentation is required on the part of the learner.
HISTORY
Originator F. M. Alexander was a Shakespearean orator who developed problems losing his voice onstage. Careful self-observation revealed that he needlessly stiffened his whole body in order to recite or speak. By 1900, he had completely solved his loss of voice by putting his original ideas and observations into practice on himself and was ready to teach others. Alexander trained teachers of his Technique in London from 1931 to 1955, up until his death.
TEACHING TODAY
Now, the Alexander Technique has the lifetime dedication of only a few thousand practicing teachers worldwide. Alexander teachers have attended over three years of full-time training to qualify to join professional organizations, which require many efresher workshops. Only a few who were trained by the founder are still living. Most Alexander teachers in the field are of the professional opinion that no informative substitution exists for classes or lessons; words do not suffice to describe the Alexander Technique, it must be experienced.
The Alexander Technique and Skiing
The Alexander Technique is a century-old educational process in which the student learns a set of skills that he or she can apply in all facets of life. One of the assumptions underlying this educational process is that most people carry more muscle tension than they need in order to carry out activities. The first skill that students learn, then, is how to lessen these areas of undue muscle tension. Second, they learn that, without the interference of the tension, they can cultivate a more natural alignment of their head, neck and spine that has associated with it qualities of balance, strength and coordination. Overall, knowledge of these skills allows students to move and carry out activities with greater ease and less effort.
In order to describe the ways in which the Alexander Technique can benefit athletes, let me start by telling my own story. I’ve been a life-long athlete. As a child in grade school, I played soccer and baseball. Outside of school, I rode horses. As I got older, I also did a lot of skiing, sailing, hiking and bicycling. During my high school summers, I participated in several bicycle tours with American Youth Hostels (during one of these, we rode from New York City to Seattle – coast to coast).
During high school and college, my favorite sport was rowing. At college, I rowed on the junior varsity lightweight crew. Because we won the Eastern Championships one year, I received a varsity letter (one of my most prized possessions!). I took a year off from college and lived in Crested Butte, Colorado; that winter I skied every day that I wasn’t working. More recently, after a long period away from it, I’ve gotten deeply involved in horseback riding again, (specifically in the discipline of dressage), and I’ve continued to ski every winter
As you can tell, I’ve always adored sports. And yet, for a long time, I felt that there was something missing in my relationship to them – something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. One aspect of this was that I was never quite as successful at them as I wanted to be. It was only when I started taking Alexander lessons that I finally was able to figure out what that "missing piece" was.
What I learned through the Alexander Technique was that, in many cases, I was putting more effort into a given sport than I really needed to, with the result that my body had a lot of extra muscle tension – tension that I wasn’t even aware of! A central reason for this was that many of my coaches and instructors would say, "If at first you don’t succeed, try it again – only this time put more elbow grease into it," or some variation on that theme. On the other hand, the Alexander Technique taught me that, if at first I don’t succeed, the best thing to do is to try a different approach. To be more specific, this means doing less – subtracting effort – and then trying the activity again.
I was so impressed with this learning that I decided to train to become a teacher – a three- year undertaking. I’ve now been teaching for almost nine years. The results of this process are tangible: at the age of 41, I’m skiing and riding better than I ever have before. And best of all, I no longer have the feeling that something is missing. Or more accurately, if that feeling appears, I see it as an indication that I may be starting to overdo. Then I can catch the tendency and address it. As a result, I have much more frequent experiences of "the zone" – that amazing experience of ease, control and well-being when you don’t feel as if you have to make the sport happen because it almost seems to be happening on its own, and you’re just going along for an intensely pleasurable ride. (Who knows, maybe if I had had the knowledge that I do now, I would have made the varsity lightweight crew in college!)
The implication of this article thus far is that the Alexander Technique is simply about learning how to lessen undue muscle tension. While that is a central theme of the technique, there is more to it than that. It’s also about cultivating an alignment of one’s head, neck and spine that has characteristics of ease, control and coordination. As you might imagine, it’s this alignment (known as the primary control) that is central to the experience of the zone.
Let me provide an example. Recently, I was skiing the moguls at Mt. Sunapee ski area in New Hampshire. Moguls are natural bumps that are created in the snow by skiers’ turns. They make skiing both more challenging and more interesting because they mean that you can’t make your turns wherever you want to; they "predetermine" your turns.
Anyway, although the moguls I was skiing on that day were very close together, I found that I could negotiate the turns that were necessary using my knees, while my upper body stayed still. What helped in making this distinction were Alexander Technique thoughts about minimizing tension in the areas of my head, neck and spine so that I could allow my head to remain poised and so that I could allow my whole spine (or more accurately the muscles associated with it) to slightly lengthen upwards. This may seem somewhat abstract if you haven’t had an experience of your head, neck and spine when they are in their optimum relationship. Nonetheless, the result was that I found my balance improving, the quick turns became easier and I had more control over them. Best of all, I had a day-long experience of the zone!
Now I don’t mean to imply that there was some miracle at work during that experience because what happened was the result of a lot of practice in both disciplines. Above all, it takes practice to be able to think about more than one thing at a time (as is necessary when you apply the Alexander Technique to any activity). Still, the benefits of combining the two disciplines are irrefutable – and available anytime.
I’d like to provide a second example of the benefits of the Alexander Technique for sports. It involves a student that I’ve worked with for a period of time; I’ve given her both Alexander Technique lessons and ski lessons. She’s been skiing for twelve years. Until she started taking Alexander lessons, her experience of skiing had not been altogether positive: in her words, "for years, I’ve skied with fear and stiffness". In particular, she had fear about the steepness of the ski slope as well as fear of falling, and, as you might imagine, these fears interfered with her enjoyment of the skiing.
During her ski lessons, we did two things. First, we worked on her skiing skills: more specifically, I told her that I thought the most important skill for any skier to have is good "brakes". (It is interesting to note here that there is a parallel between the Alexander Technique and good skiing. The Alexander Technique teaches us to pause in the midst of any activity in order to assess our level of muscle tension and lessen it. These moments of pause, which with practice become almost instantaneous and can be carried out without interrupting the activity, nonetheless act as natural "brakes" in relation to the activity. That is, they help our approach to the activity to become more measured and balanced.)
In any case, I showed this student how she could bend her knees during her turns in order to slow down or stop. In my opinion all other skiing skills are built on this one. The second thing I did with her was Alexander Technique "hands-on" during the ski lessons. This had a number of effects. First, she became more aware of the fact that a big part of fear is the tension that it causes in our body (she had only been vaguely aware of this previously). At the same time, the hands-on gave her an experience of what skiing can be like when there is less tension in her body. Of course, the other thing that allowed her to be less tense – and less fearful -- was the fact that she had begun to develop reliable brakes. Once she knew for sure that she could stop whenever she wanted to, she began to enjoy herself more. Finally, the hands-on gave her a new experience in her upper body, involving a quality of upward lengthening and lightness in her spine. Previously, the tension in her body had had the effect of pulling her down, giving her an overall feeling of heaviness that was associated with her fear of falling. Gradually, this tension and apprehension began to melt away.
Now again, I don’t mean to imply that any miracles happened with this student. The results came only after she had had a course of Alexander Technique lessons away from the ski slope, and thus had had a chance to practice the skills associated with it. In addition, as I mentioned, she had a lot of experience skiing under her belt when I met her (even though not all of it was positive). Having said that, it was clearly the combination of the two sets of skills that allowed her to experience a "great breakthrough" (her words) in her skiing, and in her sense of well-being associated with it.
