What is the AT for?

What is the Alexander Technique for?

The six members of the Interpersonal Special Interest Group recently met via Zoom to consider the above question. What follows is a summary of their views. What seemed to emerge was a striking consensus of opinion that the Technique is about much more than musculoskeletal integrity. The contributors (in order of appearance, below) were: Richard Casebow, Kathy Hick, Doris Prugel-Bennett, Penny Spawforth, Polly Waterfield and David Harrowes.

Richard Alexander Technique - a technique for what? My standard answer, based on the title of Alexander’s second book, is that it is for the development of constructive conscious control by an individual. This raises similar questions: what does that mean and what purpose does it serve? Self-experimentation is at the heart of Alexander’s story, a story of someone taking personal responsibility for his difficulties. He finds his way forward by becoming conscious of the habits that were creating the problems he had with his voice. His discovery of a means to inhibit non-constructive habits was his way forward and something extended to all his actions. I have spent more than half my life pursuing this and teaching it to others. If I go back far enough to my own beginnings with the Technique, it allowed me to function physically and mentally. If I didn’t stop, and forgot about Alexander’s technique, I would cease to function both physically from chronic pain and mentally from episodes of depression. Both are now distant parts of my past. The work that I have done using Alexander’s technique has been foundational in developing an understanding of the way I contributed to and created my difficulties. More importantly, through the power of inhibition I learned to stop trying to control my reactions using habits acquired in the first few weeks of life: and to replace them with a set supportive of exploration, curiosity and experimentation. From numerous readings of Alexander’s books, this is what I think he hoped people would take from them. I can’t say I enjoy reading his books; for many years I read them as detective fiction, to make them readable and to avoid getting exasperated and throwing them away. This way of reading has allowed me to have a dialogue with Alexander and find ways to test out in my own life what he is saying. We are all actors, in our own and other people’s stories. As such we are all capable of losing our shape to fit other people’s stories of ourselves, rather than finding our shape and fit in our own story. Conscious control, which is constructive, allows us to shapeshift, to find our fit, which is what freedom in thought and action allow, in unfolding stories within the great unfolding that is the universe. Kathy For me, the Alexander Technique is a means of opening myself up to choice. It equips me with a lens of choice, openness and possibility through which I can view the world, and a connection through which I can meet the world more wholly and deeply. It reminds me that I have choice in each and every moment, and fosters in me a mindset of choice. This choice initially presents itself through the principle of inhibition, as I pause and allow the possibility of a response different from my usual habitual one. I started this connection with choice on the physical level, beginning Alexander lessons nearly 30 years ago to help me address my chronic low-back pain. As I began to explore the possibility of choice on a physical level, the concept gradually migrated to other levels of my interaction with the world. For example, in my relationships with others if I chose to release a jaw tightened in anger during a conversation, the anger could move through me and open up a space for something new and different to arise. I might feel the initial habitual surge of anger and then, in my pause of inhibition, realise I wanted to respond with compassion, curiosity or patience rather than with anger. I consider this level of choice to be on the micro level of stimulus and response in the moment, which I experienced in my first years of practising the Technique. Over time, the practice of inhibition facilitating choice began to affect my responses to life at a more macro level, with a deeper, yet also broader, response. This led me to such insights as, not only did I have a choice within the moment of a conversation, but also in the direction of an entire relationship. My deeper patterns of conditioning and the habits in which they mired me became more apparent to me. I gained clarity on the distinction between ‘what I’ve always done’ and ‘what I really want right now’. It became easier to shift situations or let go of relationships that were no longer beneficial to me. What started as my last-ditch attempt to reduce my back pain has evolved into a lifelong journey of discovery and of embracing conscious choice: a journey infused with resonance, authenticity and intuition.

«continued from previous page and humanistic thought, where the idea is that humans refine/civilize themselves. Where he diverges from Enlightenment thought is when it comes to the body-mind split. Alexander rejected that dichotomy. He persevered in keeping the human being together as a whole organism which can develop on the cognitive, behavioural, emotional, physical and relational levels. In my opinion, AT offers an approach for creating the best conditions for an individual to (re-)discover connections to the possibility of individual congruence. Thus the AT is an approach for the physical and existential dimensions. I grew up in a farming village and working class household, where words were not the most important vehicle for communication. Instead, our senses were exercised for understanding and interacting with self and other/the world. In our household non-verbal communication was practised and interpreted by using the many senses a human being is equipped with, including smell, hearing, sensuality, movement and distance to others, facial expressions, gesticulation, etc. Manual skills and physical wellbeing were highly valued. It was understood that self-care, wellbeing and health were part of our responsibility, achieved through movement, eating good food and a relation to the natural world. I understood that I was a relational organism. From the first moment I engaged with the AT, I understood the AT offers a superb means for working with that “unspoken dimension” (Anderson, 2014). I was excited to take my homegrown knowledge further into a profession that allows for “symbiotic communication” between two people, where practitioner and client co-create an “intersubjective field” (Bosnak in Anderson, p 162), in which deep communication and understanding is taking place without talking. Therefore, in my opinion, the AT is a means for working with phenomena that are invisible but constantly active in every interaction between a person and the world. AT principles allow us to touch individuals on many levels, including the non-verbal, and through professional contact/ haptic communication. I see some of the social pathologies of contemporary civilisation as consequences of physical and emotional disconnection, psycho-physical deskilling (Carr, 2016), and unconscious self-harm, that is harming the very source that makes and sustains us. In my opinion the AT is a means to theoretically and practically address those issues sometimes directly, at other times indirectly, but always comprehensively – body and mind remain inseparable. It is for people who find their way to us.

Penny My answer to this comes through the lens of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and its concept of “universal human needs”. Needs could be defined as: “the energy in living organisms that compels them to seek fulfilment and to thrive.”1 What stops people meeting their deepest needs in the most fulfilling way? One reason, I believe, is that we develop patterns of behaviour we call “habits” to meet needs, assigning them to the subconscious for ease. Many of them are very useful, but many are not and somehow we “forget” that there can be better strategies to meet those same needs in the context of now, the whole self and the bigger picture. We become stuck in historic reactive patterns without room to respond in a fresh way to our actual, current situation. The AT can be seen as a means of unblocking these unconscious barriers to needs being met: to unblock flow. Alexander, through his astute observation and enquiring mind, has given us a path (not a destination!) towards liberation from subconscious patterns of thinking, moving, breathing and being that no longer fully serve us. Not only that, he has helped us do this when we were only, in the very dimmest of ways, aware that we wanted it. If we accept the AT path, it enables self-discoveries to be made and changes to emerge that we didn’t realise we needed! This in turn allows for a different sense of connection to the whole and more choice available to us in how we show up in the world, how we contribute our creative gifts and how we allow ourselves to receive from others. To finish with an example, I put this question to my mother (who trained as an AT teacher in the late ‘50s but never went on to teach) and she said, after silent reflection, “for me it helped me free mind and body.” She gave several examples. Her shoe size went from 6 to 7 as her feet un-tensed, her dresses hung much better, her breathing improved as her rib cage released, and as the fear that had caused the breathing problems diminished, her ability to walk into a room full of strangers improved and her self-confidence grew. Today, at 88 years old, it continues to contribute to her ability to be independent, go for walks and have a meaningful and connected life.

Polly To me the Alexander Technique is one approach to embodiment. Using the tools of inhibition and direction we can come closer to the wholeness of ourselves in relation to the world around us. Another way of putting it would be coming into the present moment. I see it as a technique for “coming home”, or as one of my teenage pupils said: “everything in one place”. In a society which is increasingly frenetic and where the “mind over matter” model still lingers in driven attempts at self-improvement, this path is radical in its simplicity and gentleness. Another teenager described her lessons as “learning to work with the body rather than against it”. I tell my pupils that even in a rapidly changing world there are things they can rely on: they will always operate in gravity, the breath is always coming and going, and they always exist in relation to what is around them, not in a bubble. We also all belong in the natural world: we breathe the same air that

«continued from previous page rustles the trees outside, the breath is always returning like the waves of the sea, our bodies are 70% water, and we are all connected into the heart of the earth through gravity, as is everything else in the room – nothing is floating around! So I see it as a technique for moving from separation to participation, for restoring the mind-body eco-system, for finding resources within. Once they have some experience, pupils can always choose to tune into their breathing, to notice that the ground is supporting them and that there is a bigger picture if they take a step back. So it is also a technique for choosing. As inhibition is practised, moments of choosing become easier and more frequent. Direction can emerge from those moments and can be developed into a way of taking charge of oneself in any activity. I like Frank Pierce-Jones’s “unified field” of perception as a framework. Working to help pupils stay with the depth of their embodied experience while coming off the table, I’ve realised what a delicate thing this is. It is all too easy to abandon the self and for many (myself included!) the distraction of relating and talking to another person is THE stimulus that brings disconnection. So it is also a technique for relating to self and other. Over the years I’ve learnt from my pupils many ways of seeing what the Technique is for. Here is [a comment suggestive of] another one: “It could be easier”.

David “The mass of [people] live lives of quiet desperation and go to their grave with the song still in them.” Most readers will know the first part of this quotation from Thoreau, without being familiar with the second. An inverted rendition of the same proposition is “no-one ever died saying I wish I had spent more time in the office.” Both quotations express unhappiness born of constraint. There are two linked themes we can explore here. The first is that much suffering is caused by the self-sabotage of ingrained habit. The second is the proposition that people leave the world with their own individual song unheard. At the turn of the 19th and 20th century, a core of influential thinkers including William James and John Dewey proposed that mind and body were integrated parts of the same unity, rather than separate but complementary structures, as asserted by Descartes. Alexander was exposed to this idea through his close friendship with Dewey and his use of the term “psycho-physical unity” showed that his Technique relied heavily on it. When pupils bring pain, discomfort or restricted movement to their Alexander Technique teacher, they are presenting symptoms both of physical difficulty and of matching mental constraint – though it will probably be precious little use the teacher telling them so, at least at the outset. The concept of psycho-physical unity implies that this is inescapable; the ingrained habit of physical behaviour is matched by an ingrained mental process and a lasting improvement in the one will necessarily be matched by a lasting change in the other. Equally, the pupil whose thinking, for whatever reason, is unchanged by their lessons is unlikely to see any permanent physical advantage. At the core of the Technique as a learned skill are the twin concepts of inhibition and direction. We stop what we are doing, the way we’re doing it, so as to create mental space to find a better way to do it. The process is extraordinarily powerful; as with throwing a stone into a pond, the ripples extend far beyond the initial impact. Yet one of the curiosities of the Technique is that its profound implications for personal growth are by and large left to pupils to discover for themselves. My fellow-contributors to this piece all bear witness to its life-enhancing capacity. It would be wonderful if this were more widely appreciated, so that our pupils could release their beautiful songs to the world.

Notes 1 Thanks to Myra Walden, NVC trainer in Mexico, for this definition

References Anderson, F. S. (2014). Bodies in Treatment: The Unspoken Dimension. London: Routledge Carr, N (2016). The Glass Cage: Who Needs Humans Anyway? New York: W. W. Norton & Company

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