Pause To Curiosity

The lived experience is the conscious, individual’s perception of learning and practicing the Alexander Technique - with as little Alexander jargon, vagueness, or pedagogical explanation as possible.

To capture this in words is a true challenge. One worth pursuing because it brings clarity to the person who attempts it on how they are thinking in activity; and it simultaneously helps move the conversation forwards for us all - towards a greater shared understanding of the many elements of experience common between us.

It requires honesty, self-confidence to be vulnerable, effort to see things as they are rather than as one wants them to be, belief that continued growth is possible, and perhaps most of all, clear, articulate thinking.

Below is a short, remarkable piece by a student of mine who gave it a go.

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Pause To Curiosity

By: Joshua Cronkhite

It’s funny how I always assume I’m right and that if things aren’t working, it's just because I haven’t doubled-down hard enough.

I’m unloading the dishwasher and my back is suddenly quite tight. Is it me or some ghost? “Him” whom I attach all my problems to?  It certainly isn’t me.

I know how to use my body.  Do I? Of course I do, ridiculous question. The tightness is turning to pain now. I can feel my emotions turning to rage, too.

I am being defeated by some cups and cutlery.

The way out starts with curiosity. So, I pause and get interested.

Pause; smile. I don’t judge or shame my behaviour. Getting the emotions re-involved at this point cuts off that little isthmus of space I’m attempting to allow between me and my behaviours, actions, or habits.

I start to get a more accurate picture of myself;  blinders-on, bulldozing my way through. I’m not really breathing either, apparently. Okay, fine this one might be me.  

I allow this pause to develop, the curiosity grows. What is my back doing? It feels scrunched, pushed down like a discarded coke can. My head and neck are like this, too. Strange. An urge to bulldoze again. Pause; kind curiosity, proceed. 

I feel like a scientist. I begin to wonder if this can change, I obviously got here so it stands to reason I can reverse out. Outwardly this unique type of inaction and passivity may be mistaken for indifference --it is not. I am trying to cultivate an environment where these changes, this step out of the habitual, can occur. This is analogous to how inorganic molecules and forces allow the conditions for life to exist and evolve. 

At this point I begin to think very precisely. I find that when I’ve cultivated this state of peaceful detachment my mind and body become like a river; with the right thoughts I am able to, like water, find the path of least resistance. I can flow, less and less staccato. Let me keep in this attitude of peaceful detachment with my thoughts, try not to bull-doze with certainty and let them affect me. Now, with the groundwork laid, the first thought enters: 

My neck is freeing. Maintaining an open focus on my body and surroundings, (without stress over the efficacy of that last thought), I allow the next thought to enter; the isthmus grows.

Allowing my head to go forward and up. I can feel something shifting, the urge to preemptively bulldoze and mechanically speed this along is strong. I cave a little to the temptation. Mistake, it doesn’t work. Run the process again, it’s a game --stay playful, stay curious. I pause, breathe, and add one more thought. Allowing my back to lengthen and widen. 

There, a shift --it happens to me. What ‘it’ is I’m unsure, it feels as though my upper body sprouts upwards delicately like the stem of a rose on time-lapse. Poised. Alert. 

I get a little too excited at this point and try and bulldoze my way to more of this feeling, my state regresses. So again I pause to curiosity, allowing the isthmus to grow, to open awareness to thinking. 

This is the game I run whenever I can.

Blog 3.0

Clarity

Every few years my blog gets a bit clearer.

It takes a fresh turn towards my goal to help clarify aspects of the Alexander Technique for students, teachers, myself, and the broader community.

This next chapter is going to focus on two things:

1. Exploration of the lived experience - the conscious, individuals perception of learning and practicing the Alexander Technique - with as little Alexander jargon, vagueness, or pedagogical explanation as possible.

2. Exploration and clarification of what we know today of the science underlying the Alexander Technique.

It’s my hope that by taking both a phenomenological, and a more quantitative based approach, that greater clarity will surface on what this is all about. That we can move towards even more modern, honest, and forward moving conversation about all that arises when pursuing this unique, challenging, and empowering skill. Ultimately, that we can contribute to a world with more equal access and self-evident understanding of the experience and underlying physiology of the Alexander Technique and it’s related ideas.

- Mark, Aug 2019

The Divided Brain & The Making of The Western World

Sometimes when your Alexander practice is really ‘on’, your thoughts and movements seem to connect and flow more effortlessly from whatever intentions you have (be it in making music, acting, in conversation with another, or just walking down the street).

-Jo Hilton

The experience is one of self awareness in action in which you see yourself move without the normal amount of effort (like watching yourself automatically, unconsciously, and effortlessly catch a wine glass that was knocked off a counter), yet you still have some choice in the matter - you can choose not to do certain actions, and instead to allow others to happen. You're part of the process as it unfolds.

Below is a fascinating short talk that touches on aspect of this experience.

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Iain McGilchrist: The Divided Brain & The Making of The Western World

Horns Growing On Young People's Skulls?

Last week several students and colleagues sent me a link to this Washington Post article. It describes a 2018 publication that notes approx 40% of youth between the ages of 18-30 years old (within the study sample) developed a horn like projection on the back of their skulls just above the neck.

The study suggests that extra bone growth on the back of the skull happened to deal with an increased downwards pull from muscles that attach to the head; those associated with our postural support system. The study goes on to suggest that this excessive muscular pull by the muscles attached to the back of the head may be due to poor posture (particularly when using the phone). So the media say, phone use in young people equals horn growing on their skulls. So what’s the deal?

It’s long been known that bone adapts to the way it is used. For instance, weight bearing exercise positively supports bone growth which can help reduce the risk of fractures as we age. In regards to the bone on the skull, I remember my neuro-anatomy lab instructor showing me a skull with a large ‘horn’ on the back of a skull and explaining how this skull came from a particularly powerful and large person - as seen by the elarged protuberance/ ‘horn’ due to the extra muscular pull on the back of his head.

Still, this study makes a big jump and suggests that the ‘horn’ in it’s sample population is due to poor posture (and phone use in particular). To be clear, this suggestion is based on only a couple of studies, and both have several significant methodological limitations to them. So despite what the media suggests, I wouldn’t set up your surgical appointment to have your horn removed quite yet.

Still, regardless of the study limitations and media sensationalizing this, I found the research to be a creative and socially interesting way of framing a study - one with the possibility to generate conversation about the connection between the way we use ourselves, our postures, and the possible effects this has on us. Hopefully it gets people thinking in a constructive way, perhaps even taking action to better their health and lives.

Below are a few Alexander Technique related concepts that came up in conversation with my students about the article.

The head, neck, and torso are connected

In the Alexander Technique students learn to develop an awareness of their individual patterns of habitual musculo-skeletal use; paying particular attention to release of unwanted head, neck, and spinal muscle tension (BMJ, 2009). An excess pull of the muscles on the back of the head occurs in many of our habitual movements (not just using the phone poorly) and is connected to how we use ourselves as a whole (not least the head and neck). As Alexander students learn to prevent the excess pulling down while as they do their activities (including using their phones), a broad range of positive changes seem to show up - such as reorganized muscle tonus throughout the entire body, increased ease in movement and poise, and improved posture to name a few.

Thus, when looking for a change in how your head or neck are organized look for the connections between all three - the head, neck, and torso are connected.

Use connects to function, connects to shape

A key principle of the Alexander Technique is that ‘how you use yourself affects how you function’. What students begin to notice as they apply the Alexander Technique to their lives is that their function has an effect on the shape of their physical body and mental states.

This small study attempts to make a connection between using the phone in a slumped manner and an excess pull of the muscles in the back of the head - in it’s own creative way it tries to highlight the idea that how we use ourselves affects our overall shape. The key takeaway from an Alexander perceptive is that how you move and posture yourself everyday may be one factor that shapes your body, which is constantly adapting to how you use it - making itself more open and dynamic, or more rigid, collapsed, or inflexible.

Like gravity, this ongoing process of our organism adapting to how we use it is a constant force- from the moment we are born until our last breath, we continue to adapt and change from how we use ourselves as we engage in the world around us. One hour of exercise (although extremely important) simply can’t compete with 23 hours a day of using yourself in a horrible, or graceful and dynamic way.

Pulling down and feeling down are connected

Another key idea here is that these youth (at least in the sample) are literally pulling themselves down more that other generations. Because the Alexander Technique is a psycho-physical practice it suggests that physical and mental aspects are directly connected in every action we make - and this includes tensions and states of embodiment. That a physical ‘pulling down’ it’s mental counterpart of ‘being down’ takes the findings beyond the physical implications, suggesting that a significant portion of this generation may actually (physically and thus mentally) be more ‘down’ than previous generations. That poor posture can have broad negative implications on musculoskeletal health with subsequent broad effects on mental health, and thus society at large, is a fascinating and scary idea traced back for generations (not to mentioned echoed by F.M. Alexander himself in the early 1900s). Still, these links aren’t perfectly linear - humans are incredibly resilient and adaptable - so much needs to be learned here to really help people live better lives. Regardless, viewing physical and mental aspects as a unified expression of your own self in action is a healthy way to enhance your self-awareness and to live a more embodied life.

How we connect to the world around us

At this point many people with a mistaken idea of what good posture is imagine that everyone should then be ‘fixing’ or ‘holding’ themselves upright, stiffly walking around. But to students of the Alexander Technique and other educational and movement practices along similar lines, it’s obvious that wouldn’t work. That it would only be the opposite side of the coin of pulling downwards; that of ‘bracing’ upwards. If the ‘perfect posture’ strategy worked then everyone would already have perfect posture. But it’s doesn’t work.

Instead, the idea would be that people can learn to not ‘pull themselves down’ (or pull themselves down less), so that the inherent postural supports that evolved to easily and gracefully support us upright can be there for us. To learn how to let ourselves ‘go UP’, to allow ourselves to move and act in our lives with more ease, upwards direction (less pulling down), and the subsequent physical-mental benefits associated with this quality of engaging in the world in a fuller, more open expression of ourselves.

Increased daily awareness can become an integrated part of the daily life. A re-education of how we use ourselves in activity can become an on-going process towards self-mastery that improves how we function in everyday life.  With its focus on application in activity, the Alexander Technique provides a unique paradigm with specific tools to help joint efforts to cultivate this growing awareness and ability.

Ultimately, self-responsibility lies with each of us. People will continue to use hand-held devices, and one approach is learn how to use our phones, tablets, and devices in a way that simultaneously improves our posture and enhances our ability to modify and adapt ourselves to meet developing technology and a rapidly changing world in a healthier way.

A Student's Exploration of Backpain

Back-pain is a real and frustrating challenge for many people.

For most, back pain is not a clear-cut mechanical problem that can be fixed with surgery. Instead, it’s multi-faceted, largely misunderstood, and approached in harmful ways ways that lead to a range of compounding issues that include less movement, more fear and confusion, greater pain sensitivity, less self-confidence and self-efficacy, and more depression and/or anxiety.

The good news is that more people are starting to recognize and share this reality with others as they shift towards new strategies and more movement. Some of these self-motivated people find themselves in an Alexander Technique lesson ready for change.

Interestingly, the Alexander Technique doesn’t treat back-pain (or anything else) directly. Instead, it’s an education and practice in awareness, posture, and movement applied directly to the activities and movements of your life. All benefits are a byproduct of this process.

It teaches how movement, posture, self-perception, and thinking all interact in real time to produce how we use ourselves in the activities our lives. You become a student of yourself in activity - and learn to use your awareness and intention to positively shape movement, postural tone, musculoskeletal use/ posture, reactions to internal and external stimuli, and more - such that you can reduce or rebalance excess tension and better self-organize yourself into more dynamically balanced and easeful movement as you go about your life.

In doing this, you learn to understand what you’re doing that may be contributing to your own back pain. You then learn to stop doing or ‘undo’ these things that may be limiting you, and to encourage natural responses that underlie health posture, ease, and freedom of movement instead. It’s through this practical, applied self-education that you decode, better self-manage, and overcome your back-pain.

This process is very different than receiving a treatment or performing a prescribed set of movements (even if helpful), but still not really knowing how or why things changed. Instead, it’s an education and practice that requires clear self-discovery, self-responsibility, and self-empowerment - understanding what you’re doing with yourself that may be contributing to or causing the issue, then changing this for the better, with the result of moving better, feeling better, and gaining greater self-knowledge along the way.

In the fascinating blog post below you can read from a student of mine who took a analytical look to into their own experience and approach to back-pain. I wrote some responses (in quotes) to further learning and practice. Much thanks to my student who was wonderfully generous to share this to help others.

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I Have A Complex Relationship With My Back

Author: C. Camman
In quote responses - Mark

I hurt my back last week.

This is not news. I’ve been hurting my back since 2013.

About six months after I finished grad school, toward the end of my work-day, I noticed that my lower back was feeling sore. I hadn’t done anything in particular to it and I assumed that when I got home I’d put some heat on it, rest, and feel better the next day, the way I always had before. Except that it didn’t feel better the next day. If anything it felt worse.

It was a couple of months of constant pain and stiffness before I accepted that resting and heat and gentle stretching on my own was not going to fix the problem. I sought out a massage therapist (made it worse at the time) and then a chiropractor (made it better) and finally a physiotherapist who assessed my whole body and how it moved and gently broke it to me that nothing was working the way it was meant to. All the parts that should be strong and hold me up were weak and shaky. All the parts that should be supple and flexible had become rigid and stiff to compensate. I’d spent my entire life up to that point working my body into a pattern of habits that was unsustainable, culminating in two-and-a-half years of grad school where I poured every waking hour into my studies and research, often sitting in the same chair without moving for hours at a time, working ten- to twelve-hour days and six or seven-day weeks, with the occasional exhausted flop of curling up in bed for a couple weeks in between major deadlines.

Oops.

So last week, when I started to feel a nagging stiffness and ache in my lower back as I tried to move around the house and get my day going, I thought I knew exactly what to do. I popped my ibuprofen, grabbed both a heat pad and an ice pack to see which worked best, tried to improve my posture throughout the day, and got in to see my RMT and chiro as soon as possible. I’ve been coping with this for over six years now (making incremental strides toward fewer and less severe flare-ups as I go) so I’ve been getting to be quite the expert in the way my body is now. What I’m not an expert in is the way I’d like my body to be.

Every time I hurt my back like this, I worry that this time it’ll be permanent. That the pain won’t gradually fade away and function return. And every time I get injured, it’s a little bit different. The things that worked the time before don’t work the same. At one point, a couple of quick adjustments from the chiropractor would bring immense relief. All I needed was to get a seized-up joint to release. This time it seemed to be an inflamed disc, something that massage and chiro can’t really touch, except to try to get the rest of my body to calm down while the disc sorts itself out.

After a couple of days of waking up in pain and struggling to stand first thing in the morning (the chiro tells me that the disc fills with fluid overnight, making it most painful in the morning and better throughout the day as I get blood flow through the area), I make a decision. I decide to accept this moment as a gift. The universe is once again offering me both opportunity and motivation to make a significant change in my life, and I’m going to take it.

I’ve been playing with the idea of evaluating my progress to recovery since the first twinge of pain. It’s impossible to avoid. I’m in a novel situation (new iteration of back pain) and I need to adapt. Therefore, I must evaluate. While I go about my day, I take stock of my physical experience, identifying indicators, running experiments, and assessing my progress toward restored well-being. The indicators are easy: how much pain do I feel, what type, and in association with which attempts to function? Walking around is fine and sitting isn’t too bad (until I try to stand up again), but reaching forward, bending down, and getting up and down are where it really hurts. After each of the interventions I try (heat, ice, lying flat on a hard surface, stretches, etc.), I go through a repertoire of movements and classify each experience under ‘worse’, ‘better’, or ‘no change’.

(In persistent pain/ longterm/ chronic pain issues (back pain being one of these) it’s common for the location, intensity, triggers, and feeling of the pain to change and move around throughout the body. This can be really scary and frustrating. This also leads to a negative process in which we narrow our attention onto the pain which causes our awareness/ nervous systems’ sensitivity to get turned way up in a protective fashion. Each time we ‘chase the sensation’ we actually change the internal neural connections that make up our perception of our pain and movement - in this case in a way that creates a negative cycle of more protection through less movement, which leads to higher sensitivity and more narrowed focus, which leads to more protection and less movement etc…)

What I learn from this is that I can’t tell what’s really helping and what’s not. It keeps changing. One day ice is better than heat. The next day heat is better and ice is terrible. About midweek, I go grocery shopping (a few blocks of walking away) and by the time I come back, the pain is almost completely gone (though it reappears by the evening after I’ve been sitting for too long again). I’d been out on a walk the day before without so much relief and, when I wake up the next day in the same amount of pain as before, the walk I take that day doesn’t help nearly as much. Was it something about slowly pushing the grocery cart around while I picked up arugula and milk with Sarah McLachlan playing softly in the background that was the real solution? Who knows. There were too many variables to pin it down. My body is a complex system with pain as an emergent property.

For many of us, part of the issue lies in an artificial (cartesian) division in which we see ourselves made up of our brain - apart from our body: We imagine we live in our head, and our body (the darn thing!) is separate from us and not cooperating. Instead, just as the brain is constantly sending information to the body, the body is constantly sending information to the brain. Even more so, in real life activity and movement the whole system acts as one integrated process (head to toe/ mind/ body/ emotion/ spirit/balance). It works like this whether we’re consciously aware of these connections or not. ‘Nature doesn’t work in parts’, and problems in how we use and experience ourselves can start to emerge when we isolate into parts.

Instead, what happens when we start to replace the word body with the word ‘self’? (i.e Self = how the brain/body/mind/emotions/nervous system interact to produce our actions, movements, tension, and feelings). The practice is then to develop and refine our ability to observe and shape shape how these aspects of us work as one unified process in action (Note: we learn to first understand and organize these aspects of ourselves via how we use our head-neck-and back relationship in relation to gravity/balance and stimuli). This gives us a way to understand and cultivate the conditions for new movement, actions, and sensations to arise, all as emergent properties of a change in the way we use or embody our whole self - head to toe, mind/body - in action.

At this point, I’ve tried the obvious things. I’ve consulted the experts. Now it’s time to change the way I’m thinking about what’s happening.

That’s great! Alexander himself came to the same conclusion when he first started developing the technique to overcome his own issue. See: Chapter 1, The Use of the Self

Since the first time I found myself wincing through a familiar movement, my strategy has been the same: identify the source of problem, intervene, return the system to previous state of comfort and function.

This strategy is really common. The issue is we ignore ourselves until some pain nags at us, which then shifts our attention back into ourselves, to the painful part of our body… we then try to shift around to move the pain away…then the pain/tension temporarily shifts so we move our attention back out of our bodies and again ignore ourselves until the pain nags us again…and the cycle continues. An alternative strategy is to use pain signal as a reminder to include more of ourselves (our postural supports in relation to balance/gravity) in our activity. Through this practice we become more ‘embodied’ in action and more skilled in how we balance and use ourselves in action.

Then, after the desired equilibrium has been restored, identify root causes of problem and implement preventative procedures (honestly, get a gym membership already, Carolyn). I’ve been pursuing that strategy for six years. I’ve had some modest successes in terms of reducing the overall number of days and hours per year I spend in debilitating physical agony (now there’s a metric), so I could chalk that up as a sign of success with room for improvement and continue to pursue the original strategy, placing renewed emphasis on the prevention component, which, despite six years of intention, I’ve barely moved the needle on. Or I could try something different, since I’m getting bored with fruitlessly nagging myself toward self-improvement while living under the threat of inevitable future pain.

There are several problems with trying to restore the system of my body to its previous state. For one, it’s impossible. If I accept my body as a complex, fluid system, then I’m not driving back down a road to correct a missed turn, I’m steering through rapids on a kayak. I can’t go back. Also, even if I could, my previous state was a precursor to my current state, with all its flaws already present if not actively raging. Better to keep moving forward. In this case, the entire strategy of intervene-stabilize-prevent is suspect. Not to mention ineffective, since I’ve demonstrated time and again that when I do return to “normal” (a new normal, at least), I’m terrible at the prevention side of things, shifting the pattern that put me here in the first place. And, no wonder, because at that point I’ve killed off the feedback loop (pain) that was giving me insight into the progress I was making, leaving nothing in its place to inform the next stage, and my only option then is to follow prescriptive advice about what I ought to be doing with my body and hope it takes. (It hasn’t. Still no gym membership.)

So instead of investing the bulk of my effort into restoring myself to a pain-free state, I have accepted pain as my indicator, not my outcome. My goal is not to be pain-free, my goal is to change my physical habits.

Truly amazing insight…Yes! Now expand that goal beyond changing physical habits to changing psychophysical habits (changing and refining the way you embody yourself in the movements and activities of your life - i.e how you develop and refine your ability to include more of yourself (your postural supports in relation to balance/gravity) into more of our activities in daily life. The end result being your bring more ease and poise to everything you do which changes how you function, your physical habits, and a whole lot more along the way.

Aside from a minimum of pain management tactics to keep myself functional enough to get by, I stopped experimenting with ways to make my back stop hurting and began experimenting with ways to introduce sustainable changes of habit in my daily life, trying to live the way I would want to be as if I were already pain-free. (The indicators for this are harder to come by and still emerging.)

One of the most common indicators, ‘does this hurt?” and ‘where exactly does it hurt’ easily narrows our attention (like seeing a tiger in the room we block out everything else and narrow down on the tiger!). This narrowed attention is very useful for acute pain such as when you cut yourself, but poorly adaptive for long term persistent pain such as back-pain.

Some new indicators could include:

Did I have any awareness of myself before the pain showed up, or was I unaware of myself until the pain brought me back in touch with my body/self?

What am I doing with my neck-head-back relationship right now? Especially in relation to my base of support). Compressed? Collapsed? Balanced and opening upwards?

Is my attention narrowing… or expanding to include more of myself, my directions, the environment around me etc..?

If I lie down in semi-supine what is my contact like with the floor? How does this change over time? 

What am I doing with my breath? (i.e where am I placing my breath? Is my breath moving or not moving?)

This opened up a whole new horizon of opportunities. And since I’m already in a state of general disruption, interrupting old habits and substituting new ones has never been easier.

Great observations. In order to cultivate something new for ourselves and our movement (outside of habit) we have to simultaneously disrupt (or stop off) the old habit from happening while allowing for a new expression of movement to occur. In other words we inhibit the old neural path, and a new pathways is directed/ activated. Overtime this creates a new pathway (that strengthens with practice) and gradually unlearns the old pattern/pathway through non-use. This learning process is usually easier when we’re ‘in a state of disruption’ because we’re slightly out of habit so the ‘pull’ or ‘itch’ to do the old habit isn’t as strong.

I literally can’t sit the way that I normally would sink into without thinking, so I get to practice a new way of sitting (informed by my newly-renewed Alexander Technique practice, which is all about shifting sensorimotor habits). I can’t get up in the morning and go straight into emails for the next hour or more, so it’s a chance to stretch out while listening to a podcast or walk up to the pool for a swim instead. These are all things I’ve tried to implement before, with variable success and always as a struggle and a chore to remember and keep on top of myself to do it. The difference in what this feels like is subtle to measure and there are still too many factors to pin anything down with absolute certainty. That my back pain substantially subsided as of this morning could be a total coincidence and is most likely a partial one. It’s only been a week (less since I made this shift), I’m not going to claim miracle breakthroughs. It remains to be seen if new patterns settle or old ones re-emerge like acid reflux after midnight.

Perfect. As much as I sometimes wish it was a miracle cure for my students, the Alexander Technique isn’t a magic pill; it’s a skill, a practical education, and a practice. Sometimes it truly does cause a rapid positive shift in feelings of health, pain relief, and well being, but the strongest way to approach it, especially for self-motivated students who love the chance at taking on the responsibility for their lives and actions, is as a practice to continually grow your connection to yourself and skill in the way you use yourself as you engage in the world….and through this, to continually develop your ability to feel better, move better, and to positively shape many aspects of your life in the process.

But, if nothing else, I’m enjoying the freedom of the cognitive shift. To have stopped waiting until I got better in order to get well, to have moved right on to the good stuff, the place where change happens.

The ‘rest and wait’ strategy is only useful for the most acute period of back-pain. Beyond this very minimal time frame ‘rest and wait’ is a very harmful strategy to use when it comes to back pain. Unfortunately, it’s probably the most commonly adopted strategy even though it easily leads to less movement - a downwards spiral of loss of muscle mass - psychological depression or downwards mood and helplessness - the nervous system increasing sensitivity to pain signals - leading to less movement etc..- this cycles downwards fast and is hard to break out of. Instead, we can all use the reminder to…”get started with good stuff, the place where change happens!”

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*To read the the original article please visit:
https://www.camman-evaluation.com/blog/2019/2/12/i-have-a-complex-relationship-with-my-back

Addition vs Subtraction in Movement

Summary: Imitation is a powerful and essential way we learn new movements and skills. When we imitate others we sometimes also copy their personal habits - which may be unhelpful or limiting given our personal design. At some point, to take skill development further we can remove the excess movement, tensions, or other unhelpful habits picked up in earlier stages of learning: To do less, so the skill can happen more easily on it’s own.

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Addition

We typically learn new skills by imitating someone else. Let’s call this addition.

Playing an instrument, swinging a tennis racket, doing a dance step, or skiing down a slope; at one point in learning the skill you probably copied the movement and postures of someone else. You had no idea how to do it, you saw someone do it, you imitated them, and over multiple rough attempts you got the gist of it.

With practice your skill then became more automatic and unconscious (i.e ‘muscle memory’) - which dropped the cognitive load on your brain to allow you to think about and process other things while performing the skill.

Imitating someone to learn a skill is something we all do intuitively. It’s our ‘go to’ for learning new skills, and depending on a range of factors (such as prior training in something that transfers over, cognitive state, the kind of feedback you get etc), copying will be faster or slower for you. In anycase, imitation is an important way we learn.

The problem with imitation is that we often unconsciously add on more than we need from other person. We also add on their personal habits that might not match us or be the best way to do the skill.

Over-tensions, personalized ways of balancing, mis-sequencing in movement, old patterns of injury or stress that the person we’re modelling carries into their movement etc.. These are all personalized aspects of movement that we tend to copy, even though they don’t often match us or our needs.

It’s also the case that sometimes their movements don’t actually suit our own physical and cognitive needs. For instance, we might have longer or short arms than them which require different speeds and level of refined control of movement; or have a different length in our torso which can lead to us overly compressing ourselves to stabilize or make ourselves smaller - or to try to stretch and over brace ourselves when more fluidity may be what’s actually needed.

Addition is an essential aspect to help us learn and move forwards at key points in skill development, but sometimes to make more progress we might need subtraction.

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Subtraction

Subtraction is the clearing away of aspects of movement, tensions, or patterning/ sequencing of movement that are getting in your way; those that limit your ability to perform the skill or movement in the most optimal way for you, personally.

This can involve learning to recognize excess or under tensions that get in your way, or eliminating extra movements while re-sequencing others.

For instance, the particular way the person you modelled balances themselves might not be optimal for the speed of your movements or for your height. The movement of their arms or limbs might not match the length of your limbs; which might work better for people with longer arms or legs than shorter ones etc…

The truth is that subtraction isn’t as easy or as sexy because

1. We’re not usually aware excess in our actions because they’re unconsciously integrated into our movement

2. Removing something can be more challenging than simply doing something new

3. It’s not cool or easy to show people all the things we’re not doing so it’s harder to talk about!

Still, subtraction is essential in many contexts, and once you become aware of the concept you can start to train yourself to see it. We get hooked on addition as the only way to get better at our craft so we keep looking for new add ons; but sometimes subtraction is the way forwards- removing the stuff that’s getting in your way. To do less so the skill can happen more easily on it’s own.

So the next time you’re watching someone else doing a skill that you can do…but they make it look easy…play with subtraction instead of addition:

• “What movements do I do, that they don’t do?”

• “What extra stuff do I do that interferes with my supports or balance?”

• “What is one obvious excess movement here and what happens when I don’t this? “

In Tune With Tone

In Tune With Tone

It’s a remarkable moment when a student experiences that a more ‘in-tensional’ upwards organization (head to toe, physical muscle tone , and cognitive awareness) has a particular tone to it. You can think of cultivating this change in tone throughout yourself like tuning a stringed instrument.

An instrument can be out of tune in many ways. Sometimes the entire instrument is too sharp or too flat. Sometimes it’s a mix of the two - some strings are too tight while others are too loose. To tune an instrument is really about finding the needed tensions for the entire instrument to resonate to produce its fullest sound.

For some ‘high strung’ students this means reducing excess tension - letting down and finding support from the ground - discovering how your habits of tone connect to the interactions with your environments, activities, and thoughts; how these relate to excess tension, tightening, or compression in very personal or unique ways. Learning to interact with the world in a less tight way so you can express and embody your actions in a more responsive and ‘in-tune’ version of yourself.

For other students, this means activating, or an increase in tension in your state of muscle tone. Learning to experience and deal with the change in feeling associated with this different tone can be a real challenge as you engage with the world around you. Resorting to a lower tone is a safe and ‘natural’ ‘home’ - a habit from which known expressions of movement, thoughts, and sensations can arise from.

In both cases, it’s about getting really clear on the reality of how you hold or collapse yourself - increasing this awareness - then giving yourself a new direction head to toe to let your brain/nervous system figure it out. This can be exciting, scary, freeing, funny, frustrating, or even bring a sense of deep relief - the feelings and sensations come and go, but the intention of the process remains the same: To be ‘in-tension’, to cultivate a dynamic and responsive tone throughout the self in activity.

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Making Music In Everyday Life

Any beautiful stringed instrument is alive with a sense of tension and tone that responds and changes with use; it can sound more rich as time goes on. I believe the same is possible in all of us.

Once you have a general ability to use your conscious awareness and intention to move towards a state of dynamic tone, then growth comes from taking yourself into ever more stimulating movements, environments, activities, and aspects of your work and life; to learn and practice how to manage, recover, expand your range and expression of movement - to manage your own ‘tone’ and make music in these different parts of your life.

When you bring more intention and awareness, a more ‘in-tune’ or toned self to stimulating places, then growth becomes inevitable. There is no fixed system here, just constant making music with the self: Succeeding, failing, growing, loosing motivation, gaining motivation, developing skill, and changing your baseline tone. How far you go is up to you.

It’s an ongoing expression of self towards a greater state of dynamic and responsive tone throughout the whole self - more responsive to both internal experiences and external challenges. With the goal to discover and bring more of your fullest self to everything you do.

Both Together - As One

One or the other

A challenge for many of my students (especially because they tend to be highly driven and self-motivated people) is to be in a state where they can be both goal oriented or competitive, yet simultaneously self-aware.

The problem is that when they focus on the end goal they want to achieve (the finish line of the race - movement - activity - or performance), they forget or ignore themselves (loss of awareness of an embodied self). (*Alexander called this end-gaining: When in an attempt to get your goal, you place all your attention on the end goal without enough attention to optimize your whole coordinated self; thus, negatively impacting your health, function, or thus your ability to achieve your outcome.)

On the flip side of this is that we can (especially in different stages of learning) become so process oriented that we loose track of what we are doing or where we are headed. When students place all their attention on themselves they can loose the drive to move towards their chosen objective and the benefits that arise when growing towards a goal oriented action or outcome.

In other words, when they drive themselves in a competitive achievement oriented way they loose awareness of themselves and the process; but when they focus on themselves and the process they loose the powerful internal drive (and it’s unconscious positive affects) that come with moving towards a goal: It’s one or the other.

But that’s were a key issues lies: The idea that it’s one or the other.

Instead, what if you can train yourself so that it’s not just one or the other, but so both occur simultaneously as one single unified experience.

Towards a unified experience - expanding awareness

If the goal is to bring your fullest self to your task, one way is to build the skill to work with an expanded field of awareness in activity. This means you’re simultaneously aware of your objective/task, and of yourself (not just perfect form or alignment, but a conscious awareness and shaping of your voluntary and unconscious movements and coordination). You are both the actor and the observer simultaneously; aware of and influencing how these processes operate, not as individual parts, but together as a single process that allows for the expression of new movement and a fresh outcome.

This isn’t a static 50/50 split, but a flowing balance between conscious awareness, direction, and internal unconscious motivation. It’s a constant opening up of your awareness such that you can include and cultivate more UP in the process and actions that are required by context of the goal or motivation.

The balance between how much attention you need to place on yourself in activity to cultivate yourself so you are going UP, and how much attention you can include of your end goal is one that shifts throughout the learning process. For example, in the beginning the thought alone of achieving the end goal is so powerful for most students that it immediately starts in motion the whole habitual way of moving and eliminates the opportunity for any new expression of movement/coordination in the action itself. To counteract this the student may need to entirely ignore the idea of their end goal and place attention entirely on the awareness and intention they need to cultivate their fullest coordination.

Later, they gain enough skill to observe what the thought of achieving their end goal brings up in them - and to make choices to inhibit and direct themselves in such a way as to move towards their goal while still cultivating the most UP they can for themselves in the activity. This process often brings on a state of flow and interestingly a much higher level of performance/ achievement towards the end goal. In this case, the student begins to ‘Run their own race’ - aware of and using the motivation from goal attainment, while remaining process oriented and embodied in action.

Doing, or rather cultivating this unified experience that can be learned and developed.

It’s a practice in which you continuously grow a deeper and deeper understanding of how to bring more of your fullest self to the movements, moments, and activities of your life.

A Student of "UP"

Going UP is a nickname for the coordination or ‘whole body response to gravity’ that we cultivate in the Alexander Technique.  When you learn the Alexander Technique you become a Student of UP.

As a student of UP your daily practice is to: Re-find UP for you; learn to cultivate more of it in movement, actions, and life; use it to bring dynamic postural tone and readiness to your postures, actions, and way of being; and learn to deal with unconscious habits that bring you down.

As a student of UP your growth in posture, movement, structure, awareness, well-being etc.. all occur as a by-product of integrating UP into the framework of your movements and activities.

The more advanced a student of Up, the better you can:

• Cultivate going UP on your own

• Recognize and prevent unnecessary compression or constriction in activity

• Cultivate Up in ever more challenging movements and activities

• Get back UP on your own after you’ve lost it

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A Student of Up practices:

• To open UP with gravity rather than pulling up against it

• To work in balance as an ongoing process (balancing) - rather than as a fixed position

• To move and act more centred over your base of support (in both stillness and dynamic movementss

• To catch yourself in an old posture and uses the opportunity to learn what you are doing vs. To catch yourself and immediately fix/stiffen yourself with perfect posture - missing the moment to go UP

• To work with ongoing direction vs. an end position or fixed final destination/posture you attain

• To learn both what to do, and what not to do in your movements

• To bring a dynamic state of postural tension to life - a calm, yet readiness for movement - instead of a state of constriction or over relaxation/ collapse

• To grow awareness of the relationship between your neck, head, and back as both an assessment tool for your coordination and as a place to influence your whole self to go UP

• To think in activity as a way to shape your coordination, actions, and responses

• To cultivate a 3 dimensional awareness (that includes width) along with simply lengthening upwards

• To cultivate the conditions for the expression of a new movement or mobility to show up instead of trying to force it

• To use the ground, gravity, and a downwards direction as an oppositional force (you have to come UP from somewhere)

• To not do the old habit while simultaneously allowing for a new expression of balance, movement, and tension vs. trying to do something new while still doing the old habit

• To refine your ability to see and influence the connections between your brain, body, and environment vs. seeing these parts as un-integrated in activity with your self located only in your brain

• To see that long term changes in posture, structure, and postural tone (that we can influence) occur through the steady/ persistent accumulation of actions and movement over time rather than any single moment

• To see and integrate internal and external sensory feedback as a unified experience

Awareness:

• To build skill in self-awareness (as a prerequisite to make new choices)

• To recognize the internal and external cues that start your habits - which lead to unnecessary tension or collapse

• To consciously expands your field of attention - instead of getting stuck in a narrowed field of attention

• To bring evermore directed awareness of themselves in a evermore challenging (physical and mental) activities

• To see how the parts (i.e limb movements etc..) integrate into the larger whole pattern of coordination vs. isolating your parts from the larger whole in activity

• To see the mind as embodied in action (brain, body, environment all influence each other)

• To use the mindset of being conscious but not self-conscious - the practice of suspending judgment and criticism

• To build (or re-discover) self awareness of yourself vs. ignoring awareness of yourself until something hurts or nags at you

To use any activity or movement as a fresh opportunity to cultivate more UP and grow towards your fullest potential.

The truth is that as you become more advanced with the Alexander Technique you find that there isn’t an obvious, simple set of step-by-step tactics. But there is a compass: A true north for learning that can head you in the right direction as you learn. I would call this UP.

Framework

The Alexander Technique needs a framework to grow in.

This is because it’s a practice that you apply to the things you do.

At first, the core framework is built of your basic movements (sitting, standing, walking, moving an arm etc..). It can also quickly expand to include your everyday activities - and maybe some Alexander procedures or directed activities to help you connect the concepts to everyday life.

Your framework might also be your professional activities. These also provide a clear motivation for building your practice and can be challenging as the stakes are generally higher than in activities of normal life.

Over time it your framework can also expand to include areas with dynamic physical and mental challenges such as exercise, social interaction, or anything else that matters to you.

They key ideas is that it’s through application to novel activities that the brain and nervous system responds with growth and adaptation to meet new challenges. We need friction to grow, and for this reason if we want to keep developing we must keep expanding the framework that we apply our practice to.

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