Keys of the Alexander Technique (part 1): Clearing up your THINKING

Two of the top benefits of the Alexander Technique are health and posture. These are, however, not exclusive to the Technique.

The objective of the Alexander Technique could be described as “lightness and freedom of movement with minimum effort.”  But here once again the Alexander Technique does not hold a monopoly.

What distinguishes the Alexander Technique from other mind-body disciplines isn’t so much what comes at the end of the process, but rather the emphasis it puts on how we get there. And the key is in the THINKING PROCESS involved.

During Alexander Technique lessons you get to learn some of the anatomical and physiological aspects of movement, but this is not where the true core of the work lies. When we think about the structures that we’ll be moving, we’re not as interested in the actual movement as we are in the clarity of the thought and intention behind the movement.

The learning process in the Alexander Technique centers on clarifying the thinking process that gets you into movement. Alexander called it “quickening the conscious mind.” It’s about working with the reasoning, discriminating, creative and decision making capabilities of our minds.

If our bodies are not responding to our conscious wishes perhaps it isn’t because they are structurally unable to do so, but rather because we’re having unconscious wishes that conflict with our conscious ones. These “unconscious wishes” are made manifest in our muscle tension patterns.

We fail to realize this because the unconscious wishes have been there for so long they have become part of our “self-definition.” To go in a new conscious direction, we must first become aware of what direction we’re already unconsciously heading in… and let go of the conflicting wish.

This is really what the Alexander Technique is about: If you wish to go left, you’ve got to first pause and remind yourself to stop your habit of always going right. Because if you rush left without thinking, that is, without “inhibiting” your tendency to go right, you’ll end up going nowhere fully or satisfactorily.

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Change is Bred in a Context

A blog about the importance of giving yourself space 

Hello. Nice to see you here!

Today I’m starting a new series of blogs in which I mean to elaborate on the 6 principles that I work from.

This is why, in order to honor this new beginning, let’s take minute to center ourselves and return to the present. With closed eyes let’s slowly and deeply breathe in and out.

Today’s purpose is precisely that: to talk about this action of centering and returning back to yourself. I’d like to communicate to you a bit about how powerful and integrative this simple act of returning to your body before every new action can be.

We’ll therefore talk about the Principle of Context and Content.

And since we’re going to be talking about returning to our bodies, it’s a good idea to feel it a bit to begin with.

I invite you to yawn and stretch, move your joints a bit. Whatever makes you become aware of the physical presence of this fabulous container: your body.

Ready? Great. First the theory.

Principle of Context and Content:

Context determines your experience of the content.

This means that how you do something has a direct influence on how you live it. In other words, the conditions in which you perform the action are fundamental to your opinion of said action.

In terms of your body-mind, context is determined by space.

It’s quite different to perform a physical movement with space in your joints, than to do so in a state of compression and collapse.

It’s quite different to make a decision when you give yourself space for thought, than when you’re hurried.

It’s a quite different emotional experience to get in a tiny lift by yourself or with a close friend, than to do so with a stranger.

Minding the context does not mean ignoring the content; rather it means giving the content the best conditions for its manifestation.

The content (your ends) are the reason why you do stuff. If you go to a talk on a subject that interests you, you do so because of the information that will be imparted. In order to take full advantage of said content, know yourself, know what suits you and what doesn’t, mind your conditions.

Coordinating your context is the first step in every action.

First we need to organize ourselves both internally and externally; then we take action in the world. Certain people are born with natural inner coordination. If, like me, that is not your case, learning to coordinate and integrate your mind-body functioning should be a priority.

Enough theory, let’s get practical.

But first, let’s move a bit, shall we?

Interlace the fingers of your hands, rotate the palms outwards and stretch your arms forward and up. Release the fingers and let the arms come down slowly, drawing big semi-circles down your sides. Close your eyes and shake your arms and shoulders.

Great. Let’s move on.

Today’s practical bit has 2 components:

1. Creating a Safe Space.

2. Stopping and Remembering Myself.

1. Creating a Safe Space.

a) Physical Space:

The place where we perform our activities is importante for our sense of confort, security and freedom. All our senses are involved in this.

- Look around and check if what is in your visual field is pleasing to your eyes. What about the sounds? And the physical sensations? Smells? Company? Adjust whatever you need to feel safe and at ease.

b) Body and Mental Space:

Your skin, your muscles, your bones, your organs, all of them give you consistency, limits and support, as well as fill up your internal spaces. Learn to become aware of them with any of the following ideas:

- Feel your skin by caressing it all over your body, in all the nooks, crannies and crevices. Alternatively you can do so by showering, taking a bubble bath, or standing in the breeze.

- Check out some anatomy images where you can get a general idea of your bones, muscles and organs. Give yourself a loving massage while you palpate the different bits, becoming aware of their consistency, elasticity, density.

- Alternatively, try out some of the self-observation exercises I give in this blog, or this one.

Your thoughts also have a quality and consitency, get to know them and note their effects in your body.

- An excelente practice to discover the workings of your mind is to try a simple mindfulness meditation, following your breath.

c) Personal Space:

The space that surrounds you is also part of your personal space. It pays to recognize it and inhabit it.

- Notice how it expands and contracts depending on the circumstances. What determines its expansion or contracting? Can you do so voluntarily?

- If you are sitting, note how you can integrate the chair to your sensory system and “feel” where its legs touch the ground.

- With your feet on the ground, note how you can be aware of the floor not only right under your feet, but also around your feet. How far can you “feel”?

d) Shared Space:

We share our spaces with living and non-living things.

- Note how you react when something or someone comes into your personal space.

- Note how others react when you invade their personal space.

- Note if it makes a difference when permission to share space is requested and granted, both in yourself and in others.

- Ask someone you feel comfortable with to take your arm and move it around, while you keep your awareness in your inner and outer spaces. Do you contract away from the contact at any point?

- Switch roles and move your friend’s arm around. While you do so, be aware of your inner and outer space, integrating your friend’s space in your movement.

2. Stopping and Remembering Myself.

During any of the above practices you’ll notice that at times your attention has wandered off the task at hand. When you do so it’s time to stop and come back to yourself.

Returning to yourself is returning to your inner and outer spaces, it’s creating space for yourself and being aware of it.

Returning to yourself is how you take care of your context, so that your experience of life’s contents is as enjoyable as possible.

Well, that’s all for today.

Today’s was a longish blog. If you’ve read this far you surely need to move a bit your body again. Let’s yawn, stretch and shake like a wet dog one last time.

That’s better. As usual, any doubts, questions or comments you are welcome to leave them in the space for comments below.

Let’s breathe together one last time. In… Out… Ah!

Thanks for stopping by.

See you next time.

Victoria

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The recipe for changing habits

Hello! Welcome to the blog. How are you? I mean it, and the answer should be important to you. Take a few seconds of outer and inner stillness to check how you are right now (physically, mentally, emotionally) and to decide if you’re well disposed to reading this blog.

This is a blog about the Alexander Technique in its relation to changing habitual reactions (physical, mental, emotional).

The purpose of this blog is for you to experiment with different ideas about how to do things differently, o how not to do them entirely.

My name is Victoria Stanham, and I’m a teacher of the Alexander Technique. I spend most of my days investigating and experimenting with the ideas I share in this blog.

My objective for today is for you to have a new experience with attention management. I’d also like to offer you at least one new idea of how to organize your thoughts that is directly applicable to changing habits with the hopes that it may answer a question you have on the subject.

If you’re interested, take a minute to clarify your question. Make it concise and clear.

As you continue reading, check regularly what effect it is having on your degree of physical, mental or emotional tension. Try to note if what you’re reading makes you nervous, angry, calm, confused, or whatever.

Take also note if you’re attention wanders off topic, and you start reading in automatic mode, without processing the new information. If this happens to you, stop, breathe and bring your attention back to the present action. If your attention insists on wandering to another topic, re-evaluate if it’s worthwhile to keep reading or if perhaps you should be taking care of that nagging business on your mind.

The ability to monitor our attention and our bodily reactions to stimuli in our surroundings is at the foundation for our success (or lack thereof) in any attempt to change a habit.

A habitual reaction follows this sequence:

1. I perceive a stimulus (conscious or subconsciously).

2. I respond with an automatic action that requires no conscious thought.

Sometimes this is good and useful. Thank goodness we don’t have to reason our way through every single action we undertake daily. That would be exhausting and very inefficient!

But sometimes, we realize that our way of reacting is causing us trouble, and we may want to change it. This, we soon realize, is not easy because habits are strong and “comfortable” (however detrimental they may be to our wellbeing).

So, in order to be successful in our enterprise, we need to learn to stop before we react, and thus give ourselves time to decide what response we truly want to give.

The problem is that we are not always aware of the stimuli that trigger our automatic reactions, and we only realize we’re reacting in our undesired way when we’re already more than half-way down the road.

The solution to this problem is to learn to perceive the signals that indicate we’re already preparing a response.

Our responses to stimuli start way before we become consciously aware of them. Our brains are constantly anticipating, building our responses based on previous experiences of similar stimuli.

Anticipation manifests itself as a state that is simultaneously physical, mental and emotional. It is perhaps easier for us to note this preparatory response in our bodies (changes in heart-rate, breathing rate, muscle tension, skin or gut sensations, etc.).

As we learn to become aware of these anticipatory reactions, we start to have the possibility of changing them.

And in order to become aware of these anticipatory responses, we need to become more aware of our bodies.

How does one go about doing that?

This is where the help of a guide becomes invaluable. If you’ll accompany me, I’ll be happy to show you the roads I’ve already walked.

So, in brief, the new reaction that we want to establish would follow this sequence:

1. I perceive the stimulus (consciously or subconsciously).

2. I perceive my anticipatory reaction… and let it go.

3. I remember my purpose.

4. I re-evaluate my response options.

5. I decide on one response.

6. I execute my choice, all the time keeping my greater purpose present and monitoring my response.

You’ve reached the end of today’s blog. It’s now your time to evaluate.

Has your quesiton been answered?

See you next time.

Victoria

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Stop! Before reading this blog...

You’ve arrived at the blog. Welcome.

Before we begin, let us take a minute to come to internal and external stillness.

Sit down as comfortably upright as you’re able. Relax your eyes and your jaw.

Become aware of your breathing. Allow the air to go in and out without trying to directly control it, allowing your breathing to be just the way it is right now.

Little by little we’re going to let go of what we were doing before arriving here: the previous webpage, what we were reading, what we were thinking.

Every action has a certain degree of inertia.

We are like a bucket full of water. We thrust our bodies and minds to and fro, and all our internal environment (physical, mental and emotional) becomes agitated, like waves in a storm.

Now we want to start something new, we’re going to read a new blog, it’s a new action, distinct from the one that preceded it.

Stopping before starting something new allows us to give the new action its due space (physical, mental and emotional)… or to simply realize that we don’t want to or don’t need to undertake it at all.

Do you really want to read this blog? You won’t know until you stop, allow the storm of residual activity inside of you to quiet down, and take a moment to listen to yourself.

That is why we bring out bodies to stillness for a moment, and we bring our senses to our inner environment for a check in. Even though we have brought the bucket to a standstill, the water inside it takes a tad longer to quiet down and pool.

Bring your attention to the sounds around you, those at no more than arms length, and then those a bit further. Take your attention to furthest sound you can perceive. Let go of that sound and bring your attention back to the space around you. Now take it into your inner space. Listen for the sounds of your heart, your breathing, your guts. 

Without losing that connection to your inner sounds, expand your attention up to where you find it adequate and comfortable in order to read the rest of this blog.

With this act of stopping and coming back to your senses, you are preparing yourself for receiving, opening up for perceiving, for taking note of how you are right now and how you feel about what you’re reading.

You are already reacting to the stimulus of these words.

If the water in your bucket is still, you’ll be able to notice what that reaction is.

What wave is stirring your water? Is it the response you want to give? Is your response appropriate for your desired objective, for achieving that which you came here to achieve?

No response is correct of incorrect. All are possible and valid. The question is not one of right or wrong, but one of useful or not for achieving your goal. Does your response help you or hinder you?

Perhaps your response is taking energy away from your objective, funneling it instead towards other needs. Perhaps those needs are valid and deserve to be listened to and heeded. Or maybe they are just part of an old habit, an automatic response whose expiration date has long passed.

If you are able to ‘see’ your response to the stimulus, you’re ready to let it go and give way to the next logical, organic action that is in line with your objective.

Working with the Alexander Technique is based on this premise. We cannot change what we cannot ‘see’. We cannot change what we don’t understand. And the first step to changing something isn’t doing something new. The first step is recognizing what we’re doing and choosing to not do it any longer, and thus give way for the next action.

Some day perhaps, we’ll be able to match the inside with the outside. Bucket and water will move in such harmony that there will be no separation, no storm. We won’t need to stop our bodies first in order to stop the water. Stillness will be part of our movement, and harmonious movement will be present in our stillness.

But we’re not there yet. Today we’re at step one. Today we quiet the external, to give a chance to the internal to come to stillness too. And that’s alright. That’s the first step. All journeys start here.

So go back to your breathing for a moment. Allow the air to come freely in and freely out.

You’re ready for your next action. You’ve prepared the ground, you’ve quieted the internal and external waters. You’ve given yourself time. You have given yourself time and space to decide.

What do you want to do? What do you need to stop doing to allow yourself to go in that direction?

See you next time.

Victoria

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Victoria Stanham, Alexander Technique teacher and Pilates instructor.

I study developmental movement, taking great inspiration from the organic and free movement of the animal kingdom.

My goal is to achieve comfort, efficiency, elegance and balance, both in movement and in stillness, according to our physical, mental and emotional design.

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Why we get stuck in a rut in our physical, emotional and mental lives

Feelings about situations, people or places are also anticipations… and they’re physical.

Imagine a person that gets on your nerves. Imagine them doing that thing that gets on your nerves, that thing you’ve told them so often to please not do.

Now sense the tension in your body. You’re anticipating.

We anticipate emotional reactions all the time. We base our anticipation on our previous experience of that person, place or situation. This is as normal and natural as the physical anticipation of weight we played with in last week’s blog. But, just as in anticipating physical effort, in emotional anticipation we must also be open to adjusting our response to what the present circumstances really present.

With emotional stuff, with relationships, this isn’t always as easy as with a regular physical weight. Some situations, some places, some people are able to trigger in us deeply ingrained pre-programmed responses that we cannot simply wish away, ignore, or consciously de-activate and adjust our response, if we are already in the middle of our emotional and physical reaction.

These situations require taking time to step away from the stimulus, until we are ready to face the situation, place or person from an open perspective, from a new place. This may take as little as a few seconds (a couple of conscious inhales and exhales and a quick reminder of your directions), or as much as months or years.

In that period of stepping away from the stimulus what we are actually doing is we are finding our own balance, our own coordination, our own sense of inner order, finding our head and our feet. We are also learning to organize our resources in new ways. We may be learning to use our resources in similar but less demanding circumstances.

Eventually we are able to face the original stimulus with “fresh eyes”, seeing it for what it is and what it offers us today. We’ll approach it differently then, tackle it with a new inner order. We may even simply confirm that we don’t want that place, situation or person in our lives as much, or at all, anymore. But we’ll have made this decision from a calmer place.

We might also realize that today we can deal with the stimulus as it is. But perhaps tomorrow, if the stimulus is really strong or we’re having a particularly bad day, our old reaction comes up. However, this time we’ll be more in tune with our bodies, with those first signs of tension that indicate that we’re starting to anticipate our old response. We can then choose to once again step away to find our inner bearings, our inner sense of direction, and make a fresh decision respecting our response to the stimulus.

So this week, start playing around with this idea that we anticipate our social interactions. Check to see how this manifests in your body. Check also to see how long you need to step away from the stimulus to find your bearings, in order to really be able to face it from a new, more flexible and coordinated place. Allow yourself to be surprised by the “new” in the “old”.

See you next week.

Victoria

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