About Conditioning

Conditioning solves a need with the ability to adapt. Conditioning is establishing a program or routine to solve an anticipated routine situation. The situation is that a question or problem is repeating that supposedly requires a solution. In conditioning, automating a series of physical actions is the solution. As the situation itself is recognized, the conditioned routine is triggered.

When people can do a previously established behavior in response to a “trigger” or stimulus, it could be described as a person having been conditioned. Who or what circumstance has done this conditioning is not stated, but it is implied. The motive of why there is a need for a particular conditioned routine is not usually examined. Needs seem to be urgent and “obvious.” The need for a conditioned response is not often considered, because adding a habit is expedient.

Forethought could allow more flexible, easily refined or updated conditioned habits. Becoming outdated is the limitation of conditioning. Using creative ability is not often done as a precursor to habit design. This is because of the sense of urgency behind a feeling of need.

Being conditioned describes a habitual, static state. The solution of conditioning is often a hope for predictability and certainty. Certainty is the ability to anticipate what is already known, as if this need will never change. Conditioning is the answer in a quest for a final solution. Conditioning is also used to provide an experience for varied reasons or uses. One objective is to create and practice the conditioned skill before it is needed.

Being conditioned is generally regarded to be an advantage – it is being educated and predictable. A conditioned response is designed to repeat the same way when a stimulus, (a “need”) is offered. The stimulus is also called a trigger for the conditioned response to go into action. That trigger is experienced as a “need” or indicator that the conditioned response is supposed to follow. In behavioral conditioning, the term for rewarding a success is called reinforcement. Reinforcement may be positive or punitive. These reinforcements are actions used to communicate and simulate consequence beyond words by using actions, images or direct experience.

It is possible to be conditioned (again, implied by who? or by what “need”?) by purely repeating an action. Examining the need for having a repeated program is often skipped over. Most people believe that conditioning is necessary because people train habits to take care of repeated circumstances. This training happens almost automatically, because it is part of how people make sense of how the world “is.” Conditioning is the first answer to a human need to adapt to prevailing circumstances.

Conditioning can also occur by being taught a skill by a teacher who designs what to practice. Intentional conditioning is made up of actions or lessons by a teacher that are designed to become innate for the student. This chain of actions may then be relied on to function the same way each time.

Conditioning is how sets of skills are trained. Otherwise, a person would need to learn from scratch each moment. Familiarity with conditioning and training in general allows people to train themselves and others to perform many “tricks,” similar to training an animal to perform. In the past, people have preferred to think of themselves as superior to animals, partly because of their obviously ability for forethought and planning. If this ability for thinking ahead is not merely arrogance, the world’s dwindling ecology rather obviously could stand to receive more benefits.

People condition themselves or others for many reasons. These people may have various motives, being parents, teachers, screenwriters, or advertising directors. Perhaps people want to be fit, to condition their physical stamina so as to have available more energy. People may use conditioning to create a skill, such as the skill of learning to ride a bicycle – so they condition themselves to learn the small motions that make up the skill by practicing and training to be able to do it. Some people use “practice” equipment to help them condition themselves, such as training wheels on a bike to learn to ride it… or using exercise equipment to help them stay in condition during the summer for the coming winter skiing season.

Depending on motive, goals to condition others may cross the border toward outright manipulation. Some conditioning has the reward for who is doing the conditioning of narrow-minded or suspect goals. Conditioning can have unanticipated or incomplete results different from the original intent. For instance, advertisers want to train the public to want to buy their product, so they repeat images to condition buyers to recognize and desire their products  – but these images disappear through overuse. Teachers want to provide an experience to train their students in a skill that requires followers, but also need to inspire self-discipline. Conductors want the orchestra to play what is written, but with “feeling.” Parents want their children to behave, but might not anticipate what sort of adult their well-intentioned conditioning might create.

Conditioning is neither good nor bad, it is merely a tool to establish and train a habit. It’s a powerful tool. Being able to automate and practice actions is a tremendous advantage. Previously trained skills can fire off in service of an intention in a very complex sequence. All that is needed is to give the command to “do” the action and it happens without having to attend to each part of the actual skill.

The disadvantages of conditioning are complex. Once actions have been conditioned, the behavior becomes automatic. Doing a conditioned action is designed to disappear. Practice is repeating an action with the intent to train it into a conditioned response. You will get “better” at doing whatever you allow yourself to repeat, whether you intend to do so or not. Improvement means further ingrained, more firmly automated, digging the rut deeper. Obviously, someone may train themselves accidentally to repeat what they later find is unnecessary. Conditions change, but the habit will remain, even though it may now be out-date.

If doing a conditioned habit is successfully installed, it will not register that it is being done, just as computer programs can run in the background. Perceptually, conditioning disappears from conscious awareness. Habituation also dulls raw perceptual sensory ability. A conditioned response becomes a perceptual assumption. Once a conditioned routine is set into place, it is obviously difficult to revise or get rid of what can’t be sensed.

Because of this lack of perception, subtracting a habit is much more problematic. Since need is an issue, merely subtracting and using awareness to search for what else is appropriate gives a strange feeling of something being wrong. What is new feels unfamiliar by nature, and so something is found wrong with it. The value of freedom or a new idea that could be a new solution is suspect.

So the need for a new and “better replacement” habits must be trained from scratch. Again, a sense of something being wrong makes it urgently tempting to skip the gradual revision that could be so useful at this stage. It is tempting to expediently select the most obviously “better” habit without any forethought about it’s design or it’s ability to be revised and improved. A tolerance or enjoyment for unfamiliarity would be handy to cultivate when it comes to learning.

So, a new habit is conditioned & trained. Then the two different circumstances must be recognized. Which conditioned habit is appropriate at what time? The ability to choose between the two skills is key, because familiarity dictates the first solution will dominate.

How to trick an insistent, previously conditioned habit to stop? That’s the next interesting question…

Respecting Patrick MacDonald’s Legacy

I’ve been lucky to have experienced the late Alexander teacher Patrick MacDonald’s work first-hand a number of times. It was because of my having been connected to (and later a trainee of the teacher-training class of ) Ottiwell/Pincas where MacDonald was a visiting master teacher.  MacDonald was the one to personally determine that I was “ready” for the hands-on part of my training. Before MacDonald, I never knew what forward and up was until I got to experience the rachet-like precision in MacDonald’s ability to direct for me. The presence in his awareness was a pleasure; it inspired complete trust from me.

Possibly because my significant coordination problems began before I learned to walk, I had little resistance to following MacDonald’s clearly indicated Directions, even before I became an A.T. trainee. In my first lesson with MacDonald, (probably my fifth A.T. lesson!) he “took me” much farther than I probably should have been taken. He probably assumed my experience level to be much higher than it was, because of my ability to follow his lead. His mistake was that this ability of mine to follow his Direction reflected in my ability to maintain on my own what he could show me. Sustaining a new coordination beyond ten or fifteen minutes was a skill which I did not possess at the time.

But at the time, I did not want to be the one to set him straight! I wanted to kick out all the stops and go for getting what I could about A.T. on the innate insight level. I had experienced enlightenment before and I had complete faith that further enlightenment was possible.  I considered A.T. to be another form of enlightenment at the time. (As a working description of A.T. for a beginner such as I was, “a form of enlightenment” was not too bad of a description.)

I managed to walk out the door of the hotel after this fifth lesson of mine with Patrick, and as soon as I looked down to the descend the steps – I fell down, unable to balance at all! As I sat there, I reluctantly realized that I had to allow my “old ways” to reassert themselves if I was going to get up again – which of course I didn’t want to do because it seemed as if I was “wasting” the lesson. I had intended to go for a really long walk to see how long I could sustain this new way of moving I’d just been doing for the last 45 min. with this amazing master teacher.

If a Danish teacher had not been there to frog-march me to my car, figuring out how to walk after that confusion would have taken me quite a bit longer…but I probably would have gone for that walk even if I had to crawl down the stairs. Perhaps it was better to have help, I might have hurt myself.  I later decided that perhaps MacDonald removed my coping compensations which was how I had learned to walk as a toddler.  But at 25 years old as I was at the time, a person feels as if they can’t hurt themselves.

Fortunately, I knew enough about what had happened to willingly welcome the strangeness of that paradoxical state. I really wanted to rely on my ability to Direct myself, dammit! I had gotten such a clear experience of what Direction was, I just knew I could sustain it.

Later I realized that I had to write off my experience with MacDonald as being a case of what had happened to me in almost every skill I had ever learned:  I would get a tantalizing flash of inspired genius, and then I would have to traverse the long road like everyone else to actually learn the skill from scratch. At the time I had no idea about how long a way I needed to come, as my misuse was congenital and had been set into place when I learned to walk oddly as a baby while tensing the side of my neck from a medical procedure.

Being able to welcome that experience of being taken “too far” didn’t do much to help me sustain it. It really wasn’t until I stumbled into Marj Barstow’s style of teaching that I was able to sustain my tolerance for such unfamiliarity as I could willingly imagine – and do something with my own sense of knowledge that worked for me to continue learning indefinitely without the help of a teacher.

My own later understanding of the MacDonald style is this: In any art form, (and each style of teaching A.T. is an art form) there are a number of objectives that evolve. In classical AT style, (besides being in concert with FM’s principles,) one of the objectives are to prevent a pupil from moving down on themselves for the period of time the lesson lasts.  The idea is that if a pupil can surrender their own sense of “self-control” and allow the teacher to assume control, the teacher can be trusted to fittingly demonstrate what is desired to be emulated by the student. This is motivated from intending the student to directly experience it in their own coordination first-hand. Then with enough constructive kinesthetic experiences, by the time a student learns to Direct for themselves, (not willfully do them,) the experience of moving easier that they had with the teacher will work a state of “do-less-ness” in the student. That’s how the process from 1.) teacher guided to 2.) student self-initiated movement was meant to be practiced via that style.

This plan didn’t work for me, but at the time I thought it was my own shortcoming and perhaps I merely wasn’t done yet on that plan when I ran into Marj Barstow and learned that language was an important piece of my learning process that needed to be satisfied.

Then, I remembered that these objectives were evolved for a somewhat Victorian and British sensibility of culture and educational style, not an American, Canadian, Australian, etc. Times change and cultures are very different. Just because we all speak a version of English gives the mistaken meaning that we are also able to surpass our cultural conditioning of how meaning and conclusions are arrived at.

In fact, MacDonald style does all this in superb ways – and these “strange” antics you see in his style of working are demonstrations of how primary control can be maintained even under odd circumstances of movements that look as if they might hurt. In a sense the teacher is “proving” to the student that they can do extraordinary, inconceivable movements. I remember one MacDonald-trained woman showing me how I could step up onto the seat of a chair without effort…with my “weaker” leg leading the step. That I could do this was unbelievable and “blew my mind” at the time.

After some experience, I believe this ability to Direct oneself works in relationship to how far you have come and in measure of your willingness to welcome and sustain unfamiliarity. Directing oneself clearly is not based on an absolute state of being entirely free or possessing “good use”. This is why someone who is twistedly shaped can “use themselves well.” This is why MacDonald could complain about how bad his own use was, and why he also could make the mistake of taking me “too far.”  Of course, one’s own standards also rise in relationship to one’s own inability to surpass one’s own standards.

This ability to surpass one’s own conditioning and refuse to habitually react is something which I have found to be quite rare out of the A.T. teaching room, even for those trained in A.T. People would rather be outraged at others for inciting or “making” a reaction happen in them …rather than suspend and reflect that their own reactions have valuable information to offer them personally. June Chadwick’s enlightened attitude I see to be a reflection of the spirit of A.T.

The other issue is one of dominant senses. I suspect the classical A.T. approach which MacDonald people have preserved appeals to a “research”  sensibility. The pieces of information in the MacDonald style are assumed to arrive and make sense gradually as the habit stops its control bit by bit. That was not true for me personally. I would become a sponge if I trusted the source, completely soaking up the information whole, without question, and then deal with the issue of figuring out what to do with it later.

For me, my experience of the MacDonald style was that it was as if a house is being built and the pieces of the construction were arriving haphazardly; then once enough essential pieces are present, they could suddenly “congeal” in a sort of insight that here was a “house” that was being built – by finally being able to perceive what all the pieces were. In a sense, MacDonald builds from the ground up new perceptual assumptions that do not need to have linguistic names.

It turned out that I’m naturally a conceptual learner who must integrate language. This may be partly why, (no matter how innately I could surrender my habit,) the MacDonald model worked for me in a limited way. Learning works much easier and more completely for me to have the idea of a “house” structure in place first in the form of any structure that could be removed later (like training wheels.) Otherwise, I have nowhere to put the (kinesthetic) information that arrives out of sequence. No matter how much information arrived, it couldn’t mean anything to me other than in that specific, literal action. I could not hold it in my awareness in the moment using the process of A.T. Partly this was because there was no process in the way A.T. was taught in that era – there is only present-tense awareness in the interaction between student and teacher. The way it was taught in that style was designed to completely bypass language and respond directly to what was happening in the moment, applied in a codified movement actions between teacher and student. I couldn’t apply this example to other movements except by having a lesson using those movements specifically, (in spite of being quite an abstract thinker by nature.) In a sense, I was at the mercy of a “literal” sort of thinking style that relied on rote animal training, rather than an abstract ability to think for myself…which I knew I had, but was deliberately being put aside during A.T. lessons.

For me it was the paradox of “non-doing” that confused me. In A.T. we’re told that this inability to duplicate the results of lessons is a result of “trying to do” (which I knew wasn’t the case with me, because I could readily suspend my “doing” during a lesson with an innate ability I possessed before I knew what A.T. lessons were.) But I knew there was something missing here for me in how A.T. was being taught, so I was intrigued enough to stick around to figure this out. Mystique was the attraction that kept me interested. The answer (for me) came when Marj Barstow taught that non-doing had a very different quality of action with specific, identifiable characteristics that were very different from habitual back-and-down doing. After Marj Barstow’s point of view, feeling was something that was useful and sometimes offered valuable insight about your suspended goal – once you had, in fact,  made a head/body move in a factually new direction as you clearly intended.

I still believe teaching any skill is a “different strokes for different folks” sort of thing. There may be as many learning styles as there are learners and teachers. There is no doubt of the absolute value of the MacDonald style in itself for others, even given its limitations for application to my own learning style. The preservationists deliver that amazing, tantalizing flash of inspired genius that motivates students to carry through the long road of learning – no matter how long it takes. I gained quite a bit from my education in it and I still admire it as a form. The field of A.T. needs it’s preservationists as well as it’s innovators.

Interview from alexandertechnique.com

Had great fun in this twenty minute interview with Robert Rickover. Robert takes care of www.alexandertechnique.com for decades now. He’s published a number of things I’ve written over the years on his website, but only recently he began doing .mp3 interviews of various teachers featuring their personal stories of how they work with the students who come to study with them.

Examples of what Alexander Technique is and how it works

Describing Perception

How do you perceive yourself? Well, you just do it. That’s an inadequate answer, but it is all most people have.

It’s my business to be teaching people to perceive what they take for granted by teaching Alexander Technique. I use the often ignored kinesthetic sense as a medium, rather than the visual or auditory…but maybe here we can cross-pollinate with it. Maybe we can use the same process and apply it to perception in general – say, the visual sense, so it could be communicated in writing.

In Alexander Technique classes, students walk across the room and try to describe how they are walking. They can’t describe much, usually. So I introduce them to categories to help them to form some questions for themselves. These categories function like thinking tools to organize and focus their point of view. The categories are:

• * timing
• * sequence
• * quality
• * direction

What you would do is to ask yourself how each of these affects what you are observing about yourself. Once they have these categories, their ability to describe what they’re experiencing for themselves works a little easier. Their new ability to observe and describe what is happening works so well they can later design, on the fly, inventive ways for getting past some pretty serious self-imposed limitations.

So perhaps we could do this with perception in general. We could make general categories to help people ask themselves specific questions. Answering these questions would give us new perceptual information out of what we usually take for granted.

We’re talking about the raw perception, not the content. So – how we direct attention to say, the visual sense with these categories? If I were to apply the same categories I just mentioned, I’d get something like:

1. * Quality: attention can be focused, like a searchlight, or diffuse like an overhead light.
2. * Timing: depending on when you pay attention, different things will be happening. A frozen image will show you stuff that you would miss in a movie, for instance. Bits and pieces do not have the same effect as the whole. Timing will influence the figure-ground relationship of what you can see. If you’re moving fast while traveling, you’ll have a whole different experience compared to moving slowly.
3. * Sequence: chains of paying attention to one thing after another bring different results; and mixing up sequences actually has an associative emotional effect. It’s easy to mistake sequence for cause and effect.
4. * Direction: Where we are oriented contributes to Point Of View. POV involves your motives about what you want others to do, react and agree with you. Your POV colors how you describe what you see, merely because it has to do with the way you’re facing.

Anyone else want to try one or more of these four categories about perception and apply them? Let me know how it goes…

Words From Our Sponsor….

Giving Up

It’s tricky to perceive what’s going on with thought and actions, because everything happens at once – and fast.

You have done it a million times. The most familiar way to suspend what you do not want is to do something else. Fire off another cue and change the channel. Time to go on to the next thing.  Once people get a cue, their urge to respond to it is very strong – hopefully strong enough to face down continuing to do the previous routine.  Brrrrring, the phone rings. Pooof! Stimulus for new behavior. A person can be SCREAMING; their phone rings and suddenly, this tiny, sweet, polite “Hello” voice comes out. They were trained by the bell to offer a new behavior. This is the mind’s superb recognition system in action.

People know that changing from one action to another works. The thinking strategy here is to install a new habit to take the place of the old one, and fire off the next trigger.

But – what happens when the previous state of mind gets in the way of the next? It acts like a problem with inertia – hard to start the ball rolling, and hard to stop it. The person picks up the phone call and they growl at the caller on the phone instead of being civilized. Even though the person on the phone doesn’t deserve it or they may take the insult personally, the previous mood or attitude of the person who answered runs over into the next activity. The poor caller is guilty by association of their bad timing.

This spill-over also happens quite innocently when training oneself to do a skill.  There is learning the intended skill… Also comes extra, unnecessary things done during the training process. These get accidentally get trained into the skill along with what is intended.

So, self-control would be handy, but too much control can be too heavy-handed. In the tiny moments most people witness themselves doing what they don’t want to do, they immediately change what they’re doing as a reaction to the witnessing. They want to “fix things” immediately – fix whatever is happening that they deem is “Wrong or Bad”.

Policing yourself is firing off the behavior of self-judgment. This is what most people call “to be inhibited.” The act of policing oneself irresistibly pops out as what is unwanted or don’t like is noted. Policing oneself works, but it stops everything indefinitely. The dam is held back until it bursts or pops off like the opening a soft drink that’s been shaken. The issue becomes a vicious circle.

I like tell another story about my own sweet mother – she could not get a photo of herself that really looked like her. Each time the camera came out, she would compose her face into an uncharacteristic expression to “get her picture taken.” Something about looking in the mirror would have the same effect. She would compose her face or her posture in a funny, uncharacteristic way. It was a sort of self-consciousness many people get today when they are filmed or during public speaking. One day I tricked her into thinking I wasn’t ready to snap her picture. Finally there was a photo of herself that she liked.

How to get past the vicious circle of assuming the only choice you have is to train and switch?

F.M. Alexander invented the idea. What he invented is a method of subtraction. Rather than adding a new behavior and firing that off to replace what it is you don’t want, merely subtract what is unnecessary.

This approach is particularly effective when one triggered behavior can’t stop the next – they run together. As in when the person who answers the phone punishes the caller by growling – who has no idea what is in progress.

So, now you’re wondering, how can the habitual routine be merely disengaged or stopped? It turns out, that a little unnoticed action of change can fly “under the radar” of the unwanted, coercive reaction. The trick is finding this something to detour the unwanted habitual reaction. It’s a design problem, finding this something. Alexander teachers specialize in being great observers to find such a thing for you. But you can do a bit of it yourself by being sneaky with your habits. Use a low-stress activity, one that makes little difference. Reassure the old habit that nothing terrible is happening. Then do the steps you imagine will get you where you want to go, bit by bit. As you unlock the skill of suspending a routine and as you practice this ability, that trickery can be used as a training tool for the ability to change routines during more important situations.

When you want to suspend a habitual routine, that’s the time to use all those nasty things you have been told that you must never do. You want to lie, cheat, fake it out, make it wait, slap it down, tickle it, distract it, etc. That’s the time to be devious. Your ability to rebel, veto, buck the system, subvert the dominant paradigm… this is what will work best on re-routing a conditioned set or routine. It’s very difficult to directly fight routines that have crystallized into habits once they get going. But you can tease them into submission by fooling them, lying to them, sneaking around them. It works best if you can catch them the moment before they go into action. The best time to do this is right before the routines get started.

The first practice of learning this skill is something most people can do. It is to refuse to do the act of self-judgment. Can you sense and witness yourself without changing or “trying to fix” what you usually do to fix the problem?

It is possible to both watch yourself do what you are doing AND also allow the event to occur anyway without your interference of self-judgment. With practice, it becomes even more possible. Perhaps it is so difficult to do such a thing because nobody has ever thought of asking people to do it. Asking in a way that worked. They ran into self-consciousness, which is a form of self-judgment, and they give up.

The funny part here is giving up is exactly what works. Giving up the self-judgment works.

Stories Show Need

For decades of my life I have specialized in adopting rather unpopular and sometimes “outdated” as well as completely new “cutting edge” ideas about ways of doing things. The value that attracts me has been that well-placed effort has a greater benefit and it is of greater benefit than a massive amount of misdirected effort. Less of doing what a person does not want will creatively provide a person with more of what they do want – as an effortless byproduct. This is especially true when small tendencies add up cumulatively over time.

These ideas of how to carry out my values of “doing less, more selectively brings more benefit” seems to be tricky to present to others for various reasons. Many other topics also posses this same challenge. Of course, this challenge of how “less is more” is at odds with the prevailing values of my American culture.
The value of timing a small effort, rather than offering a huge effort in an untimely way is an extremely interesting topic to explore. The interesting part is how to determine what is the appropriate time? It also has ramifications for the health of the planet, etc. The American ideals of “more and more is better and better” is going to have to undergo a significant change, if environmental concerns are going to be successfully addressed.

There are some factors in tactfully introducing an unpopular subject. It is handy to have foreknowledge of the various debate tactics people tend to use to dismiss the validity of your topic that you’d like people to value and/or take advantage of. With their mistaken assumptions about what something IS, people tend to want to fit what is unfamiliar into something familiar that they already know.

One of these debate tactics of dismissal is to say, “Oh, that old thing. We’ve already considered it. ” (Of course a rebuttal might be, “Perhaps there is a reason why that old thing hasn’t already gone away? Because people find it useful after all this time. So perhaps you mistakenly dismissed it before you learned enough about it to discern it’s value?”) Another categorization tactic: “That idea is exactly like this other thing…”

People when they find something new, they want to familiarize it. Perhaps having names for these debate tactics in a list would help us dispense with having to grapple with them over and over again? The debate model is an overused one. There are so many other thinking skills available than debate argument, such as lateral thinking.

OK, so HOW do you address uncovering problems that people may not want to know they have? How do you delicately and tactfully open “a can of worms” for people? Part of the reason people shrink back from admitting they have a particular problem is that they would not know how to solve it if they did acknowledge it!

When it comes to new processes, new ways of thinking, new ways of considering perception, new ideas, new inventions, these problems are common in presenting nearly everything unique, interesting and novel. These issues are also present in formerly useful practices and/or skills that were historically passed up, ignored and possibly forgotten. People might want to resurrect these “tried and true” solutions when the supposedly “better” improvement turns out to have unforeseen drawbacks.

So, I asked a very successful speaker how to deal with it. She’s Barbara Sher. She is a career counselor and speaker with multiple books under her belt in print for thirty years who now writing another book going into depth about the various reasons why certain unique groups of people do not figure out how to become a success. What she is describing as various ways of dealing with “resistance” sounds quite a bit like “inhibition.”

Her advice to me about presenting unusual topics was simple. The key presenting the solutions to unusual problems is to tell stories about why someone would need what I had to offer. These stories would illustrate why someone would want to bother to learn new ways of dealing with what has been more expediently dismissed or ignored. These stories would be about the often forgotten ways how people answered questions and designed solutions that were somewhat short-sighted at a time when they did not know what else to do.  Now circumstances have changed that encouraged new ways of doing things. Of course, eventually these “improvements” that are being designed now will also need to change.

These funny situations would illustrate universal human quandaries and paradoxes. You tell these stories and everyone laughs or cries or both. They can be self-deprecating stories or about other people who struggled and lost. But the common thread, which you spell out are that people dismissed any possibility of changing these problems because they assumed “there wasn’t a solution anyway.”

Then you offer your solutions that specifically addresses the problem. This creates hope for people that possibly there is a way out (or a return to previously valued ways) for the people listening. Their frustration level is not as great as they imagined at first, because if others have succeeded, so can they.

My story comes from a playground of my distant past when I was raising someone else’s six year old. The kid had done a pretty amazing series of moves on the monkey bar built on the side of a swing, sliding down to twisting into a wonderfully elegant twisting dismount from the swing. I had seen his antics, but he wanted to show his dad, who missed his pretty cool trick. Of course, when his dad was watching, the trick the boy had done the first time didn’t work out the same way. The poor kid was quite confused and embarassed. He had just done the trick once, why could he not do it again?

So – I’m collecting stories now. Little stories. Let me know if you have a good one.

Teaching Principles to Kids

It is only recently that A.T. teachers are figuring out how to teach Alexander Technique in classes. Until we do more work in that field and codify it better so people can teach themselves effectively without hands-on, A.T. is probably not going to be something that gets into schools – yet. Even then, there are some challenges.

The Alexander Technique is the most popular in the U.K., where it is most likely to become available in schools there. However, the possibility that AT teachers will teach in schools in the UK is slim for another reason. It is because schools have made it expensive for adults to be involved in volunteer school efforts. Evidently in the UK, any adult who is in contact with children, (even an adult who is invited to speak at a school auditorium! Or a parent that accompanies kids on an outing!) is required to be “investigated” to see if they are “implied” in any sort of rumor of child abuse or pedophile. This “investigation” costs to the tune of sixty-five pounds, which the alleged volunteer must pay themselves. Furthermore, these “results,” (which could be any sort of rumor or objection made by any disgruntled kid or custody battle) are given full weight with no judgment made as to relative actual truth. Many people are outraged and will not put up with such nonsense. So they don’t get to teach the kids in the UK. It’s the kids’ loss, justified as “protection.”

The A.T. teachers who are working in schools already – well, why don’t we ask them…?? Both kinds of teachers are too busy to reply, pretty much. Just set up those chairs over there, clean the chalkboard off and grade some papers, please.  An A.T. teacher who is also an educator doesn’t have the time to be speculating or writing here. Required curriculum is a nasty habit to break, and the price could be your tenure.

Schools resist change more completely than almost any bureaucracy. Even bringing a comparably “new” subject, something that is completely a no-brainer such as practical & creative thinking skills is met with resistance. This subject is by a proven, credentialed, creative thinker with a lifetime of experience named Edward de Bono. He has lesson plans, valuable and worthwhile content…it’s workability has even already been proven in other countries. It STILL isn’t used in either the US or the UK. It’s even mostly FREE. So…why NOT?

So that is the answer to much of your question. Schools themselves resist innovation.

Now, the teachers themselves aren’t resistant. In the US, any A.T teacher could volunteer in a classroom and get some valuable experience to contribute how our discipline should be improved to teach school kids.

But there is no pay, and who can afford to work for free these days? When I last checked, kids can’t afford private lessons…

The other problem is the kids. Kids are compelled to attend school. By the time they’re old enough to learn A.T., they are jaded about learning anything. The last thing they want to do is to pay attention.

Now, kids could be taught before they get so many bad habits, but grade school kids are literal thinkers. Somewhere after 12 is when a child’s brain is mature enough to grasp conceptual learning. Kids younger than that don’t seem to ‘get’ abstraction. A.T. is quite abstract, because it’s a process of subtraction & undoing, rather than adding on a new improvement or info. A.T. doesn’t have a “form.” A.T. students cannot be “graded.” Somehow students are supposed to get the idea that it’s OK to think, on their own, of what they want to do that might benefit from the application of A.T. principles. This “thinking on your own” is not encouraged anywhere else in school – much.

Until a decade ago or so, if I asked a bunch of A.T. teachers “what are the principles of Alexander Technique that all styles of A.T. teaching have in common…” everyone present would give me a dirty look: “how dare you ask that divisive question!”…While they were hoping nobody would call on them for such a definition.

A.T. is tricky enough that, in the past, adults were supposed to “get” what the principles were from being moved around by the teacher. That’s a bit of a stretch for kids to figure out. For kids, there has to be more content. Some of the basic assumptions need to be introduced so kids have a framework to hang the learning on. Adults come with assumptions already – and all we A.T. teachers have to do is to sweep the rug out from underneath them and we get big differences. Kids are sort of a clueless blank.

As Marj Barstow once asked me – “If we want to prevent unnecessary habits from getting a foothold from the start, how can we show and tell people what to do constructively and carry through with it?”

The other thing is people only seem motivated to learn A.T. after something goes wrong. As A.T. advocates, we’re trying to sell the need for something that people have no clue they need, with sensory equipment too dull to recognize the improvements because these crucial differences are often too subtle for them to notice.

Further, the people who have found value in A.T., they sound as if they’ve been initiated into a cult. Others who hear them can’t understand what they’re talking about or why they were just so impressed with what has happened for them. Then when Alexander teachers trot out out a list of benefits, this list is all over the map. A list of benefits make the Alexander Technique sound pretty much like snake oil… Good for whatever ails ya’.

These are a few of the problems the A.T. community has in teaching children. But…OK, let’s start somewhere… how about by thinking of situations that would motivate middle school or high school kids to learn to use A.T.?

1. So they can be good at whatever skill they try to do right off the bat.
2. So they can keep getting better instead of being completely clueless how to duplicate the happy success that just happened the first time.
3. So they won’t look like a dork as they’re getting used to their plastic surgery and can fit in with the other kids. (I’m kidding, but it feels like you’re completely weird when you’re changing shape and growing.)
4. So they can change some mannerism about themselves they don’t like
5. So they can assume or act different in any situation.
6. So they can carry those humungous backpacks with all their schoolbooks without messing up their backs.
7. So they look attractive to the opposite sex.
8. So practicing works the way they intend. So they can ride a horse, play football, run, dance, play music, etc. without running into a plateau where they can’t improve no matter how hard they want it or how long they practice.
9. So you can observe yourself & describe it without getting all tied up in knots, embarrassed or self-conscious.
10. …

We NEED this list of what might motivate kids to learn and use AT to present it to kids. I’ll make sure they get complied and report on the results. Maybe some people would like to join me in doing some experiments with a classroom?

Anyway – in conclusion, I’m a practical thinker.

In my humble opinion, to teach kids, Alexander teachers should talk about A.T. more. They should describe exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. They should question traditional ways so these means-whereby can be improved for the benefit of coming generations. They should ditch some of their own college education and use simpler words. They should write, video or record themselves experimenting. They should put the results on youtube in bite-sized pieces…. (because we already know there is no money in teaching kids A.T. or anything else. The American culture has deemed teaching kids to be one of the lower jobs on the status pole. Get used to it.)

Alexander Technique teachers need to think carefully about how people specifically learn, present the SIMPLIFIED, relevant information that is organized enough to remember. If it’s not remembered, it’s not being learned. Maybe teach mind-mapping techniques for recommending how these high school or middle school kids would take notes to help them remember such a complex thing as A.T. Maybe we need basic visualization skills or thinking skills that go along with a program of this sort.

To start with, kids and adults need to know how to observe themselves and how to run an experiment for themselves, with themselves. A sense of rhythm is handy. Then maybe the teachers could get to primary control, living anatomy, body mapping & …what do they call it in classrooms?  Ah, impulse control. I think  we have, in the term: “impulse control,” there we have our synonym for inhibition.

I’ve got more thoughts on this.. but I’m starting to rant so I’m going to stop. ;o)

Please, please, please, if you are an Alexander Technique teacher in the field, let’s not let A.T. turn into a “sit up straight” school, OK? No matter how expedient it is as a way to present Alexander Technique, selling it short doesn’t serve us humans or Alexander’s vision, now nor in the long run.

“Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.” – Daniel J. Boorstin

Your Ideas: Illustrations for Captions

I’m illustrating ideas of thinking strategy & perception in some educational writing about Alexander Technique in the form of an e-book.  Useful would be a bunch of ideas how to illustrate abstract concepts in pictures.

As thinking skills are, this subject is a challenge because it is a process. It is similar to how people get seduced by the results rather than becoming impressed with the effectiveness of using the process. A focus on results leads people to brush aside the process that got them there and seize upon the dazzling results. In the case of Alexander Technique, people get distracted by the result of getting better at doing something or recovering the ability to move easier.

The most obvious illustrations of showing pictures of the body from the result of using the process has the potential to seriously misdirect the content of Alexander Technique. The ability to see motion needs to be educated to perceive the level of action being trained. It also needs a relationship to movement, and pictures are two dimensional.

Perhaps the solutions are illustrative videos!

Alexander Technique uses the kinesthetic sense as the arena to train thinking skills. Among other benefits, the Technique helps to eliminate unnecessary habits of movement that were unintentionally trained and are perpetuated by accidental association.

The process leading up to the ability to move & learn easier is the content. The obvious choice of illustrating frozen body positions with photography tends to give potential students the wrong idea, no matter what the quality of the photographs. Readers assume pictures are showing them the examples of the “proper” ways to move so they can copy this proper form and assume the “right” positions. Of course, learning the ability to respond with less effort is a significant and valuable side effect, but when it comes to improving freedom of movement, establishing and copying an ideal is the wrong way to get it.

The act of copying bodily positioning works against learning the process because it encourages going for the results in the “old same way.” The internal experience of the learner is that moving easier will often feel wrong from the inside. This is because the human sense of orientation only gives feedback about changed position relative to the status quo, not absolute fact. What is new and unpracticed can be sensed as strangely unfamiliar and off balance if it is radically different from habituated norms.

Every advertising authority recommends dangling benefits. In Alexander Technique, the benefits are so broad that a list of them ends up sounding like snake oil sales. The process is the content, not the result. But the result is the motive for using the process!

Hope you appreciate the challenge!

Winners will get a free copy of my forth-coming e-book titled “Younger Than Yesterday, Alexander Technique for Fast Learners.”

(Of course, I am assuming that you can understand what these isolated one-liners mean in isolation without having read the rest of the writing. All misunderstandings are valid in this situation!)

Please make suggestions in the comments about pictures, designs and images to illustrate ANY of these different proposed captions. (Suggestions to edit the captions are also appreciated.)

1. *Muscles are contracted by effort. When you stop forcing them, muscles return to resting length in the “off duty” state. Lengthening a muscle feels like…nothing.
2. *As multiple goals are added and must be accommodated, being pulled in opposing directions is bound to be conflicting. We get into trouble because we can’t foresee the effect of repeating what we do over time.
3. *The sense of location, effort & weight is relative, not absolute fact. Because humans adapt, we can get used to just about anything that feels normal, once repeated enough.
4. *Repetition trains a new habit. Practicing a series of chained behaviors creates a new skill. Be careful what you allow yourself to repeat!
5. *Effectively trained habits install seamlessly; they disappear and become innate so the habit can be relied upon to work the same way every time.
6. *For a base-line comparison, show off an authentic example by observing your own habits in action without trying to improve yourself first.
7. *Get some words for how you’re moving by describing the movement’s direction, sequence, timing and quality.
8. *Thinking is the first part of movement. You are already preparing to move to respond as soon as you think about it.
9. *After movement preparation and before going into action, you get a moment of veto power.
10. *Now that you’ve experienced something new, what do you do to get a repeat performance? (Wanted are more pics of multiple choices. For instance, some ideas we already have are: “say the magic word,” “file folders,” “elephant remembering computer password”, “list-making….” Specific suggestions about how to illustrate these suggestions are great!)
11. *To duplicate desired results of an experiment: suspend previous ways of getting the goals and follow the sequence of experimenting that worked before. Presto!
12. *Recognize new information by their unfamiliar, subtle, elusive, disorienting, funny & paradoxical characteristics.
13. *Refusing, fooling, lying, slowing to a crawl, waiting, distraction, placating, cheating… Anything that works is fair game in using preventative veto power against the coercion of habitual routines!

Sensory Amnesia

Sensory perception registers relationship and tells you what is going on in relationship to the norm. Perception is relative, meaning it is not absolute fact. This is why such a surprise occurs as you are hearing your own voice when it has been recorded playing back – or seeing yourself on a video camera.

Let’s say you habitually lean forward, for instance as you walk. For some situational reason, you find yourself re-orienting yourself. If you happen to look in a mirror or get the feedback of a video camera, you may be surprised to find yourself more upright when you mistakenly sensed you are leaning backwards! Given whatever state you are in, you will only register a change in your orientation or attitude, (attitude in a nautical sense,) but not the fact of absolute location.

Sensory distortion is a very strange sensation. Optical illusions are visual examples of this same effect. Rather than merely being entertained, wonder how these things can happen! They exploit elements of perception that people have learned to take for granted.

Another example of this can be experienced in the auditory sense. If you make a short tape loop or CD skip of any voice, and play it over and over again….you’ll at first hear it saying familiar words. Then as your sense of emphasis drifts slightly, the words will recombine into saying something else. If you continue listening, a third and even fourth phrase will emerge. The number of phrases a person hears in variations will increase depending if you are younger.

Most people are not familiar with the idea that auditory illusions exist. So check out this research: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/deutsch_research1.php

Perception is built to sense new variations. The conclusions you come to and what you do about it after you sense these novelties is, of course, up to you. In the kinesthetic sense, weird and unfamiliar feedback encourages the reaction to put yourself back where you are habitually located, which is sometimes not to your advantage if new orientation takes less effort.

Obviously, it pays to reflect about what it means and what you are going to do abou it when you experience something new. The first knee-jerk reaction is often not particularly constructive. It’s not your only choice.

The characteristics of what is new are unusual. What is new doesn’t fit, doesn’t match; it feels weird, unclassified. It may be that the new perceptual experience could be used in some way to your advantage. Allow it to continue and describe its characteristics for a bit and see what happens…

One Size Doesn’t Fit

People ask me, “How can I convince someone to study A.T. who I think could benefit from it?”

There are a number of approaches. Make an appeal of benefits, taking into account what is important to the person themselves. The other approach is to relate how Alexander Technique has helped you personally. If they know you, they’ll be impressed.

People do so many unique and confounding things to twist their bodies into strange shapes. This is why many Alexander teachers believe that it’s useless to speculate what could be wrong. Alexander’s technique works to address the root of the issue, but the people need to be present because there is no way to generalize about specific problems. Everyone is a different sort of twisted, although there are common themes. An Alexander teacher would need more of a movie showing in real time the way someone moves, (rather than a photo,) just as a gait laboratory needs someone to be tested in the lab. Quality of motion can be analyzed, but circumstances need to be right for the equipment to work. Many Alexander teachers actually need to put hands-on in order to get this information reliably.

Because Alexander Technique is education, it’s often tricky to show what is going on to the person involved. Everyone is oriented towards a different starting point. Alexander teachers are famous for giving an order for one student to follow, and then rescinding & changing what they just said for another student. This is because everyone responds to commands in different ways. Even if an Alexander teacher can get a student to stop doing what is pulling them out of shape in ways that can be noticed – the way each person can undo that for themselves on the inside can be quite a different route. Often these differences are so subtle as to be unnoticeable to those untrained to spot them. Common experience is: if a person stops doing what they customarily do, they feel strange. Commonly, a shying away from unfamiliarity will make most people immediately pull themselves back into their habit. A tolerance or ability to welcome unfamiliarity is one of the values that an Alexander teacher sells to their students, along with the value of efficiency or effortlessness.

Another surprise to many people, (it is one of the secrets of Alexander Technique) is that kinesthetic information is relative, rather than absolute truth. This means if you change the direction you’re leaning, your perception will only register difference rather than give you the absolute fact of how much or which way you are leaning. Working in front of a mirror to offer proof of what is happening is the most common strategy. But it’s certainly possible, once someone stops doing the things that are pulling them out of shape, for a person to immediately start doing it again. Habits can be instantaneous reactions.

At first you must take the teacher’s word that your senses are off kilter. It’s a hard pill to swallow for some. It’s been a common experience of Alexander teachers that, given enough time, students do experience exactly what is making their bodies hurt or look funny. This is more a question of interpretation of raw sensory data rather than jumping to conclusions of the comparison between ‘weird’ and “normal.” Students have the power to change their reactions with education. Sometimes it is truly a structural problem that A.T. can only mitigate. But most often, the question of how it is possible that a person can improve will be able to be experienced immediately during an Alexander Technique lesson. Given readiness, persistence and motivation, anyone can make those temporary benefits part of their “norm.”

Don’t we have some anecdotal evidence that Alexander Technique makes you more confident and youthfully attractive to the opposite sex? ;o)

Teaching Attention

Observation is the perceptual ability to collect first-hand information. It’s determined by the way a person uses their mind and attention to direct their investigating. Similar to the way that the selection of a question directs the mind toward where to gain results, attention has qualities of perception that direct the way it can may be used.

The most simple way to use your observation is to just do it. But often people find they don’t notice anything; nothing “stands out.” This is why it pays to be able to shift your attention on purpose to generate new, creative ways of observing.

Sometimes, it’s not what the content are of what is being observed that needs consideration. How attention itself gets directed is important to learn about. Most people in our Western culture have honed their attention to be used as a selective searchlight, but that is only one possible means. There are probably as many ways of using attention as there are cultures. Attention can assume the investment of cultural or personal interest, as if it is being directed through a magnified or many faceted lens. Attention can skip and select using varied criteria. Its priority may also be reordered to fit the situation on the fly. Attention can inhabit different points of view through psychological projection or imagination. Attention can allow itself to be deliberately suspended; attention can coerce and leave no choice because of the rate of pace toward a goal. Attention can be diffused; attention can be used in a broad, general connective sense as if merging into a figure-ground relationship. Necessity directs attention for safety’s sake or in service of a specific goal that directs a course of action. In service of the needs of others and communication is another motive that warrants honing specialized skills of paying attention.

Whatever it is you do, most people have a routine of various selected ways of using their attention; these routines often use a only a few ‘favored’ qualities. This short list suffices, so new means are not often intentionally created. In fact, when asked about how many ways are there to pay attention…most people can’t think of more than a few.

Consider the quality of attention mentioned of a figure-ground relationship. This particular kind of attention would be appropriately used by an artist of any medium who is noting and bringing forth certain desired qualities without translating their meaning into words. This artistic mode of perception has quite different qualities than the kind of attention used by someone who must imperatively decide if a priority action is about to be immediately required for self-preservation motives quickly. However, if you were hunting or hiding for self-preservation, then skill at this same sort of attention would allow scanning the view to spot the location of what is being obscured by scenery. Having many qualities of attention is handy to know.

It is possible to train attention. Of course, in the doing of different skills & activities, some qualities of attention are developed and exercised in context, and this can be their largest value. There are also many philosophical essays on attention, but ideas profit from having a form for practice. Meditation practices feature attention training specifically, but these practices often contain a culturally defined prescription of how the ability should affect other values.

Purposeful Freedom Of Allowing and Leaving Out

Beyond selling the value of constructive effortlessness and patience, Alexander Technique trains attention without a prescription of what goals & content should be pursued. Although Alexander Technique uses specific examples in context to conduct a lesson and has the obvious purpose of freeing posture and gaining poise as a by-product, it is designed to be abstracted into all general contexts involving movement response. The ability to observe and choose appropriate qualities of attention tailored to certain purposes should be free from any specific context of how it was learned. This requires the ability to abstract.

Another Reason Why Alexander’s Work Is Notable
Alexander Technique is fascinating partly because it requires training attention, as well as an ability to describe what goes on inside that is not often brought to light. There are not many words for the proprioceptive sense of balance, location and relative effort in English, so the search for meaning and description can be poetic fun. Alexander Technique is a handy form for learning because it creates a circumstance where thinking has a specific physical expression that can be factually witnessed in how a person moves. Having a real example that can be used as a hypothesis shows off or proves how much the person was able to do as they intended. It’s also a medium for shining the intuitive sense buried underneath what is usually hidden by habit. Shaping expressions of intent is, in a sense, a performance art and a chance to tap the unknown for whatever you guessed might exist…so you can pay attention to what’s new!

For example, most people are not used to perceiving their proprioceptive sense. Many have never before heard of the word “proprioception”. This is defined as our sense of location in space, judgment of weight and the amount of effort it takes to perform an action. (This sense is even skipped over in the list of the 5 senses.)

If I ask someone to notice while they are taking a few steps what they are doing concerning the way they are moving, (even including causes, conclusion or judging in what they notice,) most people draw a complete blank. It helps to provide them with a list of words so they can come up with a ways to ask. They want to ask for the goal of obtaining any description, so they can compare results after experimentation.

In training the ability to observe oneself, it seems that adverbs are useful to jog and note how ones’ own perception works. It is best if that action is done playfully, because once the survival sense is active, it seems to cut off rather than open perception because attention is being used in service of an immediate imperative to act. In particular, four specific questions are help the ability to observe and describe for oneself. They are: quality, direction, sequence, timing, (in no particular order.)

…After 30 Years of A.T.

Those who study Alexander Technique have come to appreciate the ability to change oneself. A.T. has been a means to reveal assumptions that I never knew that I had, both mental and sensory. Alexander’s principles have taught me compassion, persistence and patience, along with the value of effortless movement.

Compassion came with knowledge about how so many assumptions were set into place underneath one’s own level of awareness. Later nuisances were learned by accident, bound up in a whole ball of wax, along with what was intentional. Compassion has come along because any person cannot help their own level & content of conditioning. A person can only start from where they are. They can only make their own choices from this moment. We all, in a sense, need to be de-briefed after arrival and need to study the operating manual. The kicker is the operating manual changes at each stage of human experience!

Does serving a more inclusive sense of purpose make a difference by surrendering egotistic agendas? Not much.It’s not as simple as making distinctions between states of being and motives that can be labeled as “egotistic” or “ethical” and then deciding to follow the wiser one. While studying A.T., the congruence of what means are followed will come forward, (despite the content of value.) You learn to “walk your talk.” Labeling is a little too simplistic to describe what goes on inside people and how you affect others and your world. As you determine your criteria and their priorities, they are still self-serving purposes. The Alexander teacher must be selfish and attend to themselves to be able to communicate effectively.

Certainly, it’s handy to know what these motives are. To proceed you would most effectively suspend these goals so you can conduct some experiments about ways to proceed that take many factors into account. Even if you believe you have a more inclusive and deliberate purpose, or even if purposes are surrendered indefinitely, any one, rigid way of doing things may not be the more appropriate or wiser course. Only time tells. Hopefully a person learns from mistakes that may or may not be under their influence to right.

Soon after I began to use it, Alexander Technique woke up a new sense of desire that seemed to ride at the core of an innate sense of my identity. My sense of desire has become quite a bit more sophisticated and observant over longer units of time. Perhaps this effect would have come with age and experience. Practicing Alexander’s work has brought together diverging parts of the self into wholeness, rather than encouraging to leave behind a “smaller” sense of self for a “higher” one. Judgment choices containing value preference have become more global and inclusive rather than myopic, focused and narrow.

What has most grown is an ability to welcome unfamiliarity. Along with learning the tool from Alexander’s work to stop my startle reflex, I’m not as scared in general because I’ve learned to prevent my fearful reactions about insecurity and worries that drove the reflex.

After studying A.T., how a person demonstrates & expresses their values may become daringly eccentric. My self-contained confidence comes across to others alternately as a careless affront, as reckless stupidity and for some, as the ultimate in daring. It’s a strange gift to learn a tool without content, a tool that allows itself to be used for any purpose. Now that I’ve got this tool of Alexander’s example to express values, I can decide what I’m doing with it.

Of course, everyone has their edge of challenge where they fall short of their ideals. Standards tend to rise along with ability to sense differences that were not previously apparent. This is why it pays to keep track of progress over time.

Those who study A.T. come to know first-hand that any course of action that isn’t flexible, also isn’t free to respond to changing circumstances – be they social or involving the self. People without the ability to be flexible tend to interpret actions that they do not understand as either “fascinating”, “magical” or “dangerous to survival.” Freedom is threatening to some – so, results may vary! Those who study and practice how thought carries into action may be grossly misunderstood by others who are not a part of the subculture of self-improvement.

Alexander Technique is revolutionary. It gets people to think for themselves. Just as study A.T. causes dropping unnecessary mannerisms of movement, it also leads a person to ask themselves, “Why do this?”  People say Alexander Technique disappears ego, but that wasn’t my experience. Without much attachment to begin with, AT actually helped me reclaim a sense of original vision, something that every two year old has.

For me, Alexander Technique has been a means to awaken desire – along with patience and compassion. It’s been a way to shine up intuition. As my abilities have sharpened to perceive and describe crucial differences, the content of my intent has expanded. I get more ideas, and they are better ideas based on observations of what I can notice and describe. After thirty years, there are still insights that change everything for me, reverberating back into my history. It matters less what is done, and more how the doing is accomplished. The process becomes more important than the goal – perhaps the goal is never gained.

…And yes, that sense of discovery is still there, every time I free myself.

Enthusiastic Prostelitizing

I’m not sure if older Alexander teachers remember how Alexander’s work used to be taught with an attitude of paradoxical belittlement. The famously confounding British humor delivered completely arrogant intimidation and humiliation, along with stupefying physical freedom. All the while the Alexander teacher is telling the student, “dare to be wrong.” That was quite a challenge for the practice of refusing to react!

One of the marks of Alexander Technique is that is allows a person to refuse to react to any stimulus – even a strong one. Recently I happened to stumble on a youtube video of a beginning Alexander Technique trainee. He noticed that practicing Alexander Technique made him happy, even despite his grumpy moods to the contrary. Then since Alexander lessons made him feel so confident, he figured he should be a “moral” leader! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxsDUXbgkvY

Differing from the hope of enthusiastic learners who find Alexander lessons making them happier, merely learning A.T. will not “right” the values of the world. It will only make people express their values easier and more completely. Beyond selling the values of effortlessness, freedom, reason and patience, there are no further morals inherent in Alexander’s work.

As a person learns the ability to choose from any given priority of intents, these can now come from whatever mixture of criteria and values a person desires to express. This is power, and it can be a big step up into acting responsibly.

However, the content and priorities of these values (even if cultural) are still a deciding factor that are your responsibility. In this way, A.T. can be compared to the sword practice of the ancient Japanese feudal Samurai class. The Samurai efficiently carried out definite cultural values with violent ends and exquisite, elegant means.

Given patience, Alexander Technique becomes a practical means to carry out intent and to unify thought into action. The action is movement, but the ramifications reverberate all though one’s power to make decisions in general.

Why a person wants to improve their life or if they want to find out how far they can improve indefinitely  – these motives can come from any value system. Values are often determined by them or any culture to which they belong. There is no moral stricture present in Alexander’s work. AT can be applied to any goal – even ego-driven goals. After learning from Alexander’s example, these values can now run as a course of direction requiring course corrections now and then, rather than a dictate of desperate, coercive necessity.

Not Merely Sit-Up-Straight School

One way to start teaching about the Alexandrian ideals of “use” is to give people an appreciation of it. I got a suggestion to have people watch each other move and see if they can describe each other’s posture. Compare “good” to “bad” use. Maybe people can learn to spot and admire “good” use, for instance in favorite sports players and young children.

However, there is the problem with this approach. Most people who are unschooled in Alexander Technique will miss the obvious indicators that we Alexandrians have learned to spot at first. How would someone actually learn these indicators of beautiful, effortless motion?

How do you give people who have never thought about this before any idea of WHY the features an Alexander teachers point out are notable ones? At first, they don’t see anything that stands out for them when they look. They can’t understand at all why you’re making a big deal out of it. Certainly most people know that kids move like kids; when they grow up and their bones grow into place, then they look like adults. In the middle they look like truculent teens. So what?

If you show them the differences between Alexandrian ideals of “good” and “bad” use, they will probably see the difference eventually. So what? Will being able to spot those differences be useful to them in improving their own coordination?  Probably these students will assume they now have a new standard to strive for in their old same ways of over-doing. I would say that the Alexander teacher has failed to give their students much of anything useful, other than a reason why they should come back for more lessons.

The challenge as an Alexander teacher is to figure out how to give your pupils a clue how to sense improved use while being on the inside of themselves, without being able to attribute the change to the teacher’s “magic” hands.

The problem as I see it comes from, traditionally, that Alexander Technique has been taught using British standards of culturally implied opposites. Alexander teachers have been trying to teach paradoxes by pointing at what is not there. It would help if A.T. teachers thought more often about how prevailing cultural assumptions are a factor in their teaching skills.

Of course, there are philosophical reasons for using this approach. As a person learns how to prevent the routines that constitute their misuse, the “good” use that is present underneath all those habits and compensations will emerge as if by itself. This mark of “do-less-ness” should be a prominent experience of any Alexander Technique lesson.

Adding to the teacher’s bag of tricks about how to communicate what you, as an A.T. teacher, have to offer is a tremendous advantage. If all you can do as a teacher is to merely point to what is not there, and your students can’t see it in the first place – well – you could use more avenues for communication.

Most people in a state of misuse will just repeat themselves, over and over, when what they are doing does not work. Many Americans have a bad reputation because when they travel abroad and find out the person does not speak English who they want to communicate to, Americans merely talk louder as if the person must be deaf. In the Alexander Technique field, we have a word for this which is “End-gaining.” All mistaken reactions are a form of end-gaining.

However, I think inadvertently, end-gaining is what many A.T. teachers are guilty of doing by not doing enough creative thinking for the benefit of their students about how they can be learning faster and easier. When you’re the teacher, why only mimic the way you have been taught when you teach?

Well, one good reason would be preservation of the purity of what is Alexander’s work. There is certainly enough about Alexander’s Technique that deserves to be preserved. As he stated, F.M. Alexander meant for his line of work to be constantly improved.

Learning time is certainly a feature that could use improvement. The way A.T. has been traditionally taught, pupils are just supposed to get it from a teacher pointing at what they want a pupil to do and indicating…see that? The answer for the pupil might be, “No, I don’t see that. See what?” Then the teacher works with them again. Pointing at their improved use the teacher again asks, “Get this?” The student says “Get what?”

Part of the reason Alexander teachers have so much trouble teaching is that what they have to offer is …NOTHING!!! They are teaching a learning process that results in a lack of effort. The public doesn’t get that this “Nothing” is what is valuable. People want to “DO SOMETHING” to get whatever the benefits are they have been told is possible to get by learning Alexander Technique.

It would be an advantage to work with this assumption rather than against it. Perhaps if a teacher could spell out the steps that contain what TO DO in the positive that actually works for people to learn to sense these things for themselves – then they would learn faster?

How to design these experiments?  That’s where your creative thinking ability comes into play. You need to make it safe to conduct the experiment, so when unpredictable things happen it won’t have a destructive effect. You need to encourage people to laugh, because people are more willing to take on challenges and feel daring & courageous when they are amused and curious. Both teacher and student need to establish a priority of criteria to evaluate their success. Then they can know if their experiments worked or not.

If these experiments do work to improve your student’s use, (certainly a student being able to sense subtle differences in their own use would be a benefit,) the teacher would continue using that approach. If pupils misunderstand the teacher, that strategy would be dropped. More brainstorming for discovering other means to communicate what the teacher has to offer would be in order.

There is no use for blaming pupils for not understanding the teacher. This is the frustration from their teachers that many traditionally trained AT teachers had to endure forty years ago.

So – now we have it defined: the obstacle is that the public will go after their new appreciation of “good” use in the same old ways. How can we as teachers really update these old ways of approaching new means? As teachers we do not want “Good” use to be just a different carrot that learners will lead themselves astray with. How do we teachers change that?

Granted that the Alexander community finds that people nowadays are often motivated to start learning Alexander lessons to address back problems. But does the A.T. community want Alexander Technique to be popularly misunderstood merely as “Sit Up Straight School”?

Can you think of three different and new ways to address this obstacle in communicating Alexander’s discoveries and principles? Can you think of one right now? Anyone can problem solve this challenge. You don’t have to be an Alexander Technique teacher.

One way that I’ve used to help people understand what their pattern of use is seems to work particularly well in a group of actors, but will work with any group. Humor and goofiness is a useful feature of it.

“Type-casting” Have a person who is “it” to walk their “normal” walk in front of the class. Then have the group watch to absorb those qualities. Then ask for multiple volunteers to exaggerate the mannerisms of that walk of the person who is “it” – taken to extremes. It’s quite fun to do and helps people learn what they are doing with their own mannerisms of movement while walking. Interesting because the original mannerisms of the person who is attempting to exaggerate also comes through. Having multiple people do this brings this contrast to light as a feature. People will notice the “on purpose” exaggeration…and there will also be the innate sets of Alexandrian Use underneath what is being purposefully acted out. The more people who volunteer as the exaggerators, the most interesting this gets to watch. This also works great with teens or kids as an A.T. teaching activity – and it’s pretty fun as an ice-breaker that helps explore the subject of self-observation.

Wright or Rong?

In schools these days, kids are being graded depending on if they are wrong or right. Many times this has to do with how well they read the mind of the teacher – not if they responded to the question. In my era of education, it was O.K. to misunderstand the question – it was the response that mattered, not the content of the response. Now students get graded on whether they understood the question itself!

Guess that it’s an advantage to understand the intent of the questioner. Then your boss doesn’t get mad because they told you to do something inarticulately. But where is the creative misunderstanding that generates new solutions?

How can adults imagine they are preparing kids for the future by not allowing creative responses that often come from misunderstanding the nature of the question?

In practicing Alexander Technique, we deliberately make a point of putting aside sorting for wrong and right. This is because a person can only sort for wrong or right based on what they know. Sometimes we call that intention to avoid “right & wrong” as a deliberate act or prevention or suspension. If we do not stop automatic urges to conform and “do the right thing,” then nothing new has a chance to happen.

In using and learning Alexander Technique, exploring and noting what is new that might happen is the point. We want to put off coming to a conclusion before we’ve gotten more information. How much information is enough? Enough to use in some way. What we’re after is to have some new experiences so there are many interesting pieces of perceptual information availble to interpret with. We note the ones that don’t fit our previous experiences more carefully than what is expected. We like to think about what has happened that was unexpected. We would come to conclusions about the new information as a separate action from experimenting.

Generally, the idea is that, so you can have more freedom, you must move. The directions you can move in are somewhere different from the other direction your habit wants to take you when you curl up, twist, collapse or tighten. Sometimes you find that this “somewhere different” is also a habit – so you choose a different response or motion. We’ve learned from Alexander Technique that more room to move is created if the motion starts headfirst – so you can experiment with that.

Given the pervasive quality of sensory distortion that getting used to states of being gives us, we know that a person registers kinetic changes rather than a state of being. This means that as you improve your freedom of motion, you’ll feel a “catch” where you are stopping the motion. So if you feel yourself moving the most from your ribs, then it is probably your ribs that are the most tight and set by your habits. As you undo the habit, something must move – so include whatever has jumped out at you that seems to be stuck with your intention to move again. Eventually you’ll be able to do this more often for yourself with only a thought and a very subtle opening out in response to your intention.

Everyone sets themselves into their habits a little differently – but, as you noticed, there are common themes of misuse. Get familar with your “themes of misuse.” Practice forgiveness. Appreciate the reasons you know about for doing what you do. Acknowledge that in some way, this misuse of yours must have answered a need in the past. It’s still appropriate at some times, nothing is “bad”. Over time a habit can “go bad because repeating anything can swing to extremes. Things get “bad” if you stay stuck in them. To the extent that you can come “unstuck,” then you will not suffer any possibly extreme, painful effects. Of course, as you can move easier in general, then you will be better off over time. Of course, we get better at whatever we practice. So practice what you want to do. Minimize and leave behind what you don’t want.

Try laying down on your back with your knees up on something comfortable and talk yourself through your experiments about freeing motion and see what happens. If you then notice another part of yourself getting stiff – see if you can stop that by including the stiff part of yourself into your slow motion experiments.

Once you start re-distributing your dynamic capacity for movement, the tendency is to try to “keep” yourself in that “better” position. You can hurt yourself doing that, so it’s better to go back into your habit and then move out of it again, doing what you did before… and describe what happens. Then rest before you try it again.

Try taking yourself into an action with that new way of moving as a beginning to start the movement. Think of this new way of unfolding as a way to “launch yourself” into motion. You can tell what happened by the quality of the motion – the sound of your voice – how heavy your feet hit the floor, etc.

So – the next time you’re experimenting like this – ask yourself, “what happened before I noticed this?” …and, “what did I do just before that?” and keep asking the questions…as far back as your awareness was awake enough to sense or remember. Your memory will get better – and, since habits are usually so repetitive, you’ll be able to trace your attention back to what you did, further and further.

The ability to sustain your perceptive attention is key. Leave out ‘trying’ to ‘make’ yourself do something you already have in mind. When you consider it, you don’t really know what will happen as you move toward freedom. You don’t know how far you’ll go, you don’t know what the effects might be. You don’t know what your experimenting is going to tell you – it may be something you’ve never noticed before.You merely can ask questions – move in a new direction – with easy qualities, with new timing, perhaps in new sequences, and then find out what happened and describe it to yourself.

Understanding Unfamiliarity By Filling In the Blanks

On the Alexander Google list server group, it turns out that I’ve gotten a reputation for being able to explain things that others find difficult. So I thought that I would explain how I can read something that has lots of confusing or unfamiliar words in it and still get something out of what is being said.

My ability to read came at a late age – seven. My parents prevented me from learning to read early because they guessed that my ability to imagine would not have the time to form and express itself if I learned to read too early. This probably was true – at least in my case. The effect as an adult was that I am still able to use words to explain concepts that are not completely connected to language until I consciously make the connection. Images and feelings I have are able to be expressed in other ways besides words.

So, predictably enough, as soon as I learned to read at seven, I was overly eager to try it out on anything and everything that could be read. I could not get enough of reading. At seven I took it upon myself to be regular fan of Ann Landers, an advice columnist who was published on the same page as the comics. I was also reading the many Tarzan novels, by Edgar Rice Boroughs that were in my brother’s room.

There were many words in these books that I did not understand and had never heard anyone use in speech. So I thought quite a bit about what they probably meant as I skipped over them. I looked at how these mystery words functioned in the sentence and attempted to judge their relative importance. If they were qualifying words, well, that was more important than an adverb or a descriptive word of what was happening in a sequence when I could understand some of the other words. I came to realize and invent interesting ways to find out what a word meant besides just asking someone else or looking it up in the dictionary.

For instance, if the word seemed to be a descriptive word, I tried these words out in normal conversation and looked at how grown up people reacted.

Because of this, when I encounter reading that I’d like to do (such as a paper on the Polyvagal theory,) I fall back on using my old tricks. In practice, one of my actual strategies would be that I would mentally leave a “blank” in the spaces where I’d run into a word(s) that had an unknown meaning. Then once I read the sentence, I’d guess what similar or vague words that I actually knew would suffice to belong in the blank spots. Sometimes I would diagram the sentence to distill it down to its most simplistic forms so I could understand what function the words might have to the meaning.

This strategy works really well when you’re doing something like reading F.M. Alexander’s books. I’ll let Catherine Kettrick, who has a degree in linguistics and is also an Alexander Technique teacher from an Alexander school called the Performance School in Seattle, WA, give an example from her website “study guide” section at www.performanceshool.org

To read Alexander’s long sentences with understanding, you have to be willing to go a bit slowly, figure out the subject and verb, see the different clauses and figure out their subjects and verbs, and hold them all in relation to one another til you get to the end of the sentence. To do this, it is helpful to answer the question posed by each clause as you go along. For example, here is the first sentence from the second chapter of The Use of the Self, “Use and Functioning in Relation to Reaction:” “The reader who reviews the experiences that I have tried to set down in the previous chapter will notice that at a certain point in my investigation I came to realize that my reaction to a particular stimulus was constantly the opposite of that which I desired, and that in my search for the cause of this, I discovered that my sensory appreciation (feeling) of the use of my mechanism was so untrustworthy that it led me to react by means of a use of myself which felt right, but was, in fact, too often wrong for my purpose” (p. 39).

Taking this sentence apart we find “The reader (subject) will notice” (verb). What reader you ask? “The reader who reviews the experiences…” What experiences? “…that I have tried to set down in the previous chapter…” So: “The reader who reviews the experiences that I have tried to set down in the previous chapter will notice…” What? “…that at a certain point in my investigation I came to realize…” Realize what? “…that my reaction to a particular stimulus was constantly the opposite of that which I desired…” Here is the end of the first major thought grouping in this paragraph. The “and” is used to mark the division between the two major thoughts in the paragraph. “…and that in my search for the cause of this, I discovered… ” Discovered what? (Here comes the second major thought) “…that my sensory appreciation (feeling) of the use of my mechanisms was so untrustworthy that it led me…” Led me where? “… to react by means of a use of myself which felt right, but…” (Pay attention– “But” signals a contrast–) “…but was, in fact, too often wrong for my purpose.”

Then again, if you don’t really understand a subject that you want to know more about, you can probably search the web and find someone else who will explain it to you in a way that you can understand. If you still don’t understand it, you can probably find a tutorial about it on YouTube.

From Wikipedia.org discussion pages…

I’ve been maintaining the Wikipedia.org  website featuring Alexander Technique for some years now. Right now, it’s got a pretty interesting and rather encyclopedic tone. Anyone may edit Wikipedia, so people discuss what is on there on what is known as the “talk page.” What follows is some of the more recent discussion from that page, with my comment included below.

== Summary not explained == the line as well as improve other conditions related to overcompensation appears in the summary at the top, but nowhere else is overcompensation referred to or explained. —Preceding [[Wikipedia:Signatures|unsigned]] comment added by [[User:Stillflame|Stillflame]] ([[User talk:Stillflame|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/Stillflame|contribs]]) 16:57, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

:Good point. I’ve changed the use of this jargon term to the more general “physical habits” to make it more understandable.–[[User:Vannin|Vannin]] ([[User talk:Vannin|talk]]) 16:04, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps the term “compensatory movement strategies for avoiding pain” should be substituted instead of your more general term, Vannin? It means when a person designs a work-around strategy of how to go about moving to accomplish their goals in order to avoid pain in the moment or to avoid further anticipated cumulative pain.

Also Vannin asked: “Also, please explain why movement to demonstrate its principles” differs from exercise.”

The reason for not using the word “exercise” is merely that using the word does not work to bring about in their student’s response what Alexander teachers are teaching. It creates misconceptions for their students that later need to be cleared up.

Exercises are done to be repeated at will with certain intended goals. The problem is that repetition sets up a new habit, which is against the intent of A.T. The challenge is to subtract current ongoing habits, not to put a new habit into place.

What is recommended is exploring quality, direction, sequence and timing of movement in the moment, rather than thinking of what you are doing as an exercise. So even though you may be paradoxically following a procedure to invoke discovery, it doesn’t work to anticipate results before they occur.

Let me know if that sounds like “jargon” OK?

What to Do If You Get That Twang of Pain

It’s a pretty common thing as people get older to feel aches and pains. What isn’t very common is to know what it means when unexpected things seem to be going wrong with your muscles.

When an injury is about to happen, your body will send you a very handy,  immediate warning that you are about to hurt yourself. This warning is a pull a strain or the start of a cramp, or a sudden feeling of awkwardness or grinding in your body. If you notice this message and you can respond to it by immediately stopping whatever you were doing, you will avoid hurting yourself worse.

Many people believe that these twanging messages mean that the pain has already happened and the injury is already a done deal, so they ignore it. If one of these things happens to you, it will pay off big to act immediately.

For instance, if you are carrying something, and you feel a twang of pain, do not continue carrying that thing! Put it down right then without taking another step. Of course, if you are carrying it with someone else you would tell them that you need to pay attention to the twang that just happened. If it’s a situation where you’re about to fall from losing your balance or it is your ankle that is starting to twist, just fold that knee and sit down on the ground – a skinned knee or bruises heal much faster than a sprain.

It turns out that the bulk of muscle damage of our bodies occurs just after this twang of warning. This twanging really means that something is about to go wrong – it hasn’t yet, for the most part. If you stop right then and lay or sit down to allow yourself to be free of the weight or whatever was going on when the twang occured, whatever injury that was about to happen will be significantly minimized. Taking a moment to rest immediately will pay off. You may find that there is a little bit of injury present once you take the time to check out what has happened to you. If you return to the activity, that injury may get worse. So it’s wise to take a break and do something else for awhile.

Bigger and very real injuries happen by NOT listening and acting immediately to stop whatever you were doing if a painful twang of warning signals to you that something is going wrong about how you’re using your body.

So now that you know that this twang of pain is a warning that can be helpful – the only trick is to learn to make a joke of it so your friends don’t think you’re being wimpy! Taking care of your body to help it last as long as possible is wisdom in action.

Teaching Kids Abstract Thinking

Most kids are familiar with how things they want to do a certain way will sometimes happen as if by magic. But it can be very tricky for them to figure out how to duplicate what they want to happen again.

To rouse interest when presenting Alexander Technique principles to kids, using any action a kid is interested in will make learning fun. Use balancing or cumulative skills (- such as learning to throw a ball, hit a ball with a bat, or riding a bike) for illustrating F.M. Alexander’s principles.

Kids are learning machines anyway, so they are very fun to work with – but keep lessons short; perhaps ten to fifteen minutes. Showing them some tips about how to experiment so their experimenting goes faster and is more effective will be very useful to them.

As you teach, bear in mind that kids are not able to abstract principles into different situations, unless they are specifically taught how to do so in those situations. Kids are naturally literal thinkers. Helping kids become lateral (sideways creative) thinkers is a challenge. It’s up to the teacher to carry the thread of meaning and relationship from many specifically different activities. Draw the similarities between them for the kids.

Guess there are a quite a few grownups who could use this approach as well!

Also find that for kids a little older, say beyond 6 years old, it’s helpful to be using stories in familiar movies and fairy tales to illustrate teaching points. For instance, in the Fantasia Disney movie about Mickey Mouse who figures out how to do the magic spell with the brooms. The spell really gets out of control when Mickey doesn’t know how to undo it. This story can help kids understand the nature of training themselves to do a repeated habitual order that gets out of control when they can’t cancel it. In Alexander Technique, we call this distorted sensory appreciation, (otherwise known as debauchery.)

This helps teach the secret that if you have already taught yourself how to do something, it will take a little extra skill and time to unteach the old thing you already know. Habits are tricky and “relative” – meaning habits likely to tell you information about where you are and what you are doing with your body that isn’t really true!

Once taught a four year old about how much extra energy is required to compensate for balance and how he can adapt to anything by spinning him on an office chair. How dizzy it feels to stop spinning is a great situation to illustrate a number of points. How come grownups get so stiff thinking they are going to fall down when they’re not really falling?

I like to encourage kids to avoid becoming stiff like adults are, and to regard their natural flexibility as something valuable. Along this idea, it’s handy to ask such questions like “How do adults get stiff when they start out as kids, who are so flexible?” Of course, part of the answer is that grownups expect to be right, and kids expect to be wrong – so kids are more willing to experiment than most grownups. Also great to encourage kids to model the grownups around them who have better natural good use, so the kid doesn’t pick up postural sets from the grownups that they admire that are too extreme.

Most of the challenges for many kids that age, depending on the kid, is fear; they like predictability rather than facing the unknown. Doing what you are scared to do or what’s really new feels sometimes really weird, but exciting. So giving fun experiences that outline which sort of experimenting has the feelings of a fun kind of weird. Most important to illustrate is how can a kid make it safe to try something risky while they’re experimenting?
When they have just accidentally done a new thing, sometimes I’ll ask kids questions such as: how many times do you need to do that the way you wanted before you can do it anytime you want? That teaches them patience and persistence, if they know that they need to do something four or five times before they know it – or maybe it takes them six times before it doesn’t feel so strange. Also teach them incubation learning – to stop for a moment when they do something that impresses them so it can “sink in.”

A fun concept to play with is that muscles are similar to springs in that muscles return to their natural shape when you take the pressure off of them.  For this experiment, it’s handy to have a huge exercise ball, a trampoline or a pogo-springs stick.

Love to hear more suggestions about how to teach Alexander Technique concepts to kids. Have any?

Why Did I Do That?

Do people make deliberate choices for negative reasons?

I used to imagine they do. I used to think I did. But as I have come to be able to watch myself in action making decisions and as I have come to watch my students deal with decisions they have made and habits they have put in place, I have changed my mind and no longer assume this is the case. People make choices for positive reasons.

I have come to believe that everyone I’ve ever known chooses an action (or lack of it) because of its positive aspects, not the negative ones.

Now what about those stupid choices?

Some bad ideas are selected because people couldn’t have known what the effect of their actions are over time, or how serious the effects of their actions would be once added up cumulatively. This is a problem addressed by learning one of the secrets of Alexander Technique – once learned, habits commonly disappear from self-perception.

Perhaps the choice doesn’t take crucial things into account that should have been obvious to someone with more experience. Thus the old adage; “Hindsight is 20/20.” These choices show a lack of foresight and information. Sometimes, the ordering of priorities satisfied by the choice are hidden from the person who is choosing, so a little soul-searching would help future choices. Alexander Technique helps remind people to remember to determine their priorities and criteria by becoming more aware of their own multiple priorities and assumptions of their own criteria for success. Determining and knowing one’s goals is crucial to practicing A.T. because of the need to temporarily suspend these goals so experimenting can bring in new information. If these goals are hidden from the person, they will emerge during experimentation.

It is even more common that a person feels as if they “must” make the choice for various justified points or to answer an imperative need. They may be aware that some of the effects of that choice may become negative at some time in the future. They may figure they know what the cost of the choice is, and believe they accept the cost in trade for the benefit. However, as they get closer to the cost, the benefit suddenly pales. So thinking ahead about mitigating time of arrival issues would be wise in these situations.

Related to this circumstance, Alexander Technique offers the ability to pause before choosing a habit or manner of thinking. In this moment of reflection, another choice is possible. This ability to pause and reflect how you are going to do something (called Inhibition in A.T.) allows you to also decide not to do what you realize that you do not want to do.

Sometimes people are aware of the negative aspects of a choice, but must choose between lesser evils. Perhaps they decide the costs are “worth it,” (possibly because sometimes the costs are deferred until “later,” or may not happen at all.) After learning Alexander Technique, a person realizes how often what they do repetitively has a powerful cumulative effect. They also realize that in many cases, they do have other choices. With this information, perhaps they might be encouraged to look elsewhere for more choices before making a choice that cuts off other options.

How much do people really have a choice? In many cases, most adults are a product of their conditioning – their own habits, their environment and their cultural and parental training. As such, it is seldom that people really do have a choice. Alexander Technique gives first-hand experience of how much trouble it is to change and how significant prevention can be, so this encourages compassion for others and patience with oneself.

How often do people examine or realize their options? Choices people automatically make may have negative consequences over time or immediate risks at the time of choosing, but many feel it is the only thing they can do.

Alexander Technique recommends thinking ahead a bit about the effects of choices. It has some wisdom to offer concerning the cumulative effects of what you are going to allow yourself to repeat.

One of the secrets of A.T. is that a circumstance of pure repetition encourages the training a new habit. This habit may be handy and useful – or it may become a nuisance if it goes on too long or becomes too extreme. Of course, a person gets better at whatever they allow themselves to practice – so it pays off in many ways to notice what you are allowing yourself to repeat.

Reflexes & Appropriateness

Reflexes are very handy. They are ready-made programs designed to deal with the recognition of the “need” for them. Reflexes are the ability to train skills, in essence, when chained together. The brain is superb at recognizing, but when the recognition comes, you can fire off these chains of skills and get amazing skills to happen.

The brain is superb at recognition. In fact, it’s tricky to suspend this recognition “talent” when I am facing something completely unique. I have to compensate for the time of arrival of what is new because my brain wants it to be, perform or do something I already know – or something “like” what I already know. The more I know, the more there is a need for getting these things I know out of the way so I can respond instead of react to unique circumstances.

Knowing this makes me understand how someone could say “is any
(psychological) reflex useful?”

Uniqueness is sort of delicate, unnoticable, fragile and elusive – because of those characteristics, a really new experience or new information is easy to miss. I believe that insight occurs when you note a new experience and begin to think about what that could mean for you.

Reflexes will go off conditioned by previous experience. If the situation
externally is similar to what you have experienced it before, you will succeed. There is always the possibility of a cross-over; that a skill acquired in one area will possibly apply to another new area.

If not, you’re gambling on that your previous experience will hopefully
apply. If the situation is definitely not applicable to your habitual reflex – you’ll fail, or not do so well.

So to my thinking, the problem isn’t the reaction – it’s the skill of
determining appropriateness and the possible need for experimentation. These determinations are based on sharpness of perception – Think that’s why we hold up proprioception as a important concept. Proprioception is shaped by perception that is becoming adapted to repetitious stimuli. It’s our responsibility to “refresh” our proprioception.

Some Good Questions

I love “good” questions that refresh my thinking, such as:

What timing? What direction does it go? What qualities does it have? What does sequence have to do with it?

What fits? What matches? What contrasts might reveal distinctions? What do the distinctions do, how do they function?

What functions are going on and how can I describe them? What are the factors? What actions are a priority in sequence?  What operates this way and why does it work like that? What point, what need does this function fulfill? How will the meaning I assign affect certain actions and outcomes? What does this action result in over time?
…All this and more questions make learning richly fascinating.

Hands-On, A.T. Style Described

“AT talk seems to not mention what happens when teachers use their hands on people but talks a lot about changing thinking by using thinking. What happens to the teacher and the pupil with the hand contact?”

The answer is – many things. Putting hands-on is a performance art of demonstrated, factual intention being carried into the action of motion on the part of both the teacher and student. The teacher job is using their own ability to actualize Alexander’s principles on themselves as they put their hands on the student.

What actually happens during hands-on are – many things. Most AT teachers continue to originate many, many strategies that work with different people to get their habits out of the way. If one way doesn’t work, they try another. So that is why the so many different styles of how to teach A.T. – and they all work because the principles are principles.

Generally, the greater a teacher’s personal understanding of their own ability to direct their own coordination using AT, the more effective the quality of direction that will come through their hands to their student.

You can prove this the next time you have an Alexander lesson – invite someone else along if you have private lessons. Have that person, not the teacher, put hands-on you like the teacher does and compare and describe the qualities of how it feels. You’ll immediately feel the difference; there will be pulling, heaviness – much physical confusion.

This is why it takes so long to learn to put hands-on with the objective of teaching AT – because a teacher must “walk their talk…” or in a sense, “walk their thought.” A teacher’s objective is to suspend their own ideas about what “should” be done with this student out of the way. This allows the direction to come through their hands, and allows the student to respond in any way they choose. It works much in the same way that an artist suspends “over-control” of their hands in order to allow the image they are looking at to come through their hands into a drawing or painting.

I’m not sure my description above would be appropriate to everyone who teaches A.T. but this is how I experience it myself. I know it does have at least some common agreement; but I’m sure not everyone will agree with my description because everyone comes from a unique micro-culture of implied and expressed meaning.

Why this works is a mystery. Please indulge me and allow me to speculate. Of course, this speculation is from my own experience as a teacher.

I do know that AT teachers often use their hands as merely a backstop so their student can sense the moment they pull themselves out of shape during a movement. Directing timing has much to do with the coaching that goes along with this use of the hands-on.

Actual directing that works from hand-contact: Perhaps the kind that actually making some sort of electrical contact with the students’ body, in a sense, substituting the thought messages as if the student could send lengthening thoughts on their own. That’s just my speculation of course.

Perhaps also hands-on has a sense of empathic ability or sympathy – the kind that encourages people to mirror body language. Just being around someone with much better use than you will encourage you to feel lighter.

Anyway – most AT teachers will not do this speculating, because it’s not very professional and highly subjective to each person who experiences it’s workings.  Most AT teachers never even ask the question “how.”  They are only concerned with that hands-on directing for students does work – to the extent the student’s ability to suspend their habits are able to take a break for a moment. The question of “how” is sort of a moot point, once you can do it as a teacher. You can demonstrate it, so that is “how.”

When you think about it – how does coaching or any teaching process work? Most people arrive at their technique empirically – when they do something that works, they keep doing it. When they try something that doesn’t work, they do something else.

Personal Challenges

“how do people respond when confronted with challenges that are personally presented?”

When you think about it, no matter how much experience you have, there is always the next moment when you might discover something new, right?

The characteristics of discovery is partly what AT is about. How to recognize a discovery when it does emerge.

Mostly people are defensive when challenged. This happens for many reasons; because most people assume a challenge means a contest determining a winner and loser. If they can courageously rise to the occasion and possibly realize that defensiveness either isn’t necessary or is actively not particularly fun or creative, things get interesting. Let’s say the nature of the challenge is you ask people to change their manner of speaking, ( for instance.) Most cannot do that for very long. They will see it as a personal affront to be challenged in this manner because they can’t do it or sustain it. Most adults are not used to being made into a beginner. They had to accept when young, and thus they react as if threatened – many attempts to demote people into beginners is regarded as a sort of “hazing.”

Once people become willing to challenge themselves, I noticed that people seem to have a “favored” way of directing their attention – and also a “favored” way of evaluating results. It is always fascinating to describe these and compare them to other possible styles and preferences.

Usually people do not know that there are other styles and ways of evaluating, so this process is quite eye-opening for them (and fascinating to me.) For example of various favored computations used in making decisions or evaluating results:

• Some people “add up” results, searching for similarity or grouping what they determine belongs together by their own somewhat idiosyncratic associations.
• Some people will “match” looking for a exact “fit,” of course, casting aside things that they assume do not fit. Some people “contrast to reveal differences” which is a more appropriate strategy for tapping the unknown.

• Some “subtract” to “distill the essence” which implies there is already a criteria and a priority in place.

You could generally think of these points as being tied to the various means of critical thinking. Critical in the sense of being able to make critical or operative distinctions, rather than critical in the sense of passing judgment or assuming a position or opinion that then must be justified or gain agreement.

This process is related to AT because objective description of the sensibility of the instrument and how you are using it will, obviously, direct the possible results. As teachers, we are asking students to abstract the specific examples we give them in order to apply them to other situations and circumstances.

OK – what do you think about this?

Questions Answered from answerbag

Is there any evidence–scientific, not anecdotal–that the Alexander Technique works for people experiencing back pain?

Check out some of the references on Wikipedia.org in the Alexander Technique article there. See also the Society of Alexander Technique Teachers website, where this research is collected that is being done or has been done. http://www.stat.org.uk/pages/research.htm
The short answer is not enough research exists. At this point, there are related studies which supports its effectiveness for back pain issues. A.T. is commonly applied for that purpose, (among others,) in the UK. The skills of describing the qualities and functions of bodily movement that Alexander teachers possess are corroborated in gait research lab measurements. If someone who is considering A.T. for back pain was dismayed by the lack of its proof, perhaps taking their prospective teacher to a gait research lab would convince.

Alexander Technique specializes in learning to undo overcompensation. It addresses how people tend to make up habits to adapt to repeating circumstances, which so commonly lack foresight of cumulative effects. When compared to surgery or other “solutions” offered by the traditional medical community, a course of twenty to forty lessons is a bargain. However, it does take an educational commitment; it won’t work if you don’t practice it.

The medical community tends to describe and name back problems without knowing their cause. In some cases, A.T. has successfully reversed back problems – the problems that are due to what A.T. teachers term “misuse” of the body. It is possible to get the benefits of A.T. even though your bones are structurally malformed, because A.T. principles work no matter what the present situation is. In deformities, A.T. principles may only mitigate issues, but these slight improvements can mean significant differences to the student.

I have personally just witnessed an Alexander teacher’s x-ray who had to have the last vertebrae of his tail bone removed due to it being crushed in a car accident. The anticipated collapse of the vertebrae above it has not occurred, and inevitably with it, serious pain and back problems have also not happened. His doctors do not want to hear why this is the case, which the victim believes is due to his practice of Alexander Technique. This is yet another anecdotal evidence in support of the effectiveness of A.T. that will not be recorded. I’d be happy to put you in touch with this person, and you may see his x-ray and hear his story.

Outward Manner of Moving Affects Internal Change

Yesterday, I got to be a substitute teacher for a class of singers who were part of a workshop that included Alexander Technique. In common with most A.T. teachers, I agree that to be able to use A.T. principles for oneself after only a few lessons is very, very unusual. It usually takes at least ten private lessons to gain an appreciation, and most commonly, up to forty private lessons to be able to use the discipline confidently. This is because of the tricky nature of so many of our habits. My challenge was to present Alexander Technique in an hour and a half!

Got the idea of using the action of nodding “Yes” as an activity to illustrate what the motion of “Forward” is in the Alexander Technique lexicon of – “Forward and Up.”  Saw an additional value in using this action partly because of a study I read about in a book called “The Tipping Point.” In this book, Gladwell surmised that receptivity to an idea (even one at odds with the personal interests of the subject) is more often accepted if someone is told to act and move as if they do agree. I saw this study as proof that external mannerisms connect with internal thought processes, whether people are aware of it or not. It seems to verify that change works from the outside in, as well as from the inside out.

It also made sense to me that doing this head nodding was a useful activity to illustrate how the almost unnoticed “accident” happening in nearly everyone almost of a very slight compensation for balance could act as a way of effortlessly launching any more overt motion or intention. I used the example of how a car’s clutch is used to start the car moving, noting how slipping the clutch will wear out the mechanisms prematurely.

Wouldn’t want to make it difficult for the resident A.T. teacher, having to deal with all this head waggling I had the class doing! However, the experiment seemed to be mostly a success, undoubtedly because it was a very intelligent group who seemed to be quite excellent at paying attention. From the comments they made, it seemed many of them had the ability to abstract A.T. principles from specific examples. They seemed to realize that we were using an overt motion as a beginning training-wheel; as children are first learning to write are taught with large motions of fat chalk before they are expected to gain the digital control of using smaller writing instruments.

One woman in particular had a very impressive and disciplined concentration of thinking ability that I could see would allow her to continue to rapidly grasp A.T. strategies. (I hope she can continue with A.T. study.) She had been instructed, along with the group, that during this “head nodding” motion, she was to watch for the tendency of her body to “come loose” as her head rounded the top of the arc of the apex of a “tipping” point of balance. As she experimented with my help with hands-on, she naturally chunked down the nodding movement of her head into ratchet-like increments, extending the mechanical metaphor of gently letting out the clutch to start motion. I believe that this thinking strategy was an expression of her attention seeking in each increment for the tipping point to occur. What a splendid idea that was!

Working with her, I was immediately struck how a sense of rhythm would be very handy in using one’s power to choose beyond habit. The more choice moments are created during a motion, the more choices become available. This process of incrementally pausing during a motion turns out to be very handy. In fact, pausing to re-decide against habit during motion is codified into A.T. as way to practice it, in a term called “inhibition.”

Selecting a rhythmic moment during a motion to add in the suggestion of “head moves, body follows” would be very useful. Perhaps focusing on teaching a sense of rhythm or timing would make progress learning A.T. faster? Maybe the effect of playing a metronome or music in the background to the pace of a skill would enhance learning ability? Perhaps the crucial moments of choice would be marked by the rhythmic beat instead of be slipping away in a blur of goal attainment.

It also got me thinking of the teaching style of Patrick MacDonald, who used to have the nickname of “The Mechanic.” It was not until I had lessons with MacDonald that I really experienced the meaning of the directions of both forward and up. With his hands on my head and neck, he also directed movement in increments; each motion was very clearly, forward…and then up, forward, then up; like clockwork.

It was fascinating, the common thread between MacDonald’s sophisticated body of hands-on work that had evolved during his whole lifetime and this singer’s first insight of how to use her attention in one of her first few Alexander lessons she was having with me.

What Attracted Me To Alexander Technique

I’m thinking back at what attracted me to Alexander Technique…a very loooong time ago, in 1976. Strangely enough, it wasn’t to improve my terrible twisted posture, which had to have been a very, very depressing sight in someone who was 23 years old.

I’ve assumed that the spiritual reasons that had motivated me to continue learning Alexander Technique probably wouldn’t motivate others…but maybe that’s my erroneous assumption. So that’s why I’m about share my experience here.

I wasn’t thinking about my terrible posture at all when I got to know this guy as boyfriend material. He was fascinating to me because I thought his easy posture and challenging mind meant he could naturally experience changes of consciousness. To me, this indicated the capacity for enlightenment. It’s true that he moved much lighter and easier than I could – he still does. He was studying Alexander Technique; eventually he was invited to join the teacher training class. I often accompanied him to class, and students there used me as a “body” for their practice lessons.

Still now, I often recall how he would reach up to smooth away the crink in my forehead that I didn’t realize I was doing to myself. For not having that line in my forehead thirty years later, I still quite often feel affectionate gratitude towards him, even though we only spent nearly four years with each other. What a wonderful gift to have given someone!

What convinced me to continue to study and train to teach A.T. on my own and what made it fun was the attraction of being able to change my own consciousness. AT didn’t use the coercion of an Iron Will to affect change, but something else. Mysteriously, indirectly this something else made my analytical ego attachments go away and my sense of wholeness would return.

These all-points-awareness experiences were a signature state of my Alexander Technique lessons. The potential in me that they could evoke was very exciting. Sometimes I’d have a creative flash of insight. Along with a new awareness of my body, my perceptual sensitivity would ever so slightly wake up. Sometimes there would be a leap of new awareness and insights that transformed how I thought about myself, my past and my potential power to choose my actions that I had not previously possessed. My motives to keep learning A. T. were now driven by having a means to address a split I saw between my intentions and how I mostly floundered around to bring about change in my own behavior, talents and my ability to learn.

Later, I realized my whole body was a lot happier too. I wasn’t getting worse and more limited as I got older, but I felt easier, freer. My body unwound, as did my worries and my ability to fall asleep whenever I wanted to sleep.

As I applied the Alexander Technique to learning to sing and continued to observe myself and ask questions, it gave me a significant insight about why I kept half my throat was closed. When I was a baby I had been told that I had been born with a very slight birth defect; my ear gristle grew unattached that would have allowed me to wiggle my ears. In the 1950’s doctors thought the remedy of tying off the gristle with a rubber band was preferable to holding down a squirming child and cutting off the tiny offense. Unfortunately, this choice of treatment trained the baby to tense its neck. Without realizing it, I did this to the side of my neck and also shut off half my voice. Keeping my neck tensed as I learned to walk and talk affected how I grew as a toddler. I unknowingly kept doing this extra tension, accommodating and adapting to the posture it dictated to me.

Everything was fine for me as a child, but as my hips became one piece in my late teens at 17, I began to have a mystery problem with my knee. No doctor could tell me why my knee became damaged when there was no external injury; I had to seek out a third opinion before I could even find a doctor in that era who would admit nobody knew why!

As my hip had become one piece, my body was finally forced to assume the posture of a twisting torque. This was dictated by the tension I customarily trained myself to do as a baby on one side of my head-neck. This continuous reaction had been put into place in that three week period of having an irritating rubber band on my ear as a baby!  There was even a picture of me with this squint on my face as a baby that shows what I had trained myself to do in a constant reaction to this irritant. Of course, as a child, my unformed bones were able to accommodate this tension without affect. But as I grew into an adult, there came a time when the structure must reflect the cause; this time was when my hips matured at 17. Then my knee took the brunt of this posture I had trained myself to do – and forgotten about. After 17 years old, my torqued posture actually stopped the blood flowing to my femur at my knee and caused the bone to crumble – and surgery didn’t help. I still had the limp at 23 until I began to study Alexander Technique. If I hadn’t “stumbled” onto Alexander Technique, I have no doubt that by now I would have had to have my knees replaced before my forties!

All this came clear when I talked to someone else younger who had the same rubber-banding-to-crop done to their ear when they were an infant. They had later been informed by their doctor that this barbaric practice was the cause of many back, neck and hip problems for people that only showed up in their late teens.

So you see, that although I was attracted to Alexander Technique for spiritual reasons, it had a significant benefit for the longevity and quality of my health that was not, at first, apparent to me. With my sights set on a spiritual path, I did not really realize the significance of what it meant to have an operating manual for my coordination. From my point of view, the inside state affected my outside state. I never realized that changing one’s external manner of moving could affect the inside in such a powerful way. But there it is.

Sometimes a person doesn’t know what they have to gain from a course of action until they do it and find out for themselves what they are getting from it. Sometimes this finding out takes time, especially when the course of action involves loss.

When you are giving up something, you know well what you are giving up. What you may have to gain can feel like only a promise; an uncertain elusive conviction of faith or a whisper of potential. Often, you can’t have both – you must choose either the old comforts you know well or the leap of faith; because you can’t go in two directions at once. I have experienced that myself leaping into the unknown feels like a complete willingness to risk everything. In my case, the advantage of learning A.T. was a “noh”-brainer!

I’d love to hear about your story of attraction to studying this Alexander  Technique.

Improvisationally Applied Alexander Technique

As teachers of Alexander Technique, it is very deceptive for us to take for granted the assumptions implicit in the teaching environments in which we originally learned. It is sometimes after we graduate and begin to teach beginners that these assumptions come to light. Obviously, it pays big to examine assumptions, making what we have to offer clearer and easier to understand for us and all our students.

Alexander Technique is most commonly misunderstood because of it is meant to be improvisationally applied. There are no forms or prescriptive exercises that constitute what A.T. is.

For example, Tai Chi or Yoga have certain specific motions that someone can point to that can be considered to constitute the discipline that are practiced and perfected over time. Alexander Technique does not (with one exception, the Whispered Ahh.)

After some examples, a beginning pupil of A.T. can very easily misunderstand that what they are being shown is a prescriptive form of perfect posture or complex body of “correct” movements that are supposed to be remembered, copied or learned. This problematic misunderstanding is reinforced by an A.T. custom; the one activity in particular taught in teacher training schools that many teachers fall back on when they are left to choose an activity as an example. This action is most often rising and sitting in a chair. This choice of activity was possibly so routinely made because the space available in which lessons were historically taught was often limited in the UK where A.T. originated.

I must agree that exclusively using “chair work” certainly would understandably give a learner that first mistaken impression that A.T. is “sit up straight school.” This is why I feel that if chair work is selected, it’s very important to also work with another activity of specific interest to the student, preferably chosen by the student. If the activity is chosen by the teacher, then the logic and criteria used for choosing a specific action should be explained to the student(s).

In theory, A.T. is meant to be used as a way of initiating motion and applying experimentation while doing any form of movement the user believes may benefit from bringing some attention and freedom to it. While it doesn’t matter which motion is selected, I believe two categories of actions should always be selected from; the first, a most global, routine and common action. The second selection should be another action that is meaningful and valuable to the particular student who is learning it.

Great Minds Think Alike

I had heard of Alexander Movement a long time ago and wondered if it had any commonalities to Bohm’s Artamovement. 

No, no correlation – David Bohm didn’t know or study Alexander Technique. He should have, because it would have helped him with depression. AT also specialized in the study of proprioception, which Bohm loved to discuss. Any similarity comes from both minds studying human nature and seeing similar characteristics in operation. Great minds think alike!

it was interesting that when you spoke of the “non-absolute characteristic of our ability to recognize sensory differences”, this seemed almost like what I call error. To me, absolute truth is also of little importance. That’s because I think we can know when things err from expectations or from desired ends (negative knowledge) even when we can’t know > anything positive about a situation. This sounds to me like your “recognizing differences.” Erring seems to me almost a synonym for “differing”, for it originally meant something like “moving away”, “straying.” 

 It’s not “error,” or at least I don’t think of it as error. It’s a built-in characteristic of the way humans are built to register differences and to adapt to circumstances. Brilliant design, actually, but any design has limitations. I see that you seem to have glorified “error,” but I think that’s the long way around and it is slightly confusing.

Paradoxes, I believe, are what we should seek. “Should” in the sense that it’s fun to find them. They reveal all kinds of “differences”, errors, in the movement of thought. The paradox of choice, for instance, reveals to me the sense of personal agency on one hand — my autonomy seems represented in the fact that I “make” decisions. But on the other hand, there is the sense that when an insight occurs for the first time, it occurs without “me” being engaged (again, depending on our definitions of “me” and “engagement.”). It can get very confusing very fast. But I think the facts, the truth, the actuality, sometimes busts in on my assumptions and rearrange them against my will even. Often, my discoveries of error are certainly not discoveries I’d have chosen. I sometimes resist them to the last minute.

 Yes – a paradox is what emerges when you are learning and what you expected isn’t happening to plan! The way I like to describe it is that insight comes from the unknown, after the habits stop insisting things “are” certainly familiar old same things and there is no necessity for anything new to intervene and rock the status quo. Habit seems to insist on its own usefulness and ultimate importance – quite an overwhelming resistance, depending on the investment someone had to put out to install and use a particular habit. It’s a story of what someone does when confronted with the obvious discovery that they are mistaken, made an error or didn’t know it all – as you point out.

For instance, I believe I’m moving mindfully, but the fact is I constantly bump into one thing or another. The bump is actuality, is error, is perhaps a “sensory difference.” It might signify to me directly that I’m moving without mindfulness. And this very perception is a moment of proprioception, of seeing that my typical reaction — “Yes, of course I know how to move correctly, don’t be so foolish!” — was only a reflex assumption, and wrong to boot.

 Well, we don’t know everything, and we’re not responsible for everything that occurs – it’s a childish notion that because things matter to us and are so constantly referenced to the self, that YOU are in charge of everything that happens. Shit happens, people grow up and circumstances change and we must get used to wielding bodies of a different shape and size, for instance – then we have to figure out how we are going to respond once we find ourselves in the circumstances at hand. A friend of mine once expressed this in the quote: “The only thing we HAVE to do is die. There’s always another choice.” Another example of that was noticing my stress level going up after having been traveling for two months. I decided when traveling in other countries, the point of traveling was to get myself lost and then have a good time learning where I was located in space.

What you’ve continued explaining is fascinating! All this without knowing how similar A.T. is in examining and dealing with these ideas. The way I like to describe it, given my experience with A.T., is that a habit or routine buries it’s existence into an innate sense as its nature. That’s how habits are designed, so they can become second nature and relied on so you can add another habit on in a chain of skill building. As you “bump into” stuff you didn’t expect, it’s a signal that a habit or assumptions exists or that you don’t know everything. Rather than reinforcing the need for the habit (as you narrate the urge to do with a “reflex assumptions,”) now that you are reminded the routine exists, you can subtract it or suspend it to find out something new by paying special attention – if you are willing and ready at the time for something new to occur. Paying special attention is a skill that needs some practice in most people – but in you, it’s a pretty well-honed natural talent that has been shined up into a skill. A person’s original natural sensitivity to discern more subtle perceptual differences will re-emerge as well as an easier way, an insight or a discovery as you try out your ideas. What happens when you are experimenting may feel “weird” or “unfamiliar.” This is your “spontaneous perception” that you described. So many people dismiss this novelty as meaning nothing and pull themselves back into their familiar, (but stressed out,) habits and attitudes. (Attitude in the sense that some boats may sometimes sit in the water with a leaning attitude that must be constantly taken into account during navigation.) The habitual urge is quite strong and insistent. You are an amazing, rare and keenly observant person to have noticed and have been able to outline these characteristics of discovery by yourself.

And what do we choose? I think we choose the preconditions, not the actual insight. Yes, I think I can remove excess baggage from the ground — prepare the ground — for insight. I could learn what it means to sit quietly for instance, with a silent, alert mind. But there would have to be no effort in that, or even any conscious will. For will and effort ARE forms of thought, however subtle. Thought would have to stop, without “stopping” thought. It would have to be an action that isn’t “Mine”, therefore. Not the “mine” that I typically imagine as “me”, as the Chooser. So I tend to think that something choiceless has to happen in an insight.

In Alexander Technique, we call it “inhibition.” Essentially, the choice to prevent (to stop) habits from running the show and coerce all possible outcomes. What emerges as we stop the habit is a sense of “do-less-ness,” a feeling of lightness and effortlessness in our quality of motion that is a signature of the experience an AT teacher can show you.

 

Print your post out and give it to your teacher when you get around going for a lesson. The missing piece for you will merely be the discipline of how to bring these ideas as an example into your every movement, which AT can provide.

 

My long term experience in having used AT is that the “me” in this body of mine has become more of a fitting Director of the dance, so to speak, rather than a Dictator or insecure Reactor. Almost as if my artistic side that creates meaning has just as much influence as the talking, organizing side over my decisions that influence my life. The “I” in me knows that it is a fictitious name, in some way – that the “real” me is the choices I make. With the integration, the whole that is me, I am now somehow able to notice and connect the meanings of my smallest choices, accounting for time of arrival much more elegantly. In a sense, my choices, now made with more of the whole of myself being present in a sort of simultaneous state of all points awareness, the me that is I has become more artistic, more symbolic, more spiritual and more coherent in my expressions. Every moment counts now, because I’m able to be more “in the moment” and flit back into the more linguistic, articulate side that seems to want to run the show when I want to, rather than only having that one bag of tricks.