Substitution

I mentioned before how Alexander Technique can be used to help a person who has a specific idea about what they can do that will better their situation, but for some reason or another can’t put their bright new alternate into action. Here’s a bit about how that happens…

Let’s say that the medium is movement, how an intention translates into physical action. Maybe you have a goal in mind, a purpose about why you are wanting to improve the way you move. The challenge or proof that you’re doing as you intend could be to use less effort, more mechanical advantage, perhaps even an ideal economy of applied physical energy during motion. You’ve trained this “better” substitute skill from scratch – for instance, a different tennis swing, a new way of taking a breath during a swimming stroke. Now your challenge is to do the new skill instead of the old faithful routine in the crucial moment.

Now you are ready to confront the challenge about how to interrupt your old routine and put the new one into action.

I’ll explain what I mean by that last sentence. You want to do the new skill and not do the old routine. Going in one direction will, theoretically by default, “cancel out” the other. At the moment when you direct your whole self to go physically in one direction, the other possible options are de-selected. This will happen because, theoretically, you can’t go two places at the same time.

If you try that theory out by putting  a new improvement into action – you will probably attempt to “do” both at the same time. What is likely to happen is your old routines have the power to run interference on the new things that you really want. This happens because, most of the time, when a new part of a skill is added, it’s adding onto the existing skill and not substituted in place of it.

Stopping the old skill is what you want this time, but that’s not how people are usually wired. Depending if the skill is deemed “dangerous” for any reason, your habits are wired to perform the old skill as if it’s life itself that is at risk. What’s unfamiliar and new can be blown all of proportion by a habit as if it’s totally threatening.

Granted that some people can dare to leap… but in order to leap, they need a complete conviction that they don’t want the old same thing. Another way around that is to go bit by bit to reassure yourself, and the imperative protective alarms never go off. There are obviously more ways to make the unfamiliar less scary too…

It takes a clarity of intent to gather one’s sense of purpose and direct one’s whole self. People will say this takes patience; for instance when they see detail or time invested in the quality of a job. But within an experience of absorption, the thought of being patient doesn’t exist. Instead, you want your attention to become become fully engaged at the most important moment. So marking when that moment begins is a great first step.

This ability to direct one’s attention has many qualities – some work with your goals and some don’t so well.  I’m going to suggest you use the one that works that don’t focus on the goal – strangely enough. The admonition to “Just Do It,” will likely activate what is most familiarly trained and ingrained. This works fine once you know exactly how to do what you’re trying to do – like a music conductor who only needs to give the signal for parts of the orchestra to respond at the right time.

Strangely enough, the best route is indirect and paradoxical when attempting to get yourself to do an unfamiliar skill instead of a familiar routine. It is a brand of surrender or suspension of desire for your goal. It even works to use a brand of trickery: refusing to mentally say the “action word” and instead stick to the new steps of the improvement. You aim to have an empty pause before you put the new skill into action. So, find the important moment to pay attention – and stop what you would normally do in that moment.

You might find that inserting this pause takes out the complication of the habitual routines by itself. The pause itself might be all that’s necessary. Right after this refusal to do the routine is when you can insert the newly trained improvement, if it’s needed. Easy does it!  You may even discover in that moment an even simpler improvement. The action that follows will have a whole different quality. The goal you just surrendered may feel as if it is ”doing itself” as the hindrances or complications of the old routine are removed. The experience of this happening is sometimes an odd feeling of emptiness. The “effort” you were feeling that you coupled together with the doing of the action was unnecessary, so now you can leave off the training wheels.

Why give up at the crucial moment when you want something bad enough you can taste it?  To do what you couldn’t do before.

End-gaining Mistique

We’re having an interesting conversation on one of the Facebook Alexander Technique groups. Since FB tends to cycle off rather quickly, perhaps having a spot elsewhere for the discussion would encourage it to continue.
Sara’s blog post that we’re discussing is at:
http://www.fine-balance.com/news_and_views/02-05-2012/the_wrestle_with_words_and_meanings_in_the_alexander_work/

Here are some excerpts:

Nick Drengenberg writes:

Sara, I don’t believe something being a system of work makes it finite. It makes it a something though rather than a generalised ineffability, which wouldn’t distinguish AT from any other type of experience. I see the ineffable as a bit of a slippery slope in other words, confusing questions about what’s shareable in our different experiences with what’s specific to a particular type of work, like AT. I agree each of us might experience AT differently, but you quickly lose any way in which AT is different to anything else if it becomes about attempting to share some subjective experience. I don’t think Alexander at root discovered some sort of subjective experience, those will vary for each person who comes to the work. He discovered a quite objective set of relationships between the human body and the world it sits inside. It’s those we should be trying to describe and communicate, and the feelings at each point in that exploration will be full part of the context we’re in. So a feeling of lightness or easiness will suggest a prior tightness or holding, which we can unravel using Alexander’s insights (to discover how and why we were holding), for example. It’d be a dead-end to try to make the lightness or easiness what’s important about that moment, feelings are pointers or indicators to a full context of existing in space in varying states of balance and support.

Yes, as Nick Dregenburg points out, A.T. has a therapeutic effect that is measurable and scientifically reasonable and predictable as a set of principles. In a way A.T. work could be considered an early form of observational brain science. It’s similar to Dr. Edward de Bono’s predictive models, (in “Mechanism of Mind,”) where de Bono came up with models of how thinking works so he could design compensations to stimulate creative insight. F.M Alexander came up with an open-ended, ongoing demonstration that stimulate creative-conscious insight using a bodymind integration.

Sara Solnick replies…

Nick, I don’t think we are talking about quite the same things here. I am not quite sure what you mean by describing AT as a possibly infinite system of work. What I meant was that understanding the depths of AT is not a finite process: it is layered and subtle. The principles are easily stated, as a system if you like, but their extended meaning unfolds only gradually. I do not use the word ineffable in a generalised way as you suggest – what I mean is that there are some things (in my experience at least), the essential nature of which, though apprehended, cannot necessarily be expressed adequately in words – and these can be very specific things. Subjective experience will always be part of one’s understanding of this or any other work – part of the illusion I wish to avoid in writing is that of seeing us as human beings who sit inside, or in any other way separate from, the world – for me, we are inextricably entangled with, and ultimately indistinguishable from, our world – the subjective can never be completely removed, the objective never fully attained. Alexander nevertheless developed a set of principles which can be entertained intellectually without being understood experientially. However, experience and feeling are not irrelevant to our deeper understanding of those principles – they are what promote our developing understanding, and perhaps require us to revise our intellectual formulations along the way… your last sentence seems to be suggesting something similar. But in the final analysis, what all this indicates to me, is how very difficult it is be clearly communicative with the written word alone – which was my point (perhaps misguidedly made by me in a piece of writing!)

Sara Solnick, your point is not misguided. Why this is so is deeply embedded in Alexander’s questioning and experimental foundations. At it’s best and extended toward an art form or life philosophy, A.T. takes people into the unknown, allowing a person to tap on the door of the unknowable and walk through it toward what they don’t know – time and time again. It doesn’t work every single time in a predictable manner because there are so many factors involved in asking for the unknown to reveal itself, but that’s part of it’s attraction of mystique.

Words are frozen, codified meanings. The skill of combining them is an art too – because we’re attempting to get them to say something about our experience that tends to familiarize it into being something we “know.” That’s the definition of being an author-ity.

Using words after an experience of the unknown offers the ability to “tag” for retrieval, which is how the brain works to retrieve memories. But this urge to “have” the unknown as a “thing” sells short the potential of what A.T. really offers. – and I believe this is what Sara Solnick is really hinting at…and why the A.T. community labels the “tagging” urge to be merely end-gaining.

Think about how, when you have an unusual experience, you must be careful who you tell. The telling will be shaped by your relationship to that person’s rapport with you and with the experience itself. Once an experience is in words, people have a tendency to remember what they said, rather than retrieving the raw experience itself in their memory of it. Once expressed in words, usually an experience becomes limited by its description…correct? That’s why we call it End-gaining.

What do you think?

Non-Doing

Non-doing: what Alexander Technique teachers call it when someone is able to perform an action without their own habitual routines being in the way. The term “non-doing” is a word used in the Alexander Technique lexicon to describe an experience that is quite common during an Alexander Technique lesson – an effortlessness feeling of doing something without overcompensating. Non-doing is also a special paradoxical non-action strategy used to evoke and sustain the effortlessness or “flow state”of improved coordination.

A student will experience hints of the ability for non-doing by following the guidance of an Alexander Technique teacher’s hands-on coaching. This sensation of physical lightness is a signature result of Alexander Technique lessons. With some paradoxical practice regimens, it is possible to sustain the experience of  non-action as a reliable ongoing exploration without an Alexander Technique teacher being present to coach it hands-on.

How to engage in this ability to experience a significant reduction of unnecessary effort will probably be different from the way you’ve learned nearly anything else. It involves subtracting rather than adding, thus the term non-action. It is a strategic use of the self that will involve new perceptions, self-observation, thinking proactively and a large dose of courage for experimentation.

Usually when someone is attempting to improve their skill at performance or become free from pain, (the top two goals of people who begin study at Alexander Technique,) they have in mind certain improvements they want to do that are supposed to be better replacements for those unwanted routines that they do not want to do. Certainly, training a new routine that replaces an old routine is an accepted strategy for improvement. To put this “better” into practice, a person still has to choose the less practiced non-dominant new skill that may have recently been deliberately trained as a replacement – which can be tricky given certain conditions. Alexander Technique addresses such challenges, going even further.

These tricky “certain conditions” are often hiding underneath a person’s ability to perceive what they are doing with themselves. These include postural mannerisms that unintentionally cause back pain or to retain a speaking accent, unintended perceptual assumptions or attitudes, performance anxieties, or when improvements involving will power or practice will go no further. All these tricky challenges respond to learning the skill of non-doing that Alexander Technique offers.

The way this works is what is paradoxical or strategic about it. The first step is to leave off the replacement routine; it’s deliberately suspended. Instead, a person actively refuses the habitual solution or routine they assume needs to happen as a new sort of preparation to go into action. Alexander Technique people call this to inhibit or to not-do. Curiously, what happens when the dominant default habitual interference is deliberately refused (without specifying a replacement routine,) is a sensation of unpredictable effortlessness or do-less-ness – or flow. The default integration of a little bit of nothing into one’s action is paradoxically surprising.  Apparently, we’ve been doing much more of something unnecessary without realizing it.

Not-doing this gives an experience that is quite real and not an intellectual exercise at all. You must try it – it’s fascinating. It’s a bit like pulling the rug out from under yourself. Sometimes, it feels as if you are jumping off a cliff because habits tend to dramatize their own necessity. But there you are – non-doing the very thing you just declared that you weren’t going to do…and to not-do the action this way indeed feels as if it’s an entirely different animal.

Have any stories or suggestions about how to evoke flow states of non-doing that you have experienced yourself?

Creative Movement

Imagine if there were multiple “escape hatches” for gaining effective new ideas and adopting effective new attitudes… Well, of course there are, right!?

Imagine they are not just ideas, but have a way to practice. You can practice by uncovering assumptions of thought and learning new creative thinking tools that give you ideas. That’s creative thinking. Now imagine you make improvements that better whatever you’d like to apply it to by changing yourself physically to get beyond that has become habitually assumed. That’s Alexander Technique.

The concept of “Attitudes” can possess a mental sense and may also be used in a physical sense. A person’s postural carriage and body language reflects their character and changing internal moods, as well as their intent, unspoken desires and motives. Change the inside thoughts and it will affect the outside. Change the outside mannerisms and the inside will also be affected.

Imagine a sailboat trimmed to catch the wind from a different direction to accommodate prevailing conditions – so the boat can go somewhere. Think of the advantages you could catch, if you could learn to sail yourself to catch those hidden opportunities and ideas that would usually blow over your head and be lost!

So the disadvantage is that there is a learning curve in each of these disciplines. You don’t really know about these advantages until you put in time to study what these tools are and can recognize when is the time to put them into action. They take dedication, discipline and to remember to use their advantages when things matter. Because they both involve education, the participation of the learner is required to gain their benefits.

Edward de Bono has spent his life providing these escapes from conditioned, trapped thinking, as have those people who teach F.M. Alexander’s Technique. How come so few people recognize how valuable creative thinking is? They focus on the result and not the process. How come only very few recognize the value of being able to change or improve the ability to move beyond one’s habitual conditioned responses? Again, they are usually motivated by a desire for the result; they declare the process is so abstract as to be completely mystifying.

But you could hire a creative thinker, but you’d need to recognize the value of their ideas. You could hire an Alexander Technique teacher to describe the qualities of human movement that recommend education – but instead there are expensive Gait Laboratories that are used to justify surgery as a solution.

Another thing in common is what happens when making both of these simple enough to be accessed by anyone. Simplification of either these two open-ended topics risks trivializing their tremendous power they have for improving action.

It appears that both possess a practical means about how to get beyond self-imposed limitations of having assumed the nature of reality from variously different starting points.

Rather than continuing to rant, I’ll give two parallel examples.

Edward de Bono uses the word “perception” to mean purposeful adoption of an attitude or point of view. So he invented a means for people to unite together and reflect a joined attitude by design. For instance, his invention of Six Hat Thinking has a group of people all on the same side of a question, having adopted an agreed point of view, (usually within a larger sequence) of one of the Six Thinking Hats. He called this “parallel thinking.”

While wearing the green creative Thinking Hat, Edward de Bono’s word for one of his tools is called “PO,” used in lateral thinking. How to use the provocation tool of PO is recommended in the word “movement.” This idea of “movement” is an instruction about how to regard what just got proPOsed. You suppose the provocation is absolutely true – and see if you can make observations that would be in effect if it were true. In some ways, it is very much like improvisational theater – Whatever just got proPOsed, the answer is always “yes.” That’s “movement” in a de Bono style creative thinking sense.

Now I’m remembering the past, being in class with Marj Barstow, and she asks, “How do you describe A.T. in one word?” Her idea of that word is “movement.” Marj uses the word “perception” to mean the perception of kinesthesia, which is the ability to internally know where you are located in space and to judge how little effort is really needed to perform a physical action. Her idea of a provocation is a student’s proposed activity or desire to improve something. Observations about the quality, timing, sequence, relationship and direction of movement offer the discoveries that come from experimenting with how to make movements easier. “Intention is already movement,” she declares.

Both A.T and de Bono Thinking assign certain strategies to get beyond one’s own self-imposed limitation that have attitudes and perceptions in common – how to create value by moving away from limitation into unexplored possibility.

Studying Alexander Technique is a valuable answer to an often-ignored need for proactive movement, instead of preserving the status quo of habit. I suspect that de Bono has a similar feeling of frustration when confronted by the prevailing argument culture. What good is the tired use of our prevailing argument culture, when you can design a way through these challenges that will better the whole situation?

Methodical Creativity

Spontaneity & Creativity
Some people imagine there is a canceling effect between planning and spontaneity. Creative writing is an example. Once a writer gets into the state of being a methodical editor, the spontaneity of creative ideas can stop, like a faucet that’s been turned off. How can a writer “turn on” the faucet of creative writing again? It’s a mystery to many who experience “writer’s block.” From my experience, I say that the ability to shift from the creative state to editing mode and back again is a skill that responds to practice.

Observation & Creativity
Of course, it would pay off to be able to pay attention to what is actually happening. How else will you know if something creative has happened? Bear in mind that there are many ways to describe what you think that you’re doing, which may not be what is actually happening.

As a writer, I’ve learned that naming something can be dangerous. Under the heading of “planning” and “methodical” are really effective and astute self-observations, done slowly. This can be practiced by describing the mundane things that actually happen that most people miss – which could be another part of  “methodical.”  Then there is somehow recording what happened – like people do to populate their Facebook pages. Recording what you tried is useful so you don’t have to mistakenly practice unproductive mistakes.

Accidents & Creativity
Pretty much everybody has done something really creative and beyond their abilities in a flash of “accidentally on purpose.” How much time went by until they realized something creative just did happen? Can it be done again, purposefully? Were they paying attention as they did this creative thing so they could know what happened in order to use it productively?  Are there more effective questions that might help being able to repeat a creative accident?

Some Useful Virtual Questions

• What helps to observe myself – while in action?
• What’s the challenge for being creative?
• How can I recognize that something creative just happened?
• Does creativity have characteristics that will help me spot it when it does happen?
• How am I going to recognize a partial creative answer when it happens?
• Does stopping and noting it help a creative action to happen again?

Going Slowly & Creativity
Alexander Technique teachers know that ready-made, habitual solutions preclude creative answers from emerging. So – slowing an action down to a crawl effectively works to interrupt or to stop habitual solutions from jumping in and “helpfully” providing the application of those ready-made answers. It’s easy to mistake slowing down for being “uncreative.” But going slowly is only just that. It’s possible to be very creative and go slow, because it allows the new solution to be implemented.

In practice, you must prove to people that going slow is useful. Because in our culture we have this mistaken assumption that going fast is a sign of quick-witted intelligence and going slowly is a signal of stupidity.

Method & Creativity
There’s a paradox in Alexander Technique – “let’s follow a declared process that will result in an inspirational flash of discovery!”

Stating what you are going to do and then doing it helps unify all of yourself in being pointed toward whole-minded action. Stating what you are about to do forges and practices a coherent, consistent connection between your intent and the factual response to your intent.

Are there certain useful practices or questions you enjoy asking yourself again and again because they result in a flash of creative inspiration?

Soulful

What is the difference between a gut-level intuitive, instinctive necessary response – and a conditioned, fearful, self-limiting reactive prejudice?

How can people figure this out what do do about this, without shying away from the intensity of the feelings when they emerge? I believe the Alexander Technique is essential as a tool to get a practical answer to a complex and personal psychological question.

I’d like to tell you how A.T. worked for me to uncover my own underlying motives and assumptions that helped me past a firmly entrenched childhood impasse.

These emotions took some time to uncover. They were completely hidden behind the automated reactions that I was repeating, because the compensation habit in place was working so efficiently. My childish solution was designed to avoid the unwanted feeling. It was such an effective denial that I never even felt the original emotion that drove me to design this habitual remedy. What was in place was a very over-sensitive trigger recognition system that worked splendidly – but this remedy was on too much of an over-sensitive, uncontrollable hair-trigger! Once I questioned whether I needed to implement the reaction in certain situations, I could only temper it or redirect it – until I found its origin. Finding the feelings behind the reaction stopped the problem, as well as revealing an unexpected gift.

To do this, I had to trace the reaction back to right before it started  -  this took some practice. How do you pay attention to something that happens when you’re not paying attention!? Persistence, self-observation and self forgiveness… and noting ahead of time the likely situations where it could be about to happen.

When I finally got to see this unwanted reactive habit of mine about to happen – at the moment before doing the habitual solution – what I found was so uncomfortable that it was extremely difficult to not repeat the solution that I did not want to do. My impasse was expressed in the habitual postural attitude of my body. Oh, was it uncomfortable to hang out there! Having A.T. as a tool allowed me to be able to move out of this impasse physically; my body reflected how I felt emotionally with very physical limitations that I could free up using Alexander Technique. Without A.T. to be able to move away from these limitations, I would be stuck feeling these awful, historic gunky routines of complex hurts. While within these uncomfortable feelings, I realized how ANY remedy would be justified – if the emotion is extreme enough. Wanting to avoid hurting emotionally would be a solid and completely understandable justification for repeating the habitual remedy. This would especially be true if a person didn’t have another tool for dealing with their “stuff.”

But I now wanted to change it. It was childish, unnecessary and an overcompensation for the problem.

Using A.T. allowed me to pop out of the physical reaction of how I was expressing the emotional hurt and to be able to see it for what it was – ancient history. I could much more easily understand and compassionately forgive myself. I could even congratulate myself for designing such an effective coping mechanism when I was just a kid, even if it was something I wanted to change now. Since I could recognize the core emotional motives now for what they were, I could now freshly choose a more global and compassionate ways of dealing with all these factors – not just the self-involved ones.

After this experience, my own soul core motive became positive rather than reactive. Now instead of being coerced by a childhood fear of being excluded, there was the gift of feeling a desire for everyone to play fair, to include everyone present and to nurture feelings of playfully working together to maybe build something that might not yet exist.

So – I would say that Alexander Technique allowed me in that situation to “go deep into my soul.”

Have you used Alexander Technique on a similar issue? Care to talk about what happened?

What Feels Right

Recently I was very impressed with an interesting neuroscience TED talk.   http://is.gd/4ZZmI1

I wish I could just highlight the portion I’d like to discuss.  Daniel Wolpert “The Real Reason for Brains,” documented the phenomena that people tend to exaggerate whatever they repeat, without realizing they are doing it in his experiment.  I’m referring to his results of his research with the jagged upward results  - that came from his children declaring the other person hit them “harder.”

So, now it’s a fact that anything that repeats will disappear perceptually from our awareness. People tend to add more effort, assuming that’s required to do the job. We tend to forget that repetitive practice automates the routine and trains a habit. We may not know that establishing a habit also disappears the sensation of performing the action.

This idea is also related to an excellent blog post by Jennifer Schneiderman at http://is.gd/rTk67A

There’s nothing wrong with any position, even slumping. Getting stuck in a self-imposed limitation can become a problem, over time.

Whenever a student tells me they have a pain, I always wonder if they are doing something to themselves repetitively in an everyday action, such as walking. Sure enough, when I observe them walking, there is some little extra thing they are habitually doing that they can undo that will address the issue.  Turns out that Alexander Technique teachers are a bit like a human gait laboratory, (without the recommendations of surgical solutions!)

Inside of us, our judgement of limb orientation and required effort feels like truth – it’s perceptually deceptive. But it’s this same “deception” that allows us to learn and adapt. There’s pleasure in being able to do something reliably. Of course, everyone knows how to slump! People go into the same sort of slump each time, and this is gratifying that you can get what you want in a reliable way.

Habits are designed to become innate, so we CAN have the pleasure of relying on them and add more new skills on top. With a chain of turning small abilities into habits, that’s how we build a complex skill.

That’s why consistently using Alexander Technique feels like such a threatening challenge – because it takes us into the unknown. Most people find it uncomfortable to not know what you’re doing, or how to do it. Later you might learn that the unknown is cool and fun. But it does take mental effort – because learning cuts new pathways in the brain.

Movement is what the brain is evolved to learn!

Strangely enough, our judgment of effort is a relative sense – although it feels like truthful fact. Moving in a way that is more efficient and constructive using Alexander Technique feels strangely unfamiliar, but it’s …easier. Extend your tolerance for welcoming the unknown and get somewhere new – now!