Many of the advantages of “thinking” have been misunderstood. The other day I heard someone say, “You’re thinking too much.”

Perhaps the content of what is concluded by having thought is so often confused with the process that was used to arrive at the result. Content is dazzling; it’s a big appeal that a person can improve. People want to arrive at their goal and don’t see to care much how they get there. It results in not being able to repeat the performance. This focus on expedient content of getting to a fulfilled goal is what leads to the misinformation that there is purely “talent” and not a skill that can be learned. A certain person is merely considered to be “a genius” or has “special talent.”

There are challenges in following a process that may – or may not – result in a discovery. Following a codified process to allow freedom or insight is a not an intuitive combination. Sticking with a new, deliberate process and choosing it over a lifetime of well-worn habit takes a certain willingness to face risk. Paradoxically, doing any practice of these sorts of freeing procedures, (such as learning and using thinking skills,) feels a bit like laughing too often or stretching one’s brain as if it’s a muscle that hasn’t been used in a long time. Giving up outdated mannerisms of thought and action is still a sacrifice – even if the person is certain the old ways no longer work for them.

Not unlike a political or social arena, one’s own sense of self-preservation works a bit like a bureaucracy. Once established, it will react to the possibility of its own demise. It won’t matter that there is a “better” way, because improvements have a cost – the old way.

Reassurance comes from steady, gradual, positive improvement – and sometimes the delight of a leap of insight or the promise of improvement over time. Following a new process or learning the skill of thinking creatively takes some nuts and bolts work – and a learning curve of time invested. It is a challenge to cut some new grooves in a well-habituated brain. In the USA we say: “It’s tricky to teach an old dog new tricks.” In practice, most old dogs are delighted to have something new and interesting to do. Usually, it’s the trainer rather than the dog who acts more unwilling to improve.

The consequences from improving one own ways are many. Those of us who enjoy Alexander Technique have tried to pedal the advantages of it. However, some of these consequences of being able to think and improve are tricky to deal with. They can be personally imposed setbacks that come from an internal fear of jumping forward too fast. Or they can come from how other people react negatively to what happens when people change their ways.

What do you do when you run into these setbacks? Can you describe how you get beyond them?

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…

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.

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

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…

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.

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.

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

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!