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Stopping the snap: Alexander Technique and stress management

Santa by Matthew Mackerras

Christmas. It’s that time of year again. The best of times, the worst of times. So much fun, and yet sometimes so much stress too. D you ever find yourself reacting to circumstances in a way that isn’t very helpful or constructive? Have you ever resolved to do better next time, but when next time came, found your resolve wasn’t enough?

Frankly, how do we stop ourselves from reacting to stressful or difficult events/circumstances/people in a way that isn’t good?

This was exactly the situation FM Alexander found himself in. He realised that he needed to change the way he was reacting to the stimulus to speak, because his instinctive response was causing him to lose his voice.

He had a good think, and worked out a plan for how to open his mouth and use his voice more effectively. But when he tried to use it … He found he wasn’t using it. He was using his old instinctive way instead.

Resolve and planning? Check!

Success? No!

FM realised that he was having trouble implementing his plan because when he had a stimulus to speak, he went on auto-pilot, so to speak. It didn’t matter how good his new plan was, because it never got past his auto-pilot reaction.

And this is what happens to us, too. We have grand plans about how we are not going to snap at our pesky siblings (for example), but at the critical moment, we seem to react without thinking, and snappiness occurs.

So what did FM do? He realised that he needed to switch off the auto-pilot.

 

“If I was ever to be able to change my habitual use … it would be necessary for me to make the experience of receiving the stimulus to speak and of refusing to do anything immediately in response.” *

 

And that’s what he did. He refused to do anything immediately in response. He was giving himself the mental space to stop, turn off the auto-pilot, and decide what he actually wanted to do.

So at this time of great stimulus, this is what I’m asking you to do. If there is a stimulus that causes you trouble and grief, make the experience of receiving it, and refusing to do anything immediately in response. Give yourself the space to choose your reaction – or even if you want to react at all.

* FM Alexander, The Use of the Self in the IRDEAT edition, p.424.

Inexorable deterioration, anyone?

traffic sign

Are you on a path of inexorable physical deterioration? Or is your body (and mind!) capable of ongoing change and improvement?

I think I, like most people, just accepted without question the point of view that I was on the downhill path. I’d done all the growing and blossoming I was capable of doing, and from then on I had decades ahead of merely trying to slow down my inevitable physical decline. A very jolly point of view for someone who was then in her mid twenties, agreed. But I suspect not uncommon.

Thing is, I’d accepted this doctrine without question. And the evidence for it is looking increasingly shaky. Remember how we used to be told that once we reached a certain age, our brain cells would begin dying off and not being replaced? The field of neuroplasticity has dealt that notion a pretty firm blow! *

You see, FM Alexander didn’t work from that point of view at all. When he was trying to solve his vocal problems, he experimented with the idea that the three odd things he did with his head when he was reciting were “a misuse of the parts concerned.” So all he had to do, he reasoned, was work out which one of the three ‘harmful tendencies’ (as he called them) caused the others, stop that first one, and everything would be fine.

And it was.

FM found that just by preventing the initial pulling back of his head, he not only stopped the other two ‘harmful tendencies’, but that his vocal condition improved.** By stopping the wrong thing from happening, he allowed his body to assert its natural ‘okayness’.

This is why one of my favourite quotations from FM is “You are all quite perfect – except for what you are doing.” For me, it really cuts to the heart of this issue. We are quite perfect. We are okay. We just disrupt our natural okayness with all the stuff we think we need to do to carry out the activities we love.

So… What if you are fundamentally, essentially, basically okay? What if the problems you are experiencing are things you are doing?

What one thing will you try stopping today – just to see if it makes a difference?

 

*A great introductory book on neuroplasticity is Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself
** FM writes: “with the prevention of the misuse of these parts I tended to become less hoarse while reciting, and that as I gradually gained experience in this prevention, my liability to hoarseness tended to decrease. What is more, when, after these experiences, my throat was again examined by my medical friends, a considerable improvement was found in the general condition of my larynx and vocal cords.” Use of the Self, IRDEAT edition, p.414.
Image by phanlop88 from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Not WHAT we do but HOW we do it: taking the strain away

keyboard with red stop keys

Last week I told you about how I started learning Alexander Technique in a last-ditch attempt to save my quality of life. I was suffering from RSI-like symptoms in my arms that didn’t respond to treatment from any health professional, and that was preventing me from working or doing any of my most-loved leisure activities. Like FM Alexander, I started to wonder if my problem wasn’t responding to medical treatment because it didn’t have a medical cause. I started to wonder if it was something I was doing that was causing my problems.

Okay, so I did a lot of arm-related activities. I used a computer every day for writing and research. I played recorder. I would knit most evenings, and I did a lot of cooking. But I knew lots of people who did just as many activities with their hands, or even more, and they weren’t suffering. So what was the difference? Why was I struggling?

Not what you do…

In order to discover the source of the hoarseness that was jeopardising his acting career, FM Alexander stood in front of a mirror and watched himself speak and recite. He realised that there must be something about the way he was going about the activity that was causing his problem. And after a lot of observation and experimentation, he discovered that there was a particular pattern of the way he organised his head in relation to his body during reciting that seemed to get in his way. It was HOW he was doing the activity that was causing his trouble.*

But how you do it…

Same with me. It wasn’t the computer that caused my problems. It was HOW I was using it. I was using too much force, and putting it into lots of areas where it was just inefficient and unnecessary.

What about you? Pick an activity that interests you, or that causes you trouble. And then do what FM did: have a good hard look at it. How are you doing that activity? Are you using too much energy? Are you using energy in the right places? What one thing could you change today? Make an experiment, and let me know how you get on.

 

* FM Alexander, The Use of the Self in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.413.
Image by Stuart Miles, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The ‘me’ problem – why people start Alexander Technique

recorder

Last week I told you how the beginnings of the Alexander Technique were to be found in threatened passion. FM had a passion for acting and reciting, and when he was threatened with the loss of the career that he loved, he decided to take the bold step of solving his problems for himself.

I was pretty similar to FM, in that the thing that got me started on my Alexander Technique journey was threatened passion.

I was 22, newly married, starting a postgrad degree in a new country, discovering cooking and new groups of recorder enthusiasts to play with, and finding a whole new world of knitting yarns and patterns. I was also a long way from home and everything that had been familiar and supportive, and trying to make the best of the tremendous career opportunities I had been given. Life was both incredibly exciting and astonishingly stressful.

When my arms and wrists started hurting when I used the computer or knitted, at first I ignored it. But when the discomfort increased, I went to the doctor for help. That was the beginning of my journey to doctors, specialists, physiotherapists, osteopaths and goodness knows how many other health practitioners. None of them solved the issue. Sometimes I got some temporary relief, but then I’d do more research on the computer, or play another concert, and it would be back worse than ever.

I stopped playing recorder. It hurt too much. Then I stopped knitting. Same reason. Then I got told to rest my arms completely for six weeks. No computer (while writing a thesis!) and no cooking. Not even tying shoelaces was allowed.

My life was getting smaller and smaller. And somehow I knew that the reason why medical solutions weren’t helping me was because I didn’t have a medical problem. I had a Me problem. There was something about the way I was doing the things I was doing that was causing my problems.

And that was where FM Alexander began. He asked exactly that question of his doctor:

 

‘Is it not fair, then,’ I asked him, ‘to conclude that it was something I was doing that evening in using my voice that was the cause of the trouble?’ *

 

FM suspected that there was something about the way he was using his voice that was problematic. I suspected there was something about the way I was using my arms that was problematic. He studied himself in a mirror to work out what he was doing and how to stop it. I found an Alexander Technique teacher and started having lessons.

Is there something about the way that you are going about the activities you love that is causing you problems? What one step can you take today to begin change?

* FM Alexander, The Use of the Self in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.412.
Image by Steve Ford

The final straw – Why have Alexander Technique lessons?

Last week I wrote about how we could all learn from FM Alexander’s childhood trait of being incorrigibly inquisitive. One thing I mentioned was that the trait that got him excused from school for being disruptive in class, was in adult life the key to him doing the work that led to his creation of what we now call the Alexander Technique.

But why did FM develop his work? What was it that caused him to use that questioning nature?

Most people, if they have heard of FM at all, will probably know that he was an actor, and that he suffered from vocal troubles so severe that they threatened his career. When conventional treatment didn’t work, he began exploring and experimenting to try to solve the problems for himself.

So far, so good. We have the facts. But there is something missing.

Passion.

When FM wrote in 1932 about the creation of his work some 40 years previously, he began:

 

“From my early youth I took a delight in poetry and it was one of my chief pleasures to study the plays of Shakespeare, reading them aloud and endeavouring to interpret the characters.” *

 

For FM, acting and reciting wasn’t just a job. In fact, he gave up a well-paid and promising clerking career to tread the boards. Acting was his love.

And when his vocal troubles became severe, how did FM feel?

“My disappointment was greater than I can express, for it now seemed … that I should thus be forced to give up a career in which I had become deeply interested and believed I could be successful.” **

FM had a passion for acting, and his passion was threatened. That’s why he worked so hard, I think, to find a solution to his problems.

And it should strike a chord with us, because so often this is the reason why we become interested in Alexander’s work. I was prepared to put up with pain in my wrists, until I couldn’t knit or cook any more. One of my students put up with her difficulties – until it stopped her swimming.

Typically, we will put up with discomfort and things that block us from performing at our best, we will keep going in the face of limitation, we will soldier on… until our passion is threatened.

What is the one thing that you are not prepared to give up? At what point will you stop accepting limitations, and decide to begin the process of change and renewal?

* FM Alexander, The Use of the Self in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.411.
** ibid., p.412.
Image by dan from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Be disruptive: challenge the status quo like FM Alexander

classroom

Do you find you just accept things as they are, or are you a person who questions the status quo?

This week I have been reading Michael Bloch’s biography of FM Alexander. I was fascinated by Bloch’s description of FM as a child – an “attention-seeking” boy who was ‘excused’ from regular lessons at the tiny village school in rural Tasmania.

Why?

He was disruptive. He asked too many questions.

In 1946 Walter Carrington wrote down his recollections of FM talking about his schooldays:

F.M. said that they could never make anything of him at school. He used to dispute every statement that was held up for his belief. If they then referred him to a book, he would ask how the writer of the book knew it to be true. They used to send him up for thrashings but he still came back for more.”*

 In a school child, this was a disruptive and precocious trait. FM was extremely lucky to have a school master who was prepared to spend time teaching him one-to-one outside of normal school hours.

And we are lucky too, because it meant that FM’s innate questioning nature was not crushed. It was, in fact, exactly that predisposition not to let anything rest that characterised his explorations to create the work we call the Alexander Technique. He didn’t just blindly accept what the doctors said. He didn’t cave in and find a new job when it seemed as though his acting career was finished. And when his investigations into the causes of his vocal troubles were going badly, did FM give up? No!

We should learn from this. Too often we allow the easy answer to stop us from thinking. We accept the status quo. We label something as a ‘habit’ or ‘just the way things are’ and then assume that they are unchanging and unchangeable.

But we don’t know that – not until we ask. Not until we test our beliefs and our ideas.

What assumptions are there in your life? What can you question today?

 

* Walter Carrington quoted in Bloch, M., FM: The Life of Frederick Matthias Alexander, Hachette, 2004, p.18 in the Kindle edition.

Image by criminalatt from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The importance of knowing what you’ve got

Do you know where your lungs are?

Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? So take a moment. Put your hands on where you think your lungs are. I’ll wait for you.

Done?

I asked my acting students in Cardiff recently to show me where their lungs are. I have a class of fourteen teenagers. Thirteen of them put their hands halfway down their torso, just below their ribs. I asked them if they were sure, and they all agreed that they were.

Then I showed them a picture of where the lungs really are. It caused some consternation.

lungs lungs2

You see, they’d been trying to breathe down into their abdominal cavity. They’d been told by various drama and voice teachers that breathing down there was good, so they assumed that was where their lungs were located. They also assumed that any movement that happened in the chest must be bad, and some even admitted trying to stop it happening. Sadly, all they were doing was stopping the free movement of their body to allow their lungs to fill!

FM Alexander said that we all think and act according to the peculiarities of our psycho-physical make-up.* In other words, what we believe about our bodies and the world at large determines how we move and interact. If we don’t know the basics of what we’ve got bodywise and how it works, then we’re a bit like a runner starting a race off a handicap. We’ll be struggling from the very start.

So if you’re involved in a specialised activity like singing or playing tennis or skiing (or anything else), or if you’re finding a particular activity difficult, please do spend a bit of research time. Find out what muscles and joints you’ve got. Find out where your lungs are. Get some knowledge. Because once you know what you’ve got, you can begin to plan effectively how you’re going to use it.

* FM Alexander Consctructive Conscious Control of the Individual, Irdeat edition, p.293.
Image of the lungs taken from Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy, 10th ed., Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins, p.30.

Avoiding the ow: know what you’ve got (and how to use it)!

park

I want to tell you a story about me and my son going for a run together, because it so neatly explains how just a little knowledge about how the body works can make a big difference to your experience of moving.

 

So. My son and I went out for a run around our local park. The perimeter is about 2km (a little over a mile), so not too taxing even for a nearly nine year old. 

About two thirds of the way round, my son said his right shoulder was starting to ache. Now neither he nor I could say we are experienced runners, but even we know that our shoulders shouldn’t be doing most of the work while running!

After checking it was okay with him to do some Alexander Technique work, I ran behind him for a few paces to see what was going on. He was throwing his entire shoulder region all over the place as he ran.

I break my story here to explain some anatomy…

Most people don’t realise that, functionally speaking, they have two shoulder joints: the shoulder girdle, which is formed by the collarbone and shoulderblade; and the glenohumeral joint, which is the ball and socket joint formed by the shoulder blade and the upper arm bone (humerus).

If you’re just moving your arm forwards and backwards, the glenohumeral joint will do the job admirably. You don’t need to waggle the whole shoulder girdle.

Back to the story.

I asked my son to stop, and with a bit of hands-on work I explained to him that he could use his whole shoulder region, but that he had a different shoulder joint that could move his arm back and forth more easily. And when he just move at the ball and socket joint, his arm moved so freely and easily that my son laughed.* And then he started to run.

For the first two paces, the right arm was moving in the new way, and the left arm in the old waggly way. But then he changed his left arm to the new streamlined movement. Not only did he move more gracefully, he moved more easily.

Result: he took off. He flew along. I had to work hard to keep up with him!

Once my son stopped doing the waggly thing with his arm, his shoulder stopped getting sore.** Once he knew which joints did what, his running improved.

What could you improve, if you just knew what muscles and joints you have, and how to use them?

 

* FM Alexander talks about how children love learning about how their bodies work. He writes: “They are not slow to recognise that they are themselves the most interesting machines, and their natural interest in mechanics finds full scope in the process of their own re-education.” Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, IRDEAT edition, p.381.

** An important caveat here. If you are experiencing pain or discomfort, SEE A DOCTOR. There may be something physiologic or structural  going on that the doctor can sort out. The Alexander Technique is fantastic, but it isn’t medicine, and can’t cure medical conditions.

Image by coward_lion from FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

 

“I can’t sing!” – the difference between CAN’T and DON’T, and why it matters

signpost

I recently had this exchange with a young student.

Student: I can’t sing.
Me: Really? Who told you that?
Student: Well, no one. But I can’t sing.
Me: What evidence do you have for that?
Student: I’ve heard myself.
Me: What, on a recording?
Student: [scornfully] No!
Me: So how have you heard yourself?
Student: As I’m singing.

At this point I took a little time to explain that this doesn’t really count, as you can’t hear yourself the way an audience hears you. All you can hear of yourself is a combination of internal resonance and whatever bounces back off the walls of wherever you are singing. Back to the dialogue.

Me: So have you heard yourself sing?
Student: No.
Me: So how do you know that you can’t?
Student: I guess I don’t.
Me: Do you sing at all?
Student: As little as possible.
Me: In that case, all we can say is that you don’t sing. Until you sing, we have no evidence that you can’t.

It sounds like I’m splitting hairs. But I’m not. It is a very common thing for me to have students say “I can’t” do something, when what they mean is that they tried it once and weren’t very good. So they decide not to try it ever again.

But this isn’t sufficient evidence to decide. It’s a bit like me picking up a tennis racquet for the first time and expecting to be able to play like Roger Federer. It’s possible, but the likelihood of it happening is vanishingly small. If I want to decide if I’m any good at tennis, I will need to spend some time learning the game and practising.

FM Alexander said that the centre and backbone of his work was that the conscious mind (the reasoning mind) must be quickened (made alive).* And one of the ways that we can do that is to be careful not to confuse ourselves with our language. If we say ‘can’t’ when we really mean ‘don’t’ or ‘haven’t tried’, we cut ourselves off from the possibility of experimenting and discovering whole new areas of skill and delight in our lives.

Where have you said “I can’t” where you really should be saying “I don’t yet” or “I haven’t tried”, and what would happen if you changed the way you spoke and thought?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the IRDEAT Complete Edition, p.39.
Image by graur codrin from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

 

Don’t settle for mediocre: FM Alexander on success

cake

How often do you settle for the thing that is okay, instead of pushing on further and risking being brilliant?

This happens to me every time I bake a cake. I love the baking, hate the decorating. My ideal cake is one that you can smother in icing sugar or cocoa powder and take straight to the table. Sadly, that means that often my cakes aren’t as appealing to look at as they ought to be, because I have not put in the extra effort to make them really special. When I watch the bakers n my favourite TV programme of the moment, BBC’s Great British Bake Off, I am filled with awe.

FM Alexander addresses this problem of tolerating mediocrity in his second book. He writes about how a student will have conceived of what the problem is (decorating is too difficult), will think about the reward for not having this problem (no messy icing sugar everywhere, no wasted time), and will come up with a ‘fix’ to get to the reward fastest (dust icing sugar over the cake).

The problem is that it doesn’t work. The cakes always look sort of reasonable, but not special. I can try to tell myself that I have done my best, but in my heart of hearts I know I’m kidding myself. I might be satisfying my belief structure (decorating is hard) and my conscience (I did my best), but in the end it just won’t wash, and it won’t get me beautiful cakes. To do that I need to do something new. To quote FM,

If [I] once stopped to reason the thing out, and based [my] judgement on the experience gained from the knowledge of previous failures, [I] would have to discard these orthodox plans and seek new ones. This would not be the easy way. It would be the difficult way.*

In other words, in order to go from making just okay cakes to knock ’em dead cakes, I need to reason out a new strategy. I need to take a reasoned, thought out risk.

And it might not work. The icing might go horribly wrong. But at least my cake wouldn’t be just okayish any longer. And the more I work on my new plan for icing, the better are my chances of success.

So when I get back home, I am going to try some new cake decorating ideas. Hw are you going to move beyond okayish and towards extraordinary?

* FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, IRDEAT edition, p.295.
Picture by Jennifer Mackerras