psycho-physical Archives

Why you needn’t worry about doing Alexander Technique wrong.

What if I do Alexander Technique wrong? Can I make things worse?

A tick and a cross - can you do Alexander Technique wrong?

While working with my students recently, I’ve noticed a bit of a trend. There are a number who are worried about changing what they are doing and experimenting, because they are afraid of making things worse.

Does that sound familiar to you? Perhaps you also aren’t completely satisfied with how you’re moving and responding to your environment, but you’re worried about making a change in case you mess it up!

You don’t need to worry, although it’s completely understandable if you do. First of all in this post, I want to examine the background to why a person might think this view makes sense. After that, I’ll explain why we not only shouldn’t worry about doing Alexander Technique wrong, but that we should actually embrace experimentation as a way of life.

Fear of getting worse: everything is connected

I’ve talked a lot recently about the physiological basis behind Alexander’s work: the idea that our minds and bodies are all one thing:

I, in common with most people, conceived of “body” and “mind” as separate parts of the same organism, and consequently believed that human ills, difficulties and shortcomings could be classified as either “mental” or “physical” … My practical experiences, however, led me to abandon this point of view and readers of my books will be aware that the technique described in them is based on the opposite conception, namely, that it is impossible to separate “mental” and “physical” processes in any form of human activity.[1]

If we are a psychophysical unity, then making a change in one area will change everything. So students worry that if they start experimenting with how they are moving their legs while walking, for example, that they could generate unhelpful consequences in other areas that ultimately cause them more problems than if they’d just stuck to what they know. And this is based in truth: if we make a change to one part of the system, then there will be consequential effects throughout the rest of the system, because each one of us is a psychophysical whole.

My students worry, in fact, that if they experiment with the wrong thing, they’ll do Alexander Technique wrong. So they fear experimenting.

However, there is a major problem with using psychophysical unity as a piece of evidence used to discourage experimentation, and it is this. If you are unsatisfied with the results you are currently getting, and you’ve consistently received those results from the process you are following, then you need to change the process in order to improve.

So my students’ issue isn’t really with changing stuff – they’re having lessons with me (and you are reading this blog!) so they’ve signed up for change. What they are afraid of is making a mistake.

Fear of getting worse is a fear of making mistakes

I’ve written recently about how we are taught from an early age to fear making mistakes. Being wrong is bad and shaming; getting the right answer gets us praise and is good. Understandably we most of us want to feel good, so we learn to shun wrong answers. We learn to avoid situations that might entail us making mistakes and feeling the shame that we’ve come to internalise.

This is a powerful motivational factor against making mistakes. Imagine how much more powerful it is when joined to a student’s completely understandable desire not to make any change to their system that might cause discomfort or pain? We don’t like things to hurt, and we don’t like making mistakes, so we fear experimenting and getting it wrong. But we also don’t want to be stuck doing the same old things in the same old inefficient way. What to do?

Category mistakes and robust systems

I wrote in my post about mistakes that much of our fear of mistakes is based on a category mistake. We take the limited number of cases where it is possible to make get things wrong (such as school tests) and mistakenly extrapolate that to all of our experience. I wrote:

But when you think about it, if you look across the whole of a person’s life, remembering STUFF for tests and then quoting it back on the papers is a very small and specific category of activity that isn’t repeated very often anywhere else. [2]

The likelihood of us getting something ‘wrong’ when we’re using our reasoning to experiment with how we’re moving and responding to our environment is actually really small. Part of what we’re doing when we’re working with Alexander’s ideas is improving our reasoning processes, so maybe we should have a little more faith in them, and a little more patience with ourselves as we get better in using them.

But there’s another important point that needs to be said. We are not china dolls; we are not inherently breakable. It takes significant amounts of injury or disease to make it actively dangerous for us to experiment with using our bodies better. Obviously, if you have a medical condition you should follow primary healthcare advice and be mindful of not taking things beyond limits. But for the vast majority of us the limits of experimentation are pretty broad.

So maybe we should be a little more patient and trusting of our selves and our reasoning. Maybe we should be a little less fearful. Maybe we should all just make a few more mistakes. And if we make those changes to the way we respond to Alexander’s work, maybe we’ll notice that our approach to life generally becomes a little freer and more fun.

That would be worth the occasional ‘mistake’.

[1] Alexander, F.M., The Use of the Self, London, Orion, 1984, p. 21.

[2] https://activateyou.com/2019/02/whats-right-with-being-wrong/

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Whole body vs separate parts : how choosing the right concept changes everything

A cut up apple - whole body or separate parts?

Have your ever seen someone play music, or take part in a sport, and felt as if they were needlessly throwing all of themselves into the activity? Or perhaps you’ve seen (or been) the person who is obsessed with the action of one particular part of the body – possibly because it hurts – to the exclusion of all else. I see both things a lot with the musicians that I work with: the trombone player who uses absolutely every part of her body to move the slide; the pianist who is obsessed with the action of his right thumb.

Both of these characteristics – the ‘kitchen sink’ approach and the ‘laser focus’ on one particular area – stem from correct ideas about the human body, but in both cases they have been taken to unhelpful extremes. So how are we whole, and how are we separate? And how can we change our ideas to think more helpfully about our physical structure?

Body as whole

On the one hand, we are a psycho-physical unity. As FM Alexander said,

it is impossible to separate ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ processes in any form of human activity.[1]

This means that everything is connected – mind and body. And if we decide to change the way we are using one part of our body, because our body is a whole system, everything else must necessarily change around it. This means that taking the body as a whole system is likely to effect better and more effective changes than looking at specifics.

Each request from his teacher to do something, and each injunction not to do something else, means a building-up of a series of specific psycho-physical acts towards the given “end,” namely, learning to write. This means that although the “end” may be gained, the result as a whole will not be as satisfactory as it might be, for nothing will have been done in the way of re-education on a general basis…[2]

Here’s an example of this in practice. A student can come to me with an issue involving arms and hands (when playing a trombone or a saxophone, for example); I work to help them stop muscular tension in their neck and back by perhaps questioning their concept of what they need to do to breathe, or whether they need to use neck muscles to think, and the arm problem vanishes. This is very cool, and looks a little like magic, but is based on the physiologic truth that a change in the musculoskeletal relationships in one part of the body will have ripple effects everywhere else.

Body as separate parts

But things are also separate, and often, like Alexander, I see people who are using themselves in such a way that their whole body is involved in an unhelpful pattern of tension. FM, for example, noticed this in some of his clients who came for help with speech defects:

When he spoke, I also noticed a wrong use of his tongue and lips and certain defects in the use of his head and neck, involving undue depression of the larynx and undue tension of the face and neck muscles. I then pointed out to him that his stutter was not an isolated symptom of wrong use confined to the organs of speech, but that it was associated with other symptoms of wrong use and functioning in other parts of his organism… I went on to explain that … he “stuttered” with many other different parts of his body besides his tongue and lips. [3]

Sometimes I work with musicians who want to use their whole bodies to play their instruments. For example, a trumpet player might use her whole body to raise the instrument up to play, bending backwards with her spine, rather than simply using her arms. If I work with the trumpeter and help her to separate her arms (appendicular structure) from her spine (axial structure) then raising the instrument becomes much easier.

And both things are true. They may look a bit contradictory, but they’re not – they just function on different levels. And we can take advantage of both ideas in order to improve how we’re performing.

Questions to ask yourself.

So if you’re practising, for example, you could ask yourself these questions:

Kitchen sink scenario: Am I using everything to carry out this activity? Could I think a little more about things being separate?

Laser focus scenario: am I thinking of myself too separately, or am I concentrating on separate parts and forgetting the rest of my body?

The extra credit challenge: can I manage to think of things being separate AND hold the idea of being a whole person, all at the same time?

You may find that your ability to play your instrument without crunching into the music stand, or to use a laptop without being sucked into the screen, improves if you play with these ideas. Let me know.

[1] Alexander, F.M., The Use of the Self, London, Orion, 1985, p.21.

[2] Alexander, F.M., Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, NY, Irdeat, 1997, p.233.

[3] Alexander, The Use of the Self, p.70.

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Put your self first: why you should pay attention to your body

I ran into a lovely ex-student of mine the other day. He’s now an acting student in his second year, and loving it. He told me that before he got into full-time drama school, he couldn’t understand why the pre-College programme I taught on had movement or Alexander Technique classes as part of the curriculum. ‘What’s the point of all this work on my body? I want to act!’ was the way he felt at the time.

It’s a great question. Why bother with Alexander Technique, anyway? Why not skip straight to the acting/music/anything else bit?

‘What’s the point? I just want to act!’

I think a lot of beginning acting and music students are likely to be sympathetic to this heartfelt cry. But it’s wrong, and if we substitute a different kind of activity, we’ll see why. For example, can you imagine Lewis Hamilton saying, ‘What’s the point of maintaining the car? I just want to drive’? Or Roger Federer saying, ‘What’s the point of looking after my back? I just want to play tennis’?

I think we can agree that this would never happen! Lewis Hamilton needs his car to function perfectly so that he can perform to his very best. Roger Federer needs his racquets, shoes, knees, shoulders – everything – to be in optimum shape so that he can play tennis to the best of his ability. And I’m sure that both of these top performing athletes would agree that they also need their mental processes to be in tip-top shape, too. They understand that they need to put ‘self first’.

Put your self first

If you’re a musician, you’re a musical athlete. You need everything to work to its best. Same thing if you’re an actor: you need your psycho-physical self to be ready to mould into anyone or anything that you are required to play. Same thing if you’re a chiropractor, or an office worker, or a teacher: you need your mind and body to be as ready as it can be for the tasks you ask it to perform.

The Alexander Technique helps you sort out all the things that you do to yourself that stop you from performing optimally. It gives you tools to transcend your own self-imposed limitations, and gives you options for getting around or coping with limitations imposed from outside (like illness, or bad office furniture).

My ex-student now understands why it’s so important to put your self first. Without a well-honed mechanism, you don’t have reliable tools to create the wonderful things you intend. He now loves his movement and Alexander Technique classes.

Be like my ex-student – learn to put your self first!

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