The Alexander Technique, a method for self-improvement:
I feel privileged that in my professional life as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, I get to work with people who are seeking self-improvement. By the term "self-improvement" I am thinking of what we can do, or not do, in order to improve ourselves. It is not a process in which one is being "fixed" by someone else. It does not include "intervention" from outside, by doctors and therapists, by drugs and manipulations, etc. I think of self-improvement as a process of seeing and then dropping our harmful habits, habits of thinking, feeling and sensing, habits that block us from being all that we can be.
Self-improvement as "seeing and then dropping our harmful habits" starts with improving our self-awareness. Consider, however, that a harmful habit is usually invisible to the person who has it. This is where I get to be useful. Thanks to many hours of training and experience, it is relatively easy for me to see and sense the harmful habits in someone who has come for assistance. My task then is to enable my client to perceive what I perceive.
For example, John presented to me with serious pain in his right wrist, especially bad after much work on his computer. I saw and sensed certain habits in the way he tensed his neck and shoulders and I knew well how these habits could easily lead to the trapping of nerves in the wrists. In time, as John learned to perceive these habits and learned how to drop them, he began to experience a major reduction in wrist pain. Another example, Sandra, a professional violinist, was seriously considering early retirement because of debilitating pain in her elbow. Like John, she too was able to perceive and reduce her harmful habits of neck and shoulder tension, her elbow pain diminished, and she is still playing professionally. Headaches were Andrew's problem. The main habit turned out to be the hard and forceful way he concentrated with his eyes, seldom allowing them to relax and take in his peripheral field. Sally's tendency to be "down and depressed" was alleviated by learning to carry herself with a more "up" oriented posture. Brian's life long lower back pain became history when he finally perceived and prevented his habits of tightening and arching his lower back. I could go on to give many more examples but I think you get the idea, that a huge percentage of our suffering is caused by harmful habits, habits that can be perceived and to a large extent eliminated. In the interests of clarity, I have presented fairly simple examples; I would add that more complex cases, even those involving great stress and deep emotions, obey much the same rules as do the simple ones.
It might seem to some that changing habits is a pretty difficult endeavor. I agree that with a poor method and an inexperienced guide, it is almost impossible. But with a tried and tested method and with a well-trained and caring guide, it becomes eminently do-able, even pleasant, and always richly rewarding. So what should we look for in a reliable method for self-improvement? Here are nine qualities that I would look for.
One-to-One Guidance: A guide who has successfully completed the journey many times before is invaluable. Moreover, a one-to-one relationship between you and your guide/teacher will help enormously. While group classes may be cheaper in the short term, fast and long lasting learning to drop those harmful habits will happen much more certainly in a one-to-one situation. Although I will work with pairs and couples and sometimes even three persons together, I teach not to a class but to each person individually.
Walking the Talk: Your guide must be able to walk the talk. At first glance, this may seem obvious and common sense but it is not common practice. Professional training for all types of mentoring is usually focused on what to do to the client, not on how to be the example for the client. At the same time, we all know intuitively that example is the best teacher by far, that if one’s guide possesses the harmful habits that one is trying to drop, one’s inner self will recognize the incongruity and ignore the efforts. When not with clients in Ottawa/Hull I work as the chief assistant at the Montreal Teacher Training School for the Alexander Technique where our main goal is to ensure that all graduate Alexander teachers are able to walk the talk. During 1600 hours over a period of three years, each graduate will have learned to “be” the Alexander Technique, to exemplify it in thought, speech, and movement. It helps a lot that the ratio of teacher trainer to teacher trainee in Alexander Schools never exceeds 1 to 5, so every teacher trainee gets whatever personal guidance is needed.
A Psychophysical being: Within a human being, no physical event takes place without a corresponding event happening in the mind, no mental event takes place without a corresponding event happening in the body. It can be measured that even for an eye to blink there is action in the mind. All events within a human being involve both mind and body, psyche and physique, all are psychophysical. Harmful habits originate psychophysically; they must be resolved psychophysically.
Presence of Mind: Our minds have the capacity to inhabit the past, the present, and/or the future; our bodies live in the present, one breath at a time. A fundamental problem in modern times is that our minds have been educated to talk mostly in terms of past and future while our bodies still need to talk present. Mind and body talking different languages, this is not a good recipe for achieving successful psychophysical change. Your guide in this endeavor needs to have learned how to exercise some reasonably good presence of mind in order to understand how to assist you to improve yours. It is not really all that difficult to improve. Doing so enables you to occupy sometimes a place of surprising power that resides in each and every one of us, a place from where you can more easily “see” and then drop your harmful self destructive habits.
Causes vs Symptoms: It is easy to get drawn into trying to fix the symptom rather than to deal with the cause because the symptom is shouting louder; however, leaving the cause in place ensures that the symptom will recur. It must never be forgotten that the causes of stress, tension, pain, etc. are most often to be found in harmful habits in the way one is moving and reacting to stimuli. These habits are psychophysical, they include both mind and body. A symptom’s cause begins in the mind and flows to body via the neck and the central nervous system, i.e. from the inside out, from the top down. In this manner, harmful habits involve the whole person. Successful long-term symptom alleviation requires a corresponding whole person (holistic) approach that takes into account the order in which the symptom was caused.
Action/Reaction: All of us need to remind ourselves often of the well-known fact that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What this means in the context being discussed is that the harder we try to get rid of a habit, the stronger it gets! Take, for example, trying to make a habitually tense muscle free by stretching it, i.e. overpowering it with another muscle. While this type of effort may succeed in the short term, eventually the “equal and opposite reaction” must occur, i.e. the habitually tense muscle must tense up again. What if, instead, you could talk to the tense muscle and gently persuade it to let go, to de-tense. Is it not likely that a result obtained in this gentler manner will be longer lasting and have less chance of causing collateral damage? Think relationships; your mind/body relationship is like your other relationships. You already know that in these other relationships, gentle persuasion and not direct force is more likely to get you what you want without creating unwanted reaction and unwanted side effects. It is very effective to apply this same intelligence, respect and love in your mind/body relationship.
Conscious Self-Talk: That the mind and body are already talking to each other continuously is well known. That we have the capacity to engage consciously and constructively in this dialogue is not so well known. This is one of the keys to success in changing habits. Saying, “Let my neck be free” is a much more effective strategy than forcing my neck to be free by employing muscular brute strength. I know that this assertion runs counter to our education but it is nevertheless true. Imagine your body as millions and millions of iron filings and your mind as a magnet. Whichever way your mind goes, the iron filings line up. Electro-chemical energy emanates from your mind, influencing and molding your body. Conscious intentional participation in this process works well, without eliciting resistance, without causing side effects.
Proprioception Deception: Perhaps the most common error made when trying to change habits is to rely overmuch on what it “feels” like. Proprioception is the technical word for our sense of where we are in space including our sense of how much tension is appropriate to being in that orientation. In most modern people, proprioception is a faulty compass. What feels right may well not be right at all, just familiar; the harmful habit feels right because it is what we know. Obviously, we will not get far by relying on proprioception. A competent guide will direct your attention away from your proprioceptive sense toward other of your senses and capacities that are less deceived, to your sense of touch, to your visual sense, and to your capacity for conscious constructive self talk. Sometimes guiding you with hands-on, at other times imitating you so you can see what you are doing, even getting you to watch your movement in a mirror, and all the while helping you attend to the flow of your conscious thought, your guide must be able to help you to recalibrate that faulty proprioceptive sense.
Won't Power: Your guide should also be aware of another common trap in trying to change harmful habits, i.e. the desire to do the "right" thing. The body/mind system is unimaginably complex. Trying to imagine what is right and then making it happen by sustained willpower is a fast track to frustration. Let's stand back, let's remind ourselves that our body/mind systems came into this world knowing what is right, a fact that watching very young children will readily confirm. Later, harmful habits were learned by imitation of our closest role models. Now, all that we need do is recognize and drop the harmful habits; what will remain will be right. We only need to know what we won't do. And this won't power is a whole lot easier to exercise than willpower.
I hope these thoughts prove useful to anyone interested in self-improvement. In my experience, not many methods include all nine qualities outlined above. Perhaps it is just because it includes all nine of them in a simple easy to learn method that the Alexander Technique is so effective and such a joy to work with. As a certified Alexander teacher, I stand ready to assist anyone who aspires to embark upon the journey to self-improvement.
For further information, please do not hesitate to contact me, Richard Albert, at :
e-mail: alextech@magma.ca
telephone: 613-315-5730
web site: www.magma.ca/~alextech