First Moves

First moves in a situation are often missed in the daily milieu, they are rarely formally announced as in a game of chess, rather they echo into the future sounding loud or soft depending on what they have to say. Their significance permeates our actions determining how we respond, how we experience ourselves and our actions. First moves are the set up for what might follow and arise themselves out of our understanding, our own anticipation of a situation and the possibilities or impossibilities that it holds for us. First moves rest, as in chess, not just on our formal understanding but on our tacit understanding of how things are. We start making them in the womb - we are a form of motion, alive. George Kelly used the idea that we are a form of motion to ground Personal Construct Psychology, while Alexander investigated his habitual patterns of movement to develop the Alexander Technique. Common to both is the recognition that people are not just alive, but making choices, choices which have implications, implications they are not often aware of in the way they move, turn, what they attend to, what they make sense of. Alexander developed a way of helping people become more aware of the implications of their own choices at a micro level of action, which highlights how thought is movement and how movement is thought. Kelly put it this way that ‘behaviour is an experiment’ whether you are shifting your weight to protect a sore foot or knee or whether you take up a new activity or whether you ask someone out for the first time. There is always a theory in the movement of asking, in the shifting of the weight whether it is fully articulated or not. It’s what there in the movement, the first move at the beginning and if we can learn to see it, we can change it and experiment with something else, whether its learning the Alexander Technique, taking up painting or seeing somebody else’s viewpoint for the first time. To see somebody else’s view point, to ‘stand in their shoes’, another Kelly quote, is the first step to building a better set of relationships, dialoguing with them and perhaps building a better world if not for all at least for ourselves. Perhaps ultimately this is the only first move worth exploring, seeing other people and learning to be with them.

Alexander Technique – A technique for what?

The question of what Alexander Technique is a technique for is something I often introduce at the beginning of a first lesson or a workshop. People often find it difficult to answer and I usually go on to suggest an answer in the form of how Alexander might have answered it. The suggestion I give is that it is a technique for developing Constructive Conscious Control and I might add of the Individual, which would give us the title of Alexander’s second book. That leads to a second question, or perhaps set of questions, regarding what is Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, what would it look like and what difference would it make? Well, keeping it short and simple, an answer might go something like this. We all have patterns of moving in the world which are deeply tied up with how we experience and think about the world and ourselves. Those patterns of moving in the world are not something that our bodies do separately from ourselves; they are us, involving our attitudes and everything else that we are. They exist at the core of our being and are so familiar to us that we are unaware of them, they are part of the background – a background we can only see when we move differently. The difference creates a gap we can cross over and, like a bridge once we are over it, we can look back and see where we have come from, where we have been, while holding out the prospect and possibilities of where we have come to be now. The Alexander Technique is a way of crossing over, a bridge to the possibilities and potentialities of a freer way of moving in life, an easier way of being. It helps us become aware, become conscious of the ways we habitually control movement, attitudes and emotions by stiffening our frame, carrying ourselves tightly, suppressing our emotion, rushing at things and generally making too much effort. It invites us to suspend these habits and explore what it would be like to move freely. It offers a choice in how we control ourselves in thought and action, a choice that leads to freedom in movement, and allows us to explore and develop those habits that allow this and which lead to the improvements in posture, back and neck pain that often bring people first to Alexander’s work. These improvements are what make conscious control constructive and follow on from learning to be free of our own habits and reactions, with which we stiffen and tighten – so that in the end, we are, for Alexander, free IN thought and action.

The Great Debate

As the banking crisis first unfolded I had occasion to watch a large number of American senators and congress men and women display their media skills. Watching the great debate last night you could see the same skills being transferred across the Atlantic. It’s clear though that British politicians have much to learn before they reach the level of performance demonstrated by the Americans. Why that should be I don’t know, but the difference is there. While the Americans are able to engage the audience directly and have a well integrated use of their arms and backs, the Brits or at least as far as David Cameron and Nick Clegg still look like they have just emerged from media charm school. Of the two Cameron looked like he had integrated his training better but at the moments when he was most fluent, he was focused not on the audience or the viewer but in the mid-distance. It makes for good stage presence but does not directly engage you. Nick Clegg did, by looking wide-eyed into the camera, engaging the viewer personally into a ‘you and I’ relationship. He talked consensually at these points, labelling the other two leaders as men of the past. The whole effect was an invitation to bond and perhaps allowed him to ‘win’ the debate. Gordon Brown on the whole failed to engage people directly, most notably on the question on education where he ignored the questioner and their question to launch into his pre-prepared answer. The one time he captured the audience and the viewer was when he talked about the economy and he engaged people using ‘you and I’ language as he warned about the danger of a double-dip recession. The rest of the time he tended, as did David Cameron at times, to stick to a prepared script heavy with statistics. The eyes glaze over at such points as the viewer and audience are not engaged directly, they are not included but are offered a spectacle from which they are excluded. In the medium of television, as it is evolving, what works is engagement, inclusion, a sense of ‘you and I’ and what we can do together. Cameron in his language is saying this but Clegg is embodying it. Cameron presents himself as a leader at a time when the medium is flattening values,giving power to what the viewer and the audience respond to. Here wee boyishness helps tremendously and Nick Clegg is the winner here, in this, he is the true heir of Tony Blair circa 1997 and he has one final advantage - a certain resemblance in expression to Cliff Richard. A man derided by many, who has sustained a career for over five decades, whose appeal may be hard to fathom but is undoubtedly there, particularly for women – the group pollsters' say will decide the election.

First Post

Lessons from the chair has had a long gestation of over a decade or more. Back then I was given one of the better bits of advice I have received. Certainly one of the few which when followed has been fruitful and rewarding. It came from Walter Carrington who had been taught directly by F.M. Alexander and who had taken over Alexander’s original teacher training course when Alexander died in 1956. The advice concerned Alexander’s technique and developing Constructive Conscious Control, which is what the Alexander Technique aims for. It came in three parts, the first two referring to set Alexander procedures and is the best advice for any aspiring teacher of Alexander’s work. The first part concerned hands on the back of the chair. ‘Pretty much everything you need to know about human mechanics is there’. The second concerned the ‘whispered Ah’. ‘Pretty much everything you need to know about breathing.’ The third bit of advice was to read Alexander’s books. I have to confess that I was slightly sceptical to say the least when I heard the extent of the claim but, over the years, I have come to see that Walter – master craftsman that he was - had distilled from these basic procedures an excellence in teaching and understanding Alexander’s work that few others have achieved. All that he claims is there and more in these basic procedures and over the years, from working with them and doing straight forward Alexander chair work, I have learned many lessons with regard not just to human mechanics but about human movement, action and ultimately intention. Along the way, I have become a psychotherapist working with chairs in a different way but still concerned with movement, action, intention and most of all meaning. Chairs though are not integral to my work; it is the people, the pupils and the clients as they look to solve their different problems. They are the ones who teach me most as I work with them to look at aspects of their world afresh, to seek in all cases new ways of moving that are easier, freer – and it is ultimately the concern with freedom that unites them. The freedom to be, the ease of being that goes with this, freedom not just of thought and action but ‘in thought and action’, as Alexander put it. How we might get there and some of the lessons we can learn will feature in forthcoming blogs which will range from the quite technical to the more general – I hope you will come with me and enjoy the read.