Being Alive

Women’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 this week featured Elizabeth Walker, who at 97 is still teaching the Alexander Technique. She is the last living teacher trained by Alexander and has been teaching for seventy years. The interview contained a number of gems, the importance of taking the work seriously without being serious, the importance of the inhibition and keeping things free. Perhaps the most inspiring thing is, that Elizabeth is still working, not many 97 years old can say that. She is also still getting better at what she does, again how many people can say that at 97. The sceptically minded, who manage to listen, may think this is eulogising on the part of her student, who has come back for lessons. Yet anyone with any experience of Alexander Technique Teacher’s as they age, will recognise not just that it is plausible but it is truthful. Older teachers if they are any good, develop a clarity of intention, by stripping away all the unnecessary elements, to leave only what is necessary. It is one of the attractive features of being a teacher, you get better as you age, that’s what allows teacher to keep going through their eighties, often until ninety, doing what by any standards is a physical job. The secret of course is knowing how to use yourself, keeping yourself free, not tightening unnecessarily – this is not just true for teaching but any skilled activity. Elizabeth also made the case for her continuing to teach. It helps both her and her pupils feel alive. This is as good a reason for doing anything that I know, and it is one that George Kelly recognised as being an indication of successful therapy.

Feeling alive, a meaningful life, comes in many forms not just Alexander work – it comes from having something meaningful to do. The item following Elizabeth Walker on Women’s Hour rather reinforced this for me. It featured Rachel Wotton an Australian sex worker, who works with disabled people. It is a subject that outrages some but then I do not think they really consider the alienation and rejection that people who are disabled have when they find it difficult or impossible to find a partner. I suspect that this come in part from not wanting to think that the disabled get horny and want to have sex - just as much as the next person. 


If you want to think about this more, then a good place to start is the very funny, entertaining and touching French film Nationale 7.  I saw it a few years back and a working both as a Alexander Technique Teacher and a psychotherapist has confirmed the need for an open discussion and meaningful action here. Rachel Wotton made an intelligent case for this on Women’s Hour. Like Elizabeth Walker, her work is obviously meaningful for her and helps her feel alive; while again like Elizabeth she helps others to a better quality of life. Both women demonstrate in their lives what is existentially important, meaning, helping others and feeling alive and should be respected accordingly.

No blog for two weeks as I am away at conferences and training days. Women’s Hour is available on BBC I-Player until Tuesday 19^th June. Elizabeth Walker starts at 11mins and 55 secs, Rachel Wotton at  19mins and 20 secs. Elizabeth Walker is on You Tube here, while the website for a documentary on Rachel Wotton is here. 

Why We Need A Teacher

Alexander believed anyone could do what he did in working things out for himself; he also believed that lessons would reduce the time needed to do so. I am far from certain about the former statement, while being pretty sure of the latter. The problems in working it out for oneself are many, even if you have the excellent guide that is given by Alexander in chapter one of his third book ‘The Use of The Self.’ This account of how he worked things out is undoubtedly idealised, but in his idealisation Alexander lays out a pretty good framework for learning what he knew. 

Within that account the chief difficulty becomes apparent, namely the need to do something unfamiliar, not to rely on habit, not to rely on feeling, to allow something different to happen. All too often at the last second, we revert to the familiar, go with the habit, make our usual choice, missing the new road that is in front of us.

Alexander was well aware of this, as the most recent blog by Robert Rickover makes clear. Alexander’s practical experience of teaching both himself and others emphasised this tendency to revert, to rely on habit, to rely on old conceptions of how to go about things, even simple things like sitting and walking.

In talking of conceptions here, it is worth remembering a belief of Alexander’s, that John Dewey picked up on, namely that experience precedes conception. There are some very deep waters we could get into here about conception and what is going on in general, but from a practical point of view Alexander is right. Only when you have experience can you really begin to know, to have concepts in terms of ‘knowing how,’ which is very different from ‘knowing that.’

Getting the experiences is where a teacher comes in, where the teacher can help you gain in minutes experiences that it took Alexander months to work through. Those first experiences of difference in how you can move, how you might use yourself, are what allow you to begin to be aware of what you currently do, how you currently work, what you might stop, what might be right, what might be wrong in terms of how we function. 

We too often rely on the pre-verbal solutions of our childhood, modified haphazardly or sometimes modified consciously and badly, as our way forward. A teacher can help us correct these by making plain the implications of our patterns of use, our habits, not just verbally but through experience and words, putting the two together so we can learn the concepts for ourselves. As we do so, we develop Conscious Control for ourselves; we can use ourselves intentionally. 

Without a teacher we are liable to lose ourselves, always returning to old habits, relying on old feelings of right, that are wrong; tying ourselves in knots, missing the way forward, repeating old mistakes, following the old ways, that have led us into impasse, always, and forever will do so, unless, we first learn to stop, call a halt. With that a teacher can help, before pointing the way to a new use, new habits that can free us towards a better and more constructive use of ourselves.  

Sciatica And Semi-Supine

Exchanging emails with a friend today they told me of their plan to spend the weekend on the floor in the hope of easing their sciatica. This blog is an open letter of sorts to them about what they might do; how they might help themselves using the semi-supine procedure that I know that they have learned from their Alexander Technique lessons. 

I have a particular interest in sciatica; it was what led me to Alexander lessons in the first place. I was relatively young at 24 to suffer the severity of sciatic pain that I had; it would flair up making it extremely painful to walk and I would have to take time off work to let things settle down – anti-inflammatories after the first episode seemed to have no efficacy. I tried all sorts of treatment and became familiar with a number of different physiotherapy departments, went on the machines to have my spine stretched, even had surgery. The result was always the same, things would get better and I would go back to work; three months of thirteen-hour days (I was working as an accountant in London at the time) saw me off work again.

I only properly understood the cycle after my first Alexander Technique lesson, when I suddenly saw how the way I sat caused the pressure on the nerves that caused the pain. Now Alexander Technique did not cure the sciatica, it does not claim to, but it was the one thing that helped through, giving me control of my use and, through that, the ability to relieve the pressure.

At first, that control was only there, as sometimes happens, when I was lying in semi-supine, later it came when I was standing up, until now when I can get it pretty much almost anywhere. This allows me to live a full and active life, I can say I never cripple myself with sciatica now, if that is not tempting fate. A pain is almost always there in the background because of the way my back is, but to repeat, it does not bother me. I know enough to not attend to it, to direct my attention elsewhere, to interrupt the standard pain reaction in favour of elaborating what works.

And it is this, not the basic instructions for semi-supine (I’ll put them up on the blog sometime) that I want to tell my friend. Elaborate the orthogonal, go for the vertical, do not try and sort out the pain. You will only attend to it directly, end gain and make it worse. It is only when instead of relating to the pain directly by attending to it, that you allow yourself to begin to focus elsewhere, that things begin to work, almost by magic, except it is not magic, it’s predictable, repeatable, if you know about use and the use of the eyes.

If you can find a way to lightly focus on the ceiling, without concentration, without fixing the eyes, it will all start to work; it is a matter of getting curious and wondering. A helpful thought, sometimes, if the ceiling is too boring, the pain too distracting, is to imagine a brightly coloured mobile just above your eyes. If you allow yourself to see it, the same thing will happen, your eyes will open wide with wonder, things will start to work – you have created the awareness within which you can work with the directions. It is always the shift of attention, brought about through leaving yourself alone. When that happens, you start to breathe and things ease off. From experience, released breathing means a back that is working well; a back that is working well means released breathing. It’s chicken and egg sometimes, except in the case of sciatica, where the breathing comes first.