Lessons From The Chair

Best Alexander Technique Advice Ever

2012-02-17T11:53:00.000-08:00

Today, while swimming, I recalled the best piece of advice I have ever had from an Alexander Technique teacher. It came from Walter Carrington, who took over Alexander's teacher training course, when Alexander died in 1955. I took a small number of lessons with Walter over the years between qualifying in 1994 and when he died in 2005. In a good year, I would go down to London two or three times for lessons with Walter and other first generation teachers, most notably Peggy Williams. Both were remarkable teachers, from whom I had lessons that I remember and am still understanding to this day.

One such lesson was my very first lesson with Walter, when in the first five minutes, I learned more from his hands, about how things were supposed to work, than I had in my three-year training course. Of course, I needed those three years to understand what it was he wanted to me to know and was teaching me.

On one visit, shortly before I was due to get married, I explained to Walter that with finances being tight, I did not expect to be in London again for eighteen months. Walter told me not worry and then told me that:

1. If I understood hands on the back of the chair, then I would learn and know pretty much everything I need to know about human mechanics and functioning.

2. That if I understood the whispered ‘ah’, I would learn and know pretty much all I would ever need to know about breathing.

3. Finally, Walter added that I should read the books, meaning the four books Alexander wrote, and I would have all I need to know about the Alexander Technique and Conscious Control.

At the time, being of a sceptical frame of mind, I doubted the truth of what Walter said; I thought he might just be exaggerating. Scepticism though has to be tempered with experimentation, so I followed Walter’s advice and come to see the truth of it. So now, if I was asked for advice, I would repeat what Walter told me, namely that if you learn the set procedures which are 'hands on the back of the chair' and the whispered 'ah' and, more importantly, if you understand them, you have pretty much all you need for whatever physical activity you might be undertaking.

Returning to the reason I recalled all this today in the swimming pool, well I have been working again with hands on the back of the chair and today I was applying it in the pool. My swimming was easier, faster and more powerful than usual, as I was using myself better than normal. As I still want to improve, I'll be standing putting my hands on the back of the chair again, not just to improve my swimming but to understand the needs of my pupils and help them improve the use of themselves in whatever daily round of activities they undertake and whatever outside pastimes they enjoy.

Stand Up Straight Now!

2012-02-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

If you felt yourself stiffen to the above command then you are almost certainly not alone. It is most people’s first and un-thought out reaction to being asked to stand up straight. The resultant posture involves a fixing and holding of the breath. It was even cultivated for a while as a healthy posture in schools and of course the classic sergeant major pose with head pulled back, chest puffed out is an exaggerated form of it. The fact that it is not healthy, in interfering with relaxed respiration and placing undue strain on the back, was missed until Alexander came along. His work was in part responsible for these sort of exercises disappearing and some of the worst exercises of army drill stopping in the early twentieth century.

However, you just cannot keep a bad idea down as it were, and nearly a century later the idea that we should practice standing up and sitting up straight, as a way of cultivating will power and control is back. It is being promoted by Professor Roy Baumeister and my attention was drawn to his work, through an interesting post on Alexander Technique teacher Jennifer Mackerras' blog.

Now the problem with simply asking someone to stand up straight is that it assumes that they know how to do it. Yet if they did, you would expect not to have to tell them, they just would stand well. It is a point made by John Dewey* in elaborating a conversation with Alexander. Alexander having pointed out to him that people, in seeking to make any change, including one as simple as changing how they stand, believe they merely have to will it and it will happen.

This for Alexander, according to Dewey, is merely a ‘superstition', a belief ‘on a par with primitive magic in its neglect of attention to the means which are involved in reaching an end.’ What is important is an ‘intelligent inquiry to discover means which will produce a desired result, and intelligent intervention to procure the means.’

Without the enquiry into how we might change how we stand, we are most likely, to quote Dewey again, to end up ‘standing differently, but only a different kind of badly.’ This Dewey expands on, to make a more general point that an act comes before the thought, that a habit must be established before we can ‘evoke a thought at will.’

These thoughts of Dewey for me, connect Alexander to George Kelly and his Psychology of Personal Constructs. Kelly was hugely influenced by Dewey and, in his insistence that ‘behaviour is the experiment’, one can see a direct link between the foregoing and his evolution of fixed role therapy. A link that is re-enforced by something else Alexander said, that Dewey reported, namely that we are not simply talking about ‘control of the body’, but the ‘control of the mind and character’. All of these rely on ‘intelligently controlled habit’ and that must be the aim of Alexander lessons or any kind of therapy, such as Personal Construct Psychology, which takes people as active creators of their own lives.

*Dewey,J. (2008) The Middle Works, 1899-1924 ,Volume 14:1922, Human Nature and Conduct . Carbondale:Southern Illinois University Press p23-25

Curiosity Recaptured

2012-02-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, before blogging became prominent, Mornum Time Press published a book of short essays centred on people's experience of the Alexander Technique -AT. I am not sure whether Jerry Sontag, who edited the book, came up with the title or someone else did, but whoever it was, in choosing 'Curiosity Recaptured', they chose well. For 'Curiosity Recaptured' says something about an attitude to life and to others ,that we can consciously choose, whatever life throws at us. It allows us not just to be curious but to wonder.

I was reminded of the book today, during a conversation with an senior psychotherapist about how they see their work. They described their work with couples, as helping people to make the most conscious adult choices possible, through being curious about the other. It was a nice simple explanation of where dialogue begins, where what Kelly called sociality starts.

Sociality is something that distinguished personal construct psychology back in the 50's. Now psychologists and other psychotherapists are catching up, as they talk about theory of mind and mentalization. Their contributions are all illuminating and helpful but lack something of the clarity of Kelly was getting at. Namely, that in order to play a role with regard to somebody, it is helpful to be able to predict them by being able to 'stand in their shoes' so to speak. The extent to which we can do this helps determines the type of role that we can play.

At a very simple level, this occurs every day while driving or walking along the pavement. Sometimes it goes wrong, as today when I encountered someone walking towards me. We both did that dance that sometimes occurs, with each person trying to step one way and then the other. In this case, our anticipations went astray, we both went the same way and collided. Thankfully this is rare, particularly when driving!

In work and at home we play more complex roles and have to navigate not just relationships with one other, but amongst groups. We need to make sense not just of the individual people involved but of the multiple relationships that exist between people, as well as the relationships horizontal and vertical that exist between the group and the outside world.

Personal Construct Psychology - PCP has some lovely ways of working with these that have been developed by Harry Proctor in the form of Perceiver Element Grids, PEG’s for short. I have used them with both therapy clients and pupils to help them think about the various relationships in their families and most importantly, help them suspend, a PCP word, or inhibit an AT word, old constructs, a PCP word, or conceptions, an AT word.

Whichever words one chooses, whatever theory one starts with, both refer to the same ability of stopping, looking and beginning to see the situation a fresh - as I blogged about last week. It is always a matter of finding our sense of wonder, our sense of curiosity, possibility, no matter what assails, no matter how troublesome a situation or a relationship is. As it is the freshness of being present, that presents the future with new horizons, new vistas, ways forward, whether together or apart.

Stopping, Looking and Seeing

2012-01-26T21:16:00.000-08:00

Today I start with a quote from the opening paragraph of art historian John Berger's, 'The Art of Seeing' – something I wish I had written as it expresses beautifully, something fundamental, not just about the work that I do, but about life and what it is to be in the world.

'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'

This quote resonates with me so much, because when I am working I often make a distinction between looking and seeing, listen and hearing, feeling and touching, and for that matter feeling and being touched. Of these, I place the most emphasis on vision, as when we begin to allow ourselves to stop look and see, our relationship with all our senses changes, improves. We experience the world differently, we see the world differently, we hear the world differently and we can touch and be touched by it differently.

Use in effecting function, as Alexander noted affects ourselves, how we see our possibilities, whether we have can have hope. Hope in our darkest hours is a light that can lead us onwards, finding a way to a new future. We do not have to ‘paint ourselves into a corner’ as George Kelly observed and to free ourselves we need not just words but the ability to see a situation differently, to see the alternatives. Only then do we have a choice where we can weigh up the implications before committing ourselves to action.

Stopping which I blogged about last week, involves a commitment to look at a situation, to see it, to become focussed. The experience of which, is a coherence not just towards the situation but within ourselves, as it includes us, as we release, lengthen and widen, breathe, prepare. This reflects the fact that most of our experience is both pre and non verbal – words giving the handles that allow for patterns and sequences to be identified, thought about, and communicated to others.

Stopping also allows us to look at others, be with them, be alongside them and I will be blogging more about this aspect of my work in coming weeks. For the use of the eyes and the facial muscles involves our earliest habits, habits that link us to others in an inter-personal world, an inter-personal world that is sometimes hidden, but always there. This world, the world of love and attachments is the source of our deepest anguish, profoundest sadness, as well as moments of immense joy, happiness. It is a world to be understood, that in our being with others, we can take a conscious stance towards.

Which brings me back as always to the Primary Control its importance in organising not just ourselves but our experience of the world, whether we want to better understand others, perform better or simply free ourselves from aches and pains that interfere with everyday living. The Primary Control is the means through which conscious control can become established and constructive – it is what makes Alexander’s work unique and it is freely available to anybody who knows how to stop, look, listen, become aware of themselves and allow themselves to begin to see and hear the rhythms and patterns of their lives, their worlds.

Stopping

2012-01-20T07:37:00.000-08:00

This week has been a reminder of the need to stop. Stop or stopping carries a very particular meaning in Alexander Technique, one beyond its normal connotation, that to those that who have not applied the technique for themselves, may well be misunderstood. The importance of stop or inhibition is something one returns to, not just in daily life for oneself but with pupils. Who when they come in with a particular complaint have often forgotten the need to stop.

Stopping in Alexander terms does not mean collapsing or slumping on the sofa to watch TV. It is an active pause, active in the sense that one chooses not do certain things, not go about things in a particular manner or way. Alexander talked about ‘stopping doing the wrong thing and letting the right thing do itself’.

Of course to stop doing the wrong things, you have to know what you do not want and in Alexander terms this is very easy to specify. You need to stop doing anything that fixes or interferes with your breathing. You need to become aware of the micro-acts, preparations and attitudes that leave you holding your breath, shortening in stature, tightening in the neck. Becoming aware can be a difficult process. It helps if you have developed a physical skill in the past but you still need to know what to become aware of and avoid looking for it.

Looking for it is where most pupils go wrong when they start lessons, they start to attend to themselves directly rather than looking and seeing what’s around them or looking to see where they want to go or what they need to focus on. Indeed if they start to concentrate, and you can try this at home by concentrating on something in the room, they fix and hold their breath. Focus is different from concentration, it involves maintaining a balance between foveal and peripheral vision and not a narrowing of attention to a particular point. Focus involves attention that is directed away from the self and allows for consciousness of the self to emerge. This is a pre-requisite of conscious control.

Focus is a solution for mind-wandering, it is also a solution for anxiety providing one knows how to get there and getting there involves stop. In this respect it is somewhat like meditation or the mindfulness techniques that are becoming popular, it is also somewhat different in that Alexander Technique highlights what Alexander called the Primary Control, which is the relationship between the head, the neck and the torso. If we get this relationship right, our breathing will ease and deepen, we will relax without collapsing, we will lengthen and gain an improvement in our posture. Most of all we will be at our most resourceful for action, as we feel energised and light.

All this comes from stopping shortening and tightening into action, from knowing that we do not want to tighten our necks, pull our heads back, pull our heads down, shorten our spine and various other simple things. In Alexander though when we think of stopping these things we turn what we do not want into something positive. So we think of our necks being free, our heads going forward and up, our backs lengthening. In the first place all these guiding order or directions as Alexander talked about are inhibitory, they are about stopping something and as you do, the right thing does begin to happen, your neck does free, your head does go forward and up, you do lengthen and you can begin to see and focus on what needs to happen, on what you need to do, on what you want to occur. Stopping is the beginning of action, as well as the end. Stopping is the way we begin again, when life assails us and we need to find freedom, freedom in thought, freedom in action.

Freedom For Living

2012-01-13T02:38:00.000-08:00

A New Year and a new beginning, and the New Year resolution for this blog is to find video clips of people, other than Fred Astaire, who have what, Alexander would have called good use. So expect clips of various actor’s and sports people who have had Alexander Lessons such as Judi Dench, William Hurt, Helena Bonham Carter, Sebastian Coe, Greg Chappell and Mathew Pinsent. Today, there is a clip great Don Bradman, someone who never had Alexander lessons but whose use, Alexander very much admired. He like Astaire, in his chosen field exemplifies good use through his own technique.

Good use, or if you like, good co-ordination in physical activities, is always founded on the principles of poise and balance, which no particular method, technique or activity has a patent on. Alexander himself worked out the principles in his chosen field of using his voice as an actor. What makes him different from people who have worked out the principles with regard to dance, rowing, horse riding, fencing or martial arts, was his realisation that it was possible to be aware of his use in everything he did and to gain a conscious control of himself.

Alexander writings about conscious control are somewhat inaccessible to a modern audience for example, when he writes about conscious control as being ‘Man’s Supreme Inheritance’ – the title of his first book. Yet, in his last book ‘The Universal Constant in Living’, another somewhat inaccessible title, Alexander writes about his work as a practical method for changing behaviour and concludes about the importance of having ‘freedom in thought and action.’

‘Freedom in thought and action’ implies poise, balance and true relaxation, not the state of collapse that people often mistake for relaxation. ‘Freedom in thought and action’ also implies the ability to choose how we go about doing things, the attitudes we take to situations, events, others and ourselves. These are all deeply important if conscious control is to be achieved in its fullest sense. The freedom each person seeks for the most part depends on what is important to them and their individual life histories. For people who seek mastery of a particular activity like the sportsmen and actors named above, it is about both a freedom that helps prevent injury and improves performance.

For my pupils this week, it has been the ability to put one’s own coat on, or to run for the bus without pain injury, simple things yes, but simple things that if you cannot do, leave you with a reducing quality of life and often a narrowing sphere of activity and enjoyment. With other pupils and clients it is a freedom from past behaviours and habits formed in their earliest years, that stop them from being free to be themselves with others. Freedom is always important. The freedom to be, is what makes life worth living and allows people to transcend the most difficult of situations and circumstances – Alexander Technique and PCP are both different ways for seeking the same path and end of a better life, squarely and fairly faced.

Merry Christmas Everybody

2011-12-22T03:12:00.000-08:00

This is the last blog for three weeks, as I take a well earned rest and it is a short one. below are three clips embodying different types ways of celebrating the season. The first, as I was forced to admit recently, I remember from first time round in 1973 and it everybody is having fun - they are also pulling down, interfering with their poise and balance. From an Alexander point of view this is not the way to go about things but I remember it as fun at the time.

Fun is important, but how you embody it well that can carry a cost or it can be joyful and uplifting, as with the following two clips. The first involves Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers and is here just to prove that you can have fun, joy, poise and balance at the same time. The second is there, to illustrate a different way of being, one that is also poised and balanced.

So, finally the third clip, it is there because it is Christmas, it features my favourite painting and most of all it remind's me of my mum, who died just over three years ago. She always used to listen to the Kings College carol service on the radio and the opening verse always sends shivers up my spine, stills me and tells me Christmas has started, even though she is no longer here.

What ever you have planned for Christmas and the New Year, have fun and if you can, be poised and balanced whether your are dancing your socks off or singing your heart out with some carols or hymns. Many of which invite you to open your eyes, lift up your heads and open your hearts and the questions is as always, how to do this. Merry Christmas Everybody and a Happy New Year to all when it comes.

Going Up Stairs 2 - The Steps

2011-12-15T09:25:00.000-08:00

How to go up stairs – which of course need to be laid out as step 1, step 2 .....

Step 1: Is to stop at the bottom of the stairs and give yourself a few moments.

Step 2: Is to notice how you probably want to lean forward into the stairs you go up and push off your leading leg. The leaning forward is really a pulling forward that starts with the neck.

Step 3: Keeping your neck free here means not pulling forward, it is an act of inhibition, that if carried out successfully interrupts all previous patterns, it is part of what makes the use of the neck and the head in relation to the torso the primary control. Carried out successfully you will probably feel your weight shift to your heels; do not try to shift your weight directly.

Step 4: Allow your eyes to focus on where you want to go. This is really important, most people go wrong here either by attending directly to themselves, or by concentrating which really just involves holding your breath.

Step 5: Make sure you are carrying out steps 3 and 4 while carrying out any subsequent steps.

Step 6: It is useful to imagine a horizontal plane, one that will move upwards with each step. It is useful here to remember what the old Scottish shepherds used to say about going up hills, which is not lean in to them, but just imagine you are walking on the flat. The horizontal plane is one that you want your forehead to move into. Now rehearse the idea of your forehead moving into the horizontal plane, all the time taking care to make sure that you maintain the step 2 and 3 of not pulling forward with the neck and being focussed, as well as not actually moving the forehead forward. Experientially if you get this right then it usually seems like it is impossible to move without tightening your neck by pulling forward.

Step 7: Now it is time to just allow yourself to go up the stairs and it is important that you accept, that as you move off at the beginning, you will probably pull forward a little bit. That is not only alright but helpful and necessary, as it allows you to build up your awareness of what you need to inhibit and you can improve it next time, until going up stairs becomes easy. You will be using yourself better anyway if you have stopped and thought through the steps outlined above.

Finally, remember as I said last week if you lack Alexander experience then this is something that can generally be quickly and easily taught – just get in touch and we can arrange something. Most of all remember not to take this too seriously, play with it and have fun.

Going Up Stairs

2011-12-08T03:18:00.000-08:00

I ran into an old pupil this week, someone I had taught a few years ago. Although he recognised me, he could not immediately place me, what had remained with him was what I had taught him, he had it as an ingrained habit when it came to getting out of a chair or going up stairs. His appreciation of being able to go up stairs easily, echoed a conversation with a web designer who I had been talking to a couple of days before. They too had, had lessons, although not from me and had found it most useful for going up stairs. Something that Edinburghians can get a great deal of practice with in tenements and the various sets of steps that exist across the city. If you add in Edinburgh's various hills, it is a useful place to know, how to easily go up.

In order to change how you go up stairs, to move from it being effortful to easy, you have to change your conception or understanding of the 'how' of your use, and the act. This is constructive conscious control in action, and involves a movement between the understanding or conception and the ability to enact a co-ordinated use of the self.

When it comes to going up stairs, this is what Alexander would have called a physical act and the standard of functioning achieved for him would depend on both the conception of the act to be performed and the ability to then carry it out with a co-ordinated use of the self. Or much more simply and what I tell pupils is that before we act, we need to prepare, and then we need to act. Action, has two stages and the first determines the qualities and standard of the second.

That first stage is when we can start to re-educate ourselves into a different use or co-ordination of ourselves. It is where we need to first, stop or pause, to exercise conscious control for our process of conceiving of what not to do, as much as of what to do. Conceiving though depends on how we are at the time in ourselves, in other words, on our use and co-ordination, which in turn depends on our conception. We are a ‘strange loop’ moving between phases that we think of as mental and physical, with each always dependent on the other. We are as Alexander said ‘pyscho-physical’, we are as cognitive scientists are saying embodied.

Next week as, I'll give detailed instructions as to the practical steps to going upstairs, which will be easy to follow, if you have some Alexander experience here and can easily and quickly be taught if not.

The Use of The Self

2011-12-01T07:15:00.000-08:00

Understanding Alexander’s work in its fullest and deepest sense takes a life time because his technique is a technique for living and conscious control is something that has to be lived. As one goes further, the limits of the known become more obvious and unknown possibilities beckon, to be faced, to be accepted, to become known in themselves.

‘Reasoning into the unknown’ is how one of Alexander's pupils described his work. It was a phrase he picked up on and repeated in one of his books. Books which are anything but easy to read and to understand, which is in part down to Alexander’s style and in part to the need for the experience of constructive conscious control, as a lived experience over time. Otherwise one moves off down the wrong track missing the import of Alexander’s thought and work.

In other words understanding Alexander’s work is not just to be understood intellectually but practically, and in saying it is to be understood practically that means it is to be understood intelligently as well. Intelligence and practicality go together in understanding and the development of ‘Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual’ and ‘The Use of the Self’, which are the titles of Alexander’s second and third books. These are difficult, abstract phrases, which when understood, are simple, functional enhancing one’s well being and general standard of functioning, as they are experienced and understood.

It is worth spending some time on understanding what Alexander means by these phrases and today as I have previously blogged on ‘constructive conscious control,’ I want to look at the use of the self. For it is here with this simple phrase that people often go wrong turning ‘the use of the self’ into the ‘use of the body’. It is a common enough error among new pupils and totally understandable and pardonable if you are starting lessons with a view to helping back or neck problems. It is less pardonable when it is repeated by a teacher, which unfortunately sometimes happens, or as also happens, someone purporting to understand Alexander’s work from reading the books.

The reason it is less pardonable is because Alexander is very clear that he has no wish to separate mind and body, they are for him a psycho-physical unity. Which again is another one of his phrases that is easy to pass by, as too difficult to understand. Yet, it is rewarding in the end, as one begins to appreciate the scope of his work, in its reach, its application to everything and in its potential primacy in everything, as discussed last week.

The feature of psycho-physical unity which is pertinent here is that instead of thinking of the body as something separate to be commanded, we must think of all of our different mechanisms, systems and realise they are part of something whole, something whole that is our selves. The self for Alexander encompasses everything, he does not initially differentiate it into separate systems, which is not so very different from where some modern psychologists start and I’ll return to this soon.

In the meantime I want to close with a simple practical thought as to why the difference between thinking of the use of the self says something different to the use of the body, and it is this, because the self brings with it not just the use of the eyes but the ability to direct attention, which is a basic feature of conscious control. And practically speaking without understanding about the direction of attention and the use of the eyes it is hard to proceed with learning Alexander Technique. Again more on this soon.

The Primacy of the Primary Control

2011-11-24T06:14:00.000-08:00

Not a compelling title for a blog, I know, but perhaps one of the most important things to understand about Alexander's work. It is a phrase I wish I had come up with, and comes from a pupil who has gone on to train as an Alexander Technique Teacher. They used it in one lesson with me, to sum up their insight into what I was teaching them. It expresses something very nicely that people take time to understand about Alexander's work. It is often missed if a person's exposure is limited or they fail to understand the importance of the primary control in developing constructive conscious control. Constructive Conscious Control, of course is also a daunting phrase, and being the aim of Alexander Technique it is important to understand it.

Breaking down the phrase into its constituent parts enables it to be quite easily understandable by most people. Particularly when followed by a simple and practical demonstration that is relevant to them. The easiest place to start is with the middle and last terms together. ‘Conscious control’ for Alexander means being aware of how we control ourselves in thinking and action. The contrast to conscious control is where we are unaware of how we do things, where we rely on what Alexander would have called ‘sub-conscious guidance and control’ and the trouble with sub-conscious guidance and control is not only are we not fully aware of how we are controlling the use of ourselves and our habits, but we are also not fully alive to the short and long-term implications of how we go about things. Implications which include poor performance, being in a bad mood, to troublesome musculoskeletal problems such as back and neck pain. For Alexander such implications are indications of a control that is destructive of the positive potentialities that he would see as our birthright and future.

The positive potentialities can be maximised through a conscious control that is constructive, that is not only is not harmful but it improves what he termed the ‘standard of functioning’ through time – which is another Alexander phrase that lacks appeal and is difficult to get to grips with. Which I’ll blog about sometime but for the moment it might be best understood as covering an amalgam of different psycho-physical attributes all trending in a positive direction. So constructive conscious control improves not just performance, but mental and physical well being, as well as helping prevent various ailments that are centred around interference with breathing and a harmful use of the musculoskeletal system.

Like a good engineer Alexander discovered one central factor that worked to control everything, which involves a ‘certain use of the head in relation to the neck, and the head and neck in relation to the torso, and the other parts’. That ‘certain use’ is an intentional choice to both not do certain things and to proceed about one’s business in definite manner which promotes ‘freedom in thought and action.’ As a certain use it precedes everything, thinking about a subject, a person; making a movement, performing an action. It is primary, it comes first, always, in everything.

Tap Dancing on Roller Skates

2011-11-17T04:39:00.000-08:00

Blogging has been suspended for the last few weeks, as the demands of paperwork and accounts for my professional body PCPA have taken the time set aside for blogging out of my week. Normal service should hopefully now resume and in returning, I realise how much I have missed having time to sit down and write this blog. My last blog promised to thank my fellow Dark Angels individually, for the wonderful time they gave me in Spain, and this last week I had occasion to meet one of them Charlotte Halliday at a wonderful event organised by her marketing company Noble Ox at the Scottish Malt Whisky Society’s home in Leith. It was a lovely chance to meet Charlotte again and to sample some wonderful whisky. I am going to resist the temptation to blog on the night and the construing of whisky, it is a blog I’ll undoubtedly do one day, and I am going just thank my fellow Dark Angels collectively.

And so I am going to turn to Saturday night and the opening film of the Edinburgh Dance Film Festival ‘Shall We Dance’ at the Edinburgh Filmhouse. It was a real treat to which the audience including me responded with a spontaneous round of applause at the end. For me it was the sheer delight of watching the dancing of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, particularly Astaire. Indeed I would go further, it is the joy of watching Astaire do anything, for if you want to see the ease, freedom and lightness of movement that Alexander work aspires to then one can do no better than watch him not just dance, but walk, sit and even sing. But it is dancing that marks him out and here’s a clip from when he is 51. Just watch the ease of movement, the athleticism and think of the sheer strength this requires, particularly when he is dancing in and on the piano. It is also worth noting his muscular development or lack of it in the conventional sense, it is something Sir George Trevelyan noted about Alexander.

I cannot resist a second clip this time Shall We Dance itself, where Astaire and Roger’s tap dance on roller skates, look at Astaire in particular. How is this for co-ordination and use, it only gets better when they are wearing normal shoes. Enjoy!

Sketches of Spain 2 - A Walk Into Aracena

2011-10-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

Sustained heat has a smell, in the same way that damp has. Damp’s smell, I am more familiar with. It is an amalgam that enfolds other scents, and with Autumn coming, leaves falling, mulching leaves will soon become part of its odour. I assume sustained heat has a variability too, but I am new to it, becoming aware of it, aware of its possibility, which is obvious now, when I walked down the track for the first time from Finca el Tornero, where I was staying with Dark Angels, into the town of Aracena.

The landscape around the town of Aracena was foreign at first, dry, dusty, with chestnut trees, cork trees populating the hill sides, shading pigs, wild boar, wild mushrooms sprouting, occasional fig trees and vegetable plots. White houses dot the landscape, with a lake shimmering in the mid-day heat far behind me. Men are unloading horses to work in a ring. On my walk back, I will see one of them, further down the road, and even though I do not ride, I work with enough riders to see the stillness and quality of how he sits on the horse. There is a unity between man and horse, that demonstrates a working skill – this is a man who can ride a horse not just for pleasure but as a working animal. He looks back at my staring wonder, clearly puzzled not perhaps realising the full extent of the appreciation of the man in the Panama hat. It is always a rare privilege to watch someone use themselves well, demonstrate a skill, that demonstrability lies in its very ease, lack of effort, its stillness.

Stillness in action, stillness before action, stillness before words, 'negative capability' as Keats called it. The waiting to hear the word, see a way forward, thinking as Heidegger would have it. Poise and balance, freedom in thought and action, as Alexander would will it. These are not simply abstract notions but the concrete realities of a living life discovered, and rediscovered in any skilled activity, that benefits from poise, balance and thought, as exemplified by a man on a horse.

Next week, will once again see me in Spain, when I will get round to thanking my fellow Dark Angels as promised last week.

Sketches of Spain 1 - A Warm Thank You To Dark Angels

2011-10-06T06:16:00.001-07:00

I find it is always good to stretch myself, try new things, find myself on the other side of learning, remembering what it is like to be new to something. So it was last week when I was in Spain, doing a writing course, which not surprisingly, since it was a writing course for business, was full of professional writers. Who were all frighteningly good, when it came to writing, leaving me somewhat nervous as, apart from this blog, I do little writing that is for public consumption. My normal use of language is spoken, conversational, looking to help people turn things around and in therapy part of this work is to find words and work with stories – which is why I came to be in Spain with Dark Angels. Who are specialists in myth, stories, branding and communication and whose mission is to help people use words more ‘engagingly and imaginatively within the business environment’. My mission was in part to learn to write better for public consumption, it is increasingly part of my job, and then perhaps more importantly to see what I could borrow from the Dark Angels cookbook and introduce to therapeutic practice. Two exercises have proved readily adaptable and are likely to be part of my repertoire for years to come. The first is the six-word story, the second is more adapted and invites clients to write a poem by completing some lines to say for example, why they are sad or angry. The poems have been moving in themselves but more importantly have allowed words to be attached to feelings, feelings placed in context, the non-verbal to become verbal, which allows for further elaboration of and the opening of new avenues for exploration and reconstruction. The six-word story offers a similar potential by taking a fragment of speech, and asking clients to take it as a story and elaborate their meaning world from there. Both are simple tools readily adapted from the world of business, which like the world of therapy and the world in general, moves in narratives, with characters acting out their roles in their respective worlds, roles which can enhance people’s lives or harm them. In the therapy I practice, PCP, we use self-characterisations, as an assessment and research tool, and the nice thing is that the person completing them, gets to become their own researcher and are hopefully not then trapped in some interpretation of the therapist – meaning here is always to be negotiated. So it is with business writing, similar skills, standing in the shoes of the client and a Dark Angels exercise similar to a self-characterisation. There are differences of course, important differences, but as with most things, many skills cross contexts, and by the end of the course I am happy with what I have written, and know that I can write. Dark Angels give you wings to fly as a writer way beyond the world of business and they have much to teach beyond that world too. I'll be returning to Spain and Dark Angels again next week, in the meantime my thanks to Stuart Delves and John Simmons – two of the best trainers I have worked with. Also, thanks to my fellow Dark Angels, who will get a personal mention next time.

Ellen Wilkie

2011-09-15T05:19:00.000-07:00

In writing last week’s blog, I looked up my copy of 'The Art of Loving'. Folded within it was the obituary of Ellen Wilkie. Ellen had been a presenter on Channel 4’s current affairs programme for the disabled community ‘Same Difference’, as well as an actor, singer and poet. She was thirty two when she died on the 7th August 1989.

I met Ellen a few weeks before this, when we were both staying at the MacLeod Centre on Iona. She was there as a practising Christian, I was there trying to make sense of a Christian upbringing, which I was leaving behind and endeavouring to understand, as I did so. We met at meal time, it was natural to do so, the other inhabitants were a party, we and I include Ellen’s friend, and carer Judith Gunn, were solo independent travellers. In meeting, I took Ellen for who she was, the fact of her disability was obvious, as was her failing, it was clear she had not long to live. It seemed right to neither ask, what was wrong or to ask about her disability. I trusted her to tell me, if the time came and the moment was right. The moment did come one evening, after I helped Ellen to get to the abbey, to read some of her poems, as part of the evening service. She read well, with the skill of an accomplished performer. Afterwards two older women came to thank Ellen, as I stood behind her. They told her how good the poems were and silently, unsaid in the thanking, in the intonation, was the addition, ‘for a cripple.’ I was upset, angry on Ellen’s behalf but worse was to come. The next person came up and asked her straight out, what was wrong with her, adding, as if it gave her the right to know, that she was second year medical student at Aberdeen. Afterwards, when we talked about what had happened, Ellen told me her story, of how she had an extremely rare muscle wasting disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy. She had outlived the doctors predictions for her life expectancy by over a decade, successfully fighting the view and prejudices we had seen displayed that evening, to live a rich and full life. One in which she had packed more in and been more alive to her possibilities than many people manage in a life time. That she lived so long, Ellen put down to an experimental treatment she had, that she live so well, she put down to the love of her family and her Christian faith. I think everyone who knew her would have added her spirit and her determination. Looking back over twenty years later, I realise we became friends because I took her as she wanted to be taken, I looked past the obvious to find the person and for that I am thankful. It was a rare meeting, remaining a precious memory, a reminder of the possible in the most difficult of circumstances, as well as the wonders of friendship, in unfamiliar circumstances.

Which is where I will be next week, on a course with new people, sharing, trusting to find connection and possibility. Which means no blog for two weeks.

The Art of Loving and Sociality

2011-09-08T09:14:00.000-07:00

There is a dimension that is common to most, if not all psychological theories, which spans the need to be ourselves, individual and free, to being one with the other, or others in a moment of fusion. A friend of mine refers to this desire for fusion, in its unhealthy form, as the 'urge to merge'. It is something, that is with us from birth, and requires re-construal throughout the life span, as we learn to be ourselves with, and amongst others. Before we reconstrue, the desire for fusion, often manifests itself, as a quest to be loved, to find someone, who will love us. Eric Fromm the German psychoanalyst and social psychologist suggested that the solution to this quest lies, not in finding someone but in giving it up and learning to love somebody else. This is not an easy task according to Fromm, in his classic book 'The Art of Loving," as it requires us to develop, not just an objective love of the other, but an objective love of oneself, and through these come to an attitude of love for others in general.

To do this we have to know the other person, we have to know ourselves and to know is a task which involves prediction, anticipation of what we ourselves will do and how others themselves will react. It involves an idea of of what human flourishing and growth consists in, which involves an awareness of ourselves and others. Practically speaking we need to be able to direct our attention from ourselves to others. To shift attention to the other, is to start to make sense of not just them, but of ourselves in relation, as someone who attends, tends to others. To tend others, to care, to actively love in a Frommian sense, requires sociality, not in a superficial sense, as when we drive and we mostly successfully, anticipate and predict other drivers, but in a deep sense. A deep sense requiring not just an ability to be with another but with ourselves, in a unity where each is separate, individual, yet joined together, in a moment of being, a unity of purpose. In that moment of being and unity of purpose, an attitude starts to take hold, which extends beyond that single relationship, into our other relations, allowing a depth of maturity and wisdom to develop, so that in our becoming, we become fully human.

How to Stand In Someones Else's Shoes

2011-08-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Following from last week’s suggestion that the ability to stand in another's shoes is a great achievement, today begins to look at the practical 'how' of how this be approached. The first thing to note is that, we almost all possess the ability. As young children we effortlessly move in and out of others' perspectives, adopting them for our future benefit and gain, internalising them for our future loss and pain. Getting older things can harden, we assume more, thought sediments itself, remaining undisturbed, it becomes viscous, a colloid, gluing us to one perspective, our own, asserted over others. We lose the ability to take the other's view into account, to see where they are, to meet them on the edge of their world, to greet them on the edge of our own. Exploration ceases and we can find ourselves alone with the likeminded, unable to reach out, across the barriers of human thought, to mutual understanding.

Proceeding directly at this point is often to project, to assume, when what is needed is the ability to stop and be, in the face of the other, to get the feel of them, not as we normally feel but as they feel. What marks this 'stop' out is the conscious choice that marks it, it is an arrest in thought, willed, where we stop heading down familiar tracks, where we cease making habitual movements in favour of a free balance and a conscious choice to focus on the other, while being aware of our own tightening into premature movement, which pre-empts a full consideration of the other, in their predicament,in their position, in their being.

Consideration here is a practical matter, it is not just words, although many words have been used to describe it 'bracketing' in phenomenology, 'suspension' by Kelly, 'inhibition' by Alexander and it is Alexander who perhaps gives the most practical instructions for learning here. For inhibition in its most radical form, involves a complete suspension of what has gone before, in favour of a seeing, feeling, controlled mirroring of the other, where sympathy, empathy, appreciation are established in fellow feeling. Fellow feeling, feelings for our fellows, fellowship with others, friendships with others, these are important goods to us and to others. They come with learning to 'stop', to see and to feel with others, if Alexander gives most help here in stopping then Kelly give most help with the understanding that can develop from here. More next time.....

The Need for Understanding

2011-08-18T06:42:00.000-07:00

The UK has been somewhat awash this last fortnight with varying reactions to the recent riots in England, much of which has seen people in the press validating pre-existing positions rather than stopping and making genuine enquiry into what has happened. I somewhat wish they would follow the following advice of Konrad Lorenz that ‘it is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.’ This, as a habit, has much to recommend it, to everybody, not just research scientists or members of the commentariat. Perhaps, if we all followed it, we might begin not just to know ourselves a bit better but begin to know and understand other people better. Without such understanding from others it is difficult to know our own character; we need others to provide a ‘mirror’, and for this we need ‘society’. It is in the company of others in their ‘countenance’ and ‘behaviour’, that we begin to see the ‘propriety’ and ‘impropriety’ of our own ‘passions’ and the ‘beauty’ and ‘deformity’ of our own ‘minds’ to paraphrase Adam Smith. Face-to-face understanding is necessary if we are to succeed in relationships and building, not so much a better society but, society. We need each other to understand ourselves more fully. With sometimes the deepest, fullest understanding of ourselves coming from accepting that others hold views of us that are painful and difficult for us accept. While difficult to do, the rewards from this can be great, opening an opportunity for dialogue and giving us the freedom to more fully ‘stand in the other’s shoes.’ The ability to ‘stand in the other’s shoes’ is one of the great achievements we can make, particularly face-to-face with those with whom we disagree, who are not of our tribe. Yet without it conflict, violence, rage, fury, whether in looting or arson or the desire to use live ammunition or ruin lives with vengeful sentencing.We need to understand each other, starting with those we love and extending outwards through our neighbours, colleagues to a wider society. This starts with ‘standing in other’s shoes’. This is a good basis for sociality, which is what Kelly called the ability to understand how others makes sense of us and the world. With it, for him, we are able to play a role with the other, lover, partner, friend, neighbour, colleague, citizen....... Without it we are condemned not only to not know the other but to not fully know ourselves and it is only through more fully knowing ourselves, that we can put aside our own anger and rage, find ways of connecting with others, proceed with relationships and build communities that support human flourishing.

Cutting the Bungee Cord

2011-08-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

Despondency tends to descend on people who, in trying to change, repeatedly experience failure, finding themselves jerked back to where they started, just at that point when success seemed to be within reach or even accomplished. It is like trying to change with a bungee rope tied to your back which becomes taut at the last moment, pulling yourself back to where you started - change becomes a Sisyphean task. Each day a person seems condemned to start again, only to be frustrated. It is a familiar experience for many and is often evidence of failure to really stop and find a way forward.

Both Alexander and Kelly wrote about this phenomena and using different language both suggested solutions that were similar and pertinent to whoever finds themselves experiencing this sort of difficulty. As is often the case, it is helpful to approach such difficulties not just from one standpoint but two or more and that is what I hope to do today.

For Alexander, the failure lies in what he called 'end-gaining', in not identifying the real cause of our difficulties, which lay for him in relying on what he called 'subconscious guidance and control.' Rather, we identify a specific fault and tend to try and correct it directly, so a problem with a limb is seen as just that, and not a problem stemming from the overall use of ourselves that is best corrected by aiming for a better co-ordination of the whole. For Alexander, the need to stop and think, to reconstrue is an embodied matter, best done through releasing one's breathing, freeing oneself for a wide range of possible actions, actions that in themselves depend on new conceptions of what is possible, conceptions that recognise situations for what they are, which break our dependence on old habits and cut the cord that binds us to our past. What Kelly adds to this comes with the formal idea of a construct being based on a dichotomy, a contrast, where we like to experience ourselves on one side of the distinction being made. Constructs as contrasts, are highly personal, borrowed and evolved by each person for their individual ends. Meanings are seen as personal, rather than dictionary definitions formally imposed. So, that for one person the choice at work might be to pull down and be a 'kindly' person rather than a 'efficient’ one, where attempts at ‘efficiency’ are always in the end trumped by the need to be ‘kind’. This might happen because being 'kind' or 'nice' is ultimately a way of attempting to control the person’s anxiety in the face of the unknown demands of ‘efficiency’. Kelly called this kind of attempt at change ‘slot rattling’ and like Alexander saw it is an ineffective sort of change, that is better replaced by controlled elaboration and experimentation. In this case the link between being ‘kindly’ and ‘efficient’ might usefully be broken and seen not as an ‘either/or’ but possibly as an ‘and’, subsumed underneath a new construct for change – that of ‘confidence in the face of the unknown’. This involves the ability to stand and face the future, to see what possibilities hope offers us. It is the pre-requisite for change that Alexander always brings us back to and Kelly invites us to adventurously elaborate by cutting the cord to our past failures and seeking the future.

On Being Wrong

2011-08-02T09:11:00.000-07:00

Every so often a theme emerges and is repeated in conversations with pupils and clients. Of late it has been around the question of being wrong. It is something that happens to everybody and not just once either. What is important is not so much the fact of being wrong, but our attitude and the attitude of those around us. That is not say that the consequences of any particular act are not important, they are - affecting our attitude and the attitudes of those around us. Our attitude here, as in so much of life, tends to be habitual, the result of choices, sometimes long forgotten, that reach far into the future, helping or condemning us, depending on, how we feel about, how we react to, how we see ourselves, when we get it wrong.
Two basic attitudes to being wrong have emerged during these conversations. There are those who do not want to be wrong, who do not want to fail, who always want to be right and those that accept that they will get it wrong, at least some of the time and use that as an opportunity for learning, for getting better at what they want to do, or for reconstruing their path and finding a new way. The former attitude if held to, always seems to lead to stagnation, to a failure to learn, stifling creativity and new growth, in the search of a vanishing certainty, that has become a mirage, leading not to water but to a desert.
Changing such attitudes is sometimes easy, sometimes not, sometimes requiring a great deal of insight and reconstruction for experimentation to become a way of life. Intelligent experimentation is what marked Alexander's discovery, after he realised that he must be doing something wrong in using his voice and therefore be causing the vocal problems that were effecting his career. You can read about this in the first chapter of his third book 'The Use of The Self.' This account fits perfectly with how George Kelly saw people as 'personal scientists', and is a paradigmatic example of how to work on problems. It is a great way to look at teaching and learning the Alexander Technique. It is also a great way to look at therapy and relationships. What makes it a great way here, is that it treats people as equals, with lives to live, seeing difficulties and challenges as natural parts of life, to be faced, overcome, in a world of uncertainties. Facing the unknown, as I blogged last week, is a stance cultivated in Alexander Lessons. It is a necessity for the personal scientist, wishing to chart a course to the future. It requires an ability to look at oneself calmly and accept where necessary that 'I was wrong,' before finding and committing again to a future hope. The alternative is a future, that is ever constricting, reliant on a past failures, with hope becoming more elusive. It is only by acceptance, that hope might reveal itself as an ever present possibility of the future.

Psychotherapy, Psycho-therapy and Alexander Technique

2011-07-28T04:26:00.000-07:00

Etymology is a favourite pastime, the root of words giving clues not just to forgotten meanings but often to a vital world hidden behind a veil of socialisation and habit. So it is with psychotherapy, a word increasingly professionalised, medicalised and placed at the service of the government and the market economy. I got to thinking about the roots of psychotherapy and all the work I do as an Alexander Technique teacher and professional psychotherapist, thanks to an recent, excellent article by Guy Dargert in the The Psychotherapist. The two root words psyche and therapy point to a specific domain and the act of ministering to it. Dargert locates the domain of ‘psyche’ in the myth of Psyche and the necessity of her journey from a ‘charmed but ultimately unsatisfying life’, where ‘all her wishes were effortlessly fulfilled’, to one where she has faced the contingency of life, the limits of human endeavour and the inevitability of death. Such a journey marks our way to maturity, a therapist is simply one who attends to the possibilities afforded in such a journey, who perhaps may play the role of mentor. To play the role of mentor is, as Dargert points out, to enter the world of ‘menos’, a word with which the Greeks combined for ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ – a ‘mentor’ being a person who brings an ‘overview’, ‘a higher perspective’ and ‘clear thinking’ to troubled minds. For Dargert such a person might be a ‘true ‘mental health practitioner’’.
To talk of ‘spirit’ is to talk of what is vital, what is animating, and this is usually associated with breathing, which is another meaning of ‘psyche’ that Dargert notes. A psychotherapist would be a person who minsters both to the journey of Psyche and would attend to the process of breathing. In doing so they might adopt the role of mentor providing oversight and clarity, inviting a person onwards to where they can stand calmly in the face of the unknown – which is an aim of the Alexander Technique. It is often forgot that Alexander thought of his work as ‘psycho-therapy’, but it is not surprising when you think of his emphasis on breathing. Breathing not just for its own sake but as a necessity for forming ‘satisfactory conceptions of new or unfamiliar ideas or experiences.’ In this Alexander Technique is a practical way of learning to face ones difficulties, to follow the journey of Psyche, to become one’s own mentor, to become whole in the face of uncertainty and the unknown, to dream, to live a life, and to feel alive. To feel alive is as, good a measure of outcome, as any in psychotherapy. George Kelly recognised this and while his Personal Construct Psychology might focus more on ‘menos’, deep within it is a recognition of Psyche, the need for transition, the need to reconstrue, the need to dream - through what he called loosening, the need to live by what he called tightening, into experiment and action.

Freedom

2010-10-29T04:56:00.000-07:00

Freedom comes in many guises. Like many words it is easy to say but what it means is harder to fathom. It is freighted, weighed down, deep by experience, history and myth, surround it like dense fog. To approach it, fathom it, we can turn to dictionaries, philosophers, songs, movies. ‘Freedom is just another word for nothing' left to lose’ in ‘Me and Bobby Mcgee.’ While in Braveheart, William Wallace makes the following speech ‘Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!’
That it is better to die by living, rather than live by dying, is the classic existentialist position.
Sartre a leading exponent wrote that ‘we are condemned to be free’. Our freedom lies in having to make choices, in taking responsibility for ourselves. We cannot blame others, our parents, society, God or evade it by pleading the unconscious. We are not blind puppets, dancing on the end of someone else’s string – it really is up to us. To recall Shakespeare we are actors on a stage, ‘players’, with our ‘exits’ and ‘entrances.’ Playing ‘many parts’ through ‘seven ages’ we start with sound, as infants ‘mewling’, schoolboys ‘whining.’ Before, we become lovers ‘sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad’. Sound is shaped, words arise and we continue as the soldier ‘full of strange oaths’, and then the justice ’full of wise saws’. In the ‘sixth age’, the ‘big manly voice’, is ‘turning again toward childish treble, pipes’, with ‘whistles in’ its ‘sound.’ From speech, back to sound,and then lastly silence.
Sound is our medium, shaped sound our speech. Our voices carry us into the known world and beyond. It is the connecting pattern vibrating between us, if we let it be, as sound. Sounding the depths we fathom our own freedom. We find, our own unique, individual voices, in speech and language. We communicate, and become human. Language is here connecting. It is the gift by which we give ourselves, find ourselves, find love, find friendship - love and friendship are cognate with freedom. The fog has lifted, as it sometimes does and in the clarity of the moment, freedom, love and friendship are together, united in language, three in one, a trinity to aim for. A trinity, experienced last week, with my fellow Dark Angels, to all of whom, my thanks.

Hume and Rousseau

2010-07-16T05:28:00.000-07:00

‘You are nursing a viper to your bosom’ was the warning given to David Hume about Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Baron d’Holbach. Although ignored by Hume, it was to prove prescient of his ultimate experience of Rousseau who charged Hume himself with either being the ‘best’ of men or the ‘blackest’. This was in response to Hume’s attempts to aid Rousseau in escaping the Continent to the freedom of Britain and a royal pension. Both men’s anticipations of each other were invalidated by the other’s behaviour. Behaviour which itself came from their own experience and understandings of the world, which formed the basis of their philosophies which are incommensurable and still stand today as opposing influences towards action.
Their falling out, a very public affair, divided their contemporaries. A perceptive and entertaining account of it is given in ‘The Philosopher’s Quarrel’ by Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott. It highlights how philosophy was not so much an academic discipline but a way of thinking about the world and ultimately a way of living in it for both men. This is something too readily forgotten today, yet the fundamental questions of philosophy articulated by Kant, who claimed to have been awoken from his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by Hume, are still of vital importance today. These concern what it is to be a person, what we can hope for, how we know and what we ought to do in the light of the answers to these questions. Rousseau and Hume answered them very differently.
For Rousseau we are born good, it is society that is corrupt and corrupting of an essential goodness that can be rediscovered in nature and solitude, where we can know and be sure of our own hearts, through our own feeling. As a critique of reason and society it captured many other hearts in a Romantic Idealism and it still has a powerful appeal today. Where to believe in our essential goodness can exculpate us of responsibility, allowing us to blame society and where we can place all the wickedness, evil and badness of the world, there and on others. Set against this is a Humean perspective of us being inevitably social, of needing others and recognising our limits, including the limits of our reason, which as Hume famously noted is the ‘slave of our passions’. Reason can though help us, educate us in living, allowing us to recognise the limits of our own understanding and to push it further in understanding others. It is this capacity, to understand others, that is at the heart of being human forming the potential bonds of attachments that can see us through life. Hume having flirted with solitude, and the melancholy that comes with it, was integrated into the social world, attached to it with good friends by the time he died. Rousseau convinced in his own rightness of feeling that he was good, lived in a narrowing world of Jean-Jacques, unable to reconstrue, condemned to self-righteousness and loneliness. He had excluded himself from society in the name of his own goodness, he though, did not complain.

The Importance of Understanding

2010-07-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

Visiting Cardiff for the first time at the weekend, I arrived at the airport to realise how little I knew about the city. It was a first visit and landing at Cardiff airport, which is much smaller than Edinburgh, I realised that much I was assuming about the place was mediated by living in another capital city, of a similar-sized country, and from watching rugby internationals on television at the Arms Park. A similar experience occurred a few years ago on arriving in Berlin and realising my knowledge of Germany was almost completely dominated by the myths of two world wars, as well as the Cold War. Everything was propagated by films, newspapers, novels and histories taught and read. The knowledge I brought to each place and people turned out to be stereotypical; cardboard when confronted with real people and real places. Flimsy and shallow, it proved less robust than the stage settings of the operas I had gone to see in both cities. This is not an isolated experience or an uncommon one of taking with us and transferring into situations understandings we have inherited and acquired along the way. In Cardiff, as in Berlin, it was relatively easy to begin to look, see and describe what was there in terms of similarities and difference to other experiences. That, however, is not always the case. In opera and drama, as in life, situations are presented that make up the human drama, highlighting the choices that we make and the various pressures that surround us. These are often more crucial going to the core of our existence, at the heart of which is how we get on with others. Eric Fromm highlighted that, too often, the question here is who will love us? Not who will we love and how? Answering these later questions is the work of a lifetime, with our answers heavily dependent on where we started in life, but it starts with understanding and the understanding of ourselves through others. In this respect, without sentimentalising motherhood or making Raoul Moat’s mother responsible for her son’s beliefs and actions, I’m fairly sure that wishing her son dead indicates a lack of understanding. And lack of understanding is fatal, as this case shows; without it there is no possibility of love and relationships, and without love and relationships we would all be dead.

First Moves

2010-04-30T02:23:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-04-23T01:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-16T04:52:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-11T13:16:00.001-07:00

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.