Freedom For Living

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.

Freedom

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.