Going Up Stairs 2 - The Steps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.