We Have Moved

This week the blog "Acting ‘As if…..’ The Importance of Mindsets and Learning How To Learn (Part 1)" can be found at the revamped website of the Edinburgh Alexander Centre . I will keep posting links here to new posts between now and the end of the year, to give people time to adjust to the move. Richard

Using the Alexander Technique to get a good night's sleep

A pupil returned last week and reported how their sleeping had improved as a result of their last lesson - they were getting a good night's sleep and waking up more refreshed. The need to think about how we use ourselves while sleeping, in my experience, is quite common. Alexander thought people’s use while sleeping was often worse than their waking use and, in many respects, this is probably true. What is also true is that as our use in our waking life improves, we become more aware of areas in our lives where we pull down and tighten up, which is something that often happens when to go bed and ready ourselves to sleep. We snuggle up into something that resembles the foetal position, holding ourselves tight, interfering with our breathing in a way that babies do not. Two things tend to result, the first is that we do not sleep as deeply as we might and secondly we wake up not just tired but stiff from holding ourselves tight over a number of hours.

Over the eighteen years I have been teaching, I have developed a simple lesson for teaching pupils how to apply the Alexander Technique to this, which in most cases sorts the problem out. 

It consists of five parts, which I am going to give you today.

1. Firstly, check the pillow height to ensure the neck is in alignment; it changes with whether you are on your back or your side. It's not a great idea to sleep on your front.
2. Next find out, by doing it, whether when you close your eyes, you look down and interfere with your breathing. The correction is very simple, just close your eyes again and this time, after you have looked down, keep your eyes shut but allow yourself to look ahead - you should find that your breathing just releases, if it has been held.
3. If you sleep on your side, then how you get there from your back is very important. Most people put themselves wrong by tightening and shortening their legs to turn - don't. You need let your head look in the direction of travel and bring your arm over your torso to point using your pinkie and the finger next to it in the direction of travel - to initiate the movement. If you know how to move from semi-supine to all fours, this is relatively easy. You should end up on your side, neither pulling everything forward or leaning back. Most importantly your breathing should be released.
4. The use of the arms is where people often go wrong, when lying on their side by wanting to tightly cuddle themselves, to give themselves comfort. To understand this, it is a good idea to lay the top arm on your side to help yourself become aware of what you do. From there bring it down to your habitual placement, if your breathing becomes held, then experiment with finding a way to bring the arm down and round without interfering with your breathing.     
5. Finally, make sure you are not pulling your knees together - they should always be going forward and away even if touching. Once again, if you have been gripping them together, you should find that your breathing is released when you stop. 

To summarise, what you are wanting to ensure is that you are not holding your breath in any way while sleeping. To learn to do this, it really is a matter of learning to put this into practice when you go to bed and want it all to be working in the morning. You will find then that you can gradually adjust over time to a more refreshing and comfortable sleep. If you find difficulties with this, then come along for a lesson and, providing you have some recent AT background, I can show you how to put this into practice in half an hour.

The Importance of Alexander's Work

Every so often I find myself reflecting on what the Alexander Technique is a technique for – it is a subject I have blogged about before. Last time, I addressed the question with what I thought Alexander's answer might be in terms of Constructive Conscious Control. Today I want to try a different tack based in part on observations made over the summer when I was taking a break from blogging. The summer with the Olympics and other things provided a rich source of observations with attendant questions as to the importance of both Alexander's observations and his technique.

Starting with the Olympics, in what I saw, what struck me most was how much better the athletes and other participants were trained in poise and balance, from twenty years ago. Reflecting on this change, which you can also see in football, I am aware of how scientists using video, such as Alain Berthoz, have come to understand the importance of the head, neck relationship in movement. What Alexander saw in the mirror has been captured on film and has presumably filtered down into the training programmes that Olympic athletes are using. That does not mean that they are developing Constructive Conscious Control, it just means that they are working better in terms of poise and balance, which certainly makes a difference. 

If my speculation is right about things filtering down, it has not filtered down further to a more general level, as a recent visit to my local swimming pool made clear. As I was leaving, a group of children was being instructed in the intricacies of the crawl. Their instructor was standing on the pool edge telling them to put their head down in order to crawl, which is dubious enough. What he was demonstrating though was not putting the head down, but pulling the neck forward while raising his shoulder and putting excess muscle tension into his arms. He had no practical understanding and was demonstrating to his charges how to disco-ordinate themselves and to make unnecessary effort that would interfere with their poise and balance in the pool, as well as their breathing. (If you want to understand how Alexander Technique can be integrated with swimming, check out the Shaw Method.)

Continuing out of the pool, I passed the Gravity Studio where three young women were working with weights, allegedly in harmony with gravity except they were not. Each one was pulling their head back, narrowing their back, exercising indeed, but exercising habits that are harmful, which risk injury, interfere with breathing and lower the general standard of functioning. 

So here at least there is a need for conscious control in being aware of both what one is doing and its implications. When it comes to teaching others, a basic understanding of use is necessary to see that others are not harming themselves, not practising disco-ordination whether in the pool, at games or in the classroom. This week is International Alexander Awareness Week and it is focussing on children and the importance of good habits being inculcated rather than the teaching disco-ordination.  Alexander wrote about the need for this over sixty years ago, as well as the need for those instructing others to be au fait with the principles of poise and balance, and to be able to teach and supervise people in accordance with these. The Olympics provides evidence that this is happening for elite athletes; where it is really needed is in schools not just in sports or even the arts but in everyday living – now that would be something. 

Alexander Technique And Sport

With the Olympics starting today in London, it is hard to escape sport for the next couple of weeks. One of the things all the sports on display have in common is the need for control, balance and poise. These are all things that Alexander Technique can help with, as well as avoiding injury, and Alexander Technique has been successfully used at this highest level. 

Rather, than recite a list that would include Olympic show jumpers, rowers, runners, including the London Olympics’ chairman Lord Coe, I thought it would be interesting to find some clips of great sporting moments demonstrating particularly good use. In the end, I decided to limit myself, to a man who was not an Olympian, but is regarded as the best batsman of all time – Don Bradman. Don Bradman was a man Alexander very much admired and in this clip from You Tube you can see why. 

If you watch Bradman demonstrating each stroke at 2.48 you will see that for each stroke he carefully puts lengthens over the leg he wants to support him before stepping forward or backwards with the other leg. The bat is raised as he goes over the supporting leg and is only used to make the stroke once the moving leg has been placed where Bradman wants it. As, he says they are all ‘practically the same.’ It is a beautiful display of control and use.

For those who crave a little Olympic Glory, here are two clips Seb Coe winning the 1500 in Moscow and then the British Gold medal winning coxless four rowing team in Athens where Mathew Pinsett and Alex Partridge are the two rowers who took lessons. They were taught by Caroline Chishom to ‘overcome an almost religious belief in the contracted muscle, an over-trained physique and an immune system on the blink.’ Semi-supine was to help them recover from races better, to prevent injuries and to boost their immune system. They were also taught about the importance of lengthening muscle for making longer more powerful strokes, while using the hip joints rather than bending at the waist. It all helped with all their other training to help them get Gold. 

No posts till September as its the Olympics and then the festival here in Edinburgh. 

Introducing Inhibition

Withholding consent, refraining from doing what one has always done, stopping yourself from relying on old habits, inhibiting, to use Alexander’s word, is the first step in his technique. The second is directing, but that can only come when one has first inhibited what one does not want.

Knowing what one does not want is actually the hard part, for it involves a ‘knowing what,’ that encompasses sufficient awareness of movement, for ‘know how’ to develop. So someone who reads in a book that they want to ‘keep their neck free, and allow their head to go forward up’ may be able to tell you that this is what is wanted without any awareness of what this actually means in their own case. 

Understanding what it means in your own case can be gained in many ways but is most easily done with a teacher.  Teachers, being different, use different approaches to helping pupils develop their own individual understanding. My own preferred ways of working start most often with looking at how pupils move from sitting to standing and how they move from standing into a walk. I use the two activities to help pupils develop a basic understanding of what they do not want, so that they can learn to refrain from starting off the movement, in their old familiar way, by relying on their habit.

What happens in both cases is that people unfamiliar with Alexander work pull forward by tightening their neck muscles, shifting their weight on to the balls of their feet as they shorten in stature. To not pull forward, to not tighten, is to keep the neck free in relation to the desired action of which the movement of coming forward is a constituent part. This is inhibition and the inhibitory part of what were called ‘guiding orders’ or ‘direction’ by Alexander.

There are a sequence of guiding order or directions, from head to toe, that flow in a particular order and taken together form a really good description of what we want and what we do not want in order to let everything flow. It is important to remember that within this positively stated description of keeping your neck free, allowing your head to go forward and up, there is first and foremost an injunction not to tighten, not to pull the head back, not to pull the head down, enfolded within it.

The practicalities of enacting this start with remembering you want to change things and stopping yourself from rushing into action by relying on habit. In stopping, at the beginning you are learning to rehearse for something new, to prevent the familiar from happening, so the unfamiliar can be brought about by wishing and willing. So, in relation to going from sitting to standing or moving from standing into a walk, you must allow yourself to lightly focus on where you want to go. By focussing your attention this way you begin to create the awareness within which you can inhibit what you do not want, the pull forward, the tightening, the shortening. 

From there directions as to what you do want can be rehearsed and at the ‘still point’ which is reached by following these stages, the ‘still point’ where one’s breathing is released, there is a sense for those beginning lessons of it being impossible to move without tightening. Reaching that place allows a new question to be posed of ‘how do I move without tightening, how can I move freely?’ Both are good questions that need to be answered, how you do that requires another blog. In the meantime, getting to the place where the questions have relevance is the task of all Alexander pupils. 

Alexander Technique and Chronic Pain – New Research

Following on from the recent research on Alexander Technique and chronic back pain, new research has been done on giving lessons to help people with pain management at an NHS Pain Clinic in England. While not a full clinical trial, the research evidence further supports the effectiveness of Alexander Technique in helping people with Chronic Pain. The people who took part in the study, while self-selecting, reported improvements in their quality of life and an ability to reduce medication. The pupils who did best were those committed to self-management and therefore learning what they could from the six lessons they were given. The lead consultant commented on the effectiveness of the Alexander Technique as a ‘psychological’ intervention noting that the overall pain experienced remained constant while feelings of well being and quality of life improved.

The number of lessons involved means that it would be surprising if people whose pain was chronic experienced any reduction in pain. If that was going to happen, it would be expected to take many more lessons and for some people the reality is that chronic pain is just going to be part of their daily life. That does not mean, as this research demonstrates, that one can do nothing to help oneself; that one has to live an ever diminishing life – there is still always a choice.
That choice centres on where one places one’s attention. 

The standard pain reaction involves a move from being aware of pain to directly attending to it. What happens in that move to attending to pain is that emergency response mechanisms get activated, the body tends to stiffen, and the meaning of the pain is sought in its implications for the immediate present and then the distant future. There is a psycho-physical response of our whole being. 

Where pain is ongoing of course the habit of attending to the pain, looking for it becomes established. What every parent, with a small child in pain, knows of course is that it is important to distract the child, to encourage it to look elsewhere. So with Alexander Technique and looking at habits in relation to pain, and not just physical pain either. The necessity is to learn to become conscious of where one is directing one’s attention, the nature of that attention and how consciously learning to direct attention elsewhere, in a manner where one’s breathing releases, deepens, changes things, produces feelings of well being, as well as establishing a sense of control as a new habit is established.

If Alexander Technique were solely concerned with distraction and the control of attention, it would not differ from other psychological approaches. What it adds is that in recognition of our embodiment, in its assumption that we are psycho-physical, it encourages people to develop control of their whole response, so that the postural mal-adaptions to chronic pain are lessened through the development of a manner of using one’s self that is optimal in terms of not just pyshco-physical functioning but of physical functioning and psychological functioning, as this research helps further establish. 

Knowing How v Knowing That

I first became aware of Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ while studying philosophy at Aberdeen University as an undergraduate. It is a distinction whose importance I have found myself reflecting on for a number of reasons, not least the importance Alexander placed on it in emphasising the importance of the ‘means-whereby’ we go about our business. Alexander, I think it is fair to say, was dismissive of ‘knowing that’; there are numerous accounts of him turning away from encounters with eminent people, who might have helped him promote his work, on the basis that for him their ‘use’ was obviously, shall we say, not what it might be.

I suspect that while necessary, in some senses to protect the developing use and practice of the Alexander Technique, it has rather isolated the Alexander world from developing its theory, which is there in the writings of Alexander. This is a pity, there is much the Alexander world can learn from others, equally there is much others can learn from us, in what we can observe and teach. 

I was reminded of this at the weekend when I was at Trinity College in Dublin, attending the European Personal Construct Association’s (EPCA) conference. I had the privilege of running a workshop linking my work as an Alexander Technique Teacher and as a Psychotherapist. I will spare you the full title but the workshop focused on how Alexander Technique and Conscious Control can be helpful inter-personally in getting at habits laid down in the early weeks of life. Habits that have a profound effect on how we experience ourselves and then others. 

While I think that not only did Alexander recognise a link and aim to work with it, I think that for many reasons his work and writings here are limited. Yet, they went on to inspire people like Margaret Naumburg who founded Art Therapy in the United States, Fritz Perls who started Gestalt Therapy, and through John Dewey, George Kelly who developed Personal Construct Psychology. Not enough work has been done to trace Alexander’s influence or to develop the theoretical links that would help expand his work in its practical reach.

On the ground individual teachers continue to make a difference, making links and finding people who are interested. Alexander Technique teachers have a lot to offer in terms of ‘know how’ or the ‘mean’s whereby’; we can learn to control not only our behaviour but what Alexander termed our ‘manner of reaction.’ He was explicit in his last book that people who were familiar with his work had missed the significance of his work here. 

Fortunately not everyone has missed it as a welcome bit of news in my inbox today attests to, in that Eric Donnison and Caroline Dale are organising a project to teach AT to the kids, parents and staff of Kid’s Company founded by the truly remarkable Camila Batmanghelidjh. It’s a project one can only wish well to in its proposed undertaking of offering Alexander Technique and its ‘know-how’ to people who have had a very raw start in life.