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.

Ellen Wilkie

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

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.