How Do We Know?

This is one of the four fundamental questions that philosophy seeks to answer according to Kant, it is also something central to applying the Alexander Technique to develop Conscious Control. It is a question that most new pupils come to ask in learning Alexander’s technique, as they realise that they can no longer rely on their sense of feeling, it is unreliable, the judgements it contains are not to be trusted. 

Now, if you have the time you can engage with Kant, who has much, that is of use to say; you will hopefully emerge wiser, but it will really do you no good if you are trying to learn the Alexander Technique. In lessons what you think you know is immediately thrown into question when it comes to simple acts like sitting, standing walking, let alone anything else – feeling is not enough. Something else is needed.

One needs a standard and fortunately there is one there – the gold standard when it comes to judging how one is going at any given moment. That gold standard lies not within one’s attention but within one’s awareness of one’s breathing. If one’s breathing is released, relaxed and easy, even while exerting your self, you are going to be going well. You will also find that if you have a back problem for example your back will be supporting you to the best of its ability.

Good support and good breathing go together; there was a reason why Alexander was known as the ‘breathing man’ and it is just this. Now the great thing about using breathing as a standard is that relaxed, easy, released breathing is hard to fake, it is a continuously reliable feedback loop that goes with you over time.  The feeling of standing straight, tall, is too often illusory. We are too good at thinking this, only to be proved wrong, as Alexander students too often find when they start lessons – if you pull forward habitually when standing, straightening up through freeing one’s neck is going to feel like leaning backwards.

There are other answers to the question of how do we know, but this is the best in terms of the on-going immediacy of experience. Longer term we know from being aware of the success of ourselves in applying Alexander’s technique and finding the release in breathing; the lightness in being and sense of well being that go with this, along with an improved sense of balance, as well other indicators of improved functioning. These though are indirect outcomes of aiming for conscious control of our use and not direct attempts to sort out our problems.

Direct attempts almost, if not always go wrong, we need to stop, and when it comes to many complaints it is as an absence of something that indicated our success and achievements in relearning how to sit, stand, walk, talk or understand others. Absence of pain if we are lucky is an outcome, always to be welcomed, it is not something to be looked for; the way markers, are gathered instances of consciously released breathing; developed over time into conscious control of ourselves – which is something worth aiming for.

No blog next week as I am away. 

Alexander Technique and the Inter-personal 4

Hate, like love, is something we all experience. It is part of life and decidedly normal. If you have any doubts about this, then just hang around with some two year olds for a while. Hate like love is always an option. What we do with it, how we control it, how we react to it, how others react to it - are what counts. 

We might be open, as Eric Hobsbawn recently was, in saying that we are 'good haters,' sustaining a particular commitment, by doing so. Or we might be terrified of the fact that we do hate; leaving it unrecognised, to pursue an image of ourselves as 'good' or maybe 'nice.' Where that happens we have often learned to pull down to control our reactions, our feelings and to stop ourselves from saying things, which we fear will provoke humiliation and isolation. We anticipate verbal abuse or perhaps physical attack. We have learned to control our desire to speak and to try to escape from feelings that we have been taught are 'wrong' or 'bad.' Often the understanding that develops here is not that the feelings are ‘wrong’ or 'bad' but that I am 'bad.'

Now, in an ideal world everybody would have a mum or a dad who can cope with his or her child saying 'I hate you' or 'I don't want to do that.' Mum and dad would be able to understand that it is what young kids do, and in their understanding they would be free enough to help their child understand the normalcy of their feeling, freeing them to find a way forward, to return to loving their parent in time, always in a new and more mature way. Where that does not happen on a regular, predictable basis and children are taught to be good, they usually learn to pull their heads down, shorten and tighten, learning to hide their misery, acting a part, sometimes as a 'good,' 'dutiful' son or daughter, at other times as the wayward rebel.

A habitual use of the head and the neck develops, which not only interferes with our organic functioning but plays its part in our psycho-physical attitude, that we are ‘bad’ which we hold towards ourselves, as well as, whatever attitude we adopt to others and the outside world. In Personal Construct terms we are talking about a person’s ‘core role’, the role they play, as if it is a matter of life or death, and a role that is deeply tied to systems of life maintenance. 

To develop Conscious Control here is a matter of developing, if we simplify things greatly, two different stances, one of which is towards those aspects of the self that have been rejected or fragmented which are often tied to spontaneity and feelings of being alive. Practically speaking what we are looking for is the ability to face unwanted and often shamed parts of oneself, by applying the Alexander Technique and learning to face and then understand them, through dialogue, if you believe as I do that at heart we are dialogical beings. 

The second stance is towards others and if I am seeking to illustrate this in an Alexander lesson, I will stand in front of a pupil and ask them to directly look at me. Often what happens is that they pull their heads down, sometimes they want to look away. As I talk them through the process, they find they can engage with me, visibly lengthening, releasing their breathing, improving their organic functioning and establishing a conscious use of themselves in relation to another.

If I am working in my capacity as a therapist, I will invite people to then take this further by allowing themselves to look and see the other, by describing the other and their own experience of the other. With the description of the other including a portrait of how they see and experience the situation and relationship. This allows the development of what Kelly called sociality and is called mentalization elsewhere. Most importantly it leads to the possibility of new role relationships, relationships that are vital for people's well-being and functioning. This leads me to propose that from an Alexander Technique point of view, that if we were to consider what is involved in the highest standard of inter-personal function, there would two conditions, the first concerned with the ability to consciously and co-ordinate the use of ourselves in relationships. While the second following Kelly would be concerned with our ability to understand the other in their terms. 

This rather long blog concludes this series on Alexander Technique and the Inter-personal. To those that have followed it right the way through and sent me comments or talked to me about the ideas contained here, a big thank you. I will be developing them further in time for the EPCA conference in July where I will be presenting them in a workshop format to colleagues from that particular world. 

Alexander Technique and the Inter-Personal 3

Sitting up, standing up, are achievements. We forget this, if we ever realise it, only to take note when we see a baby sitting or up standing for the first time; taking his or her first steps. That there is such a thing as sitting up well, standing well is often missed, unremarked on. The gesture of ourselves to ourselves, to the outside world, too often pre-dominates, to the exclusion of our organic functioning, manifesting itself, in breathing that is held, muscles that are sore, ailments that seem to afflict us, ways of being with others that can terrify us and them. 

That these might be linked escapes us, if we approach them through disciplines that have first divided the human being into physical or mental, psychological or physiological, where psychological is not firmly grounded in the concept of ourselves, as actors in and of the world. Such philosophical and epistemological groundings may seem far removed from the distraction of a bad back, the pain of a sore neck, the blinding migraine that occludes the possibility of work.  Yet, such groundings are openings towards understandings that can free us of habitual pains and terrors; groundings that Alexander struggled with and understood in terms of action and through not dividing but combining the mental and physical into the psycho-physical.

The psycho-physical for Alexander is his way of saying that we are indivisible into mental and physical when it comes to the ‘act of living.’ Acts, themselves, are approached by him, as mental or physical when it comes to, how use, effects the standard of functioning. This is because he lacks better words, better understandings and what is missed, as I blogged about in the first of this series, are inter-personal acts. 

Inter-personal acts require some explaining. In some ways, what I am about to write might seem obvious, but from the nineteenth century which conceptualised people as organisms, to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century conceptualisation of people as information processors, it has been a hard won battle to recognize again that people are people. That we are formed as people by our first relationships; that being understood is often our first step in understanding.  

Understanding first of all occurs face-to-face between mother and baby, it is non-verbal in its grounding with mutual gazing providing respite and calm when anxiety threatens. We are inherently social, our withdrawals and individuality existing only within the network of our personal relationships. To be excluded from the personal realm, in the fullest sense, in infancy, is to face non-existence, a terror and an anxiety that is met with a full-throated cry or perhaps, a muffled sob. 

Lesser terrors exist; lesser anxieties exist, grounded in this greater terror. Our first attempts at controlling them are to look to mum, or are withdrawals that come with looking away or looking down. Each has characteristics of its own; each exists within a network of personal constructs that are all too easily dismissed, as subjective when placed in ‘objective’ frameworks concerning mechanical or organic functioning. 

For some and certainly not all these early habits of control, involving the use of the head and neck to control attention, to control feelings of overwhelm, to control anxiety in the personal realm are what are evoked in Alexander lessons. Early and core elements of experience then are loosened becoming available for reconstruction through a mental act, that is transforming in the present, towards the past and future in new personal acts towards others and ourselves. This allows for the highest standard of inter-personal and intra-personal functioning to be achieved through our conscious understanding and acceptance of ourselves and others, of which more next time. 

Alexander Technique and the Inter-Personal 2

Many thanks to Magdalena for her comments on last week's blog. There is no disagreement I think between us, in taking the aim of Alexander Technique to be 'consciousness, and making conscious decisions as to what and how we want to be and how we want to operate, rather than be driven by habits'. There was and is no suggestion from me that this was new to people deeply interested in the Alexander Technique in its broadest sense. Where there might be disagreement is in how far the Alexander community should be open about this and about how far for marketing purposes we stray into ideas which are deeply problematical, when viewed from the perspective of Alexander's writing. That though, is for another day and blog. 

Today I want to return to what I suggested was new in last week's blog. For this Magdalena's comments provides a welcome point of departure in iterating, what I understand to be Alexander's position, namely the importance of using the stimulus-response model to understand ourselves. While I reject the stimulus-response model, the reasons for which I will come to shortly, this rejection is not the radical break, that I was blogging about last week. That comes with looking at ourselves as persons in relationship and with elaborating how Conscious Control might look if we took ourselves to be persons in relationship rather than simply as individuals. 

To elaborate, what Conscious Control of the person might look like, one must first get past and give up the stimulus-response model that Alexander uses. Magdalena's comment here is most helpful, in that she is open in writing that this is something she 'believes.' I think that this ultimately correct, in that it is a belief, or a model, or even a position and as such we can choose whether or not we wish to adopt it or not. For me the rejection of the stimulus-response model, even when used at its most conversational came from the pragmatic realisation, that it concealed more than it revealed, hides more than it illuminates.

By this I mean that, what Magdalena labels as a stimulus, I have always found to be constructions, interpretations of myself, a situation, another, that are better deconstructed and dialogued with, rather placed within the ‘category of “stimulus”’. In other words Magdalena’s comments exist as comments to me, comments to you that if placed by me or you, within the ‘category of “stimulus”’ hide what they essentially are, namely comments by another person to me and to you. To re-label them or subsume them as ‘stimuli’ is to hide that Magdalena and I, have at least temporarily entered into, which is some sort of relationship with each other. As, such we hopefully exist to each other as persons trying to understand each other, from our very limited communication through this blog, and are not merely stimuli in each other’s worlds.

My sincere thanks to Magdalena for her comment, which has allowed me to, hopefully illustrate, something of what I am attempting to begin to communicate. There will be no blog next week as Easter will be upon us. 

Alexander Technique and The Inter-Personal

Today I want to blog about something very new in the Alexander world, something so new that to my knowledge no-one to date has ever suggested it. Having said that readers of this blog will notice familiar themes, as will anybody conversant with Alexander's work. However what I want to say goes beyond Alexander in very important ways, while looking at ways of fulfilling certain of the promises that he felt his work contained.

In doing this I go against the grain of certain contemporary Alexander trends which emphasise the physical and publicise the Alexander Technique as a 'practical way of improving posture'. 'Improving posture' is often the motivation for seeking Alexander lessons and an outcome. There is nothing wrong in either but as an answer to what the Alexander Technique is, it falls woefully short. My own answer can be found in a previous blog and is grounded in Alexander's writings, most notably the title of his second book 'Constructive Conscious Control of The Individual' - CCI. 

For those that do not have time to read two blog posts in one day, I will briefly break down the salient points for them here. The first is that Alexander Technique is concerned with consciousness, what we can be aware of and specifically it is concerned with becoming aware of how we control ourselves and the implications in terms of functioning in a general sense. Patterns of control can be constructive in that they allows for greater levels of integration and functioning or they can be destructive with poor performance and various difficulties being the result. Normally, now a days when Alexander Technique teachers list the resulting difficulties, they list as Alexander would have phrased it, 'so called physical' difficulties such as back or neck pain. He though, again to paraphrase, included 'so called mental difficulties'. Unfortunately his writing here here is not always particularly illuminating because of his adoption of a stimulus-response model for mental processes. There is one particular observation concerning manner of use and manner of reaction that I will come back to in a later blog that is absolutely key here, in its practicality and usefulness.  

Today though there are four points of departure. Three from Alexander and one from John Dewey. Starting with Dewey, he explicitly refers to Alexander's work as a 'completed psychoanalysis', so it is clear that for Dewey and one assumes Alexander who included Dewey's introduction to his work that 'conscious control' is relevant to the field that psychotherapy seeks to elaborate. 

Moving on to Alexander he explicitly makes 'behaviour' the concern of his work, specifically the change of behaviour. This is very rarely mentioned, if at all in an evolving Alexander literature. Yet, for me this is often what holds out most promise, if not the only promise of the Alexander Technique. It allows us to become aware, conscious of our  behaviour, conscious of it implications and gives a practical procedure for helping to change it. Now behaviour and action are intimately connected and the two final points of departure are Alexander's breaking of the world into physical and mental acts, excluding and ignoring what I would call inter-personal acts. Part of the reason is that Alexander like many men of his time was wedded to a unit of society based on the individual rather than looking to see individuals as persons in relationship - this being the fourth and final point of departure. 

One of the ironies of the last point is that it is possible to trace tentative links through Dewey and McMurray showing how Alexander's work might have influenced the development. What is important to say here and what marks this out as a radical break with Alexander is to note that our earliest habits, habits to do with the use of our head and our neck, habits to control our experience of ourselves are not the result of some stimulus-response mechanism but our active experimentation with being in the world. So that by six months babies have functionally acquired movements of their heads and necks to control their experience before they can walk. That control exists in and evolves in an interpersonal framework and the Alexander Technique can help establish conscious control inter-personally in our relationships with others. To do this we need to recognise a different category of action to the two that Alexander outlines in CCI, that is of of inter-personal acts. Doing so radically breaks and extends Alexander's work into our personal relationships, our being with other's and allows for for links to be made with psychology, psychotherapy. Most of all it allows for an extension of ourselves through understanding of ourselves in relation to others and giving us the opportunity not just to be with others but to play a role with respect to them.

Pulling Forward To Concentrate - A Bad Idea

Regular readers of this blog will know I spend a lot of time writing about how we look and the importance of seeing. The last two weeks have been no exception, looking at the importance of allowing oneself to focus over attempting to concentrate. In these, I described concentration in terms of increasing muscle tension around the eyes and face, as one fixes one's attention on an object. There is another element that is particularly relevant to working on a computer, reading a book, and, as I increasingly see on visits to London, watching films or TV programmes on a iPhone. It is also an element that comes up in inter-personal relations, of which more another time.

This element concerns the desire to pull forward, which in itself is not a bad thing; it is, as in everything from an Alexander perspective, a matter of how it is done - the 'means whereby'. The advantage of pulling forward from a visual perspective is a loss of peripheral vision; it is harder to be distracted, which is often what we are looking for in a busy office or on a crowded train.

If you want, you can test this now by just moving towards the screen. As you get closer, you will notice that your world narrows to the screen and you lose awareness of your surroundings. All too often we take this a step further in the way we pull forward and lose ourselves, if we are lucky, in interesting work, only to be reminded by tiredness or aching limbs of our corporeality, our embodiment. If we find the work boring then the pull forward can involve a collapsing and or a holding oneself in place using excess muscle tension. Whichever way we pull forward, unless we first stop and make sure we lengthen as we go, we will shorten in stature and hold our breath, creating excess tension.

Answers to this vary and include the aforementioned lengthening to go forward. However, when it comes to reading, the answer is often to raise the book higher, so that we do not have to collapse to read it. When it comes to working in an office, the answer is to train ourselves to focus and not be distracted by our colleagues, to train ourselves to be conscious of the micro decisions and acts we make every day, to become aware of the implications of these decisions in terms of our functioning and general well being, as well as certain specific problems that might ail us.

If we can do that then we have a chance to remain poised, calm in the face of whatever difficulties work throws at us, not rushing or straining at it, but allowing ourselves to be at our most resourced, our most resourceful as we undertake what needs to be done.

No blog next week as I am away in London for a board meeting, among other things, so it will be two weeks before I post again. Until then take care and best wishes.

An Invitation to Focus

Most of us I suspect have been told to concentrate at some points in our lives, first by somebody else and then maybe by ourselves, so that concentration becomes a habit, a strategy for coping with certain situations. It is such a common prescription that it is rarely questioned as to whether it is a good remedy and if so for what. In other words two questions are left unasked. The first concerns what situations might we want to concentrate in; the second asks whether concentration is in fact a good thing.

Taking this second question first, is concentration a good thing? Well we cannot answer that until we decide what a good thing might be. So let me offer some preliminary suggestions as to how we might proceed. Firstly, does it tackle the problem in hand and secondly what happens when it becomes a habit that we automatically use throughout our lives. Some of the answers to the second suggestion can be laid hold of quite easily by the following simple experiment. Pick an object somewhere around you and attend to it by concentrating. You should find that you are aware of increasing the amount of muscle tension around your eyes and in your face. You might also be aware of holding your breath. Finally, you might be aware of the narrowing of your perceptual field and the loss of your peripheral vision.

In themselves, as a one off, these are things that happen. Depending how we choose to look at them, will depend on how we value them. If we look at ourselves as organic beings then over time the holding of our breath, interferes with our organic functioning in several ways, including posturally. Over time it can lead to definite physical problems – many of Alexander’s observations here still stand the test of time.  It also effects how we both experience ourselves and the situation. Typically when we narrow attention like this, there is a loss of context and therefore understanding – we think less well. If nothing else because we are getting less oxygen to our brains, so from a functioning and performance level we might conclude that there is a cost both short and long term.

Short term considerations often dominate here, in how we approach the task in hand. In seeking to get things done we ‘end-gain’ in Alexander speak and fail to consider the use of ourselves or the ‘means-whereby’ we do things to continue with Alexander speak. It is in the use of ourselves that Alexander Technique seeks to establish a Conscious Control and the most basic way we approach activity is by sight.

Here the choice is between choosing to concentrate or allowing ourselves to focus. Concentration as noted, has costs, it also brings with it an attitude to life, as does focus. With focus we get to be curious, wonder. We also perform differently as we are able to be released in our breathing, free in our movements, free in our thought and our action. I'll return again to this next week, to look more at individual situations where we might be tempted by concentration and end-gaining - until then have a good week.