Does Alexander Technique teaching imply psycho-physical unity or psycho-physical separation?

Does Alexander Technique teaching imply psycho-physical unity or psycho-physical separation?

 
I’ve been reflecting on some exchanges that I and others have had recently on the difficulties implicit in the styles of teaching the Alexander Technique. Many of these conversations have been inspiring and have touched on some ideas and perplexities I’ve been harbouring for years, despite being a busy and keen Alexander teacher, teaching…. well, the Alexander Technique!

More and more, in the light of personal experience and in my teaching work however, I find that the lexicon, or even the assumptions, (as grand as they might be at times) of AT need updating; and I have felt more inclined to radical experimentation in the last few years  – (all indirect ‘procedures’) with several other types of ‘approach’. In some ways it might be that I have started to find my own voice and enjoy my work even more and also, happily, be less hard on myself into the bargain….. Basically I have decided to go with what seems to work. A simple enough strategy one might say, but, I’m reminded about that wonderful line and am cautious not to ‘impose a pattern and falsify’. Basically, my concerns stem from the problems of manipulating a system that was not really meant to be controlled consciously – at least in the main!

In no way am I demeaning my history (it was perfect actually, because it was my past) or any other way of working, but I am convinced that the way the technique is often presented is not really relevant, in the way we would like it to be, to many people and, though we might make great play with the idea that we have unity at the heart of much of our work, I am beginning to think that, in the main, this message is not coming across. Because, wonderful as it is in many ways, and strangely enough, we don’t really have unity, proper, at the heart of the work, as it is described or as it happens in practice. That’s why it’s so hard to defend and describe it as such. Simple. It’s a matter of belief, principally, and also, traditionally, a too ‘one sided’ approach to change.

Take gravity for a moment. We do seem to involved in getting people ‘more (or back) on their feet’ so to speak. Now I’m not a professional scientist, but as I understand gravity, it has always been presented in Alexander circles as a force that can help us stay ‘up’. Yet we are told, we also need (more and more) help and clever thinking to aid this presumably ‘natural’ reactive process, the ‘push’ from the planet’ and that when we get good at this it will (be part of a wider process that) give us ‘freedom to change’. ‘Lightness’, physical and mental, is at the heart of this promise. I have my reservations now, about the best means to achieve this in light of ongoing experience in my work with students and also in myself. Truth be told, I’d say we get way to bogged down on detail. I’m reminded of the emissary, in Iain Mcgilchrist’s book: ‘The Master and His Emissary’, where the emissary, the poor step child with high ambition, takes off with a view, gleaned from the ‘master’ – the right hemisphere, and imposes a view on the world that is narrow, bureaucratic and instructive…….

Gravity, of course can be thought of not only in terms of the attraction between the earth and objects within its gravitational field but between any objects existing within their respective fields. I exert a pull on the earth and also on my friend sitting opposite me at the breakfast table (very small indeed  they may be), though I don’t actually get physically pulled towards her. But she is there nonetheless!  I’d not really combined this idea with the idea that all life is relationship and we learn best in this relational context. We are ‘relationing’. We are, also, existing in space and it is attending in this field where, I think we get our best and most natural action. The very idea implies that the forces around us are also within (us) and that our struggles are entirely due to our own misapprehensions – like the idea that gravity makes us ‘heavier’.

The pull between the earth and ‘us’ is in fact co-equal; not ‘us’ (very small) and earth (very huge) pulling us towards it, not in any case, in such a way that we should need to enlist our best Alexander thinking to keep ourselves maximally, ‘up’. Personally, I am starting to think that we get this the wrong way around and that I am ‘down’ – or ‘up’ for good reason; and I find it perfectly reasonable to be ‘there’ – wherever that may be….

On the positive side, AT has taught me to ‘not react’, not to rush, really, however I feel myself to ‘be’; though I would have to confess that I rarely know with accuracy how I ‘think’ myself to be, as I can only feel my function and not my-self; that is, actually, ‘how’ I am. I have learnt that this is not really a matter for me anyway. It is simply not my business and a product of my conditioning……. it has a long history.

I have found working in a traditional Alexander way to be beguiling but not  always relevant, some of the time; and now, have taught too many students (today, jazz musicians for example) who are absolutely fine as they are or, in actual fact nearly fine – helped at times with careful questioning and detective work about their attention, desires and engagement with a musical purpose. I am rarely ‘wrong’ when I sense someone is saying something authentic through music, that their ‘use’ will be pretty good, at that point in time at any rate. If the use is coherent, even if there could be less effort, i find that it’s easy to encourage less – with the same (musical, dramatic) intention. It might be the same in any other field. My change in this regard has simply come about because I  find I am more interested and enjoying being with my students, more than telling them about the ‘Alexander Technique’. Some people reading this might already find this statement perplexing, I think.

I’d like to suggest that Alexander ‘directing’, though it might be subtle at times, may be missing the point, (and it is a fine point, at times) ultimately. Unfortunately for me, I rather like using my hands and I know that I am able feel more and more as I teach more and more, yet, I wonder if this is actually always pointing my pupils in the direction in which they need to go, or reaffirming their belief in ‘sensation’, which is, as I have said a consequence rather than a tool for change.

Actually, I am rather doubtful, these days about tools for change, especially one’s that have a methodology, as well. Any tool is of course only as good as it’s user, but the desire to have a tool in the first place, again, takes us to a place where desire to be somewhere else – improved, (within a schema),  is still uppermost in the mind.

Heaven forbid, we are over one hundred years old as a discipline and we still find trouble in the clear expression of ‘forward and up’ and tirelessly debate the best verbal formulations for similar ‘directives’. Remember, the emissary is an arch manipulator!! It would be better perhaps to consider, though, the angle at which we view the picture. Raking light might be better!

Not content to try to understand why this is a potential problem of pedagogy we seem to have embraced ‘positive thinking’ as well, to make up for this lack. Not that there is anything wrong with positive thinking in the right context, but personally, I find this development increasingly disquieting. Quite what this means is important (to me at least), and it’s something I’d like to consider briefly.

The story so far…..

Alexandrians ‘inhibit’ and ‘direct’, in the main, partly as a thoughtful and then embodied response to gravity and, also in response to activities and patterns of behaviour we’d like to attenuate; or develop. Most of us would like more freedom, though, perhaps not stopping to consider whether that is properly an aim or an immanent, current potentiality. And I mean ‘properly’, because I see that we might be mistaking freedom for something grand when it is in fact something obvious. I’m not suggesting that we should not have an aim, but I am also reminded that there may be truth in the idea that ‘happy is the man who is nothing’.

Back to gravity for a moment….. We aim, at least in part, to counteract, or even use gravity to our advantage: we do this by ‘thinking up’ and also down; and in all sorts of ways in between. (Since gravity is there all the time it would seem to be involved at least as a background to all our activity, mental and physical).

We can maximise gravity’s effect, certainly, by ‘thinking ‘up’ (wherever that may be) or, we can avoid ‘pulling ‘down’ thus making ourselves heavier, kinesthetically speaking. Does this upward state, though, at which we are seen to aim in lessons, give us more freedom or, is it an illusion of freedom because it is an aim? ‘AT’ as content rather than as a ‘vessel’?

It’s clear, though it sounds rather obvious, that because we are prevented from accelerating further than the surface of the earth, (because we are on it), we can’t really get lower than the surface of the earth! Yet, just this morning, watching people disembark from the train, it did seem as if many try to do, just this. The eyes are down and the whole of the ‘self’ follows….it’s like a funeral cortege in form and moving.

I wonder though, whether the self is just down and that the solution is not to be found in just  a bit more ‘directing’. Perhaps it might be better to address the problem of  ‘am I interested in going to work’ and, what is my anticipation of this activity, and how do I deal with this in this moment’, in the light of this question. I think we might all agree that this picture is one that is addressed, partially, by the AT. And we have been partially very effective at addressing it I would say. But, I do see people, who do not fit this mould: performers with whom I work and others, too. Increasingly, I meet people who I’d rather not want to ‘invite to change’ or give them any Alexander type direction. No necks or knees- even if we ‘know’ where these areas, are.

However, the main question I’d like to ask is this: are Alexander people any different, really, conceptually speaking, from most others, except that they ‘know’ that this ‘downward’ behaviour might not be the most profitable kind of way to go about things? In meeting a change, perhaps to a lighter kind of living, is there an over-reliance on thought-as- a means -of -change as opposed to, (and at the expense of), a more ‘attentional,’ honest self questioning directive – as- a- means – of change?

I mentioned a while ago that it was becoming clear to me that the self was not necessarily at it’s most free when being ‘thought’ ‘for’ and that perhaps, a merging with the external world as a source of pure ‘experience’ and as a continuum, might be transforming in itself.

I do, however find increasingly, that working with student and professional musicians that this ‘narrative’ approach with little by way of guiding manual direction is sufficient and that I am tired of good players being ‘straightened out’ by AT teachers applying their training, in an indexed fashion leading to a situation where they ‘have arms supported by the back’ and all the rest of it. In the last week I have come across three people who gave up on the AT because all they did in lessons was a. lying down b. chair work and then, in a lengthened state,  c. re-aquainted with their instrument…… Personally, I find that this approach can, if not very carefully presented, dis-unify the self.

These teaching strategies, however, imply using thought in a guise- not both ordinarily defined. On the one hand there is thinking about the self which implies a more internal type of thinking: to achieve, supposedly an ‘inwardly directed tensional balance’, as someone once said. Better ‘use’ by another name.  On the other hand there is relational thinking, in order to become aware of intention, motive and also the distance at which we ‘self- operate’ in the world……. I’m reminded of  Douglas Harding (Author of ‘Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious here, when he explains that we are ‘built for loving’.

If we take as our starting point the idea previously stated that the body is not meant to be thought ‘for’ – (I’m not making a judgement about this one way or the other, and it is not an original idea by any means) then how might we go about achieving unity’ by these means, rather than it remaining a purely descriptive yet deceptively simple process? I’d suggest that to ask these questions with energy is to answer them.

A further question might be: does the AT (as commonly taught) engender a division in the self that needs more continuous input and makes the meat it feeds upon. Great for keeping pupils, but perhaps not entirely the point, ultimately.

Have we mistaken the AT to be a separate process, the ‘vessel’ rather than a nod in the direction of freedom, without value added? Are we, in fact, trying to ‘impose a formula for the process of ‘change’….even if we ask, in myriad, seemingly clever ways? Are we checking in on things that are actually ok? Are we, fatally, caught up in the idea of ‘becoming’?

As such, does / can real change and clarity of thinking have a system attached to it at all? Is a system such as ours (AT) already bound up with the baggage of the thousand yesterdays of indecisive directing, stiffening or comfortable, received reasoning? Is good use on a continuum or does unity ‘happen’ instantaneously, in space/ time, when we perceive our wrongness or mistaken ideas fully?

Are we teaching, on reflection, ‘object-bound work” instead of  a more ‘contextual’ type of inquiry – approaching a true ‘unity of self’: emotional, physical and mindful – defined with care assuming emotion and thought to be different to each other, at least for the sake of written description.

Do Alexandrians act from this ‘centre of observation’ and from this advantageous point or do they split and work against natural forces that are already showing us the way, however contrary to habit they might feel?  Do we separate things out? As someone once asked, quite interestingly, I think, ‘where is Alexander’s right brain?’ An answer might be, that we have started to manufacture one, because we have seen that there is not one there, really speaking…..

Another more practical question I’m asking is this: ‘does working with attention and clarity of intention and appreciating the benefits of working this way depend on (at least) a formative period of Alexander Technique lessons? Or, can this way of working exist independently, and might it, practically speaking, be a difficult call for the profession of Alexander teachers. I am beginning to think it might be.