Narcissus and Alexander – Reflections on the Origins of the Alexander Technique

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Beside the pleasant pool Narcissus lay
And bending over, quenched his thirst, to find
Within his heart a thirst of different kind…

Narcissus the Greek

Narcissus was an exceptionally beautiful sixteen-year-old Greek boy, hard and disdainful, who scorned everyone, including the nymph Echo who had fallen madly in love with him. But Echo got her revenge: one day Narcissus lay down beside a pool and, seeing his own reflection, was so smitten by his beauty that he fell in love with himself.

Narcissus never discovered that he was only looking at a reflection. He tried to clasp and kiss it, but naturally was unable to do so. Frustrated and tormented by not being able to possess the object of his desire, he grieved and grieved. When mourners came for him, even his body had disappeared. All that was left of him was a flower next to the pool.

This is the first recorded reaction to seeing one’s own reflection – a pretty depressing story, to say the least. But now let’s fast forward a few millennia and shift our attention away from the cradle of western civilization to a distant outpost of the late l9th Century British Empire. For it was in Australia that a historic man-mirror encounter of quite a different sort was taking place. How did it compare with Narcissus’ sad tale?

Alexander the Australian

Frederick Matthias Alexander was an exceptionally talented young man from Tasmania who spent a great deal of time looking at himself in a mirror. One can easily imagine his friends and colleagues becoming concerned about this odd behavior: “Fred just stands there in front of that damned mirror for hours on end. Can’t even get him to come down to the pub for a beer anymore.” “I know. Yesterday, when I stopped by his rooms, he was having an intimate talk with his reflection. That voice problem of his has gone to his head.”

Alexander eventually left his mirror and his homeland and moved to England. No doubt some he encountered there also thought him a bit strange – in a harmless sort of way of course. Others saw genius in the man and attached great value to his discoveries. They read his books, gazed intently into their own mirrors, and gladly paid good money for lessons in his Technique. A few of them devoted their lives to furthering his work. This pattern continues today, almost sixty years after Alexander’s death.

Narcissus became world famous. His story is perhaps the best known of all the tales of ancient Greek mythology and his name has become synonymous with self-love and self-centeredness. Alexander, on the other hand, remains comparatively unknown, although his name too has crept into the vocabulary of his followers. One early American disciple suggested that the President and all members of Congress ought to be fully and completely “Alexanderized” before they assumed their duties. Students of his method sometimes speak of “doing their Alexander” and at time accuse each other of being stiff “Alexandroids”.

Alexander teachers and students can occasionally be accused of narcissism – when our legitimate Alexandrian emphasis on paying attention to ourselves slips over into obsessive self-interest. But for for the most part we continue to use mirrors, and other tools for self-observation, in a discerning and reasoned manner. This is something Narcissus was simply not able to do. He was overcome with self-love, and in no condition to bring his critical faculties to bear on his predicament. “That poor chap was simply not in communication with his reasoning,” Alexander might well have declared.

Unlike Narcissus, who wanted to merge with his reflection, Alexander used his mirror as a means of distancing himself from his faulty sensory awareness. In his own “creation story” – Chapter I of Use of the Self – Alexander systematically brings his mirror into play at each step of his quest. While Narcissus lost his human form and was transformed into a flower, Alexander used his reflection to gain accurate information about himself in order to fulfill his human potential. Indeed the mirror proved to be his principle tool for learning the truth about his behavior, and about the effectiveness of the attempts to make useful changes in that behavior.

As far as we know, Alexander was the very first person in history to use a mirror in that way. He forever changed the relationship between man and mirror and that in itself is worth reflecting upon.

Notes:

The opening translation comes from The Metamorphosis of Ovid – An English Translation, by A. E. Watts, University of California, Berkeley (1954)

Most interpretations of the Narcissus myth treat Narcissus as a deluded and tragic figure. A very different interpretation has been put forth by Thomas Moore in his best-selling book, Care of the Soul, Harper and Collins, New York (1992).

A fascinating account of our historical relationship with mirrors is provided in The Mirror and Man by Benjamin Goldberg, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville (1985) and in Coming to Our Senses, Morris Berman, Simon and Schuster, New York (1989).

Learning how to Stop

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A STORY:

“A man enjoys life. But it isn’t perfect. He sometimes experiences
pain, frustration, and suffering. For a while he gets along okay.
But the suffering builds over time, over a number of years. The
suffering becomes a major intrusion in his life. He exclaims,
“Something has got to change!”

“He goes to the wise man and explains that, although he was okay with
life for a while, more and more it has been growing on his mind that
he’s not happy with the way things are, and that he’s really quite
sure now that something has got to change. “Could you help me to
change?” he asks.

“The wise man says, “Thank you for coming to me. You did the right
thing in coming here. And now I will give you my advice: change
nothing.”

THE END

When I first read this, a part of me thought to myself, “Well, being a wise man seems pretty simple. Maybe I’ll take up the profession myself. All I’ll have to do is tell people seeking my wisdom: “change nothing” and my exulted place in society will be assured. I might be able to make more money too!

But as a teacher of the Alexander Technique I had to admit that the wise man’s advice was pretty profound. In my field I often work with people who have come to believe that the solution to problems with their physical functioning lies in trying to do something different – to just change something.

Take the field of posture, for example. Some people believe, or have been told, that their posture is poor. Sometimes they’ve been warned that they face potentially serious health risks – perhaps due to the restricted breathing that often goes along with poor posture. Or, for older students, the greater likelihood they’ll loose their balance and fall with potentially serious results. Maybe they’ve come to realize that poor posture just doesn’t look good, that their personal or professional lives are being adversely affected.

They want to improve their posture and, more often than not, are quick to demonstrate just how they might go about doing just that. Someone who is a sloucher, for example, will demonstrate “standing up straight” by lifting their head and chest, probably in very much the way they did as children when a parent or teacher told them to “stop slouching, stand up straight”.

This procedure was effective at getting the parent or teacher off their back – at least for the minute or so until they returned to their old pattern. But it did absolutely nothing to improve their posture. All that happened was that they rearranged the harmful tensions in their body into a different, but equally dysfunctional, arrangement.

Professor John Dewey, the American philosopher and educational reformer, had a fair amount of experience with the Alexander Technique. This is what he had to say on the subject of posture:

“Of course, something happens when a man acts upon his idea of standing straight. For a little while, he stands differently, but only a different kind of badly. He then takes the unaccustomed feeling which accompanies his unusual stance as evidence that he is now standing straight. But there are many ways of standing badly, and he has simply shifted his usual way to a compensatory bad way at some opposite extreme.”

In my Alexander Technique teaching practice, I’ll often ask a new student to simply notice, as best he or she can, what’s going on with their head, torso, arms and legs and to do this without making any changes. Just notice – nothing more. I’ve hardly ever met a student who was able to actually follow this instruction at first – to simply observe his or her self, without making some sort of instant change in their way of standing or sitting. These changes often involve quite large movements of the student’s head or shoulders, for example.

And yet this sort of simple “just noticing” is precisely what’s needed as a first step in learning how to make a useful change in their posture so that they don’t end up with a different way of sitting, standing or moving badly.

In the field of posture – and indeed in all areas of our lives – we need to become conscious of our habitual patterns of behavior in order to reason out how we can best make changes that will actually improve our situation – we need to “just notice” without making immediate, reflexive, changes that prevent us from sensing what we were doing before we made those changes.

A final note: The wise man did NOT say, “Give up. Your problems will never be solved. You might as well resign yourself to having them forever. Don’t waste your time being interested in improving your situation.” No, he merely said, “Change nothing.” The advice is very, very simple, but not always easy to follow.

As another wise man once said: “You need to know where you’ve been if you want to know the best place to go next.”

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Alexander Technique: Who Cares?

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F. Matthias Alexander, standing in front of a his portrait, possibly reading one of his books to himself.  What’s so special about his Technique?

The other day while shopping in the supermarket, I happened to overhear part of a conversation between two middle-aged women.  One said something like: “You’ll learn to carry yourself with greater ease, you’ll have greater self-esteem and your breathing will be fuller and freer.  You’ll feel better and have lots more energy.”  The second woman asked how she could find out more.

Call me naive, but I was certain the first lady was talking about the Alexander Technique. I was just about to chime in and introduce myself when the it turned out that the method they were talking about was Pilates!

Of course it could just have easily been yoga, the Feldenkrais method, Rolfing or any number of other methods that have a reputation for helping people improve the way they function.  And of course it could have been the Alexander Technique. But the odds of that are pretty low.

That conversation did get me thinking about two questions:

1. What is it that draws people to take a first lesson in the Technique when there are so many other options available that seem to offer the same sorts of benefits?

And perhaps even more important:

2. What causes them to continue with the Alexander Technique teaching process beyond the first few lessons?

Think back to your own early experiences with the Technique: What motivated you to go for your first lesson?  What kept you going?

In my own case, the answer to the first question was an article in Toronto Life Magazine about the Technique, and the one teacher in all of Canada at the time.  I can remember reading and re-reading it, thinking to myself, “Wow, this seems like a great way to improve the way I look and feel without having to exercise!”  I also had a colleague at work who was taking lessons who looked better in ways I couldn’t articulate, and whose back pain all but disappeared after a few weeks of lessons.

As for the second question, the Alexander Technique turned out to be exactly as I had imagined: an amazingly effective way to improve my physical being without doing any exercise. I never noticed changes during a lesson – or even well into my teacher training course.  But that didn’t matter to me because all sorts of amazing changes were taking place outside of lessons.  Perhaps most dramatic was a gain in height of about 3/4 of an inch and the need to replace most of my pants within a month of starting lessons.

I was hooked pretty much from the start and found it very surprising when Paul Collins, one of the Directors of my Alexander Technique training course, said in class one day that it’s when a new student makes a significant change, and knows it, that he or she is most likely to stop taking lessons.  As for why this would be the case, he speculated that it could because of fear of more, unpredictable, changes. Or perhaps, at some unconscious level, not wanting to face having been the cause, at least in part, for their past misuse and not wanting to take responsibility for themselves in the future.

When I started teaching, my second student did precisely this. On her third lesson she went on and on about how much better she felt, how her friends noticed that she looked so much better, and that her neck pain had all but disappeared.  She cancelled her fourth lesson, and that’s the last I heard from her!

For me, lessons always had just the opposite effect – the more I changed, the more I wanted more lessons.  In my case, greed for more of a good thing always overcame any hidden fears of the unknown, or regrets about my earlier misuse of myself.

I have to confess that these were trickier questions to answer than they seemed at first glance.  They forced me to go back in time and try to see things from my perspective of over 35 years ago.

So, once again: What were you thinking when you first decided to take Alexander Technique lessons?  And why did you continue taking lessons?

I’d love to hear your responses to these questions – and I’m sure other Alexander students and teachers would as well.

***

Here’s a podcast interview I did with Mark Josefsberg, an Alexander Technique teacher in New York City, titled: “Why do some students take one or two lessons and then quit even though they – and others – have noticed major benefits?”

 

The Power of Pause: Lyndon Johnson, Winston Churchill and F. Matthias Alexander

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President Johnson being sworn in a short time after Kennedy’s assination, standing next to Jacqueline Kennedy on Air Force 1 while on the tarmac at Love Field, Dallas.  Mrs. Kennedy was in shock and her dress was still splattered with her husband’s blood.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Lydon Johnson became president of the United States.  As many remember, he was sworn in on the same plane that brought Kennedy to Texas, and that was about to take him, along with Jacqueline Kennedy – and the coffin of the slain President – back to Washington, DC.

Johnson had been marginalized as an almost totally powerless Vice President.  Suddenly he found himself in one of the most challenging situations any leader has ever faced.  Most of Kennedy’s staff and cabinet – especially Kennedy’s brother Robert, the Attorney General – detested him, Kennedy’s legislative agenda was stalled in Congress with very little time left to pass it, and there was a general distrust of anyone from the very state in which the President was shot.

On top of all that, there was genuine concern that Kennedy’s killing was part of a much larger conspiracy to take out the entire leadership of the United States government.

In the forth volume of his series on Lydon Johnson’s life, The Passage of Power, Robert Caro says that within a few minutes of the confirmation of Kennedy’s death, everyone around Johnson was struck by what seemed a total transformation of his physical being – his posture, his facial expression, even the way he walked.  Jack Valenti is quoted in the book as saying, “… there was a new demeanor in him…the restless movements were gone…he was very quiet and seemingly very much in command of himself.”  There had, Valenti said, been “a transformation…(He) was in a strange way another man, not the man I had known.”

Perhaps the most serious of the many challenges Johnson faced during the first few days of office, was a speech to a joint session of Congress outlining his agenda and, in a sense, introducing himself to the American people.  As Caro writes, “Men who regarded themselves as his friends, who had known him or worked with him for a long time and had heard him make many speeches, were very worried.”  Johnson was a terrible public speaker.  He had a tendency to wave his arms and bellow and talk too fast, despite repeated advice to reign in those tendencies.

That may not have mattered so much as a Senator, or even a Vice President, but in a televised speech to Congress – his first as President – it would have been disastrous.

Johnson solved the problem by editing his speech to add or alter phrases so that it would be almost impossible for him to rush through it.  He also inserted into the speech, at key points, and after each paragraph, the word “Pause” and sometimes “Pause-Pause.”

This strategy worked brilliantly and his powerful and emotional speech was interrupted thirty-one times with applause.  When Johnson was finished, and he walked back up the center aisle, the applause didn’t stop until he had left the Chamber.  And, one observer said, “Everywhere you looked, people were crying.”

Johnson was hugely successful in getting Kennedy’s proposals enacted into law.  He also got a landmark civil rights bill passed – one that nobody thought was possible at the time.

An Alexander Technique take on all this is that, first, Johnson was able to powerfully re-direct his energies by an act of will while at the same time preventing (“inhibiting” in Alexander Technique jargon) harmful habits of movement and expression.

And in a situation where he needed extra help – and needed it quickly – he devised a strategy to help him prevent habitual patterns associated with that specific situation.

This was a very different strategy than the one used by F. Matthias Alexander in overcoming his own public speaking issues, although the “pause” part certainly resonates with Alexander Technique thinking.

I suspect that any teacher of the Alexander Technique who works with students wanting to improve their speaking skills advises them to slow down – often to slow down far, far more than they think is “natural.”  It is, after all, in the pauses, that the audience can absorb a speaker’s message.  When someone speaks too quickly, the message goes right past their audience.

It is also the case that the time needed for an effective pause in speaking is pretty much the same amount of time needed to easily let the air out of your lungs and allow fresh air to flow in.  You’re a lot less likely to gasp for breath if you take plenty of time to pause.

My favorite example of the power of the pause occurs in a speech given by Winston Churchill in 1940, one of the darkest times for the British in World War II. The speech, commonly referred to as “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” is thought by many to be one of the most important in modern history.

Listen to this short excerpt and you’ll see what I mean by Churchill’s effective use of the pause:

You might want to practice speaking more slowly and seeing how that effects the reactions of the people you’re speaking to.  And when you next hear someone who you sense is an effective speaker, pay attention to the pauses.

More often than not, it’s in the pauses that the real power of speech resides.

 

Backpacks, Kids and Us

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He was probably nine or ten years old. I suppose he would be about four feet tall if he were standing normally. But he wasn’t, thanks to his immense backpack. It was so heavy that his whole body curved sharply forward as he trudged along the sidewalk past my house on his way to school one morning.

He looked a little like an undersized and overloaded Sherpa on his way to Mt. Everest.

I’ve been noticing the effects of backpacks on children during the past few years. Every year the packs seem to get bigger and heaver, forcing the kids wearing them to distort their bodies more and more grotesquely.

What makes me particularly upset about this trend is that I know what’s in store for children once they reach school. They will be forced to use standardized chairs and desks that make no allowance for natural variation in childrens’ shapes and sizes – furniture chosen to save a few dollars and make them easier for the custodial staff to stack and move.

To add insult to injury, they may well be required – while using that horrible furniture – to watch a video on the importance of having good posture!

The conditions faced by most children in schools today would never be tolerated in a workplace thanks to union pressure, government regulations and the threat of lawsuits.

But they are widely accepted for our kids, even though their young bodies are at great risk of developing harmful posture patterns that can lead to pain and poor physical functioning in later life.

Why? I’ve thought a good deal about this issue and I see two main reasons why this blatant misuse of our children is allowed to continue.

First, many parents, teachers and school administrators literally can not see the harm that’s being done. Sometimes it’s because their own posture leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve noticed in my own work as an Alexander Technique teacher that people with poor posture are not usually very good at seeing the same sorts of patterns in others.

Then too kids are remarkably resilient, even when faced with the backpack and seating outrages so common in our schools today. The harmful consequences may not show up for a few years and so elementary teachers are not likely to see them. And when they do show up – perhaps in high school – it may seem then that the child just somehow developed bad posture earlier, somewhere else.

Second, I think our society has some serious blind spots when it comes to childhood development.

It used to be that hitting or even beating small children to discipline them was an accepted practice. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” went the saying.

Thankfully those practices are fading out, in large measure due to an increased understanding of the terrible long-terms effects of such violence. By now most parents are aware of the well documented link between an abusive childhood and violent behavior later in life.

But I think many well-intentioned parents and teachers are still unable to make the connection between distorting environmental factors like heavy packs and ill-fitting furniture, and future posture development. How else can one explain letting their kids leave home carrying the sort of backpacks you can see near any school? Or allowing new middle and high schools to be built with no lockers, presumably to keep students from hiding drugs, thereby forcing them to carry them from class to class?

There are some hopeful signs. The issue of children’s backpacks has begun to surface in the media. (I wish I could say the same about school furniture. but I see no progress at all in that area.) I was particularly stuck by a front-page article in the New York Times – “Heft of Students’ Backpacks Turns Into Textbook Battle.”

According to the article some schools are now issuing a separate set of books to be kept at home. California has banned textbooks that exceed a certain weight limit and legislators in New Jersey and Massachusetts are considering similar regulations.

These are useful ideas, but ultimately I believe that what we need more than anything else is a much clearer appreciation of just how important early postural influences can be so that we don’t just rely on patchwork solutions.

Here’s one way to see this for yourself: If you have photos (or videos) of yourself taken early in your life – say though your teenage years – arrange them in chronological order and see if you can spot changing postural patterns in yourself. Compare what you see in those photos to what you see when you look at yourself in a full-length mirror. Better yet, have someone else take a look too – it’s often easier to see these patterns in others.

You might be amazed at what you discover!

Santa talks about the Alexander Technique

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A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Santa Claus about his experiences with the Alexander Technique.  We had to keep out talk short as it took place during the busiest time of year for him.

Me: Santa, thanks so much for taking the time for this interview.  I know you’re knee-deep in wrapping paper and Christmas gifts right now.

Santa: It’s pretty busy here all right.  Mrs. Claus and I, along with the elves, are working flat out.  But I’m always glad to speak about the Technique developed by F. Matthias Alexander.

Me: Well, speaking of Mrs. Claus, I understand she was the person who got you to take Alexander Technique lessons.  How did that come about?

Santa: Yes my wife was pregnant with our first child, Santa Junior, a few years ago and she felt it was best to go Down South for the birth where they have proper facilities.  While she was there, she mentioned to her midwife that she had been having a lot of back pain.  Her midwife suggested she have Alexander Technique lessons and, long story short, her pain was sorted out and I have to say when she and Junior returned to the North Pole, she seemed sprightlier than I’d seen her in ages.

She thought the Technique could help me with my computer work. I do a lot of toy designing on the computer these days and I had developed serve neck and shoulder pain from, as I now realize, poking my head towards the screen and tightening my neck.  She also thought the elves could benefit as well.  They spend hours bent over their work benches making the toys and a lot of them suffer from back, neck and shoulder pain.

Me: How did you manage to get Alexander lessons for yourself and the elves?

Santa: Well, I persuaded a teacher to visit us for a week and a half and he gave us all lessons, mostly in groups.  I could sense the difference almost at once and the elves took to it very quickly indeed.  The only downside is that now I have to be on the lookout going into the workroom as the elves are often doing their constructive rest on the floor and they’re pretty easy to trip over.  More recently, since we finally got high-speed internet up here, we’ve taken to having Skype sessions from time to time, which have been very useful.

Me: That’s an amazing story Santa.  Do you find the lessons helped with the toy delivery process? I imagine that walking around on ice-covered roofs and sliding down chimneys requires a high level of coordination and balance.

Santa: Tell me about it!  Have you ever tried going up and down the inside of a chimney?  But, yes, the Technique has made those tasks a lot easier.  But the biggest thing I notice on Christmas Eve is that it’s a lot easier to manage the reindeer.

Me: I thought Rudolf and his red nose took care of a lot of that.

Santa: Rudolf?  Don’t get me started on him.  Yes, he has a nice bright nose. And yes it provides a bit of light.  But how do you think his nose got so bright? That reindeer has a serious vodka problem.  And while I appreciated the light, his guidance was, to put it mildly, erratic. Thankfully I now have GPS and Rudolph is confined to back-up duty.

Me: How did the Technique help with the reindeer?

Santa: Driving a herd of reindeer is no easy feat.  Those guys have strong wills of their own and they’re forever getting to arguments and butting each other with their antlers.  Keeping them in line requires a lot of skill, a lot of eye-hand coordination and a very strong voice.  The Alexander Technique has been a great help in all those areas.

I have to say I am very grateful to Mrs. Claus for telling me about the Technique, and very grateful for Mr. Alexander for developing it.

One other thing: During the Elves’ constructive rest periods she often reads to them from Alexander’s books.  Their favorite is The Use of the Self – they keep wanting to hear Chapter 1, “Evolution of a Technique” – and one day she announced she was going to write her own book, The Use of the Elf!

Me: Thank you Santa – I really appreciate you taking the time to talk a little about your Alexander Technique experiences.  Merry Christmas to you, Mrs Claus and all the elves.

Santa: We all wish you, and all the other wonderful Alexander Technique teachers around the world, a Merry Christmas too!

—–

After our interview was over, Santa told me that despite his problems with Rudolph, this is one of his favorite Christmas Songs.  He always listens to it on his iPod while making deliveries.

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

New Look, Same Alexander Technique

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We’re living in a golden age of Alexander Technique information availability: websites, articles, blogs, audio and video resources. The amount of good information available in all these media is huge, and growing daily.

Recently a whole new way of presenting the Technique – non-linear visual depictions – has emerged. A good example is the Graphic Recording seen at the left which was created for Angela Bradshaw, a UK teacher of the Alexander Technique by Claire Holgate. (You can see a larger version by clicking on the image.)

Now I’m a pretty linear kind of guy and so I don’t gravitate naturally to these sorts of depictions.  But there are lots and lots of people who do.  And there are Alexander Technique teachers and students who are very skilled at creating them.

Two examples:

Margaret Almon, a mosaic artist in Lansdale, Pennsylvania has created a very nice post on her Pinterest Board, Alexander Technique and ease in the art studio

Imogen Ragone, an Alexander Technique teacher in Wilmington, Delaware has also create a Pinterest Board, Alexander Technique

Pinterest creates these Boards automatically as you add new material and it’s becoming an increasingly popular social media platform.

Jupiter Jenkins, a musician and Alexander Technique student in Holland, Michigan has created several blog posts that integrate images and text in a very imaginative way.  Here’s one of them: Alexander’s Ragtime Technique

I had the image at the top of Jupiter’s blog modified for one of the pages of my website and I posted it on Facebook awhile ago, where it got a lot of attention.  You can see it on the left. It’s now on several Alexander Technique sites around the world.  This kind of “quote on a background” always gets a very good response on Facebook and Twitter.  If you “like” my Facebook page, you can see dozens of examples produced by me and others.  They are very easy to create.

If you are drawn to any of the versions of a “word-image” style of presentation, please consider creating (or having Claire create) your own Graphic Recording, or a Pinterest page, or a “quote on a background” or some other visual depiction of the Alexander Technique, and then posting it on your website as well as on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

After all there can never be too many ways for people to learn about the Alexander Technique.

Horse Sense and Sensibility

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Waiting for an Alexander Technique lesson

Many years ago I showed a copy of the Equitation issue of Direction Journal to Marjorie Barstow, the first person to graduate from the first Alexander Technique training course. Until her death at age 95, she was the world’s senior Alexander teacher. Knowing of her lifelong interest in horses, I asked, “Marj, did you ever give an Alexander lesson to a horse?” Her immediate reply was, “Yes, of course.” And then, after a very long pause, she added, with a twinkle in her eyes, “But you’d better know your horse!”

That last remark got me thinking about the nature of Alexander Technique exchanges between humans and animals. My personal experience in that area has been fairly limited. I have given what I consider a very good lesson to a frightened puppy and I’ve done some work with domestic cats. I once tried to help a cow lengthen and widen but she immediately sat down, nearly crushing my legs. Perhaps she thought it was to be a chair lesson.

There is a growing body of evidence that some species of animals such as dolphins, whales and primates are capable of quite sophisticated thinking. It even seems likely that large clusters of insects engage in creative thought even if the individual ant or bee seems to have a pretty unimaginative lifestyle.

I suspect that we are, for the most part, as ignorant of what’s going on in animals’ minds as they are of our thoughts and emotions. But is it nonetheless possible that horses and other animals could teach us a thing or two? If so, how would they do it? What conditions are necessary for useful information to be exchanged between animals and humans?

The Alexander Technique could provide a very useful framework within which to explore these kinds of questions as well as more general questions bout the nature of animal intelligence. For one thing, we are thoroughly at home with the subtleties of non-verbal communication. The Equitation issue included several examples of Alexander lessons successfully given to horses. And of course the origins of the Technique owe a great deal to Alexander’s close observations of animal behavior. Indeed the Alexander term “use” was borrowed from the language of horse trainers.

Richard Weis is an Australian Alexander teacher and a Senior Instructor of Centered Riding, a process that emphasizes the importance of developing a cooperative and harmonious relationship between horse and rider. In the Equitation issue, Richard notes that a trained horse “…has learnt to move with a free neck and an open back whilst carrying a rider through all sorts of difficult maneuvers. He has learnt to inhibit his instinctive reacting towards having a predator on his back…”

Richard adds that horses possess a delicate presence of mind and they “…can learn what even great thinkers find challenging: they can maintain their own directive orders for extended periods of time” (italics his)

If a horse can do all that, I’d certainly like to have a lesson from one!

While I was thinking about how that could be arranged, I had a conversation with Barbara Conable, an American Alexander teacher. As a child, she had something akin to upside-down table lessons from her father’s draft horses.

Wendy is always willing and eager to help you move with grace

Barbara used to lie face down along a horse’s back and, as she describes it, “I would rest there, often sleep there, on the horses’ backs, on my tummy, my limbs dangling on either side, my poor back relaxing. The horses did not merely tolerate me. They cradled me and helped me and taught me, as the Tao Te Ching says, ‘without saying a word’”.

Has anyone else had an Alexander lesson from a horse, or other animal? Or given a lesson to an animal? I would love to explore this topic further.

***

In response to this blog, Jo Ann Widner, an Alexander Technique teacher near Richmond, Virginia shared some very interesting information about horses as teachers of balance and coordination:

Image: Tina Phillips / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Marj Barstow: Master Teacher of the Alexander Technique

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Marjorie Barstow of Lincoln, Nebraska. 1899-1995

Marjorie Barstow, who everybody called Marj, was the first person to graduate from F. Matthias Alexander’s first training course.  She worked for a while with FM’s brother Albert Redden Alexander in Boston and New York and then on the eve of World War II she returned to her home in Lincoln, Nebraska where she lived and taught – in the same house – for the next 55 years.

Marj once told me that from the day she read Alexander’s book Constructive Conscious Control in the early 1920’s, not a day passed that she didn’t think about, and experiment with, his ideas.  She read. and re-read, his books over and over again, particularly Use of the Self.

Starting in her 70s, when she was “discovered” by the Alexander world, she maintained a teaching schedule that kept her away from her home for over half of each year – flying to Australia, Europe, Canada and all over the States until she was in her early 90s. She never tired of teaching and was was still giving lessons until a year or so of her death at 96.

I first met her when she was 80 and I was half-way through a teacher training course in London.  I immediately knew she was going to be my primary teacher and made sure to work with her as much as I could.  When she tired of traveling I moved to Lincoln to run workshops for her there.

I came to think of her as someone FM dispatched – no doubt unconsciously – far, far away from England.  And far from the petty infighting that he may have suspected would develop among his followers as his work became better known – the kind I saw on display when I was in London in the late 70s and early 80s.

Marj Barstow’s home – built by her father in 1899. Marj lived there for 94 years.

Lincoln, Nebraska was about as far from the London Alexander scene as it is possible to imagine. I believe that isolation from other teachers provided her the stimulus and the opportunity to develop her unique approach to teaching in ways that might not have been possible in England – for example, working primarily with groups and engaging students’ thinking in ways I had never seen before

Luckily for today’s teachers and students of the Technique, her work lives on – with the many students and teachers who were lucky enough to study with her and with the extensive collection of videos of her teaching now available on YouTube.

Here, for example, is an in the moment, very short and to the point, definition of the Alexander Technique she gave in 1982 – one of the best in my view:

And here’s the longer video from which it was taken – perfect in my experience for introducing new students to the Technique:

And here’s an audio conversation Michael Frederick and I had a couple of years ago about Marj:

Finally, her website, MarjorieBarstow.com has links to a great many other videos, personal accounts of her teaching and photos.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with this remarkable woman – truly an American Master.

 

 

Gravity’s Sad Story

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Gravity rues the day he was discovered by Newton.

What’s the first feeling you get when you hear or see the word gravity?

For a great many people it conveys something negative, or heavy – something we need to fight against to keep our body from sagging as we get older.  Or perhaps a grave situation – or even a graveyard or a grave stone.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Gravity lately and so I set up an interview with him – and yes, Gravity insisted he was definitely a he.  Gravity agreed to let me talk with an avatar he had created as a kind of public relations spokesperson.  As Gravity said, his job requires him to be on the job 24/7.

Gravity’s avatar is named Gravity and here is a partial transcript of the conversation I had with him:

Me: Welcome Gravity.  It’s good to get to talk with you – you’ve been a strong influence on me since I was born.

Gravity: It’s a pleasure to speak to you as well.  I’m very happy to have this chance to set the record straight on a number of points.  If you don’t mind, I’d like to start with your last statement because, in fact, I was influencing you from about 9 months before you were born.

Me: Of course – it’s just so difficult for me to remember.  But seriously, you’ve got to admit that you don’t get very good press these days.  Just mentioning your name can be a real downer, so to speak.  How does that make you feel?

Gravity: Not good.  Not good at all.  Here I am working – I believe as you humans might say “my butt off” – and all I get is the kind of disdain you mentioned.  Do I ever get thanked for keeping you tethered to the earth? For keeping your atmosphere from drifting off into outer space?  Indeed for keeping your earth in it’s orbit around the sun?  No – hardly a word of praise.

And that’s not even talking about the blame I get for the sorry state of your posture and coordination.

Me: I feel for you Gravity, I really do.  It’s that last point I like to get into a little more deeply.  Can you explain why we shouldn’t be fighting against you to stand and sit upright?

Gravity: Well to start with, it’s the force I apply to your heads, balancing on top of your spines, to nicely counteract the backwards pull of your neck muscles.  You humans evolved to take advantage of this and now you seem to have forgotten it.  As God said to Moses, you are a stiff-necked people.

Me: Well those of us who teach and study the Alexander Technique are well aware of that…

Gravity: I know – and believe me I’m grateful for it – but it’s not a widely-held understanding. And another thing – it’s not just the work I do on your heads – I apply my force to all the other parts of your body and indeed to your whole body.  And for the most part you fail to realize that that’s at least as important as my “head work”.

Me: Well I plead guilty to having been entirely ignorant of the significance of that for many years, even long after I started teaching the Alexander Technique.  It took a low back injury to get me thinking about your effect on all of me and start to utilize my own center of gravity.

Gravity: Yes and I’ve heard about your new project, Up With GravitySM.  I have to say I like the name and I wish you best of luck in getting the information out there.  I applaud you for showing how people can actually harness my force for good.

Me: Thanks so much for that Gravity – it’s wonderful to get that kind of praise from the source, so to speak.  Is there anything else you’d like to say to the human race?

Gravity: Just that my name only started being used 300 years ago – and has absolutely no etymological connection with graves.

Me: Maybe you should have been named Uppity?

Gravity: Well, just about anything would be better than the name I have.  Still, I must go on keeping the whole earthly system going.  Never a moment to rest.

Me: Well please let me express my gratitude for all you’ve done.  I hope you gain the respect you so richly deserve.