Nirvana in your Neck

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I was chatting with some friends over dinner, attempting to explain the basic principles of the Alexander Technique. I spoke a little about the importance Alexander teachers attach to having a free neck so that the head can easily balance on top of the spine. If a person’s neck is tense, it tends to upset that head balance, causing harmful repercussions throughout the entire body. Releasing that tension is basic to releasing those harmful effects.

“Nirvana in your neck!” said Nancy, one of my friends.

I’d never heard it put that way before, but it nicely captures an important aspect of the Alexander Technique.

F. Matthias Alexander, the developer of what today is called the Alexander Technique, was certainly not the first person to talk about the importance of the neck. The Bible is full of references to stiff-necks:

Exodus 32, verses 9, 10: The Lord said to Moses, “I see this is a stiff necked people. Now let Me be, that my anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them…”

Deuteronomy 9: verses 13 and 14 “I see that this is a stiff necked people. Let me alone and I will destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven…”

Jeremiah 7, verse 26: “They stiffened their necks, they acted worse than their fathers.”

There is even an explicit reference to the postural effect of being stiff-necked In Micah 2, verse 3: The Lord says, “I am planning such a misfortune against this clan that you will not be able to free your necks from it. You will not be able to walk erect.”

A stiff neck does indeed make it impossible to have a natural upright posture. It also creates a situation in which the work of supporting the whole body is wrongly distributed. Important functions such as breathing, blood circulation and digestion are placed under enormous strain, reducing their efficiency.

In some translations, “stiff-necked” is translated as “stubborn” which is accurate as far as it goes, but unfortunately takes us away from the physical quality inherent in the original Hebrew: kashe-oref – kashe: hard; oref: scruff of the neck.

There are also many examples in our everyday language that suggest an intimate connection between bodily attitudes and inner states of mind. We speak of a “spineless creature”, “having no backbone”, “losing our heads” and being “level-headed”. The word “attitude” itself can refer to both our outlook on life and to the physical orientation of our body.

Alexander discovered the importance of the state of his neck quite independently of all this. Working entirely on his own in late 19th century Australia, he set out to solve a voice problem he was experiencing.

He set up several mirrors that allowed him to view himself from various angles as he spoke. It didn’t take him long to notice a tendency to tighten his neck when speaking – indeed, to tighten his neck when he just thought about speaking. He also noticed some other patterns that came into play – pulling his head back and down on his neck, restricting his breathing, gripping the floor with his feet – but it turned out that the neck pattern was primary. He discovered that if he could prevent his neck from tightening. the other dysfunctional patterns dissolved.

This proved to be an extremely important discovery on his part, and not just for it’s beneficial effects on his voice. Any activity he performed – standing up from a chair, walking, whatever – was done more efficiently when he remembered to free his neck. It was useful to let his attention go to other parts of his body too, but the condition of his neck turned out to be the most important single factor in bringing about a change for the better.

Teachers of the Alexander Technique today continue to emphasize the head-neck-upper torso relationship and students often are amazed at what a difference it makes when they learn how to prevent harmful tension from forming in their neck. Students often report feeling much lighter and freer and are able to move through life with fewer physical restrictions.

Getting in touch with this “nirvana in your neck” can change your life for the better in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Here’s an audio interview about “stiff-necked” people in the Bible from Body Learning Cast, the Alexander Technique Podcast:

Image courtesy of anankkml / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Taking a Stand with Awareness

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A few years ago, I happened to have two students who were both quite tall and who had lessons scheduled one right after the other on the same morning.

Jack (not his real name) was in his late thirties, not very athletic, and was the director of a local charity. Bill was a former college football player in his mid-twenties who now worked as a computer programmer.

Jack was a classic “sloucher”; he typically sat and stood with his shoulders pulled down into his chest, his head poked forward and down. Bill tended to over straighten his back in an exaggerated “at-attention” style often seen in the military.

Both men came for Alexander Technique lessons because of back pain. Jack had been told that surgery was his best hope and Bill relied on weekly visits to a chiropractor who could help him with his symptoms but not with the underlying pattern that was causing those symptoms.

It was a fascinating experience for me to work with these two students over a period of several months. When I first gently guided Jack into a less slumped posture, his immediate reaction was: “I can’t walk into my office looking like this!”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because people would think I was arrogant!”

It turned out that Jack had been quite tall for his age most of his life and that somewhere along the way he’d got the message (from his parents? teachers? playmates?) that taking up his full size would give others the impression he was trying to act superior. His personally was by nature fairly quiet and unassuming and I suppose he didn’t want to deal with the challenges he thought his natural posture might have invited.

Bill was quite a different story. During his first lesson, I asked him to go into a slouch. With a little help from me, he was able to let go of some of his overly stiff stance. It was by no stretch of the imagination a slouch -although it felt that way to Bill. His immediate reaction was that this new way of standing was quite unacceptable – “I feel like a wimp!” was his reaction.

It turned out that his father was an ex-marine and a policeman. When we took a look at photos of him, and of Bill at various points in his life, it was clear that he had copied the military bearing of his father – as had his two older brothers.

Both these men had adapted postural patterns that were quite harmful over the long haul. And while it was fairly easy to coax them out of those patterns for a short period of time, their perceptions about these charges strongly encouraged them to revert back to their habitual patterns.

They illustrate something that every teacher of the Alexander Technique encounters: A person’s habitual patterns of sitting, standing and moving often feel “right” and any change – even one that is clearly beneficial – feels “wrong”.

You can probably think of people you know who have quite pronounced irregularities in their posture that everybody around them can easily notice – perhaps standing and sitting in ways that are very asymmetrical, of with very slumped shoulders, with one shoulder carried much higher than the other. Yet the chances are good that those people are completely unaware of their patterns.

With Jack and Bill, one of the ways I was able to help them “recalibrate” their self-perceptions was to stand them in front of a full length mirror, with a second mirror positioned so that they can see themselves from the side. I would then help them to release the extra muscle tension they were using to hold themselves in their habitual ways of standing and take a look at themselves sideways, imagining they had never seen this person before.

It didn’t take long for them to clearly see that their sense perceptions didn’t match their visual observations. After a few lessons, I asked them to make those same changes on their own in front of someone they trusted – in this case it was their wives – to get additional feedback, which confirmed their observations with the mirrors.

Both Jack and Bill had lessons over a period of about 4 months and by the end of that time, both had let go of most of their postural “holds”. Neither complained of back pain anymore. But some of the most rewarding changes occurred in other areas of their lives.

Jack found that his new physical bearing was not seen as arrogant at all, but did seem to encourage greater respect from his colleagues. Bill discovered that he was now perceived as being much more approachable. One of his co-workers actually told him that she used to be terrified of asking him for help but now felt comfortable doing so.

The next time you’re in a clothing store with mirrors set up letting you see yourself from the side, spend a few minutes taking a fresh look at yourself. Drop any concern about the usual reasons for using a mirror – your hair, your make-up, the fit of your clothes – and just take in the way this “stranger” stands and compare it to what it feels like.

You might make some very important and useful discoveries about yourself!

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Cupid talks about the Alexander Technique

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A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to interview Cupid about his experiences with the Alexander Technique.

Me: Cupid, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me.  I know you’re busy at this time of year, gearing up for the special demands on you for Valentine’s Day.

Cupid: No problem, Robert – I’ve had such positive experiences with the Technique that I love sharing them with everyone I meet.

Me: What prompted you to take Alexander lessons?

Cupid:  Well, for years I’ve noticed that my speed and agility were not what they should be.  Those are both critical for my job – I am always having to sneak up on people very quickly to shoot an arrow into their heart – and the problem was getting worse.  One day I started thinking about my early life and realized there was something I had long forgotten: I was born from a silver egg!

That’s what got me interested in the Alexander Technique.

Me: The silver egg?

Cupid: Yes, the silver egg.  You see I started thinking about being confined in that egg, and how it might have led me to compress my body.  And that I might still be doing that a little bit unconsciously.

Well, one bit of research led to another and I learned that the Alexander Technique is one of the best ways around to learn to let go of harmful, habitual, unconscious, habit patterns.  Like self-compressing.

Me: Did you find that lessons successfully helped you with your self-compression pattern?

Cupid: Absolutely, right from the first lesson.  I know that sometimes it take a few lessons to start really “getting” the Alexander Technique, but in my case there was so much overall release, so quickly, that I was hooked.

I had my first lesson about half a year ago and now I can do a good deal of self-decompressing on my own.  That’s the wonderful thing about the Alexander Technique: there are specific ways of thinking, and simple procedures, you can do yourself.  You don’t need to keep going to a teacher.  At the moment, I still find a lesson every few months can be useful, but I don’t imagine that will last much longer.

Me: That’s an amazing story Cupid!  I wonder if the Technique has helped you in other ways?

Cupid: Well, I have to do a lot of arrow shooting.  And it has to be done quickly and accurately.  While my aim was still pretty good before taking lessons, I was getting a lot of pain in my wrists and arms and sometimes even in my shoulders.  I realize now that these were signs of Repetitive Strain Injury.

The Technique helped me to hold my bow up and pull my arm back more easily, with less extra strain.  Over time, the pain has pretty much all gone away.

Me: Are there other ways the Alexander Technique has helped you?

Cupid: Yes, but they’re more subtle and harder to describe. Of course you know I’m blind and I have to hit a victim’s heart to get them to fall in love.  So I am heavily reliant on my other senses and I do feel they have improved with Alexander lessons, but in ways I cannot really understand at this point.

I also feel I have more energy, but it’s not easy for me to describe or quantify.

Me: Cupid, thank you so much for this interview – I’ll make a point of posting it on Valentine’s Day.

Cupid: That would be lovely Robert!

 

 

The New Physical Education

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One high-school subject stands out above all others in my memory: Physical Education. I detested everything about PE, from the endless runs around a large undeveloped property near my high-school to Friday afternoons in the gym where we played “murder-ball”, our own sadistic version of dodge ball.

I quickly learned that if I kept a low profile, and was discreet in minimizing my participation, I could still get by with a grade of “B”, or at worst a “C’. During the outdoor runs, I would disappear for a few rounds into a shallow ditch behind a row of hedges, out of sight of the gym teachers. My murder-ball strategy was to pretend I was hit early in the game when there were still so many players in the game that nobody noticed.

For me, PE seemed a boring and unpleasant waste of my time. So when I heard a National Public Broadcasting program about the “New Physical Education” movement, I listened with great interest.

The first part of the program described one important aspect of the New PE: fewer competitive activities (dodge ball was cited as a prime example) and more activities that emphasize personal achievement such as rock-climbing, kick-boxing and Tai-Chi.

So far so good, I thought. While rock-climbing and kick-boxing probably would not have appealed to me, I think I would have enjoyed Tai-Chi, and probably benefited a great deal from it.

But then, in the second part of the program, the whole question of evaluation and measurement was introduced. How are kids in the New PE programs to be graded?

One approach, already in use in one Seattle school, involved attaching tiny heart rate monitors to the children during class. Then, when the class was over, the teacher could check the read outs and determine just how much effort each child had made, and grade accordingly.

So much for minimizing strategies of the sort I had perfected!

But there is a far more serious issue at stake here: This kind of measurement mirrors and reinforces the preoccupation of most adult fitness programs with the quantity of activity performed, rather than the way participants use their bodies while performing those activities. We tend to be interested in how many laps we swam, the amount of weights we lifted, or the speed of our runs rather than how well we used our body in performing those sports. In other words, quantity rather than quality.

To see what this leads to, take a look at any group of runners or joggers. You will probably see tight necks, hunched shoulders and painful expressions on many of their faces. These runners may be getting a cardiovascular workout, but in the process they’re putting a lot of unnecessary and harmful pressure on their bodies. No wonder so many people who begin fitness programs drop out after a few weeks, often due to pain or injuries.

Of course it’s important that children engage in vigorous physical activity; we don’t want them to grow up to be couch potatoes. But making “effort” the primary basis for grading students – even if it’s as easy as reading a heart monitor – does our children a great disservice.

What makes this particularly sad is that we now know how to help people improve their movement quality. The twentieth century saw the development of numerous somatic therapies and teaching methods that have proven effective in helping people of all ages perform all their activities, from everyday ones like walking and using a computer right through to vigorous sports, with greater ease, efficiency and safety.

The method I know best, first as a student and then, for the past thirty years as a teacher, is the Alexander Technique. It has a long history of helping people with stress-related conditions like back pain and stiff necks and shoulders and it is often used by musicians, dancers and actors to improve the quality of their performance.

The Alexander Technique is taught by specially-trained teachers, but some of its principles could easily be included in PE classes. Take for instance the Alexander-related process that has come to be known as “body-mapping.” This approach includes learning, on your own body, just where important joints are located and how they function.

It turns out that most of us have serious “mis-maps” of our own body which cause us to move in ways that attempt to reinforce those incorrect ideas. For example, many people think their hip joints are at waist level when, in fact, they are located far lower on our torso. Correcting this mis-map is quite easy to do and almost always results in much smoother bending, walking and running patterns.

Another method that can easily be taught to children (and adults) is the Up With Gravity process, a simple way of using the power of gravity to release tension and lighten up.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the New Physical Education programs included teaching these kinds of useful self-knowledge to our kids so they could go through life using their bodies as nature intended? And look back on their PE experiences with fondness and gratitude?

Image courtesy of Vlado / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

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 spoke with Santa Claus about his Alexander Technique experiences. We had to keep our talk short because it was the busiest time of year for him.

Me: Santa, thanks so much for taking 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, and 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 in my body 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 may be 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 Zoom 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 deer 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 final thing your readers might find amusing: During the Elves’ constructive rest periods Ms Claus 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! which they found most amusing.  The next day, BoBo, the Senior Elf, announced he had commissioned a book to be titled: Mrs Claus’ Constructive Control.

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

Santa: We all wish you, and the wonderful Alexander Technique teachers around the world, a Happy Holiday season too!

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After our interview was over, Santa told me that despite his past problems with Rudolph, this is his favorite Christmas Song.  He listens to it on his iPod while making deliveries and he especially recommends this funny and joyful video.  “It’s my Christmas Gift to all Alexander Technique students, and teachers” he told me.

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net