Alexander Technique
Pat Daniels
Certified Teacher
Member, Canadian Society for Teachers of the Alexander Technique
Alexander Technique is a process of teaching yourself to coordinate efficiently. You learn what unconscious patterns of use you have, how to inhibit those inefficient patterns, and, at the same time, how to employ new, more effective ones.
Unconscious pattern of use / Unreliable sensory appreciation / The kinesthetic sense of right and wrong
Your unconscious pattern of use is layered. You start out in life with a natural coordination. When you’re about 3 years old, you imitate the people around you – usually your parents and/or older siblings. “Viola!”, your unconscious, habitual pattern is well on its way to getting firmly established whether you are aware of it or not. When you get into mid-elementary school, you add imitating the bigger kids, then, in high school, it’s the ‘cool’ kids or whomever you admire. Then you add some more layers on top of the previous ones when you start having lessons of all sorts. In these lessons, you tend to imitate the physical, external shapes the teacher tells you to do. And sometimes you may even get ‘thinking’ lessons. But very rarely do you get instruction not to do what you are already, unconsciously doing WHILE doing the new thing.
This is what forms your unconscious pattern of use, which leads to an unreliable sensory appreciation. It is this unconscious pattern that has your feel if everything is right or not. If whatever you are attempting fits in with your unconscious pattern, it is right and if not it’s wrong.
In Alexander Technique (AT), you learn about the stuff that you do without thinking (your unconscious pattern of use) and, at the same time, how to do something that’s more efficient instead (your improved and conscious pattern of use). Because this is a new coordination rather than an habitual one, it can often feel wrong. This phenomenon is described in the AT world as your “unreliable sensory appreciation”, or more simply, “Just because you feel it’s true, does not make it true”.
Direction
This has two meanings. One is in the sense of “up-down”, “right-left”, “north-south” kind of directions. The other is to give yourself instructions. In the AT, this instruction lies at the center of the work.
Let my neck free so that
my head may go forward and up
and let my back lengthen and widen
This usually gets shortened to:Neck free or Forward and Up!
Believe it or not, people studying AT often experience realizations that they have been mis-labeling parts of their bodies
Head
Often you think of your head as your face. So if I ask someone to let their head go forward and up, they could very well end up lifting their face and thus shortening at the back of their neck.
To find a more efficient image of your head, take your index fingers and place them under the occipital bump at the back of your head and draw a parallel line to the floor while moving your fingers to the front of your head. You should end up somewhere around your upper teeth. Think, ‘skull’. This is a more efficient version of ‘head’. Now, when you think of letting your head go forward and up, you won’t shorten your spine to do so. You can actually get taller thinking this way.
Neck
Your neck is simply that which connects your back and your head. For singers and wind/brass-players particularly, this is a very critical area. The throat closes down so easily. Learning to not do this gets you out of a lot of bad habits. These performers can often confuse the “neck” to mean only the throat.
The spine, with your nervous system, comes up through the neck and culminates underneath the occipital bump. This area is a nexus of interference. Learning to detect what you don’t want to happen is one of the aims of Alexander Technique. When you can expand your idea of ‘neck’, you can improve your efficiency a lot.
Back
When most people think of the back, it’s a layer about and inch thick that goes from neck to waist and side-to-side of your torso. Try thinking of it as going from the top of your head to the soles of your feet, from the center of your back to your finger tips, and from the surface at the back of your body to the surface at the front of your body.
After redefining these areas and applying the directions given above, you now have a new, less compartmentalized, more inclusive and efficient version of head, neck and back.
Inhibition
Inhibition, in the Alexandrian sense, is simply saying, “no” to what you detect as an interference. Too often we think of inhibition in the Freudian sense of emotional suppression and mix in guilt and ‘should-nots’. This is where choice plays a crucial part. So often when we do something we think we’re not suppose to do, we get angry with ourselves – especially performers!
When you apply inhibition in Alexander Technique, you are choosing not to do that thing that you don’t want. That’s it. To learn what that thing is that you don’t want, you must use Direction.
Posture
One of the most frequent problems I come across is students’ preconceived concepts of posture. (Even the diagram below, a supposedly good example, has a lower back curve that can be a problem) Here is one such:
Chest out, pull shoulders back, chin tucked in, knees locked back and
weight over the balls of your feet.
One of the first things to consider when improving your coordination is to throw out the concept of posture. Posture makes you push and pull your body into an unnatural state rather than a natural balanced one.
Balance
Balance is dynamic. You can’t hold balance or get balance. It must be allowed.
Have you ever tried to balance a teeter-totter with a friend? Do you remember how busy your body was? You can be quiet on the outside, but you were quite busy on the inside. You had to be ready to react to your friend’s movement while maintaining your own position. If you got tight, you usually couldn’t keep the teeter-totter level.
Balance is about having just the right amount of muscle activity – no more, no less.
Mental discipline
All performers have some degree of mental discipline. It is thinking what you need to think about WHEN you need to think it. In Alexander Technique you not only need to remember what to think, but how to think it, when to think it, whether or not you’re thinking it, and what is the quality of those thoughts and reactions to those thoughts. Yes, you have to do this when performing, but it’s not always on a conscious level.
There’s a big misconception that when you learn something new, you pay attention to it until it becomes a habit. Then you don’t have to think about it any more. When this happens, you start going backwards in technique. The best musicians I have worked with all tell me that they try to make as many aspects conscious as possible. In repetitious practice, you must add detail every time you play or sing a passage. If you are repeating only for consistency, you will be less stable in your performance.
Faulty sensory perception or Habitual thinking
This usually habitual thinking comes in the form of good/bad, right/wrong, and relaxation/tension. When you learn something, you try to do it right or feel it right. If you are actually trying to learn something new, you can’t use ‘feeling right’ to help you. That makes you go right back into habit. And when you finally do it differently, it feels wrong, so you don’t do it again. Then you wonder why you can’t do it the way the teacher wants you to.
Alexander Technique teaches you how to change your sensory awareness. It’s not that you will feel things differently, but that you use the same information in a different way.
For example:
It’s very difficult to notice if you are freeing your neck, especially at the beginning of lessons. Instead you can use your feet. If they are quiet while you are sitting or standing, there’s a good chance you aren’t interfering as much as usual. Ask yourself, while you are giving directions, if the weight is equally over both feet from front to back and side to side. If you find that your feet are busy or that the weight is more to the front or the side or your toes are grabbing, then your neck is not free.
Ends and means
Most of the time, when we try to learn a new thing, we want to go straight to the end product. We want to make it right. The problem with that approach is that you will be using your habitual pattern to accomplish the new thing. When you incorporate the Alexander Technique, you are allowing the new thing to occur (hence the instruction to free the neck and allow the head to go forward and up etc.).
Alexander used the term “end-gaining” to describe the inappropriate focusing on the desired result combined with paying little attention to the way to achieve the result. The opposite state is known as “employing the means whereby”, or the use of appropriate attention to the process of discovering the steps to achieving the goal. It is the difference between reading the menu for two hours (fixating on the goal), and placing an order (the means whereby).
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