This was a my contribution to a debate on the AlexTech forum questioning the validity of an approach known as Therapeutic Touch.

Hello,

I don’t know what Therapeutic Touch is but I would say the phrase itself, without the capital letters, is expressive of something that happens to most of us on a daily basis. I have a wife and children: we touch each other a lot; this is definitely therapeutic. We also have two cats, who may be mysteriously selective about the approaches they make, but whose contact almost invariably leaves us feeling better. I even have chickens in the back garden who sidle up against me and to whom I respond in kind with a brief bit of feather stroking.

Such touch is presumably therapeutic without meaning to be. Formulated touch, as I suppose Therapeutic Touch must be, might work less well for being partially contrived. Evaluated touch, as in any testing of TT, would be so bound up with other concerns – primarily, success or failure – it might not have any effect at all; but we should hardly be surprised, nor necessarily dismissive of its value, if it doesn’t.

Why do we touch other people, or animals, anyway? I think the short answer is, we do it out of love, in order to connect. Leaving the question of TT behind, I have always found the most unfortunate aspect of the Alexander Technique to be the use of the hands. This is so fraught with problems, I’m surprised Alexander pursued it, particularly as he had taught himself in quite a different way.

The main problem with touching is that any instructive quality in the teacher’s hands (along with any facility for learning in the student) gets mixed up with and runs the risk of being overwhelmed by the extraordinarily powerful human instinct to connect on a non-instructive level through the same means. The result is that during a typical Alexander lesson far more is likely to be happening than meets the eye, or the hands, of even (or particularly) the most experienced teacher.

It is this aspect of what we do, largely without intending to, that we have no explanation for and occasionally go so far as to deny the existence of. Of course, it is actually not a part of our work at all but only the inevitable consequence of teaching manually. I believe this fosters a number of ills, amongst them an inordinate dependence on fresh imput from a teacher, leading to an extension of the learning process to sometimes farcical lengths; a craven subservience to the wisdom of the hands that often seems to result in a freakish parady of good use; and of course the widespread notion that our work is something that is administered rather than learned.

I don’t think there’s much point as Alexander teachers trying to explain what happens (other than what we intend) when we touch each other in a way that is professionally okay because it’s a learning situation but that is undeniably intimate in the sense that it’s to everyone’s advantage to be less than ordinarily defensive; but I do think we should accept the common ground we have with all other "hands-on" approaches, particularly the less active sort. We may think their explanation for what they do is ludicrous – it may well be – but that doesn’t mean the consequences of their touch won’t still be far greater than they – or we – will be able to understand.

None of this need matter to us as Alexander teachers if we could only learn to stop using our hands. Whether some invisible force or energy passes to and fro between people when they touch would become supremely irrelevant from the point of view of learning inhibition and direction if we could devise new ways of teaching what is, with all due respect to Alexander’s psychophysical whole, primarily a mental discipline.

I believe for this reason reports of the work of those such as David Gorman who, even if he no longer claims to teach the Technique, looks to remain far closer to Alexandrian principles than any "hands-on" approach I can think of, should be warmly welcomed, if only to encourage others to investigate and experiment in their turn.



Nicholas.

This was written as a contribution for a projected issue of Direction magazine on the same subject.

The purpose of the Alexander Technique is to improve, at the same time as making more conscious, individual sensory appreciation, in order for the Primary Control – the relationship between our head, neck and back – to function more freely.

Although lessons from a teacher are the traditional means of bringing this about, Alexander never had any. He taught himself; and without necessarily suggesting we should do as he did, it certainly ought to be possible, as part of the learning process, for us to consolidate, or build on, benefits already gained during lessons.

How we might do this, and the way we perceive those benefits, depends largely on how we are taught. Insofar as learning the Technique hinges on our feeling kinesthetically wrong while receiving objective evidence to the contrary, Alexander’s way of working in front of mirrors is largely replicated by our ways of working with teachers. Through the provision of objective feedback, our initially false sensory impressions are gradually made more reliable.

This can only take place under artificial conditions, with our immediate ends in temporary abeyance. In everyday life, we can’t realistically abandon those ends, or doubt the veracity of our senses; but we can expect to progress, via lessons, from an original dependence on a kinesthesia that is largely hidden from us, and demonstrably faulty, to an increasingly conscious reliance on, as Alexander puts it, "a new sensory observation of the use of (our)selves".

That Alexander recognised a potential discrepancy between the need, during the learning process, for disassociation from the kinesthetic sense, and the desirability, in daily life, of association with it, is clear from his statement: "I wish it to be understood that throughout my writings I use the term conscious guidance and control to indicate primarily a plane to be reached rather than a method of reaching it".

This suggests he considered the formal procedure of working in front of mirrors, when he learned to disregard his kinesthesia in order to retrain it, and the various ways he devised for imparting the same principle to pupils, as distinct from, and a preparation for, the informal process of relying on that kinesthesia during everyday life while "thinking in activity".

For the average pupil, who only ever has a relatively short course of lessons, it may not matter how, or even whether, they are taught to work on their own (formally), so long as they are left with some (informal) awareness of what they are doing wrong, and some means of preventing it. Students and teachers, if they are to live up to their name, cannot afford to be so sanguine, however much they may feel their sensory appreciation has improved as a result of training.

In fact, the more that improvement can be attributed to the hands of others, the more they will need to know, once they are alone, how to consolidate and extend their understanding of themselves, if they are not to lose what they have gained. This is done largely informally, but in order to verify what is happening, an element of formal work would be necessary. If teachers prefer to rely for feedback on lessons from their peers, it will be at the expense of an incestuous dependence, however much insight may be gained, with what constitutes independent formal work becoming increasingly unclear the more rarely it is practised.

Any teacher who focuses exclusively on informal work runs the risk of their sensory appreciation regressing. This will begin innocuously enough, when something known to be wrong passes unnoticed so often it feels right; but the tendency, in a continued absence of objective feedback, will persist, particularly affecting those whose use has improved over the years, through hands-on work, without much conscious knowledge of how the changes came about.

It is unfortunate so few teachers openly acknowledge the importance of work on the self, or even recognise the phenomena exists. Although there is widespread willingness in the Alexander world to discuss different teaching approaches and styles, it is rare to find much in the way of explanation as to what lies behind them, still less how any degree of self-learning can be expected to take place.

The simple need is for teachers to be precise about what they themselves do, or whether they do anything at all; and not to assume the jargon they use necessarily means the same for others as it does for them. Difficult as it may seem to put any Alexander experience into words, the processes involved, if they are not to be thought haphazard, ought to be capable of being described.

To find out how teachers, students and pupils approached this subject, I devised a questionnaire. I realised it would be uncomfortable to complete, since it asked members of the Alexander community to put into words what they had so far, with the notable exception of Joe Armstrong, failed to touch on in their numerous articles, letters and books; but I still hoped I might discover a little of what they thought, and whether there was anything approaching a consensus of opinion on the subject.

I asked how people worked on themselves; and whether, and in what way, they used mirrors. I wondered how they inhibited, and if they differentiated between directing and ordering. I wanted to know whether teachers encouraged pupils or students to work on their own; and if this encouragement was considered adequate.

It would have been interesting to discover the practical difficulties encountered; how it was easiest to go wrong, or have a false impression of progress; whether it seemed possible to advance more readily alone than through having lessons.

Most of all, I would have liked to know how much importance was attached to the objective viewpoint normally provided by a teacher, and in Alexander’s case, by mirrors, in enabling someone to go from "the known to the unknown"; and whether it was thought this feedback was otherwise available.

I sent out enough questionnaires to have had something approaching a representative sample had they all been returned, but few were. I don’t consider this lack of response a failure; in a way, it is the most eloquent reply I could have had. It suggests, not that the questions were unanswerable, but that even fewer people than I had thought were able, or willing, to answer them.

In the absence of any new understanding, I reconsidered my own short history of working on myself. Prior to training, I had no real idea this was possible, never mind desirable. I had heard of inhibition and direction, and thought I understood them, as concepts; but I was more concerned with the aftermath of lessons, which were given in relative silence, and how I could maintain their effect, than with how I might recreate it for myself.

My training course was unusual in that it involved long periods set aside for work on the self. Trainees were advised to do what Alexander did, though it was understood we should find out what that was for ourselves. In the simplest terms, I learned to give myself a stimulus to move but to refuse to respond to it, to then order or direct, and finally to move. I carried on in this vein for about a year, until it dawned on me, following a re-reading of The Use of the Self, that I was failing to do what Alexander suggested.

Not only was I relying on mirrors, when I used them at all, for little more than preening purposes, I was glossing over the "critical moment" Alexander took pains to emphasise had made the difference between success and failure. I now saw, while working on myself, I had to be prepared, whatever I might initially have decided, to abandon my original plan, and do something else, or nothing, instead.

The problem was, I seemed to divine in advance what this would be, finding myself, time and again, going through the wearying charade of dreaming up a stimulus, refusing to respond to it, giving directions, and finally "reconsidering", only to discover, in a sort of belated, knee-jerk way, that I had either lost track of what was going on, had already moved, or had long ago decided to stay where I was.

Just as problematic as where and how I directed my attention was the difficulty I had in remembering with any constancy to direct it at all. Sometimes, I would catch myself, after setting out on a procedure designed to last a matter of seconds, emerging fifteen minutes later from a long, drawn out fantasy, to almost immediately, as I negotiated my way back to the present, begin wondering how long it was till the coffee break.

Without exaggeration, out of all the hours set aside on the training course for the purpose of working on myself, I must have wasted four fifths daydreaming, while still assiduously going through the motions of standing, sitting, or raising an arm.

Luckily, what I eventually found, and still find, far more interesting than a formal approach that even now, when I try it, seems more soporific than liberating, is the informal business of living with a sensed awareness of, and reliance on, current conditions. From that angle, the Alexander Technique is every bit as exciting as I had always hoped, but could never be quite sure, and frequently doubted until well into my training course, it would turn out to be.

The drawback was, this seemed to become mine not as a result of any diligence I had shown at formal work, nor of all the lessons I had received over the years, but as the seemingly accidental offshoot of having to learn to pay attention to myself while teaching. To my surprise, I discovered the background awareness I was left with, once I became committed to noticing what I was doing as well as the way I was doing it, far from being the poor relation of the "method" I had thought I was being taught, was itself the elusive "plane to be reached".

It wasn’t that I didn’t know this was supposed to happen – in theory, at any rate. The awareness Alexander talked of as being the basis of conscious guidance and control seemed to me when I first read about the Technique, and still does seem, paramount; yet it took me an inordinately long time to experience. This was partly because I anticipated something falling from heaven, or else having to be cultivated by myself; but when it was as obvious as learning to pay attention, all I really needed was to be told where and how to direct it.

If a teacher fails to articulate a role for a pupil to play other than responding to their hands, that pupil’s understanding of inhibition and direction will be limited to a kinesthetic memory. Such memories epitomised my early experience of the Technique. The converse is also true, when undue emphasis on giving orders or directions at the expense of the kinesthetic observation on which inhibition ultimately depends, can lead to cerebral isolation. This is what I later suffered from.

Long after the average pupil, not faced with the prospect of having to consider their use for professional purposes, not even if they were as steeped as I was in the intricacies of Alexander’s procedure for learning to do so, would have called it a day, I finally woke up!

I didn’t want my pupils to follow the route I had. It seemed important that they shouldn’t equate carrying out a mental procedure in order to produce a changed physical state, or even their later enjoyment of that state – rather than the experience of an existing state differently – with conscious guidance and control.

Despite this, I still believed I needed to be able to work on myself in a formal way, especially after leaving the training course, if I was to maintain, and possibly improve, the standards I had become used to. I felt it would be unrealistic to expect to subsist for the rest of my life on the work of the previous three years. I also wanted to be able to advise my pupils, even after a fraction of the number of lessons I had had, how they might become independent.

The trouble was, any of the more usual ways put forward as useful for the purposes of formal work ignore the fact that unless a teacher is present, or mirrors are being used knowledgeably, existing sensory appreciation will have to be relied on. Since it is on the discrepancy between what we feel is happening and what is verifiably the case that such work depends, following these procedures is more likely to strengthen existing habits than change them.

Reliable feedback is the basis of inhibition. In formal work it cannot be sensory based, since that is what we are trying to change. For pupils, it is tactile, or verbal, depending on the emphasis of the teacher. For Alexander, feedback was visual, as it needs to be for anyone wanting to work as he did.

Ideally, we would all know how to use mirrors properly, just as we could, presumably, learn to use live images through camcorders as a modern day replacement for them; but until someone describes in detail how they do this, and how they have personally benefited from it, and it is shown to be a transferable skill, we should treat the possibility of doing what Alexander did as something of a pipe dream.

Floor or wall work might seem to provide, in their undeniably flat surfaces, some sort of verification of what is going on; but this is still highly subjective, depending as it does on individual sensory appreciation. Moreover, although directing or ordering may go some way to compensating for the lack of objective feedback, if there is limited awareness of the need to inhibit, and to continue inhibiting, whatever end is in mind, during what Alexander called the "critical moment", and at the same time keep all other available options open, even the best laid procedure will become stereotyped.

The more simplistic types of formal work, where orders or directions are repeated without reference to any particular end, seem to be little more than affirmations of "the known". Used as a specific formula designed to produce a conditioned response, they largely ignore inhibition and place little or no importance on the question of freedom of choice.

I imagine most teachers, if they do formal work at all, fall short of doing it as effectively as Alexander did, and end up formulating their own idiosyncratic procedures to follow. Because these aren’t what Alexander specified doesn’t invalidate them, but teachers ought to know, at the very least, whether what they are doing does, or doesn’t, reveal the shortcomings of their existing sensory appreciation, largely by addressing the question of the "critical moment"; and if it doesn’t, try and account for its usefulness.

My belief is we need to share whatever ways we have devised of working on ourselves that take into account the fact most of us find Alexander’s own formal approach too onerous.

It is worth remembering that the relationship between the head, neck and back Alexander saw in his mirrors was not some ideal figuration dreamed up by him but was what he came to recognise, in himself and throughout nature, as the fundament of good use. In other words, if we didn’t get in the way of such a relationship, it would exist, and as soon as we stop interfering, will do so again, by default.

The way Alexander encouraged its re-emergence was through training himself to respond to circumstances while consciously avoiding misuse. This is not to say there are not other ways of achieving the same thing.

On the understanding we are born with a Primary Control that operates freely, any initial interference must begin as a conscious choice, when we will have decided, for whatever reason, to suppress an otherwise unconscious reaction. Once this has been repeated sufficiently often, it will become subconscious, or habitual. By degrees, we will reach the stage where most of our behaviour is subconsciously based. This acts as a powerful constraint on the free functioning of the Primary Control; but because the interference is largely outside awareness, we can do little about it.

Alexander’s answer was that "the conscious mind must be quickened". This is the purpose of lessons and of all formal work, as it is of the informal capacity for thinking in activity it fosters. The question needing to be asked is whether whatever we do in the name of the Technique satisfies this by increasing the reliability of our sensory awareness and encouraging consciousness of it in the face of circumstances.

One interesting way of working is through spontaneous movement, also known as co-ex, or consciousness expansion. This is a time honoured practice that traditionally takes place in small groups and has many adherents in diverse cultures worldwide. Although the guidelines, such as they are, differ slightly, depending on where they have evolved, the essence is the same: everyone in the group allows movement to occur, and if desired, sound to emerge, that is not consciously chosen.

Spontaneous movement is fairly easy to recognise from within once the initial hurdle has been cleared that tells you it should look or feel a particular way. Its trademark is its effortlessness and unexpectedness. Almost always, it is not the sort of movement, or sound, an individual would allow themselves to make at any other time, whether in company or alone. That is the key point. Movement and sound that we unconsciously want and need to make in order to keep ourselves healthy – and that may on that basis be presumed to be inextricably linked to our Primary Control – is usually held in check because it is perceived as unseemly.

The constant, daily checking of such impulses happens on a subconscious level, and is so well established we barely notice it. If we are to allow spontaneous movement to occur, it will be through the auspices of our conscious mind. We are then, in effect, stopping our habitual, subconscious tendency to interfere, thereby allowing the unconscious to function more freely. It may not feel like Alexandrian inhibition and direction, still less conscious guidance and control, but the principle is the same.

Spontaneous movement, repeated sufficiently often, on a regular basis, is profoundly rewarding, both on its own merits and as an adjunct to informal Alexander work. I hesitate to call it a formal activity in its own right – even though, through it, kinesthetic reliability can be assumed to increase, as the subconscious hold on the unconscious is gradually lessened – because it depends on existing sensory appreciation to guide us.

No objective feedback as to whether what we think is happening is happening is possible since learning to recognise spontaneous movement can only occur, and be verified, internally. There are no predetermined, or correct, or even desirable, movements to be made; every individual has a unique repertoire, depending entirely on themselves. There is, however, more than adequate scope for "reconsideration" as each and every movement is continually being evaluated for its spontaneity at what, in effect, constitutes a continuous "critical moment".

One of the difficulties in Alexander work is that of maintaining a conscious correlation between mind and body. This seems to be encouraged through the practice of spontaneous movement. Although it is possible to daydream while still moving move more or less freely, the nature of spontaneity tends to draw the body and mind into a synchrony that makes this unlikely. I recommend the procedure, without in any way suggesting it is more appropriate for anyone than what they already do. What they do do, and why they do it, is what would be so interesting to know.

The real work, of course, remains what it always was: the informal process of being present, inhibiting and directing, in the moment. This is something anyone can do, whatever the state of their sensory appreciation. Admittedly, an individual’s available options, in terms of how they might respond to stimuli, will be limited by the degree to which their kinesthesia is at fault; but even if they have only had a few lessons, once they have learned to "remember to inhibit", they will in many ways be in as strong a position as, if not a stronger one than, their teacher, because they will be far less indebted to the hands of others; and if they persevere, they should find their kinesthesia becoming more reliable, their use improving, and their consciousness expanding, independently of any additional formal work.

This is because long-term attentiveness to the means-whereby is bound to restore some of what a lifetime of inattentiveness put wrong. It is to our ability to function automatically that we must attribute the phenomena of faulty sensory appreciation; and the less reliant we are, or have been, on others to undo some of the damage done, the more likely we will be to make progress alone. This approach may not get us as far along the way, but our control of the process will be much greater.

This ‘lesson’ highlighted for me one of the downsides of advertising.

When I first started teaching I used to advertise in the local paper offering a free introductory lesson. The adverts would appear in the personal column, sometimes finding their way under HEALTH, sometimes ALTERNATIVE THERAPY, sometimes TUITION.

I expected to have calls from people who had no idea what the Alexander Technique was; and from those who thought they knew, but didn’t; but for some reason I never anticipated interest from the readers of newspaper personal columns whose primary interest is in those apparently common, occasionally coded references to discreet sexual practices.

I particularly remember one visit from a man who travelled over fifty miles to see me. I had disliked the sound of him from the first moment of answering the phone – he sounded so sibilant, I might almost have been speaking to Gollum – but having offered a free lesson, and having tried and failed to put him off, I had little choice but to agree a time for an appointment.

He arrived on the hour, in a flashy car, and stepped across my threshold with a look on his face that seemed to suggest he was game for anything. It crossed my mind that he was as nervous as me; but I supposed, half jokingly, that if he really thought the Alexander Technique was a strange and secret sexual practice, and if his interpretation of what I had said on the phone was simply that the form those practices took was too extraordinary to be explicit about, he had reason to be nervous.

We went into my small teaching room, where there were two chairs, but no couch. He looked around, but didn’t seem unduly surprised I studied him more closely. I suppose in many ways he was an ordinary looking man, even if he did have too many rings on his fingers, one of which held a semi-precious stone as large as a pullet’s egg; and as I began my usual pre-introductory lesson spiel, I started to think I had been mistaken.

After talking for some time I said if it was okay with him I would put my hands on his body and show him how I worked. He reacted nervously.

"No, no, don’t touch me. Don’t for heaven’s sake touch me. Just explain."

I thought I had already explained; perhaps he was waiting for the secret teachings: the code to decipher what I had already said. He was, I noticed, fiddling around with something in his trouser pocket. Was it his handkerchief? I didn’t want to stare; I didn’t want to look at all. Turning to his face, it reminded me of grainy black and white picture I’d seen of Alaistair Crowley on a bad day.

I stepped back and asked him what, in particular, he wanted to know.

"Just talk. I like to hear you talk. Explain this…this technique…"

I sat down and talked. I rabbited on, staring glassy eyed at the wall behind his head, every now and again casting glances at the man’s groin, my wall clock, the enormous ring on his finger. As for my "use", the best I can say is that I was unaware of it.

Suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, after he had sat silently for at least fifteen minutes, and I had pretty much assumed he was simply a harmless nutter, who for some obscure reason had travelled fifty miles on busy roads to hear something he could have easily have got out of a book, he spoke.

I was so stunned by what he said that I asked him to repeat himself. He did, very calmly and distinctly. The atmosphere in the room changed. Sweat burst out of all my orifices. He repeated himself for the third time, staring at me lewdly as he did so. The passage of time has dulled my memory of his words. All I know is they were crude and to the point. His was truly an indecent proposal, and it was directed at me.

There seemed no doubt he meant what he said. I started to wonder if he had a knife or a gun; he was certainly bigger and stronger than me. His fingers, I suddenly noticed, seemed pudgier than when he had arrived, as if they were swollen with lust. The independent movement in his trousers I could no longer ignore. I found myself incapable of responding, even when he reached across to me and almost expertly gave my genitals a testing squeeze, as if he was a shopper testing fruit.

What I consciously intended doing next I have no idea. I was trying to maintain the pretence that the introductory lesson was still going on, and that what he had said and done hadn’t really happened, and certainly didn’t matter. Then I heard myself speak, in what sounded like a high, squeaky voice.

"I’m sorry, I’m not like that".

Incredibly, my wife and children chose that moment to arrive back in the house. The noise they made, opening the door and piling through it, which I normally found so exasperating when in teaching mode, I lapped at as if it was a healing draught. Again, the atmosphere in the room changed. A shadow passed across my client’s face, and he rose without a word, rearranging his groin as he did so.

He was perfectly civil. We shook hands. He thanked me for my time, and I accompanied him to the door. As he got into his car, possibly anticipating the drive home, he cast me a tiny glance of what looked like resentment, but overall I thought he took any disappointment extremely well. I was disappointed, too, but only at the ease with which I had been thoroughly discountenanced.

I heard subsequently, from a masseur friend, that it is an occupational hazard of "body workers" to be inundated with calls from people seeking "relief" at their hands. In retrospect, I am only glad my client wouldn’t let me put my hands on him, though I still can’t understand why one sort of touch should have been anathema to him while another was apparently so very much to his taste.

This was a contribution I made to the AlexTech Internet forum whose members were debating the merits or otherwise of exercise in relation to the Technique.

I’ve been musing over some of the recent emails and wondering how the Alexander Technique relates to exercise. Clearly, it is not enough to say that by following the principles of inhibition and direction a full and healthy life will automatically ensue. It might be fuller and healthier than
beforehand; but much would depend on what that life consisted of. I imagine the vast majority of Westerners, including most Alexander teachers, lead far from ideal existences.

Despite his account of John Doe, Alexander wasn’t dismissive of a culture that encouraged people to live and work under conditions of relative restraint, even if they did visit the gym afterwards to try and rebalance things; what he railed against was their poor use generally.

I spend most of my time sitting or standing, moving quietly from room to room, doing quite a lot mentally but hardly taxing myself physically. To compensate for this, I garden a fair amount, play tennis regularly, ride occasionally, walk and bicycle when the need or mood arises; but I have become increasingly aware that I should do more with myself, energetically, if I am to stay healthy.

I’ve always made a distinction between activity and exercise, thinking of activity as something that is engaged in for its own purpose, and exercise as being done to produce an effect. Some activity can come to seem like exercise; exercise done in a certain way could become an activity.

If we define enjoyment in life as the pursuit of those activities where mind and body gel in such a way we are unable to say where one begins and the other ends, duration and effort, the cardinal virtues of exercise, become irrelevant. Alexander work seems particularly possible then.

At the other extreme, when we are engaged in something we don’t enjoy, we have to cajole our minds to stay with the matter at hand, and our bodies to keep going. We are neither fully present, nor actively engaged. When the mind detaches itself from what the body is doing, Alexander work becomes impossible.

Not wanting to play more tennis, garden unnecessarily, or do anything else I enjoyed for its own sake simply in order to get fit, I cast around for a form of exercise that might in itself prove pleasurable. I tried any number of approaches, all of which I found tedious. A case in point is the Astanga Yoga I am currently experimenting with. It’s very dynamic and I end the sessions feeling thoroughly integrated; but the process itself takes close to two hours to complete, and for the most part, as much mentally as physically, it is a struggle. Why, I wonder, should I be asking and telling myself, as I stretch and twist, a hundred and one irrelevant things, such as how much time this is taking up, what needs to be done in the garden, how grim the weather is, what’s going to be for supper, how my children are, what I plan to do tomorrow – instead of paying attention to what I am doing and how I’m doing it?

None of this tangential thinking happens when I play tennis, or if it does, it focuses on the way the game is going; even if I’m just hitting a ball against a wall on my own, I’m engaged in the activity. Cantering on a horse doesn’t incline me to think extraneously, either. Even sowing broad
beans involves me pretty fully. Sadly, I haven’t been present in this way very much or often when exercising; but then if I’m honest nor have I when lying on the floor in semi-supine.

Although inhibition and direction, and the mind/body gelling that makes them possible, require only a slight change in perspective to bring about, the ease or otherwise of “thinking in activity” does seem to depend more on the nature of that activity than any amount of conscious intention.
This makes me wonder whether it is better (both as an Alexander student and from the point of view of overall health) to pursue those activities where attentiveness to what is going on comes easily, rather than persevere with those where it hardly seems possible.

So far as specific abdominal or any other exercises go, I doubt such things exist. No exercise can isolate one part of us so long as we, rather than machines or electrical pads, are carrying it out. If the worry is whether something we do is in keeping with Alexander’s precepts, our concern
oughtn’t to be how trying to tighten up an area of ourselves might or might not affect overall coordination, but whether we are actually present, inhibiting and directing, while doing it. If we adhere to principle, and that principle is sound, our coordination will sort itself out.

Ideally, of course, there would be some activity we loved so much that we couldn’t do enough of it, that brought our minds and bodies together without apparent effort, made inhibition and direction second nature, handed us the shape we wanted and the tranquillity we sought as by products, giving us endurance and longevity along the way.

In the meantime, if most of our activities are sedentary, and we find inhibition and direction at least as possible while exercising as doing anything else, where’s the harm; especially if, as in the case of K, the perceived problem is associated with an activity like running, which presumably she enjoys? Assuming she is able to remain present (which seems likely, from what she says) amazing change can be wrought in moments, through the tiniest alteration in perspective, with no muscular effort whatsoever.

Anyone doubting this should spend some time with Malcolm Baulk, who has made working with runners something of a speciality. I’m just a chasing-after-the-ball lumberer myself, but I was glad to be reminded during a group lesson what sorts of change (kinesthetically perceived by me, highly visible in others) can come about during such an ordinary, seemingly automatic activity, through the expenditure of less rather than more effort, simply by consciously giving consent for it to do so. 

Whether this would apply to weight lifting I have no idea but I do remember reading some interesting observations by David Gorman years back involving a nautilus machine and how much more effectively it could be used through a reasoned, Alexandrian approach than simply piling on the pressure in the traditional manner.

I wrote this during my last year of training to be a teacher. Most of it still makes sense to me more than a decade later.

I first became interested in the Alexander technique as a possible way of making greater sense out of ‘ordinary’ life. The idea of unity of mind and body while engaging in commonplace activities intrigued me. I anticipated from the outset learning a specific method that I could then ‘apply’ as and when I chose. When I started lessons and began reading more on the subject, I became confused about how I was supposed to do this. Only since joining a training course, and receiving considerably more tuition from experienced teachers than an average pupil could ever expect, have I begun to learn how to apply the Technique to my life. My reason for writing this article is to open the question of what intermediate stages it is necessary for a pupil to pass through before emerging with a recognisable method of applying the Technique to the ordinary activities of their own lives.

INHIBITION

‘Inhibition’ was explained to me and I found the theory easy to understand. In practice, I perceived it as stopping whatever I was doing, both physically and mentally, in order to ‘give directions’.

GIVING DIRECTIONS

Some study of the available literature seemed to me of value in understanding what was meant by this. As Wilfred Barlow said:

“He (Alexander) was asking for something completely novel from himself and also from his pupils: and the trouble was that he did not make very clear to them what it was that he wanted, so that innumerable versions – or none – of this part of his work began to appear.” (1)

I found that Alexander himself had stated, in connection with his use of the words ‘direction’ and ‘directed’:

“…I wish to indicate the process involved in projecting messages from the brain to the mechanisms and in conducting the energy necessary to the use of those mechanisms.” (2)

Although he was less than explicit when it came to the precise form such ‘messages. should take, my overall impression, gained at the time from his books, was that ‘directions’ or ‘orders’ were to be given verbally, in sequence, as he put it:

“…all together, one after the other.” (2)

I persevered with this, both during lessons and during my everyday activity. It seemed relatively simple, although rather odd: the main difficulty was remembering to stop and do it.

KEEPING THE DIRECTIONS GOING

Some time passed before it was pointed out to me that I shouldn’t be merely ‘giving directions’, but that I must endeavour to ‘keep them going’ during activity. Did this mean I was supposed to repeat these words indefinitely? I thought perhaps it did, and since I wasn’t able to establish, either on my own, from my teacher, or through my reading, what else to do – at least not in specific enough terms to carry out – I tried without much success to do this. Then, one day I came across a passage in Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual where Alexander suggested, in connection with singing:

“…when once the necessary control has been gained, the pause required for inhibition and for giving the necessary orders will be only momentary.” (3)

How could a pause for something as pedantic as verbal ‘directions’, given in their proper sequence, be only momentary? Verbal ‘directions’ indubitably take time. Was this ‘necessary control’ that Alexander spoke of the key to being able to ‘keep the directions going’? I was beginning to suspect it could be neither possible nor desirable for me to repeat verbal ‘orders’ for any great length of time, whatever the activity. But how, otherwise, was I to proceed from ‘giving directions’ to being able to ‘keep’ them ‘going’? Then I discovered that Alexander had said, elsewhere:

“…if we are going to do, not a mechanical exercise, but something real that matters, you have to think out beforehand the means whereby you have to do it, and give the directions or orders for these means whereby, in the form of a wish, as it were, and keep that wish going all through the activity.” (4)

I decided that in order to do this I first needed to understand what ‘to think out’ actually meant. After some consideration I defined it as the actions of my mind in its representations of experience, past or potential, through ‘visual’, ‘verbal’ or ‘kinesthetic’ means.

I therefore had three main ways of mentally ‘representing’ such a ‘wish’. ‘Verbal thought’ I recognised as the words I had been saying to myself by way of ‘directions’. ‘Visual thought’ seemed to encompass the various images I could form in my mind’s eye of, or representative of, a neck ‘releasing’ and a head ‘leading’ and a spine ‘lengthening’ and a torso and set of shoulders ‘widening’. ‘Kinesthetic thought’ I came to consider as the imagined sensation, arising out of an accumulation of past experiences, of muscular ‘undoing’.

I discovered that these three ‘modes’ of thought’ rarely existed in isolation from each other. ‘Verbal thought’ might lead to ‘visual thought’, or vice versa; either could then be followed by ‘kinesthetic thought’; and so on. I recognised how a similar stream of mental activity – words, pictures, imagined sensations – was almost continuous in my daily life. I eventually realised I had probably been ‘directing – involuntarily – in the visual and kinesthetic ‘modes’, for some time, but that until recently I had remained oblivious to all but my intended use of words.

This changed my understanding of how ‘directions’ could be ‘given’ and allowed me more conscious flexibility in my attempts at ‘keeping them going’ during activity. There were still far too many times, however, when ‘thinking’ the ‘directions’ in this way seemed to interfere with whatever I was simultaneously trying to ‘do’, and I felt I needed an alternative, less distracting way of staying attentive to what Alexander termed the ‘means-whereby’ while getting on with the actual experience of ‘living’.

After a further period of investigation, I discovered that the ‘intention’ that lay behind the ‘wish’ that Alexander talked of could apparently remain extant even after the ‘formulation of thought’ which established that ‘wish’ had faded away. It was this residual ‘sense of direction’ that I subsequently learned to employ while ‘keeping my directions going’ during diverse activities. As Alexander put it, it was a question of:

“…merely framing and holding this desire in mind…” (5)

Outside of Alexander work, I appear to go through much the same abstract process whenever I experience a lasting impression or ‘sense’ of something without continuing to reflect on it. An example would be a visit to the shops. On the way, I might remind myself where I am going, either verbally (“I’ll go to Tesco, then Safeway…and I mustn’t forget the flour”) through internal pictures (the route to be taken, the cheese counter, the checkout point) or with a variety of associated sensations (an anticipated jostling in the aisles, the remembered warmth of underfloor heating). But during the moments when I’m not actively ‘thinking’, but am simply walking along the pavement, taking in the surroundings, I still ‘know’ I am ‘going to the shops’.

In this instance, as in virtually every other, an ‘intention’ is created and maintained by ‘thought’. Such an intention only remains constant until another thought countermands it; but it doesn’t necessarily need continuity of the original thought, or constant repetition of similarly-minded thoughts, in order to survive. It seemed to me, that in Alexander work, if my intention, or ‘desire’ had been adequately thought out, or ‘framed’ it could remain a pervasive influence on my behaviour, independent of any continuous verbal or visual or kinesthetic formulation, for as long as I ‘held it in mind’. Once it had lapsed, it might require a fresh infusion of ‘thought’ in order to be recaptured, just as it might, at any stage, require extending or redefining in a similar fashion.

THINKING IN ACTIVITY

Despite having learned – to some extent – how to ‘keep my directions going’, I still wasn’t satisfied that I was able to ‘apply’ the Technique to my life in any meaningful fashion. There seemed too little connection between what I was doing with my mind and what I may or may not have been doing with my body. Perhaps this hankering after ‘psycho-physical unity’ was what prompted me to wonder, over a further period of time, whether the nature of my attachment to ‘mental directions’ was somehow preventing me from allowing much of the ‘muscular undoing’ that they were designed to bring about to actually take place.

I eventually decided that if I was going to learn to recognise some of the ways I was interfering with my functioning, I needed to do more than simply ‘keep the directions going’. Such an approach may have had its uses, but I could hardly expect it to facilitate the delicate balancing task that I was beginning to suspect was implied by the phrase ‘thinking in activity’.

Rather than “stopping whatever I was doing, both physically and mentally, in order to ‘give directions'”, the process of ‘thinking in activity’ seemed one of continuously ‘wishing’ for certain conditions while at the same time becoming as aware as possible of any interference in letting these conditions come about. As I investigated further, and experimented with organising and maintaining varying degrees of ‘awareness of self’ concurrently with a separately constituted ‘sense of direction’, I found myself developing an increasing ability to remain ‘in the present moment’ – a state that I had long known as theoretically essential for ‘applying’ the Technique, but which I had never before understood how to enter voluntarily.

It was only at this late stage – two years on in the training course – that I began to find myself in conscious possession of the ‘useful tool’ for taking ‘into life’ that I had always hoped the Technique represented. Now, one year later, my abiding interest is in trying to ensure, whenever possible, that the inwardly directed attention involved in ‘thinking in activity’ is present, but not in such a way that it prevents me from experiencing (through one or more of the senses) my immediate environment. As Michael Gelb puts it:

“Attention in the Alexandrian sense involved a balanced awareness of oneself and surroundings with an easy emphasis on whatever is particularly relevant at the moment.” (6)

The problem is, of course, that such ‘balance’ and ‘ease’ is in itself unlikely to be come by easily. So when today’s teachers talk, as Alexander did, of a course of lessons, say, from twenty to forty, what do they mean to imply they can teach a pupil in that time? Alexander believed he could:

“Pass on in four weeks what it took (him) ten years to discover…) (5)

Would that have included the ‘control’ he spoke of as being ‘necessary’ for turning the somewhat lengthy process of ‘formal’ inhibition and direction into no more than a ‘momentary pause’? Such an ability presumably becomes more realisable the more one experiences what Alexander termed ‘the primary control’ working well; but how often is often enough for such experience to lead to a pupil being able to stay attentively aware of both ‘preferred means’ and ‘desired ends’ for any appreciable length of time?

Frank Pierce Jones said:

“To me it is an expansion of the field of consciousness (or of “attention” if you object to the term “consciousness”) in space and time so that you are taking in both yourself and your environment, both the present moment and the next. It is a unified field organised around the self as a centerô at the beginning it has a very simple system of organisation but it always takes in both the self (including the relation of the head to the trunk) and something in the environment.” (7)

For this “expansion of the field of consciousness” to be something a pupil might want to take the trouble to cultivate, it would surely help to know, early on, how important it is for applying the Technique, during lessons as in life. It appears, after all, to be virtually a pre-requisite for Alexander work in any but the most static situation. As Frank Pierce Jones put it:

“(it is this)…expanded field of consciousness (that) makes possible what Dewy called ‘thinking in activity’.” (7)

If the overall aim of the Technique is, in fact, to teach a pupil to ‘think in activity’ during everyday life, it would certainly be odd if it was not explained, throughout a course of lessons, how best to do this. Otherwise, confusion may result, as it apparently did for Nicholas Albery, as to what exactly is being taught:

“…I got fed up paying for hour-long sessions, just to be shown over and over again the same exercises, how to lie down, sit up, stand up and sit down.” (8)

Pupils are not always able to make the connections that may seem obvious to a teacher. While lessons certainly increased my sensory awareness of myself, and time spent attending to ‘directing’ resulted in a degree of understanding of the new conditions I wanted to establish generally; without the decision on my part to unify this, and use it to plan and enact the next move in life, my progress in learning to ‘think in activity’ was always going to proceed in a vacuum. And yet, in order to make that decision, in a situation where I believed I was learning a specific ‘methodology’ from a teacher, I think I needed to have it presented to me as an integral part of that teaching before I was even able to perceive it as an option. Walter Carrington points out:

“…there are a lot of highly educated and intelligent people who never make it to that point at all. they don’t want to and are willing to accept the experience without understanding or applying it. When people don’t want to understand or apply it, it’s very difficult in my experience to do much about it.” (9)

This is fair comment. And in such instances I suppose a pupil has no readily identifiable role to play. Whatever changes take place in them presumably occur without the active, chosen involvement of their conscious minds. But pupils who haven’t just come for the laying on of hands expect to be told, and if necessary, taught, how to use their brains in the particular way the subject demands. For this to happen, teachers presumably need to know not only how, specifically, they do want their pupils to think, but also how to get this across to them with a minimum of confusion. Communication between teacher and pupil is paramount, and it cannot seriously be left to ‘the hands’ to do all the talking.

CONSTRUCTIVE CONSCIOUS CONTROL

F.M.Alexander was in no doubt about what was being sought, overall:

“I wish it to be clearly understood that throughout my writings I use the term ‘conscious guidance and control’ to indicate primarily a plane to be reached rather than a method of reaching it.” (5)

This sentence meant nothing to me the first time I read it. Now, however, the implication seems inescapable. whereas ‘formal’ inhibition and direction, as set out in Chapter 1 of The Use of the Self may provide, as it did Alexander, a means of access to another ‘plane’, via the acquired ability to ‘keep those directions going’, being involved in the ‘informal’ process of ‘thinking in activity’ is to find that one is already on it. If such distinctions are valid, and perhaps more importantly, can be separately taught and learned, it seems unnecessary to leave the possibility of transition from one stage to the other to the vagaries of chance. some degree of ‘conscious control’ is presumably available at many ‘levels’ of ‘use’, and if undue adherence to ‘formal work’ gets in the way of its enjoyment than it might help a pupil to know. Just as it could aid both pupil and teacher, when such a ‘formal’ way of working is dismissed from the outset, to know if this omission aids, impedes, or worse, deludes, progress overall.

It is easy to confuse wanting progress with ‘end-gaining’; but inattention to the ‘means-whereby’ is as likely while reaching for a pencil as in climbing a mountain. At a certain point in learning the Technique, perhaps progress in being able to ‘think in activity’ could be facilitated by ‘inhibition’ being explained not as ‘stopping’, which all too often seems to mean ‘stiffening’, but as ‘remembering to become aware of ourselves’. As Alexander put it:

“…(inhibition) is largely a matter of that process of remembering which is involved in ‘thinking in activity’…” (5)

In another passage, he elaborated:

“If we become sensorily aware of doing a harmful thing to ourselves, we can cease doing it.” (5)

Such ‘informal’ inhibition, rather than suggesting stopping everything, out of a blanket refusal to respond with the ‘wrong’ thing, would mean ceasing to do what we recognise, at whatever level of sensory awareness we have reached, as ‘harmful’. The effectiveness of this would seem to depend primarily on our willingness, during everyday activity, to raise to consciousness as much about ourselves and our interference with the operation of ‘the primary control’ as we can.

Naturally, during early lessons, our sensory awareness may be so minimal, that for inhibition to be learned, it may have to be expressed as ‘not doing anything at all’ in response to a given stimulus. As our sensory appreciation improves, we will hopefully learn to ‘discern’ a measure of our own interference, so that whatever the activity, whenever we remember to attend to ‘the means-whereby’, the unreasoned or unconscious hold on our behaviour may be modified.

As a general rule, the more regularly we can give such attention in daily life, the less manifest that influence is likely to become. Due ‘attention’ in this respect would seem to be whatever is needed to establish and maintain our desired overall ‘sense of direction’, and to allow this to effect our sensory-based experience of ourselves in our environment.

‘Conscious control’ appears to me to rest primarily on this ability to ‘keep the directions going’ without losing track of whatever else is happening. Acquiring this ‘informal’ skill may depend on having done, and on continuing to do, a certain amount of ‘formal’ Alexander work. But whether or not this is the case, such work belongs by definition to the ‘learning process’ rather than to ‘real life’. And if ‘real life’ is ever to become the ‘learning’ environment at the same time as being the ‘living’ environment, pupils of the Alexander Technique will necessarily have to learn to work ‘informally’. As Alexander suggested:

“…no more fundamental experience is available than that which comes to a person who, with or without a teacher, will patiently devote the time to learning to apply the technique in the act of living.” (3)

(1) Wilfred Barlow – The Alexander Principle.

(2) FM Alexander – The Use of the Self.

(3) FM Alexander – Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual.

(4) The Alexander Review, vol 3, no 1 – The Bedford Lecture.

(5) FM Alexander – The Universal Constant in Living.

(6) Michael Gelb – Body Learning.

(7) Frank Pierce Jones – Body awareness in Action.

(8) Nicholas Albery – How to save the Body.

(9) Walter Carrington – On the Alexander Technique.