Category: Writing

Breathing

Posted on by dod

Breathing is a deep subject. This barely scratches the surface of it.

The other night, I lay awake listening to my wife breathing. There was no doubt: hers was an effortful in breath, followed by a relaxed out breath.

I’ve noticed the same in children and animals.

I’ve only once in my life been in a situation – while meditating, which is not something I do regularly – of being able to ‘watch’ my own breathing, for a protracted period, without at the same time seeming to interfere with it. It appeared then that both in breath and out breath were happening by automatic reflex, with no discernible muscular effort on my part.

Recently, I came across the work of Ian Jackson, who teaches what he calls “the Rebound In-breath”.

Here is a quote from him:

“A similar rebound effect occurs with the insqueezing of the ribcage. You literally use muscle to bend bone here, and, like the bent wood of a bow when you release the arrow, the bone springs back when you release the insqueezing muscles. The rebound relaxing of the abdominal wall, the effortless flattening of the diaphragm, and the rebound release of the ribcage are all interconnected parts of the passive in-breath.

A reader, commenting on Ian Jackson’s work, said:

“These exercises are by far and away the most original and interesting that I have found in any book on breathing, and I’ve read multitudes. I particularly enjoyed ‘Upsidedown Breathing’ – actively pushing the air out of my lungs and then passively letting it in. Most breathwork teaches the reverse, i.e. to “take” one’s in-breath, and relax on one’s out breath. ‘Upsidedown Breathing’ is a lot more relaxing, and its result is that the in-breath becomes larger and easier.”

This put me in mind, inevitably, of the ‘whispered ah’.

I appreciate the ‘whispered ah’ is a great deal more subtle than the “Rebound In-breath”, as described (and “Upsidedown Breathing”, too); and it involves a lot besides breathing. However, I’ve always assumed that when I breathed out during a ‘whispered ah’ (particularly, a ‘silent whispered ah’), I was deliberately employing a degree (however small) of muscular effort to cause a contraction of my rib cage; and that when I stopped making this effort, my rib cage would ‘spring’ open again, allowing air to rush in. Any time I’ve listened to someone else’s ‘whispered ah’, it’s usually sounded like this: an effortful out breath, followed by a relaxed in breath.

In his writing, Ian Jackson suggests that evolution has somehow got it wrong, and that we are habitually breathing the less effective way around. Needing reminding what, in fact, the physiology of ‘normal’ breathing was, I did a cursory on line check and came up with the following:

“Breathing consists of two phases, inspiration and expiration. During inspiration, the diaphragm and the intercostal muscles contract. The diaphragm moves downwards increasing the volume of the thoracic (chest) cavity, and the intercostal muscles pull the ribs up expanding the rib cage and further increasing this volume. This increase of volume lowers the air pressure in the alveoli to below atmospheric pressure. Because air always flows from a region of high pressure to a region of lower pressure, it rushes in through the respiratory tract and into the alveoli. In contrast to inspiration, during expiration the diaphragm and intercostal muscles relax. This returns the thoracic cavity to it’s original volume, increasing the air pressure in the lungs, and forcing the air out.”

This suggested that during a ‘whispered ah’, when air flooded – seemingly effortlessly – into my lungs as I ceased to breathe out, it was actually being ‘drawn in’, indirectly, through unconsciously employed muscular contractions; and it also implied that when I breathed out, deliberately, far from requiring to make an effort to do this, I merely needed to relax those prior contractions and exhalation would take place automatically.

I saw how making a conscious effort (however small) to breath out, when no effort was required, and consciously discontinuing that effort while making no additional effort to breath in (other than ‘allowing’ the necessary reflex to occur) may, inadvertently, have created, in me, an understanding of optimal breathing, along the lines suggested by Ian Jackson.

Clearly, during a ‘whispered ah’, it is important to discriminate between innate and extraneous muscular effort when breathing in, eliminating the latter rather than the former; and to recognise that the only effort required in breathing out (so long as the necessary relaxation of contracted muscles occurs as it should) is in controlling the sound being made. In the case of a ‘silent whispered ah’, breathing out would be effortless.

For a long while, whenever I’ve had one of those moments when I realized (yet again) that, for no physiologically sound reason, I’d stopped breathing, rather than kick start the process through a deliberate effort, I’ve tried to ‘undo’ whatever it was that appeared to be preventing breathing from proceeding normally. I used to perceive this as the ‘closing down’ of my trunk, that required, rather as a dead man lever on a train, to be physically reactivated.

Recently, I started recognizing this ‘closing down’ had to do with a certain type of thinking – generally, the type that took me away from myself – and that if I stopped that thinking, breathing would resume automatically.

Belatedly, I saw that the ‘closing down’ wasn’t the cause, but the manifestation, of me ‘stopping breathing’; and both were due to my way of thinking.

Incidentally, by ‘stopping’ that ‘way of thinking’, I don’t mean to imply any particular Alexander connotation. The sort of skill I’m talking about here is that commonly employed by anyone emerging from mental abstraction in order to attend to whatever is going on.

I certainly find it worth remembering that however apparently good physical use may be, it is easy to be mentally absent; and that that mental absence is often accompanied by intermittent bouts of stopped breathing. It never ceases to amaze me how often I catch myself holding my breath.

This ‘evolution in understanding’ may seem paltry to those for whom the ‘whispered ah’ and breathing in general hold no mysteries; but I thought it was worth recording.

John Cale at Brighton 16 Jan 2004

Posted on by dod

This was Cale’s last show on his European tour.

Having seen John Cale at St Luke’s without the benefit of knowing Hobosapiens back to front, familiarity with the new songs meant I enjoyed Brighton ten times more. The set list was similar, though no Hallelujah, nor Cordoba. In fact, it was almost identical to the others posted recently. 

Queuing to get in, I was worried only a smattering of people would turn up. In the end, a respectable number half filled the Dome. It was a curious mix of young and old, weird and very ordinary looking. It could have been a model train collector’s seminar.

I sat near the front; but as soon as the music started I headed closer to the stage. That was definitely the place to be.

I thought the entire set was musically pretty tight, and song seemed to follow song seamlessly. There was very little talking, or introductions: the songs spoke for themselves.

Over the years, I’ve got so used to hearing musically simple – just piano or acoustic guitar – versions of most of John Cale’s truly amazing back catalogue I found I preferred the recent songs to those I knew almost as well as childhood nursery rhymes. Having said that, Chinese Envoy and Andulucia were fantastic. I couldn’t say the same for Paris 1919. The lead guitar interpretation of the pastoral interlude just didn’t do it for me. There were three great screamers: Fear (unbelievable), Cable Hogue and Leaving It Up To You (visceral); they left me wondering at how much strain a throat (or heart) can take.

I would have liked to hear Zen; but Over Her Head, Look Horizon, Magritte, Archimedes, and Things, were all top class. One song stood out above all the others, though, and that was Caravan. This was performed loudly, but started softly, remained beautifully modulated throughout, and rose to its crescendo so sure footedly I was in awe. What a fantastic track it is.

I don’t know how the enthusiasm of the audience compared with other shows on the tour. John seemed happy enough with his reception. I wasn’t yodeling but I was clapping pretty loudly. Clapping above my head, which is rare for me. I did join in the shouts for an encore, but this was always going to happen, since it was used to both introduce and bid farewell to the band members.

What I hope to see one day is John Cale in concert, alone with his electronic keyboard. Sensitive and accomplished though the others were, it was John’s versatility that shone through. What a voice; what lyrics; what an extraordinary performer!

My abiding feeling was astonishment at how somebody so accomplished – a living legend, as I overheard one person say – should attract such a relatively paltry audience; and how fortunate I was to be there

Directing and Ordering by Joe Armstrong

Posted on by dod

DIRECTING AND ORDERING: A Discussion of working on Yourself by Joe Armstrong.

Joe Armstrong deserves the thanks of the Alexander community for his willingness to consider the almost taboo question of how teachers work on themselves.

This knowledge is important. However much anyone might change as a result of lessons, if the Technique is to live up to its promise, they ought to know how to maintain whatever benefits they receive, and hopefully extend them in the future, through readily understandable means.

Unfortunately, Joe’s story is likely to be typical of many teachers, who despite having had the equivalent of several hundred lessons, find they are unable to progress on their own, or even stay their ground, and so resort to another teacher’s hands for further guidance. Anybody who has read the available Alexander literature could be forgiven for finding such dependence risible.

Directing non-verbally during everyday life was Joe’s initial understanding of what working on himself meant. In his booklet, he calls this Procedure 2, and in conjunction with inhibition, recommends it as the raison d’etre of the Technique. However, he admits to eventually finding, several years after training, that no amount of such thinking produced the type of changes he had got used to from lessons, or prevented the return of habits he thought he had long overcome.

Even though his early teachers had warned him against it, Joe decided to experiment with what he calls verbal ordering. As a result of this he experienced changes he believes could only otherwise have been obtained through skilled hands. His suggestion is that if we want to become independent of other teachers, and yet still maintain and improve our use, we should regularly spend twenty minutes, in a position or condition of relative inactivity, slowly and silently repeating Alexander’s original word-phrases. He calls this Procedure 1.

Most of us will be familiar with a variant of Procedure 2; many may think it is all there is to know. Procedure 1 is more problematic. Giving orders in this way seems on the surface to be a form of meditation, where the unhurried repetition of a string of words could be expected to blank out both thought and its physiological counterpart, producing the benefits of a calm and integrated mind and body. At the same time, it should elicit a conditioned response; though whether this would necessarily be based on the cumulative effect of ordering during past lessons rather than during subsequent periods of disequilibrium, is a moot point.

One question that springs to mind is the importance, or otherwise, of the words. Alexander is supposed to have said any nonsense would serve his purpose. Meditators have differing views on this subject. Certainly, with straightforward conditioning, when something from the past becomes recaptured by the use of key words in the present, the actual meaning of those words is irrelevant.

However, Joe suggests that by ordering we could be tapping into the wisdom of our unconscious on a far deeper level than straightforward conditioning can reach, and in a much more specific way than during meditation. The implication is that Alexander’s phrases, both because of their inherent meaning and the added significance they gain as a result of lessons, act on the primary control directly.

Joe emphasises that the effectiveness of this depends on the dissociation of the orders from whatever we might think they represent or hope they will achieve, and from our consciousness of the parts of us to which they refer. If this is the case, it may go some way to explaining why Procedure 2, despite years of application, should have failed to produce satisfactory results for him, since the intention behind non-verbal directing is largely conditional on an awareness of, and therefore close association with, the same sensory mechanism it is attempting to change.

This is as it should be. Unity, or full association, is what Procedure 2 represents. It is Alexander’s "plane to be reached"; whereas Procedure 1 appears to be Joe’s "method of reaching it". However, the process he describes hardly seems an adequate substitute for lessons, since it fails to address, other than incidentally, the question of inhibition.

A more appropriate way of filling the same twenty minutes might be to follow the instructions set out in The Use of the Self. Learning to work on ourselves in the way Alexander did, at the juncture between stimulus and response, rather than with what is, for all its undoubted benefits, hardly more than a series of affirmations, must be a worthwhile goal for anyone desiring a measure of autonomy. Whether ordering or directing would best help facilitate this, remains debatable.

Having re-discovered what he believes it means to work on himself, Joe freely acknowledges it is neither what he originally thought, nor what he was taught. It is so refreshing to read something by a teacher of the Technique querying what goes on during lessons and training courses that disagreeing with anything Joe says seems almost querulous. Hopefully, those who don’t feel this way will be sufficiently enthused after reading his booklet to explain why. If more people were prepared to describe the way they, as individuals, approach this issue, it would be to everyone’s benefit.

The Next Room

Posted on by dod

This account concerns the possible after-death condition and whereabouts of my father. When he died I found that neither I nor anyone else had any clear idea what might have happened to him. Had he vanished for good, as science suggested? Was he living on somewhere else, according to occult tradition? Or would he resurface unchanged at a later date, which the reading at his funeral implied? The unhappy, unspoken consensus seemed to be that it was unrealistic to expect anything other than his total annihilation.

It was clear, for all our cultural sophistication, modern man knew nothing of what happened to its dead, beyond their obvious physical demise. Wanting to learn more, I wrote to church leaders, authors, philosophers, scientists, asking where and in what state they thought my father was.

The response encouraged me to do some further investigation on my own. I read widely, wrote more letters and started to form my research into a story.

I discovered the world was divided between those who were certain neither my father nor anyone else survived death in any form and those who were equally convinced, though often in contradictory ways, that everyone lived on, Belief in the former largely depended on the absence of any certain proof supporting the latter.

Almost without exception, Western religion relied on unverifiable historical texts for its beliefs. Contemporarily, only Spiritualists claimed to be in touch, and to encourage communication, with the actual dead. The occult view, which was shared to some extent by Eastern religions, was that the dream world, which all of us visit every night, was where we ended up when we died, and that this was my father’s current home; but that conscious access to it was problematic..

A number of avenues of exploration presented themselves. Out-of-the-body travel was one. I wrote letters to researchers in this field, meanwhile asking myself how it could be possible to know whether the experience of travelling in the dream world, let alone meeting my father there, was real or imaginary. The crucial question seemed to be whether the mind and the world visited could exist separately from the brain.

The scientific position was clear. The mind and brain were the same. When the body died, so did they. I wrote to and received a letter from the arch-exponant of this way of thinking, Susan Blackmore, and was made aware of the hardly less vehement beliefs of Richard Dawkins and Nicholas Humpreys. What was puzzling to me were the number of equally reputable, fully as intelligent non-scientists who subscribed to the opposite viewpoint. One who wrote to me, Professor David Fontana, was quite catagoric on this score.

I thought the problem might be solved if I could learn to travel out of my own body, or failing that, discover someone else who could, and was willing and able to verify this, principally by observing details of something hidden from both them and anyone else. I wrote to neurosurgeon Peter Fenwick, who was experimenting along these lines in hospitals, with those who had undergone Near Death Experiences.

I looked at the historical evidence for survival phenomena, outside of religion, in particular the claims for full form, corporeal manifestations of the dead; but it was difficult to rely even on first hand accounts from such ordinarily impressive sources as the physicist Sir William Crookes or author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, since whatever they believed they witnessed couldn’t realistically be replicated.

Then I came across an organisation attempting to encourage similar manifestations today, whose newsletter reported such bizarre occurrences as the regular reappearance of an extremely vocal Judy Garland, and the occasional visit by Lord Dowding of WW11 fame, as well as innumerable others, in private houses across the country. Unfortunately, all such appearances took place in the dark, where the ‘dead’ could be heard and occasionally touched but not actually seen; and although audio recordings were made infra red filming was disallowed.

I found a contemporary scientist citing the latest physics in support of bodily resurrection but no immortality of the soul; another, using the same discipline to describe an ethereal world in which our souls had lived, were currently half occupying, and would always belong; and others again denying all possibility of – in Richard Dawkins’ words – “energy fields unknown to physics”.

Overall, I bemoaned the lack of interest humanity took in any literal investigation into something that should have been as important, if not far more important, to its individual members as their schooling, careers or pension plans. Making the assumption there was no life after death, or that even if there was it would do us no good to speculate about it, least of all consider how the way we lived now might affect us later, struck me as little more sensible than denying the need to work and earn to provide money and creature comforts in the known world.

I had thought that by visiting a medium I would receive some form of conclusive proof, but this wasn’t the case. I was resigned to ending my research wiser but no more certain of what was or wasn’t true concerning my father. Then something extraordinary happened. I had, and have, no ready explanation for this.

Before and after

Posted on by dod

This was written in response to a fellow teacher who disagreed with my thoughts concerning the timing of inhibition in Alexander work. It includes a description of the dramatic results of my first (and, for the next year, only) lesson.

Reading over J’s very reasonable last post ("words, getting closer"), it would seem that our major area of disagreement concerns the point in time that students of the Technique step in to stop or refrain from sending messages to stiffen their necks, along with the relative effectiveness of their intervention. I simply don’t think there is such a clear-cut beginning and end to the majority of stimuli affecting our lives as he evidently does, nor that there is much qualitative difference in when we act.

The notion we receive and respond to stimuli in isolation, and that in some way it is too late to ‘step in’ between one reaction and another, makes little sense to me. Possibly, in the case of "dead lifting a barbell", where there is a clear beginning and end, without much space for anything else, we can behave like this; and in ‘formal’ Alexander work, it may be necessary to simulate ideal conditions; but most of the instances and events that fill my life don’t lend themselves to such an approach.

In this connection, J emphasised:

"’Counteracting’ or ‘undoing’ neck tension AFTER you have unconsciously engaged it is too late to make a new reaction to the original stimulus… The old pattern has already been launched, and attempts to modify the results, even if partially successful, are worthless compared to the ability to refrain from starting."

He also said:

"Certainly being able to notice that your are bracing your neck and ceasing to do so is a worthwhile skill to develop. BUT I don’t think you can reach this point without having gained some previous experience of what it feels like to react to stimuli WITHOUT such bracing."

I thought about this as I cycled five miles to play tennis the other day, wondering where stimulus and response could be said to begin and end. There were some fairly clear moments of potential ‘bracing’, from the gestation of the idea during lunch, while humping the bike out of the garden shed, when negotiating initial traffic; but once I was well on my way the gaps between the myriad stimuli coming at me from all sides (including, of course, the overriding aim of getting to my destination) and my reactions to them seemed seamless. Where was an Alexander student supposed to ‘step in’?

Although most of the time I was careering along in a state of blithe unconsciousness, whenever I ‘surfaced’, I became aware of a degree of interference. I accept that my ability to perceive what J calls "bracing" is partly (though not exclusively) the result of earlier Alexander work; but I don’t agree with him that stopping it after the fact is "too late", nor that this should be in any way dependant on having previously learned to "react to stimuli without such bracing". In fact, I should say the opposite was the case, with any facility we may have for preventing interference from starting depending largely on our skill at recognising and stopping it while it is going on.

The difficulty of ‘getting in before the event’ in an Alexandrian context seems little different to stopping off any other deep seated habit at its source. If, for example, our temper tends to get the better of us, it strikes me as churlish to refuse to curtail it mid-reaction on the grounds we should have prevented it surging up in the first place. Obviously, prevention is better; but that is more likely to come about after rather than before curtailment; and if it turns out we are angry, in the way that our necks are stiff, most of the time, our best bet must be to cease being so occasionally, then (hopefully) more and more often, before aspiring to not become so in the first place – whenever that might be.

In the light of this, I would take J’s statement:

"Certainly being able to notice that you are bracing your neck and ceasing to do so is a worthwhile skill to develop. BUT I don’t think you can reach this point without having gained some previous experience of what it feels like to react to stimuli WITHOUT such bracing."

And rephrase it, thus:

"Certainly being able to react to stimuli WITHOUT such bracing is a worthwhile skill to develop. BUT I don’t think you can reach this point without having gained some previous experience of what it feels like to notice that you are bracing your neck and ceasing to do so."

In another post, J made this additional point:

"Trying to follow the advice; ‘just don’t stiffen your neck, and stop doing it if you do,’ would be as absurd as hoping to learn the Technique from page 174-5."

My experience is that sensory appreciation of what we are doing is not so much faulty as hidden, and that we can become aware of it quickly and effortlessly, if our attention is appropriately drawn in that direction. I think this requires insight and cleverness on the part of the teacher, but not necessarily any manual contact. I’ve known it happen in students I’ve taught and often when it hasn’t happened I’ve felt it would have if I’d said or done something different.

As an example from my own past, I had my first Alexander lesson in the early eighties. Initially, the teacher started leading me through what I later recognised as the traditional lesson format; but after a short time she stopped, moved away, and asked me, with my arms hanging by my side, to pretend I was carrying two heavy buckets. Almost immediately, my shoulders dropped about six inches. As they did so, an immense sigh escaped me. I realised I had been holding my shoulders up around my ears, pushing my head forward to good effect, for what I later worked out must have been nearly two decades, all without knowing it.

This trait had begun when I was at school during the time it was fashionable to have long hair. The school disallowed hair to touch the collar at the nape of the neck so I had learned to pull my shoulders as far back and away from the rest of me as possible and push my head in the opposite direction. This was a conscious effort and took some doing but eventually it became habitual. My mother and later my wife used to comment on what they saw as my deformed upper torso and try and reshape me but I laughed them off. I couldn’t relate to what they were saying; nor could I see in the mirror what they saw. So far as I was concerned, I felt, looked and was normal. Yet, ten minutes into my first Alexander lesson, a teacher had enabled me to recognise how wrong I had been.

I had that first lesson in London. Since I lived in Portugal, where there were no teachers, I wasn’t able to have another for more than a year. During the intervening months, I became increasingly conscious of what I was doing with my shoulders. Whenever I wasn’t thinking about them, they rose up and my head pushed forward. As soon as I did think about them, I became aware of an almighty tightening taking place. It staggered me I could be making so much effort without realising it. Each time I remembered, and thought of the ‘heavy buckets’, that effort ceased, my shoulders dropped, and my head righted itself. I used to see it happening in shop windows as I walked past. The pain of this release was extraordinary, like being strung up by meat hooks. I found it hard to believe simply stopping doing something should produce such torture.

By the end of that first year, the habit of jacking my shoulders up had more or less vanished, although vestiges remained. Throughout that time, I don’t remember ‘getting in before the event’ in the sense of ever finding myself in a balanced state and pre-empting the shoulder raising. Instead, I ‘undid’ it whenever I came across it, at first increasingly often, then with gradually decreasing frequency and amplitude, until eventually there was nothing to undo any more. Looking at old photographs at the time, I couldn’t believe how deformed I had been. My wife and mother remarked on the change and reminded me of how often they had chastised me in the past, to no avail.

The point of this story is not whether the single lesson I had or the approach I followed had anything much to do with the Alexander Technique, but to show that is is possible for an aspect of use that was deliberately conceived, became established, then became habitual, and that I was wholly unconscious of for many, many years – despite having it pointed out to me on numerous occasions – could suddenly become as obvious to me as it was to others; that the insight I gained was not only lasting but grew daily; and that my remedial approach had involved me saying ‘no’ while rather than before reacting to stimuli.

The notion that I might be doing other, similarly stupid things to myself without knowing about them made me determined to have more lessons as and when I could. I reasoned that if something so dramatic could be uncovered so swiftly, what wouldn’t happen if I had a full course? Something I particularly wanted to find out was what I was doing with my lower back, which often hurt. Unfortunately, though it was no less obvious, this took a lot longer (further lessons were with a ‘traditionalist’ in a different part of England), and it involved my training to become a teacher. It’s difficult now, looking back, to know whether I am justified in thinking if I had seen the right person at the right time what I later discovered might have been revealed much earlier.

My main worry concerns those who take a course of lessons in the Technique and decide not to go on to either become teachers or perpetual students. In other words, the vast majority. I remember my own confusion and disappointment at this stage of learning with my apparent lack of progress, particularly in inhibition. It was only after more lessons that I could count, and being present at two years of a three year training course, studying and thinking about the Technique many hours of the day, that my mortification at hardly ever ‘getting in before the event’ became gradually overshadowed by the dawning realisation I didn’t have to.

It was as if I had travelled full circle. It was only then, when I became comfortable again with the idea of ‘getting in’ whenever I remembered, that I allowed myself to stop doing with my neck and back what I had grown to believe I was always too far advanced in my reactions to usefully inhibit. This led to not only a massive reduction in interference, but, as a consequence of an expanding kinesthetic familiarity with what I was doing wrong, a gradually increasing ability not to start interfering in the first place, a dual endeavour I’m working on to this day.

What is inhibition?

Posted on by dod

An investigation into what we are saying ‘no’ to when we inhibit, and why an increased knowledge of this might be useful.

There seems to be some reluctance among teachers of the Alexander technique to clarify what they mean by inhibition, even while claiming it as the cornerstone of their work. Usually it is explained as ‘stopping’, or ‘refusing to respond’ to a stimulus to act. But is that all it is? In his last book, Alexander suggested:

“By this initial inhibition change becomes possible, and we pass on to consider what should be our next procedure.”

Often, the “next procedure” would be a general injunction to give ‘directions’ – in other words, the purely mental projection of desired physical conditions, with no particular reference to what current conditions actually are. But since the purpose of the Alexander Technique is to encourage a person to use more appropriate ‘means’, a prior need would seem to be for an active sensory awareness by them of what their present means are. Alexander goes on to say:

“Primarily our concern must be to find out in what way we are interfering with the right employment of the primary control, and decide to prevent this interference by consciously refusing to project the messages which habitually bring it about.”

This article is based on the belief that recognising how we ‘interfere’ with ‘the right employment of the primary control’ is essential if we want to know how to avoid doing it. The formal learning process, as I understand it, involves experiencing an intention to move, and, ultimately, the carrying out of that intention, while receiving trustworthy feedback that is is possible for this to happen, without what would normally be felt to be a vital part of the impulse-to-action taking place. As soon as even a small measure of interference has been kinesthetically perceived in this way, iot can be inhibited.

Interference takes many forms and is not going to be discovered easily. But we do have guidelines in our search. We know more or less that what we are looking for will be in direct contradiction to the directions as they are expressed verbally – in other words, a tendancy for our neck muscles to pull our heads ‘backwards and down’ onto our ‘shortening’ spines and ‘narrowing’ backs. But for inhibitory purposes they do not need to be actually expressed, so much as their preventative intention known. As Alexander continued:

“Only secondarily are we interested in the projection of the new messages which will in time lead us indirectly, that is, through a change in the employment of the primary control of our use, to the change we desire in our habitual reflex activity.”

 

Remembering

I find it helpful to think of the inhibitory process beginning with ‘remembering’. Quite where on the stimulus/response cycle this initial remembering takes place would determine the next step. While it is obviously important to try and remember beforereacting to a stimulus-to-action, it certainly isn’t too late if we remember afterwards, so long as we are able to achieve something of a balanced state here and now.

As an example, we could imagine our phone ringing while we are at the breakfast table. If we are honest, few of us, out of a beginning condition of unconscious activity, are likely to register such an unexpected stimulus in time to prevent ourselves from reacting automatically.

However, even if we do manage, all we will have achieved is an ‘initial’ inhibition’. Not only does the main stimulus remain with us, but other stimuli – abandoning toast, coffee and an interesting conversation, negotiating the cluttered passageway, anticipating who is on the phone – will also be present. And as soon as we pick up the phone, a new group of stimuli will announce themselves. Each and every stimulus brings with it the threat of potential interference.

There is also the question of the interference – the result of already forgotten stimuli – that was present as an unnpticed part of our ‘beginning condition’. This will also be present for those of us who remember only after having reacted to the sound of the phone – perhaps mid-way out of our chair. We will be carrying, in addition, the interference associated with that reaction. What do we do about such existing interference?

Assuming we haven’t lapsed back into our prior state of relative unconsciousness, it is hardly necessary for us to ‘stop’ – en route to the hall – in order to ‘refuse to respond’ to the stimulus to continue walking, before the opportunity arises to inhibit interference. The opportunity is already there. Our inhibitory task is simply to cease or refrain from doing whatever we recognise as ‘unnecessary’.

So long as we remain ‘present’, we can go on to fulfill various ‘ends’, including terminating the conversation and returning to our breakfast, while simultaneously attending to our means. Although our ability to do this usefully will ultimately depend on whatever level of interference we have learned to recognise, it is still necessary for us to remember – in other words, to become ‘conscious’ – before we can change anything for ourselves, and to continue to remember if we want to go on influencing the manner of our use. It is this conscious, inhibitory Alexander ‘work’, which can only be done on our own, that I think can help determine the nature and quality of our lives.

 

Working on our own

Since it is doubtful if many of us could work innovatively in the way that Alexander set out in The Use of the Self, lessons will be our only means of obtaining ‘objective’ feedback. The more objective feedback we have, the better our sensory appreciation is likely to become. But we need to be careful not to confuse the formal learning process, when we try to hold existing sensory appreciation in abeyance, in order to experience something that would be impossible on our own, with the remainder of our time, when we have little choice but to rely on it.

The majority of this time is spent in relative unconsciousness, during which we are wholly reliant on ‘automatic’ proprioception. When we remember ourselves, we will often become aware, through ‘conscious’ proprioception, that we are ‘interfering with the right employment of the primary control’.

The degree to which we can ‘prevent this interference by consciously refusing to project the messages which habitually bring it about’, will depend on how much of the unnecessary behaviour we have learned to recognise lies within our control. This, in turn, will depend on the overall acuity of our proprioceptive sense. Assuming we are able to perceive, kinesthetically, some tendency to stiffen our necks and shorten our spines, then we only need to avoid doing this – and to the extent that we have already indulged the tendency, to cease doing it – in order to experience a change in our condition.

However, as soon as we ‘forget’ ourselves again, any such inhibited behaviour will pass out of our control and we will revert to our habitual state. This reversal will reflect the extent to which our proprioceptive sense, schooled through ‘formal’ work to recognise interference, is keener and sharper when it is conscious than when it is automatic.

It is precisely this differential that enables us to work on ourselves independently of objective feedback. As a general rule, each time we go through the process of remembering and forgetting, our habitual state and the kinesthetic sense that determines it will be subjected to an ‘improving’ influence. How often, and what, we remember will directly determine the cumulative effect of this influence. Initially, and for as long as any interference is indistinguishable from our normal state, we can make no progress at all. Clear recognition of what we are doing wrong is essential if we are to learn how to avoid it. It will need to be avoided repeatedly before it can become habitually absent, to the extent that that absence comes to feel normal.

The process feeds itself. Once something that has always seemed a vital part of us is perceived as unnecessary, and is inhibited sufficiently often for our habitual state to have begun to reflect this, it will start to fade from conscious awareness. As it does so, some other tendency – or the same tendency on a deeper level – having itself seemed equally inseparable from our essential self, will become recognisable as further interference.

In this way, the differential between conscious and automatic proprioception is maintained, or even increased, and a continuing process of change can take place. This would tend to happen by small increments, so that what feels normal today may not seem that different to yesterday or last week but would probably have felt unprotective a year ago and might feel imprisoning in a year’s time.

Such a changing appreciation of what constitutes interference would operate rather like the improving ability of a mechanic to recognise the appropriate torques and tolerances pertaining to his work; or a musician’s growing awareness of how best to play her instrument; or a rider’s recognition of more subtle ways of communicating with a particular horse. Time and a certain quality of application seem to be the common denominators. It is as well to remember that although this process offers the potential for improvement, it is not necessarily going to do much more than simply lessen or arrest our ‘natural’ inclination to stay the way we are, unless we give it considerable attention. It is, after all, only the inverse of the same process, operating on an unconscious level, that caused us to lose our innate good use in the first place, and pulls most of us in that direction still.

 

Zombyism

Working on ourselves in this way can begin at any level of expertise. As soon as we have recognised, kinesthetically, some form of interference, we are no longer totally reliant on a mirror or a teacher’s instruction to tell us where we are going wrong. Until then, our ability to stop our automatic behaviour will remain limited, since our knowledge of what we arc doing as we decide to move or act, and as we actually do move or act, will hardly exist.

How could this be otherwise? Without mirrors, and knowledge of how to use them, or a teacher’s assistance, effective inhibition depends on kinesthetic appreciation of potential and actual interference. The only trouble with such an emphasis is when it gets wrongly interpreted – at all levels – as a suggestion to ‘feel things out’. Teachers warn, rightly, of becoming “Alexandroids”. Patrick Macdonald, in his book, The Alexander Technique As I See It, includes, under Z, in his index the entry: “Zombyism – to be abhorred.” Becoming increasingly aware of ourselves sensorily is not a question of memorising the feeling of what seemed ‘right’ and trying to ‘do’ it: it is rather a matter of recognising what is unnecessary and endeavouring not to do it. Perhaps Alexander should have the last word:

“The employment of inhibition calls for the exercise of memory and awareness, the former for remembering the procedures involved in the technique and the proper sequence in which they should be used, and the latter in the recognition of what is happening”.

 

 

More on ‘droidism’

Posted on by dod

I’ve always believed one measure of success in ‘applying’ the Alexander Technique to life is not to look as though you are.

A couple of years ago on British TV there was a two part drama called “The Tribe” about a disaffected group of relatively well-to-do oddballs who lived in a converted warehouse, had some sort of business in drug production or dealing, and regularly make the journey across town, en masse, sweeping through parks, down side streets, and across wasteland, to see their connections.

Their trips across town were something of a set piece. The group strode rather than ambled, wrapped up in either leather gear or swirling greatcoats. None smiled; most wore an intense scowl. Without exception, they had well squared shoulders, and moved rather woodenly, their heads appearing to turn only in conjunction with their shoulders. Often they would stop, gazing out ahead, looking into mid distance.

They stood out like a separate race from the general populace, who were clearly intimidated by them; until, at the denouement of the film, cracks in their armour appeared and they disintegrated into a disorganised rabble, at which point they looked almost normal.

After watching this, I read a damning review in the following week’s Sunday newspaper, and was amused by the writer’s description of the group crossing the town as “looking like Alexander teachers on an outing”.

Inhibition and ‘droidism’

Posted on by dod

Why the two so often go hand in hand.

J made this observation:

“I have seen people involved in what they call ‘inhibiting’ and I wonder what the conceptual framework for their practise involves – in practise it produces an ‘Alexandroid’ condition. It looks like they are ‘inhibiting’ their freedom.”

I would say the conceptual framework for this is largely one of trying to inhibit a thought pattern whose theoretical nature is more apparent than its actual presence or effect.

At every stage of learning the Technique, the degree to which we are able to kinesthetically notice ourselves pulling backwards and down will be limited by, and will itself limit, the degree to which we are conscious of our intention to do so. The two go hand in hand.

However, since, in all of us, a varying amount of misdirection will remain subconscious, there will always be the temptation to ‘deal’ with this, by stopping doing as much as we can in the area concerned – the neck, head and back region – in the hope of successfully inhibiting what we aren’t aware of.

Hence, the familiar appearance of having swallowed a coathanger that is so prevalent amongst Alexander students.

In a nutshell, I would say Alexandroid behaviour is a result of trying to consciously inhibit more than we know we are doing.

In the zone

Posted on by dod

I wrote this after reading a newspaper report proclaiming how rarely even highly accomplished sportsmen and women experienced the sublimity of life “in the zone”

I talk to them, and find that they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world, but the knowledge that they are so.

From the (seventeenth-century) letters of Dorothy Osborne.

I first came across this expression when I read a newspaper report of a tennis match during which the contestants, for short periods, played so sublimely they were considered to be "in the zone". This was described as a state of mind and body that few ordinary mortals could aspire to, during which the play, and the interaction between the two players, flowed so apparently effortlessly, and yet so flawlessly, it defied analysis.

Strangely enough, I felt I recognised an approximation of this state, not only from my own casual and infrequent tennis games, but other activities too. Far from being a phenomenon limited to sport professionals, it seemed to me it was available to anyone, anytime, since it was so clearly dependent on a particular balance of attention.

The state is widely recognised, but is generally considered to occur haphazardly, in unusual circumstances, when certain conditions are right conditions which supposedly can’t be forecast. It would seem at its most prevalent when events conspire to flood the senses, creating an acute awareness of what is going on, with at its centre ourselves, but leaving no spare attention for extraneous thought.

Presumably, this is why finding ourselves in the zone is relatively common during sport or adventure, when extremes are the norm; or else in unique circumstances, which demand our full attention. In semiautomatic living, which is what we are engaged in most of the time, awareness of ourselves and our surroundings is minimal and our minds are largely on other questions. For complex matters, we tend to concentrate, narrowing our attention and excluding even more from awareness. Only on special occasions or for truly demanding tasks, it seems, do we really come alive.

Although we will recognise when we are in this state, which is essentially one of direct sensory perception, and enjoy it while it lasts, we can only reflect on it and consider what it means once it is over. This is because, in order for it to happen at all, our normal train of thought must first have stopped. Most times, the condition ends prematurely, as soon as we start wondering how long it will go on for.

The exceptional nature of these experiences for humans is directly related to their infrequency and short duration. Unfortunately, the more out of the ordinary they seem, the more paltry by comparison we have to admit the rest of our lives are. If we were able to spend more of our time like this, it might be less immediately thrilling, but there would be a sense of heightened awareness overall.

It must be assumed that animals live in a version of the zone most of the time. Clearly, they neither enjoy the reflective pleasure we do in considering it exceptional, which for them it is not, nor suffer the problem of this knowledge precipitating its end. We are almost certainly born that way, too; but we quickly learn to leave the world of sensory experience behind, relegating it to relative unawareness, in order to concentrate on other aspects of our growing and evolving minds.

Although we call this process "becoming conscious", without its distracting influence it is difficult to imagine any animal behaving with less consciousness than us. All too often we are consumed with reflections and abstractions that are far removed from what we are doing, leaving us functioning like automatons. A horse grazing in a field is unlikely to be wishing it was somewhere else, or planning tomorrow; it knows where it is and what it is about, in the absence of any convincing reason not to.

Whether we subscribe to the view that animals are conscious in a way we once were but now can only aspire to, or we are conscious in a way animals can never be, the human faculty for higher forms of thought is what separates us from their world absolutely. These higher forms are essentially language based. Without the ability to conceptualise linguistically, we would find it as difficult as animals undoubtedly do to string more than two or three consecutive thoughts together.

Animals certainly think, very probably in the same predominantly pictorial, auditory, tactile ways we do; but they lack an inner voice to put these imaginings into context. Consequently, they cannot think about things in the abstract fashion we are used to; only of them, in the sense of something beyond their immediate perception becoming the focus of their attention. We call the animal inability to function at our multifarious level mindlessness, and deplore it, while at the same time hankering after the tranquility we believe it brings and commiserating with ourselves for having lost that.

If we accept evolution, this ability of ours must have been acquired gradually, enabling us to leave the animal world by stages; so that any rare instances of it in the earliest days will have seemed as extraordinary, because so vastly different, as their absence does now. The continuation of this learning process would probably have found us, at some point in time, uniformly at home both in our ability to consider ourselves and our world separately, and to experience them directly.

If today we were able to stop such thinking at will, for as long as we wanted, in order to enter more fully into whatever we were doing, and then start it again when we needed to, in order to consider and manipulate our environment, we might find we were not only happier and healthier, but also, being less neurotic, considering and manipulating that environment differently. As a result, our world could be a more pleasant place to live in.

Unfortunately, we seem to have managed to progress from the animal state, with its complete absence of what we understand as conscious thought, to our present day human state, where it is practically unceasing, without remembering how we got there. This blanket weight of cognition doesn’t alter the fact that a blueprint for living in the realm of direct sensory experience remains as much at our centre as it ever did, just as it does for all sentient creatures.

Accidental entry to this realm, which is what most humans have to rely on, seems to hinge on the creation and filling of a momentary vacuum, either when demanding circumstances silence our internal voice sufficiently to force a more immediate attention upon us; or when circumstances are so unusual we are transported by a radically changed perception.

What appears to happen at such moments is that one or more of our senses is suddenly overwhelmed and our questioning brain stops in its tracks, impressions flood in through every other sense and we become vibrantly alive. What triggers this is often something we are used to but suddenly see, hear, taste, smell or feel, as if for the first time. Standing in a garden on a beautiful day can organise our attention for us in this fashion. Bob sleighing, mountaineering, anything with an element of danger to it, will do the same, as will more prosaic activities requiring, or being given, our unconditional attention, just so long as we are sufficiently competent at them to avoid the necessity of having to consider, or think about, what we are doing.

It is in this state that cricketers are said to see the ball like a football and racing drivers claim if they were to reflect on their actions they would crash. Of course, they would need to have honed their inborn or acquired skill before any experience of it could be expected to be sublime; but they would also need to know how not to let undue reliance on technique prevent that sublimity from occuring.

Although such moments usually occur haphazardly, they should be more open to conscious emulation for most of us, even in stable circumstances, than a continual search for new or increasingly demanding challenges. One obvious way of experiencing life more fully is to behave as though each moment is our first, or last. This is what animals do, unknowingly, since they have little conception of a linear past or future; and it need be no pretence for us to do the same. All that is needed is for us to stop serial thought, even if only momentarily.

Unfortunately, trying to do this by an effort of will can amount to a severer repression of underlying sentience than that caused by such thinking itself. The alternative is for us to work directly at reopening our senses. Sensory perception, including proprioception, is what ultimately determines responses to stimuli, and is our interface with the world. In this case, there is no need to do anything, other than take in what is already present. It is unnecessary for us to try and stop our train of thought when that happens: it simply ceases to exist.

Knowing how to reopen our senses may seem a problem, but a far greater one lies in remembering to do so. Most of us would be astounded if we took the trouble to try this. Naturally, we would have difficulty getting through our days if we did not continue to exclude vast quantities of information from consciousness. It is only when we do this all the time, even while wanting not to, that it becomes inappropriate.

Wanting to stop thinking might seem to be in opposition to the spirit of Alexander work; but there is an essential difference between the sort of thought that enables us to organise our lives through the forming of intentions and the sort that allows us to experience life while holding those intentions in mind.

Thinking about something involves a complex series of imaginative processes; thinking of it can include one or more of these same processes, but in conjunction rather than succession. If, for example, we think of our front door, an image of it is all we are likely to be aware of; but as soon as we think about it, we may remember it lets in draughts, needs painting, squeaks on being opened, and is the entrance to a house we haven’t finished paying for.

Any intention to deal with these problems, or to behave in a particular way in another area of life, would itself be a thought of, rather than about, a plan of action. Although we can fulfill an intention while thinking about it – or of or about something else – it will be at the expense of our awareness, and probably the effectiveness, of what we are doing. If we want to maintain consciousness of our actions, which in its fullest sense would include consciousness of both where (our environment) and how (the "means whereby") we are carrying them out, we must avoid superfluous thought.

The same principle applies if we want to prevent the Alexandrian intent behind "thinking in activity" detracting from our enjoyment of that activity. As soon as we find ourselves considering, rather than experiencing, the process of inhibition and direction as it relates to life, it will no longer be a beneficial influence on our use so much as the cause of our lapsed attention.

For as long as that attention remains constant, and sufficiently widespread for us to be conscious of both where and how we are as well as what we are doing, we can expect a sharpening of perception generally. Because our senses are a unified whole rather than isolated mechanisms, the validity of what we feel kinesthetically will be matched by whatever we see, hear or touch. This should enable us, regardless of the actual state of our sensory appreciation, to enjoy an integrated consciousness. In other words, we will find ourselves in the zone

For those of us unfamiliar with Alexander work it is probable that by emphasising the direct experience of life through all our senses their gradual rehabilitation – including that of proprioception – will happen naturally. It would be unsuprising if this was the case, since a tendency towards homeostasis must exist; and if thinking about life is what has so disabled us for a proper appreciation of it, stopping that by returning our senses to consciousness should cause their reliablity to fall back into line.

Since such a process would also work in reverse, anyone enjoying the improving kinesthesia Alexander lessons promote could expect a commensurate quickening of their other senses. Even without lessons, by virtue of its insistence on our paying attention now, to as much that is going on as possible, the Technique would still constitute an invaluable discipline for anyone wanting to spend more of their time "in the zone".

Touch

Posted on by dod

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.