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The Alexander Technique is a technique for improving freedom and ease of movement.
Developed at the end of the nineteenth century by F. M. Alexander (1869-1955),
an Australian actor, it began as a vocal training method. As Alexander continued
his experiments it became clear that what he discovered had a positive effect
not just on the use of the voice but also on the use of the body as a whole.
Alexander and his brother A.R. Alexander (1874-1947) developed a way of teaching
which involved the direct use of the teacher’s hands to convey information
about the student’s movement habits.
The Alexanders moved to London and set up a highly successful teaching practice
there. During the two world wars they taught in America as well. They trained
teachers of their work beginning formally in the early 1930’s. After their
death their work was continued by teachers they had trained, initially in London,
but eventually teachers and teacher training programs arose all over the world,
including, in the last ten years or so, IN Japan.
F.M. Alexander wrote four books, and his work has been the subject of a number
of research studies demonstrating the validity of his observations and suggesting
something about the mechanisms underlying his discoveries. What were these discoveries?
Alexander observed a reflex pattern in the body which he named "the Primary
Control." This pattern, which humans share with other vertebrates, causes
the body to lengthen and widen as it becomes more active. This lengthening and
widening, which is involuntary and results from a tendency for the bones to
release in a direction away from the center of the body, seems to be dependent
on the freedom of a key relationship, that of the head to the neck. When this
relationship is free, the whole body tends to be free and the lengthening and
widening effect of the Primary Control can operate freely. If, on the other
hand, the relationship between the head and the neck is tense and rigid, that
tension and rigidity tends to spread through the body as a whole, and the lengthening
and widening effect of the Primary Control is lost or at least diminished.
This so-called "Primary Control" is in fact the reflex support for
our posture and coordination. When it works properly, our movement is graceful,
easy, strong, balanced, sensitive, and flexible. Our muscles don’t overwork
and we don’t feel stiff and clumsy. Our natural, inborn brilliant physical
intelligence can function at its best.
However, Alexander noticed, observing first his own and then others’ behavior,
a habit of beginning activities by tightening the neck and pulling the head
back and down, thus interfering with the Primary Control. In his own case, this
interference caused him to lose his voice; but he soon found that for himself
and others there were many other consequences—clumsiness, extra effort,
weakness, insensitivity, and numbness, to name a few. The habit, like all habits,
was unconscious and operated involuntarily. Alexander’s first and most
important task, therefore, was to notice something he was doing that had been
happening outside his awareness. He managed this first visually, watching himself
carefully in the mirror; in order to do so he needed to develop the ability
to see what he was doing objectively.
His next task was to learn to feel from the inside what he was seeing, and this
goal proved more elusive. His habitual interpretations of his own body sensations
tended to override both what he saw and what he intended to do. Some of the
most important aspects of Alexander’s discoveries consisted of ways to
inhibit his habitual responses so that the innate patterns of the Primary Control
could emerge, with their good effect on his freedom and ease of movement.
It is already clear that a crucial feature of Alexander’s work involved
learning to notice and take control of things about his behavior that had previously
been outside his awareness. Throughout his career, he developed ever greater
sensitivity to his own movement and to that of his students. His teaching consisted
largely of training others to notice the same subtle movement factors in their
own behavior which he had learned to notice in his so they could experience
the same increased freedom and excellence in movement that he had found for
himself.
During Alexander’s lifetime and in the first years after his death, it
was natural that the teachers he trained should attempt to come as close as
possible to what he himself was doing, both in content and in style. But as
time passed, various teachers, while dedicated to maintaining the core of Alexander’s
discoveries and teaching, began to bring the fruits of their own experience
and thought to their work. I can speak with some assurance in describing the
development of my own teachers’ teaching.
Frank Pierce Jones, (1905-1975) with the encouragement of the famous American
philosopher and scholar John Dewey (himself a student of Alexander), undertook
a series of careful and thoughtful experiments at the Tufts University Institute
for Psychological Research. These experiments demonstrated the objective reality
of Alexander’s discoveries and suggested some physiological explanations
for the lightness, improved coordination, and freedom and ease of movement which
Alexander and his students reported as a result of following his procedures.
It was obvious that Jones’s experimental work and the explanations he proposed
had a strong effect on both the manner and content of his teaching. He was interested
in his students using their own observation and thinking to improve their movement
and their lives in general. He published many research papers and summarized
his work in the book Freedom to Change.
Marjorie Barstow (1899-1995), my other principal teacher, was likewise highly
original and innovative. The first graduate of Alexander’s first teacher-training
course, she had a deep understanding of the principles of Alexander’s discoveries,
and so felt free to move beyond the teaching methods which he developed and
which had become the traditional framework for Alexander instruction. Ms. Barstow
tried to avoid anything that could in its turn become habitual and unthinking,
and lead to fixture and stiffness. She was also a leader in finding ways to
teach the Alexander Technique to groups rather than only in private lessons.
She made the application of Alexander’s discoveries to the activities of
everyday life and of her students’ professions central to her teaching.
From some hints that I took from Marjorie Barstow’s teaching along with
my own interest in anatomy and physiology and a scientific approach to the technique,
I have over the last twenty-five years developed a subdiscipline of the Alexander
Technique that I call Body Mapping. In the working out of this idea I have received
much support from my colleagues, particularly from Barbara Conable, who has
written two books based in part on these ideas.
The basic idea of Body Mapping is that among the many maps of the world we carry
in our brains is a map of the structure, size, and functioning of our own bodies.
We use these maps (as we use all maps) to interpret our experience and to direct
our activity. It must be made clear from the outset that this map, like all
our maps, is not built in to the brain at birth, but formed by our life experiences.
Like all maps, the body map is learned over time, on the basis of direct experience,
intuition, imagination, deduction, and information received from others. It
must be learned because (like the rest of the world) the body changes over time,
and any map based just on a child’s body will be flawed as a guide for
an adult.
But since the body map is learned—and initially learned practically from
nothing by an infant—it can contain errors: indeed, by the very nature
of the map, it cannot avoid containing errors. The map is not the territory;
it is of use in part because of what it leaves out as much as because of what
it includes. These errors are often inconsequential, but sometimes they can
have important results.
An interesting example is the experience which led to my interest in developing
the body map idea in the first place. A colleague asked me to help him diagnose
a problem which was bothering one of his violin students. The problem was that
she did not seem able to bend the elbow of her right arm when she bowed the
violin. All his suggestions and her own sincere wishes did not help her to carry
out her intentions to do so. When I watched her play, something suggested to
me that she did not actually know where her elbow was. So I said to her, "When
you first started to play the violin, your elbow was here," (and I pointed
to a place on her arm about 7 cm above her elbow). "But now, you’ve
grown, and your elbow is here," (and I showed her where her elbow joint
really was). She tried moving her elbow, and said, "Why so it is! Well,
I can do that." She then proceeded to play the violin normally, bending
her elbow with ease. For her, that was all there was to it, and when I reminded
her of the incident fifteen years later, she had forgotten it completely. But
for me, it was the beginning of a fascinating exploration that continued with
some intensity for about twenty-five years, and that still sometimes brings
me surprises.
What had happened? Of course I hadn’t changed anything about her arm itself;
all I had done was to help her change her idea about her arm. She had apparently
thought her elbow joint was up where there was actually solid bone, and when
she tried to bend it there, of course it didn’t bend. At the same time,
thinking that the joint was up there, she thought that there was only solid
bone where the elbow joint really was, and so would have done everything possible
to prevent movement there (where movement should have only been possible in
the case of a severe break!)
It is important to realize that these misunderstandings were all unconscious
on her part. She had probably never consciously asked herself where her elbow
joint was nor realized that she had any idea about it. This idea was the map
she had of that part of her body. It formed a link between her conscious intention
to move and the part of her brain that actually had to carry out that intention.
Such was the power of that map that in spite of the actual facts of her own
anatomy, she was unable to move in a way that contradicted the (actually wrong)
information in her map. (It is also interesting to notice that the problem that
she had in playing the violin did not extend to other areas of her life. She
could do many things which involved bending her right elbow with no trouble
at all: combing her hair, eating, driving a car, writing, and many more. Apparently
only the body map associated with playing the violin contained this distortion.)
As the implications of this lesson began to become clear to me, I started looking
at my own experiences and those of my friends and students, and I found similar
mapping errors everywhere I looked. This is not the place to go into great detail
about what I and my colleagues have found—the subject has been treated
extensively in our books (see below)—but a further example might be useful
in understanding the concept. Please consider the palm of your right hand, specifically
where the little finger joins the palm. You will notice a little line or fold
across the base of the finger, and many people assume that this line is the
location of the joint between the finger and the hand. Perhaps you are one of
them. Actually, however, the joint is about an inch further on towards the wrist,
actually within what we usually call the hand.
Try moving your fingers as if the joint were up at the little line at the base
of the finger, and then again as if the joint were where it in fact is. If you
can feel a difference, you have just experienced the operation of the body map
in its incorrect and correct forms.
The body map is central to our experience of our bodies. It determines how we
experience and move them. Since it is what organizes our awareness of ourselves,
whenever we might begin to notice something that doesn’t match the map,
we either ignore it or try to reshape our bodies to match the map. We may have
noticed people who distort their bodies to try to conceal or augment some part
of themselves with which they aren’t satisfied, or of which they are ashamed.
We may have noticed very tall people who unconsciously pull themselves down
to try to be the same size as shorter people around them; awkward teenagers
who are trying to make an almost-adult body fit into a still-child-sized map.
Or we may notice people who move awkwardly simply because they don’t understand
how their bodies are put together. These things usually happen below the surface
of consciousness, but they do happen.
The good news is that when people become aware of the inaccuracies in their
body maps it is relatively easy to correct them. This can make an immediate
positive change in their experience and movement. Alexander teachers who are
trained in the concepts of Body Mapping can often diagnose faulty mapping and
help their students clarify and correct their body maps. If you want to find
out more about Body Mapping, you may be interested in two books which present
the ideas in much greater detail: How to Learn the Alexander Technique,
by Barbara Conable and William Conable and What Every Musician Needs to Know
About the Body by Barbara Conable and Ben Conable. Both are published by
Andover Press. They can be obtained from any bookseller or directly from Andover
Press.
One of the aspects of our use of our bodies most subject to confusion is support.
We live our lives in an ocean of gravity. We are built to do so; when astronauts
spend much time outside of earth’s gravitational field they have health
problems. However, we often hear about gravity’s supposed ill effects on
the body. In fact, our bones and muscles are perfectly adequate, perfectly designed
to support and move us as long as we don’t interfere with the natural functioning
of our bodies’ coordination and postural reflexes—that is, with the
Primary Control.
It is actually our bones that support us. It is as if there were a force travelling
up from the floor through our bones carrying us through the gravitational ocean.
Our muscles have two main tasks: to move us (our bones, really) around, and
keep the bones lined up so that this supporting force is carried through bones
and joints so that our body structures don’t collapse. The bones support
us; the muscles make sure that the bones are lined up so they can do so. Many
people don’t realize these facts and believe instead that only their muscles
hold them up. This faulty body map leads them to try to hold themselves up only
by muscular effort, which can be tiring and painful. Many people, under the
influence of such a map, don’t have any internal sense of their bones at
all; indeed many people believe that it is impossible to sense bones from the
inside (though everyone knows you can feel them from the outside).
It is in fact not true that you can’t sense your own bones from inside.
In the first place it is possible to sense them by inference. There is, for
instance, a place inside your thigh that is not skin and that doesn’t move
like muscle, but which is long and central and which travels wherever your leg
goes. You can feel your muscles work around and against it; it is your thigh
bone. You are sensing it in a way by what it is not: there’s something
there that isn’t muscle or skin and that’s shaped like a bone. It’s
probably a bone. If you gently move someone else’s leg, it’s easy
to sense where the bone must be by the way the leg moves.
But I have found that it is possible to move from this inferential way of sensing
bones to a more direct sensing of the bone itself. Bone has its own feeling
quality, which is quite unlike the sensation of skin, muscle, or other flesh.
It’s hard to describe in words, but the great majority of my students seem
able to learn to recognize it both in themselves and in each other. It is perhaps
connected with the flow of energy, which seems to flow differently through bone
than through other parts of the body such as muscles, fascia, or the nervous
system. This is a very subtle phenomenon, something that many people (especially
in America) believe and have been taught doesn’t exist or can’t be
felt. My own experience leads me to believe that I and many of my colleagues
and students do feel it regularly and predictably.
Without doubt, when people learn to change their body maps so that they sense
themselves in this new way, they gain a new sense of effortless support and
ease of movement. From an Alexander teacher’s point of view, their Primary
Control begins to work better and it is easier to teach them to move with the
freedom and excellent coordination that Alexander students and teachers seek.
Here is a new frontier that a few Alexander teachers are beginning to explore.
Like earlier discoveries—the Primary Control and the habits which interfere
with it; the body map and its effects—it involves learning to notice and
understand phenomena which have previously existed outside of our awareness.
The sensations are so subtle and delicate that they are easy to ignore; at first
it is common for people to be unsure whether they are feeling them or just making
them up. This, however, is something common to many kinds of advanced learning.
Professional musicians, artists, writers, doctors, in fact everyone with highly
developed skills routinely notices things that escape people who don’t
share their training. I don’t know just what it is that my friend the violin-maker
sees when he looks at a fine instrument, but I know what a difference his expertise
makes in the sound of his instruments. In the same way a good Alexander teacher
can notice things about your movement patterns which completely elude you; but
then you can learn in your turn how to notice them and gain the benefits of
increased freedom, ease, grace, and comfort in your movement and your life.
[This article was originally written for and published in Japanese by Fili,
a Japanese magazine, on February 15, 2002.]
©William Conable, 2002