“A serious misconception could arise if our work were to be classified as a form of alternative therapy or a manipulative technique. It should be seen, rather, as an educational method; a process that involves both physical and mental re-education, whose ultimate aim is the practice of a practical technique of self-help.”(Taken from “On Categorizing the Alexander Technique” – The Alexander Journal No. 10, December 1989)
“If I may waste a little time here, I think you would be amused by this story if you don’t know it. Ethel Webb, I think it was, once heard F.M. in very serious conversation with a very eminent Harley Street consultant. They were talking about a woman who had come to F.M. as a pupil and had been the patient of the consultant. The consultant was saying very emphatically to F.M., ‘But, Mr. Alexander, within my experience so and…
“We don’t teach people to walk, any more than we teach people to breathe. What we teach in connection with breathing are the particular snags and traps that you’ve got to look out for, the particular things you’ve got to avoid, so the breathing mechanism is free to look after itself. It is exactly the same with walking.”(Taken from “Thinking Aloud” – Walking p151)
“Furthermore you’ve got to find a way of getting it to happen without muscular effort; it’s no good trying to push and pull and strain to take yourself up. You’ve got to talk to it, persuade it to happen.”(Taken from a talk given on his training course on July 5, 1985)
“Let me point out to you in parentheses, that erect posture – this stance that the human race has chosen and adopted – can have nothing whatsoever to recommend it, when compared to the horizontal stance of the four-footed animals, unless in its achievement we also achieve and maintain an efficient, near-perfect balance. Four-footed creatures balance on their four feet pretty adequately; we balance on our two, for the most part, very precariously. This is a more serious matter than…
“In class on Thursday FM was good on end-gaining and means-whereby. He said that when you get up in the morning you know that you are coming to town but you don’t allow this knowledge to hinder you from carrying out the normal routine of getting dressed, having breakfast and so. So with getting into or out of a chair.”(Taken from “A Time to Remember” – p17)
Q: How do you make it clear to the pupil that the Alexander Technique is not a therapy, particularly to those who’ve been on a Cook’s Tour of conventional and alternative therapies and think that this is just another port of call? A: If anyone comes to me and says that they’ve got this, that or the other, I say, “Well, alright. But the fact of the matter is that the way you use yourself – the way you stiffen,…
“You can’t just do your Alexander at 11:30 in the morning and lead a normal life the rest of the time… It is something you just have to recognize, that it has the first claim on your thought and attention all the time. If you find that boring and restricting, that is very definitely your fault because you haven’t taken the trouble to think in terms of expansion and growth and development. You will find, if you do so, that…
“So long as we’re alive, we are moving. We are, to a considerable extent, being carried. It’s very much up to us to see that we’re not carried in directions that we don’t want to be carried in.”(Taken from “Thinking Aloud” – Wishing, Willing and Fairy Tales p19)
“It seems to me that telling yourself subvocally, ‘the head to go forward and up’ and so on is a very, very powerful stimulus to do it. If I tell myself things, I usually tell myself to do things. I’m not so subtle in conversations with myself that I just tell myself to give consent to do something. I don’t just say, you know, ‘Come on, old fellow, just let it happen.’ I say, ‘Wake up at the back there!’…
Just to recap, in ordinary everyday life, we suffer from weight, we suffer from being heavy, from being relatively immobile. We can say we suffer, because we are creatures constructed for movement. Movement is what our lives are all about. You’ve got to mobilize weight and control it and regulate it, and you do that by and through energy. So, learning to use yourself properly is learning to regulate direction and control the flow of energy.(Taken from “Thinking Aloud” –…
F.M. used to say to people very often, “Now tell me, what’s the difference between when you go to do something and when you try to do it?” And the difference is that when people try to do something, they make a great deal more muscular effort about it. The muscular effort is associated with an emotional attitude as well – an attitude of anxiety, fear of failure, and all that sort of thing.(Taken from “The Act of Living” –…
Well, there’s no formal doctrine of change. At one level, the type of change depends entirely upon the individual. At another level, the type of change comes under the heading “general functioning”. Now, people might say that the term “general functioning” is extremely vague, and I suppose it is…However, it’s a matter of common-sense that if you can get people to move more lightly and freely – so that they’re taking pressure off rather than putting it on – it…
People often fail to realize the full significance of his work, because of our human mania for “separation” in our thinking. It is not just a matter of the use of the body, but of the whole of the self. It is a technique to be practised and put into practice, to be lived. But this is something that must be experienced before it can be properly understood.Walter Carrington (“An Evolution of the Alexander Technique” – Alexander and Emotion p156)
The whole point is that, from a practical point of view, certain things have got to happen and certain things mustn’t happen. And really it’s much more important to see that the wrong thing doesn’t happen than to see that the right thing happens. We’re such creatures of habit that if the wrong thing is allowed to happen, a wrong habit is readily established. People make the mistake of believing that if they carry out an action somehow or another…
The way we teach and present the Technique, the emphasis is so much on non-doing, on inhibition. That is tremendously important, but if you are not careful, people start to look upon the Technique as something that is done to them, not something they can do or make use of. In fact, the Technique gets rather caricatured in this way, when people begin to think they can’t really do anything to help themselves, apart from lying down. They can’t lie…
Now, obviously, you are going to give the pupil advice to lie down, to do this without fail, to do this for 10 minutes a day, for five minutes if there isn’t time. To do it if necessary before tumbling into bed at night, but to do it. People who are going to be on their own, and are not going to have the possibility of having Alexander lessons, do need to have some kind of a reminder and if…
Now with regard to thinking about yourself: What is thinking about yourself? Well, thinking about yourself is above all sorting out what you really want, what you really wish, what you, if you like, believe in, and then constantly reminding yourself about it. Our biggest difficulty all the time as F.M. used to say is that we “forget to remember”. We have simply got to remember. Now, life being as difficult as it is and so much of life being…
So, at the outset, never mind what we do want. Everybody thinks that what we do want is what matters, but of course it isn’t. The thing that matters is what we don’t want. If we can be clear about what we don’t want, what mustn’t take place, then we can watch out and at the very first signs that it is going wrong, we can quickly intervene and, hopefully, stop it. But people’s minds don’t work in that way.Walter…
Q: What aspects of improved general functioning should we look for to evaluate whether we’re on the right track?A: Breathing, balance, upright stature, lightness and freedom of movement are all useful measures. But the criterion that Alexander valued most highly was an individual’s capacity to take a decision and stick to it when that decision involves going against the habits of a lifetime. Now, that’s a pretty severe test by any standards!Walter Carrington (“Explaining the Alexander Technique – In Conversation…
Now, it was Alexander’s specific and very important contribution to recognise that in order to have integration in the individual, we’ve got to have balance – we’ve got to have poise. In our terms, we’ve got to go up – we mustn’t pull down. Pulling down upsets poise, upsets balance, and therefore disintegrates. Pulling down causes disintegration. You can’t do something to integrate – the mechanism of integration is there already but you’ve got to allow the mechanism of integration…
I remember an old pupil of mine who was in quite a high position in an insurance company. He was known for being very conservative, very, very staid, very conventional. I was giving him a lesson one day and he said, “You know, a groove is a very comfortable thing.” And he was expressing, quite obviously, a deep feeling that he was having. He realized that in the work I was doing I was trying to winkle him out of…
I’ll say a little bit more about Alexander’s expressed view that belief is a matter of muscle tension. I’m pretty certain that what he meant, and what I would mean by such a thing, is that when any of us adopt fixed beliefs and fixed ideas, above all it is from the grounds of security and safeguarding ourselves. We think: “I believe this has to be so because if it isn’t so, then I don’t know what to do, I…
It is absolutely necessary to remember that all living things, trees and shrubs, and you and me included, have to have a means of generating the energy that will overcome all the forces and influences that seek to get us down. Now, life is full of influences to get us down. Emotional, psychological and, of course, physical. Though we think immediately of gravity, psychological forms are just as powerful in many cases in forcing us to sink down.Walter Carrington (“Thinking…
If you’re not clear about what you want, you’re very unlikely to get it. You also have to remember you want it, because we want all sorts of different things and our wants and wishes change from moment to moment. If you’re going to make a change in habit from pulling down to going up, you have to be very persistent in your wanting. You can’t afford to forget, because every time you forget you’ll revert to your habit.Walter Carrington…
I don’t see how it can be hurried. FM always used to compare the Technique to gardening, which is a good analogy. There are no satisfactory shortcuts in gardening and it’s the same with the Technique. I would say though that a good dose of manure can work wonders.Walter Carrington (“Personally Speaking” – Part 3 p134)
The basic thing is up, and up is built in.Walter Carrington (“Thinking Aloud” – Lengthening in Stature p36)
So when we say think about your neck being free, it isn’t a matter of trying to feel whether it’s free and then trying from there to free it. You don’t have to try to free it. Trying to free it implies making some sort of effort to free it, and freedom is not going to be brought about by effort; stiffening is brought about by effort. If your neck is stiff, it’s because you’re stiffening it. If you stop…
I always say to people, “Think about time. Realize how much time is a personal thing, how much time is an individual possession.” Often we say, “Oh, I haven’t got time to do this or that,” but you’re the only person who can give yourself time. Nobody else can give you time. You’ve got to take the time. You’ve got to be prepared to take the time it takes. Time is something that is extraordinarily elastic. In some desperate moments…
I always take it from lesson to lesson and hope that, as a pupil becomes more aware of what the problem is – how every time they go to get out of the chair they stiffen the neck and pull the head back – it will gradually dawn on them that they do the same thing when they do all the other things in their life… The best a teacher can do is to give them the opportunity to learn…
When people stand, and when they try to stand tall and straight, they have an inevitable tendency to brace the legs, which involves the hyper-extension of the hip joint, the knee joint, and the fixing of the ankle. This tendency is there all the time, stimulated at the drop of a hat, and that is why we need the constant reminder of the opposite.Walter Carrington (“Thinking Aloud” – Knees Going Forward and Away p160)
Use is the exercise of conscious choice. It is conscious awareness, the essence of our individual living, because when we are talking about use in that sense, we are talking about choices and decisions. You choose to do, you choose not to do, in the light of all that you know and understand and feel and think.Walter Carrington (“Thinking Aloud” – The Demand of the Constant p93)
I remember what was probably Alexander’s last lesson, although presumably he didn’t know that it was at the time. In this particular case, he was taking an old lady who had been a pupil of his for some years… So here was this old lady and when F.M. finished the lesson, he patted her on the shoulder and said, ‘Now, my dear, see that you don’t stiffen your neck, and see that you’ve always got something to look forward to.’…
It is the persistence, the keeping on, on, on. If you realize that your body is shrinking, that you are contracting, that you can see that instead of your shoulders going out as they should, they’re hunching in, keep hunching in, and go on hunching in, then you’ve got to direct the energy for them to go out. You’ve got to keep directing the energy to go out, and you’ve got to keep right on at it persistently and continuously….