Quotes from experienced teachers who studied with Alexander, and occasionally quotes from Alexander himself
“FM said one very important thing in class. Never to do anything that lowers the standard of your manner of use. It is no good doing something that puts you wrong and then trying to put yourself right in the process. The thing to do is to stop and only to do what you can do without interfering.”(Taken from “A Time to Remember” – p39)
“People imagine that their bodies are disobedient and unreliable in carrying out their wishes, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Our bodies get terribly confused because of the conflicting demands that we make of them all the time in our muddled, confused, contradictory wishes. And that is certainly what this technique is really about.”(Taken from “Thinking Aloud” – Wishing, Willing and Fairy Tales p17)
“Trees have roots” she suddenly announced in one lesson, “which connect them with the ground.” I had heard lots of teachers speak about ‘rooting to the ground’ – but never Miss Goldie. I was surprised, but somehow felt on more familiar ground. “Trees… roots…. yes, I know about all that…” Then, as if to shock me out of my complacency, she stood back a foot or so and added, “But we are not trees. Legs are not for support; they…
Q: How will students know when they are right? A: There isn’t anything either right or wrong when dealing with co-ordination. There are degrees of movement. Life is really moving from one position to another. We never stop and say, “This is right – this is my posture, this is the way I ought to be”. If we do that we’re stiff trying to hold that posture. It isn’t natural for our bodies to be held in positions. (Taken from…
“When a man reaches the point where he concludes that he ‘knows’ his subject, he decides, consciously or subconsciously, that he has nothing more to learn, and he promptly begins to lose what he does know; when he becomes aware that he has ‘grown up’, he has reached a stage where he has already begun to stultify those potentialities for growth which once were his, and which might have been his to the end. Boredom, monotony, and discontent follow swift…
“I don’t think teachers can change people: the change is up to them. I think if teachers try to make people change they will revolt eventually. People have various ways of resisting.”(Taken from a “Personally Speaking” Part 3 p 120)
“No verbal description can do justice to a technique which involves the changing…of an individual’s sensory experiences. One cannot describe the experience of seeing the colour, red. Similarly one cannot describe the much more complex experience of improved physical coordination. A verbal description would mean something only to a person who had actually had the experience described… Complete understanding of the system can come only with the practice of it.”(Taken from “Ends and Means” p223)
“Unfortunately, we have been taught that all the ordinary, most necessary, and therefore most oft-repeated acts of life should be automatic and unconscious; for this reason they have become indifferent. The condition here indicated is one that induces stagnation…and as it becomes more and more pronounced with advancing age, we gradually lose the capacity to take conscious interest in and derive pleasure from those normal and useful activities of life… Small wonder, then, that sooner or later we seek satisfaction…
“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…
A pupil of one of my colleagues was once told in a lesson not to close her eyes. She said, “If I don’t close my eyes, I can’t concentrate.” My colleague said, “I don’t want you to try to concentrate.” “But,” she said, “if I don’t concentrate I can’t feel what is happening.” “I don’t want you to try and feel what is happening,” he said. “But,” she replied, “if I don’t feel, how can I relax?” “I don’t want…
“The trouble is most of us grow up with the idea that just thinking about doing something is one thing and actually doing it is another. In the Alexander work we soon find out that there is no wall or line separating the former from the latter. We learn that whatever boundary there is is so tenuous that to distinguish between the thinking-about-doing and doing is of little use or value except academically. The distinction may have theoretical value, but…
“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)
“Beliefs are what hamper us. Because of them we are not experimental enough. Because of them we have not enough of the adventurous spirit.”N.B. Beliefs in what we have already achieved in our work are the most hampering of all: Being “right” is clinging to the belief that the changed conditions of today are these for always. This will mean fixture again, in the long run.”(Taken from “Irene Tasker: Her Life and Work” p260)
Q: I assume that there must have been any number of people who were eager to learn the Technique but who would have said to Alexander: “Now, that’s all very nice. It works beautifully while I’m here in the teaching room… But what about applying this to real life?” A: Indeed. But FM encouraged them to work on themselves when he wasn’t there. …”Now, when you get ready for bed tonight I want you to go about your business very…
“I do not know who it was who introduced [Aldous] Huxley to Alexander. It could have been any one of his friends. “Going to Alexander” was a fashionable thing to do in the circles in which the Huxleys moved… Sometime in the fall of 1935 Huxley began having daily lessons in what Alexander called “the Use of the Self.” His general condition soon began to improve and by the end of the year he was speaking in public. In February,…
“Everyone wants to be right, but no one stops to consider if their idea of right is right.”(Taken from “Articles and Lectures” – Teaching Aphorisms p194)
“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)
“The idea of finishing a movement means that we have lost sight of our means-whereby.”(Taken from “Irene Tasker: Her Life and Work” p250)
“And as I have said previously, he [Alexander] was always telling us how to use our time constructively. For example, you’re waiting for a bus, and it’s late. ‘Now, there’s no point getting frustrated,’ he used to tell us. ‘Do a bit of work instead.’”(Taken from “Alexander Technique: The Ground Rules” – part 3 p101)
“There is no such thing as a right position, but there is such a thing as a right direction.”(Taken from “Articles and Lectures – Teaching Aphorisms p194”)
“As I remember, F.M. did not talk much when he was teaching. In his teaching practice he had made it a rule that all new pupils were only accepted if they read the books first. Whether this really worked out I never discovered, but it was obvious that by getting a pupil to have some idea of what to expect from lessons with him, this ruling saved him the trouble of having to explain what he was doing and what…
“People that haven’t any fish to fry, they see it all right.”(Taken from “Articles and Lectures” – Teaching Aphorisms p205)
“The experience you want is in the process of getting it. If you have something, give it up. Getting it, not having it, is what you want.”(Taken from “Articles and Lectures” – Teaching Aphorisms p196)
“When you get a thing like the Alexander work…who looks after it? It’s neither biology, nor psychology, nor sociology, nor history, nor anything. Therefore, it doesn’t exist. What is obviously needed in academic institutions…is a few people who run about on the woodwork between the pigeonholes, and peep into all of them and see what can be done, and who are not closed to disciplines which don’t happen to fit into any of the categories considered as valid by the…
I asked ChatGPT to give me some quotes in the style of F.M. Alexander, using bogan language and Yoda’s speech patterns. I hope they’re helpful. “Oi, mate! Change ain’t easy, but effort put, break free from same ol’ drongo routine, you must.” “Screw yer past, cobber! Power you have, chuck a U-ey and fresh start, you must. Take control of ya thoughts, unleash a ripper new version of yaself, you will.” “Body and noggin, mates they are, ya know? Fix…
Q: Which book changed your life? A: The one the teacher put under my head during the Alexander Technique sessions at RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]. I grew an inch and a half. (Taken from “Questions & Answers”, The Guardian, May 7 2015)
“The brain becomes used to thinking in a certain way, it works in a groove, and when set in action, slides along the familiar, well-worn path; but when once it is lifted out of the groove, it is astonishing how easily it may be directed. At first it will have a tendency to return to its old manner of working by means of one mechanical unintelligent operation, but the groove soon fills, and although thereafter we may be able to…
“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…
“Alexander Technique really helped my posture and focus during my stint as Othello with Northern Broadsides theatre company. Imagine how excited I was when arrived at the National Theatre for Comedy of Errors and found I could have Alexander taught to me once a week, I was chuffed to little meatballs.”(Taken from the BBC Radio show ‘Front Row’)
“Have I ever told you how FM came to use his hands in teaching? No? Well, after FM recovered his voice, he earned part of his living teaching drama students. I remember him telling me: ‘It never occurred to me that they wouldn’t be able to do what I told them. But they just couldn’t understand what I was talking about. So when they pulled their heads back, I just put my hands on and made an adjustment.’ Later on,…
“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)
“When he comes into my room at first, I ask him to sit down in the chair – and we all do that, it is a matter of etiquette – and when he has sat down in the chair, I have the history of his life’s use of himself. It is all there. It is a very simple way, ladies and gentlemen, of getting at the habits and peculiarities of a person, but we get at it that way.”(Taken from…
“Don’t trouble yourself about going slowly, it is necessary to go slowly.”(Taken from a letter from AR Alexander to Frank Pierce Jones as quoted in Jones’ book “Freedom to Change” – chapter 9 p81)
“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!’…
One has to learn the Art of falling upwards.(Taken from “The Alexander Technique As I See It” – Notebook Jottings p34)
Thinking, directing, “giving orders”, or however you wish to describe it, is not an end in itself. It has value and meaning only as it is applied to the pupil’s own life.(Taken from “Freedom to Change” – Appendix D p193)
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” –…
In describing their experiences pupils are apt to emphasize physical changes – so much so that the Technique is often thought of as a kind of posture training. I think this is natural, especially for intellectuals who tend to be overawed by the physical changes that lessons produce. In my case, the discovery that physical activity could be a source of pleasure was like waking from a bad dream. In the past I had taken exercise of one kind or…
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” –…
The next point I think I should make here is in regard to position…A position that is right today, cannot possibly be right tomorrow if you have improved. How can it be? It must be wrong tomorrow, and it will be wrong again the next day if you have improved, because it will have changed with the rest of your changing conditions.(Taken from “Articles and Lectures” – Bedford Physical Training College Lecture p171)
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…
I remember sitting on the tram on my way back to Streatham Hill and thinking, “Now, should my back be here or should it be there?” I was experimenting a lot in those early days although I didn’t understand that that wasn’t how to go about it at all. I think nearly everyone does that in the beginning. And, of course, it does take time, especially if you’re very young like I was, to appreciate that it’s all going to…
On another occasion several of us, all tall, went to a theatre and sat bolt upright as conscientious Alexander students in the front of the stalls, thereby blocking the view of frustrated unfortunates behind us. For we did not sag, as most people do after sitting a while. No, we gave our directions and lengthened relentlessly.(Taken from “Alexander’s Way” – The Alexander Journal No. 13 Autumn 1993 p5)
In 1924 a child whose parents were in India was sent to Alexander for lessons. He was nervous and excitable and Alexander felt that he needed daily help in employing the new use of himself in his schoolwork. Other parents who were themselves having lessons asked for the same kind of help for their children, and a class was set up to provide academic instruction for them, “upon the principle,” Alexander wrote, “that the end for which they are working…
You cannot change and yet remain the same, though this is what most people want.Patrick MacDonald (Taken from “The Alexander Technique As I See It” – Notebook Jottings p17)
In all our activities, we tend to pull our heads back and contract or shorten ourselves. We give ourselves an order or direction to do a certain thing, and then we fight against ourselves in doing it. Whereas the head naturally wants to go forward and up and the back to lengthen and widen. That’s all there is to it. But it works. Whatever we may think about it, there it is!F.M. Alexander as recounted by Goddard Binkley (Taken from…
What I learnt was beautiful, it was an art… It was about being still and relaxed in order to be able to 100 percent listen to someone, to be in the present.Hugh Jackman (“Inside the Actors Studio” Season 10 Episode 11)
At the end [of my lesson] I was left with feet apart – rather forward. FM said “Pick up your feet and walk.” I hesitated as with feet so far apart it felt quite impossible. FM said “No. Don’t change back to [the] old position of [the] feet. Take the plunge and do what you don’t know.”Irene Tasker (“Irene Tasker: Her Life and Work with the Alexander Technique” – Notebooks p 262)
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)
I was born with no natural aptitude. I wasn’t pretty. I moved with no grace at all. I auditioned for the London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Arts but was not accepted. When I was finally admitted to Central School of Speech and Drama and showed up at my first movement class with my hump back and wearing a leotard, the movement teacher said, “Oh God.” He sent me to the head of the school who then sent me to…
The great enemy is fixing, holding, trying to keep it. He [Alexander] used to say, “It’s not having it that matters, but it’s knowing how to get from where you are now to something a bit better.” Marjory Barlow (Direction Magazine Vol 2, No 2 – “The Barlows” p18)
Six or seven places in my books I have made a remark which no one ever seems to remember, and that is that ends come of themselves. When you sit down you are in too much of a hurry to do so. You drive right for the end. Don’t think about the end! Don’t think about sitting down! What you do want to do, however, is to think of the means that are right for you to attain the end….
When we set out to do a thing, getting it done is not the really important thing. Rather, what is, above all, important, is to pay attention to what we are doing to ourselves while in the process of doing that which we set out to do.F.M. Alexander as recounted by Goddard Binkley (“The Expanding Self” p90)
When the word “relaxation” is used to denote the letting go of excess tension, then it conveys a proper idea. For most people, however, it denotes an over-slackening of the muscles and tissues. The word ‘collapse’ could, indeed, be substituted. This is a very harmful condition and, in my opinion, far worse than the excess tension that it replaces. It is a pity that ‘relaxation’ has become so popular.Many years ago my boxing trainer delivered himself of this piece of…
Q: Then how to teach new pupils to stop?A: It is a brief reminder, a quick intention. You do get these people who are laboring and look as if they are laying an egg or something!I explain that they need to be still so that I am able to work with them – so that my hands can work on them. I ask them to keep their eyes looking out and seeing something – looking out but being still within….
“More ease and lightness,” “a feeling of ease, of competence – very different from ‘relaxation’,” “a greater degree of ease and consequent pleasure,” are expressions that subjects have used to describe the experience. The feeling of pleasure in an everyday movement takes most subjects by surprise, and their faces break spontaneously into a smile as they notice it. “It’s a funny thing,” one of them said. “It’s as if my arms liked moving this way and wanted to do it…
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…
It was serious work but he wouldn’t let us get heavy with it. Sometimes he would come into the room where we were all waiting, and he’d look all ‘round at our faces and he’d say, “Go and walk ‘round the block. You’re no good to me looking like that. You’re too serious, too grim.” So we often had to go and take a walk.Marjory Barlow (“Taking Time – Six interviews with first generation teachers” – p71)
Q: Not to overstate the obvious, but would you say that the Alexander Technique is more than just about posture?A: Oh, good heavens, [emphatically] yes! That’s the least important.Q: And the most important?A: It’s the change in the whole self, the whole outlook on life and being. Like a revolution – your whole world changes. And it’s like coming to a crossroads, and saying are you going on or are you going to run back, and knowing, really, that you…
Stillness is a state of awareness – leaving yourself alone – not doing anything to be still and not doing anything not to be still. Some people mistake stillness for collapse. Collapse is an act. Stillness is not.Peggy Williams (“Unsmudged. An Encounter with Peggy Williams” – p152)
FM would sometimes walk a pupil at the end of the lesson. He’d say, “Up to put the foot down because we all think down to put the foot down.” That was his shorthand version of what was involved.Marjory Barlow (“Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules” – part 3 p103)
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…
As I’ve said previously, FM was a very practical man. And although a lot of people got the wrong end of the stick, he always emphasised that this work wasn’t about getting in and out of chairs. It’s about paying attention to how you’re using your body whatever you’re doing – even standing on your head if that’s what you want to do!Marjory Barlow (“Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules” – part 1 p66)
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…
The big stumbling block for me lay in my concept of thinking. Thinking meant concentrating, narrowing the attention to a small area and making an effort to keep it there.Frank Pierce Jones (“Freedom to Change” – chapter 2 p9)
Now the phrase “forward and up” has led to more confusion than any of the other ones used in teaching the Alexander Technique, and its explanation affords considerable difficulty. In the first place it must be remembered that Alexander coined the phrase in response to what he saw himself and others doing wrong. He noticed that he was pulling his head back and down, and he came to the conclusion that this was an interference with proper use. “Forward and…
The Alexander Technique does not teach position. It teaches proper co-ordination in all normal positions. If the little extension of the spine that Alexander demanded is operative then it matters little what position the body adopts. That is not to say that positions have no importance. There are some positions in which proper co-ordination is difficult or impossible. For instance, it is difficult for anyone to sit in many so-called “easy” chairs without collapsing their spines. These chairs are much…
Worry is one of these bad habits which, once established, are very hard to break. A curious feature of this habit is that, in certain cases, though you may remove the cause for worry, and the subject may admit that the cause has been removed, the removal of the cause does not remove the “mental” state which the subject declared was the cause of the worry. The fact is, the person has developed the worry habit, a state in which…
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…
And we must always keep in mind that what distinguishes the Technique from other disciplines is that it’s a re-educational process. The pupil has to become aware of what it is that he or she is doing, and find out what’s wrong in order not to carry on doing it…Really, this is the magical thing about the Technique if it’s properly taught. The teacher doesn’t merely point out to someone what’s wrong, but instead shows them how to prevent it…
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…
Ultimately a pupil must be able to make reliable kinaesthetic observations of himself in activity. Such observations, however, cannot be performed by the suggestions of the teacher. The purpose of lessons is to sharpen the kinaesthetic sense and to increase self-knowledge and self-control. The purpose is not to help the pupil develop his fantasy life. To imagine, for example, that your head is a balloon (which it certainly is not) is to get further away from reality than you already…
For a person who is attempting to learn Alexander’s work from written or verbal instructions, there are pitfalls at every turn. Alexander himself never learned through words. He learned through a series of experiences. So the pupil, to learn, must be given the experience again and again, so that the experience and the appropriate words will be associated in the pupil’s consciousness. The general semanticists say, very properly, that words are maps of a certain territory, but they are not…
All I want you to do is to give certain directions for me, and then inhibit the tremendous effort you are making to be right.FM Alexander (“Articles and Lectures” – Teaching Aphorisms p204)
What makes a good pupil? It is not suggestibility. The person who sits down, relaxes and prepares to have some kind of novel experience may get what he is looking for, but it will not be the Alexander Technique. A healthy scepticism is much easier to deal with.Frank Pierce Jones (“Freedom to Change” – chapter 14 p154)
Do not forget that right and wrong change, and should change as your body and co-ordination change. What is right for you today should be wrong for you tomorrow. Do not, therefore, try and fix a picture of a specific co-ordination in your brain as the right one; it will have to be modified, perhaps many times, over a long period…Remember, you are slowly eliminating the wrong. Finality, for most of us, and that includes me, is not in sight.Patrick…
For example, as training course students he used to tell us that if we were waiting for a bus and it was a long time coming, or if we were caught in a traffic jam there was no point in getting upset about it. He would say: “Don’t get angry, give your orders [directions] instead. In that way, you can begin to extend the Technique to your emotional reactions.”Marjory Barlow (“Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules” – part 1 p65)
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…
Playing musical instruments can be a source of mal-coordination. So many piano players gain their emphasis by bringing the body downwards towards the keys. It is only the arms, hands and fingers that should travel downwards. The body should be directly upwards.Patrick MacDonald (“The Alexander Technique As I See It” – Notebook Jottings p23)
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…
The great enemy is fixing, holding, trying to keep it. He used to say, “It’s not having it that matters, but it’s knowing how to get from where you are now to something a bit better.”Marjory Barlow (Direction Magazine Vol 2 No 2 – “The Barlows” p18)
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…
I think that a major difficulty is that the problem lies much further back than most people including a lot of Alexander teachers imagine. Everyone nowadays thinks that what they are doing is inhibiting getting in or out of chairs, but that’s not what it’s about at all. Instead, what has to take place is inhibiting the response to the first reaction to get out of the chair. That is the essence of the Technique.”Marjory Barlow (“Alexander Technique: the Ground…
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…
Again, in the sphere of politics, what can be more stupid than the ordinary party attitude, leading, as it does, to undesirable individual manifestations of deception, prejudice, egotism, and “emotional gusts”? It is an unreasonable and dishonest course to withhold support from or denounce measures which one believes to be right and of value to humanity, simply because they chance to be advocated by the political party to which one does not belong. Under the present plan politics and deception…
Boiled down, it all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus. But no one will see it that way. They will see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that a pupil decides what he will or will not consent to do. They may teach you anatomy and physiology till they are black in the face – you will still have this to face:…
You’ve got to have the intention in the work and the attention to the details. Begin with the simple things, the things within your control, and gradually you’ll be able to extend that control even to very strong emotional reactions. That’s where people don’t apply it. That to me was such a lifesaver because I was so emotional.Marjory Barlow (Direction Magazine Vol2 No2 “The Barlows” p19)
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…
It was all great fun and was never allowed to be serious in the studious sense, F.M. saw to that. If we were looking solemn in class F.M. sent us out for a walk, “come back when you are smiling again!” We hastened to obey and took ourselves once round St. Vincent’s Square, naturally putting our heads forward and up to walk.Erika Whittaker (“Alexander’s Way” – The Alexander Journal No. 13 Autumn 1993 p5)
Everyone is always teaching one what to do, leaving us still doing the things we shouldn’t do.FM Alexander (“Articles and Lectures” – Teaching Aphorisms p196)
You are not here to do exercises or to learn to do something right, but to get able to meet a stimulus that always puts you wrong and to learn to deal with it.FM Alexander (“Articles and Lectures” – Teaching Aphorisms p203)
The Alexander Technique might be defined as a method for knowing simultaneously what you are not doing as well as what you are doing – knowing, for example, that you are not interfering with the “primary control” while you are talking, listening or thinking…Frank Pierce Jones (“Freedom to Change” – chapter 14 p158)
After all, the only thing we’ve got to help us is to do it wrong, and then learn from it. I realise, of course, that this is not the attitude of most people who think that they’ve got to be right all the time. Which reminds me of something FM used to say to us: “You are right – there’s nothing wrong with any of you. You’re all quite perfect, except for what you’re doing.” That’s rather wonderful, isn’t it?Marjory…
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)
When at first you don’t succeed, never try again, at least, not in the same way. Trying almost always involves extra and excessive tension.Patrick MacDonald (“The Alexander Technique As I See It” – Notebook Jottings p1)
He used these words to describe a relationship of the head, neck and back in which the neck became progressively freer, the head tended to go forward in relation to the neck and up, and the back tended to lengthen and widen. When this relationship or pattern is working, all parts of the body involved in use and movement work cooperatively together and to the best advantage. Such right use in the ordinary activities of everyday life had a dramatically…
When the pupil perceives directly through the kinaesthetic sense and can compare a habitual with a non-habitual way of doing something, he doesn’t need words in order to grasp the significance of the experience. Alexander put it succinctly in a remark reported by Lulie Westfeldt (p. 71): “If we become sensorily aware of doing a harmful thing to ourselves, we can cease doing it.” The key word here is “sensorily.”Frank Pierce Jones (“Freedom to Change” – Chapter 6 p51)
The basic thing is up, and up is built in.Walter Carrington (“Thinking Aloud” – Lengthening in Stature p36)
Alexander used to say that when Sir Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravitation, people began to think that in order to move one foot off the ground you had to shift your weight over and down on to the other. “But”, said Alexander, “I was a very ill educated man. I never heard of Sir Isaac Newton. It didn’t affect me!”Patrick MacDonald (“The Alexander Technique As I See It” – Notebook Jottings p10)
“Neck free (or free your neck), head forward and up, back to lengthen and widen” and, very importantly, “knees to go forward and away.” He [Alexander] said to me, “If I stand beside you and say those words, you can’t go wrong. But I can’t be with you all the time so you’ve got to learn to do that for yourself.”Marjory Barlow (“Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules” – Part 1 p29)
As I understand it, the Alexander Technique is not concerned with three-dimensional but with four-dimensional posture, in other words with movement.Frank Pierce Jones (“Freedom to Change” – Appendix D p190)
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…
In Alexander’s sense “stopping doing” means stopping that which leads to over-activity. It does not mean collapse (relaxation), for this is a doing of a different and even more harmful kind. To gain improvement it is necessary to stop thinking in certain ways and to think differently.Patrick MacDonald (“The Alexander Technique As I See It” – Notebook Jottings p13)
There’s a “still point” as Elliot would say, where, I don’t say it’s unaffected, but it’s not pushed off its perch – you’re able to keep something going whatever happens to you outwardly. And that’s the secret of life really. You don’t have any say in what happens to you, but you do have a say in how you react and that’s what this work is all about – never mind good use and all that. That’s what this work…
Having injured my back in a car accident, I had never been able to sit at a desk for any length of time without discomfort. Now I began to notice that whenever I leaned forward to read or write I displaced my head downward and allowed my chest to collapse so that my torso was a dead weight on my lower back. Since I had always done this, I assumed that there was no alternative except to make an effort…
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…
It seems appropriate to say here that it is natural for our bodies to work efficiently. It is not, however, our habit, owing to the fact that consciously or unconsciously we have learnt a lot of bad habits, over many generations.Patrick MacDonald (“The Alexander Technique As I See It” – Notebook Jottings p7)
Then first thing in the morning when you wake up, don’t leap out of bed otherwise it will be 11 o’clock before you even think about freeing your neck. Stay there for a while with the knees drawn up and give your orders. Then get out of bed slowly – don’t rush it. It’s not good for you to go from lying on your back for hours and then to spring out of bed. Then you can work out the…
“Anyone,” said F. M.,” can do what I do if he does what I did.” In practice, few seem to have succeeded in accomplishing this. The reason, I am sure, is that in spite of warnings they “turn it into a doing.” People have frequently introduced themselves to me with the statement: “I have read Mr. Alexander’s books and I always try to hold my head in the right position, which he advocates.” This, of course, is just what he…
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)
One thing that it is important for us to realize in considering the thoughts given to the back is that the back includes the pelvis; it does not stop at the waistline. And what Alexander meant by “lengthening the back’ is that one must think the whole back, including the pelvis, upwards.Lulie Westfeldt (“F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work” – Chapter 13 p140)
“Head forward” might have several meanings. Most people think of it as head forward in space. Alexander in using the words meant head forward in relation to the neck. It took a long time and hard work to find this out. One realized in time that his hands, which he used in demonstrating and teaching, were always tending to take the neck back and the head forward in relation to it. Once one had discovered this, one could ask him…
Let the neck be free. You will notice that the phrase starts with “let”. This is important. It means that the pupil should avoid stiffening the neck – not that he should do something to free it. I frequently find pupils going through all sorts of contortions in the belief that they are “freeing the neck”. They are usually, in fact, producing an extra stiffening by so doing.Patrick MacDonald (“On Giving Directions, Doing and Non-Doing” – STAT Memorial Lecture 1963)
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)
One day when I was having trouble understanding the relation between my thinking and the kinaesthetic experiences A.R. was giving me, he said, “Be patient; stick to principle; and it will all open up like a great cauliflower.” I did not understand what this meant but it was somehow reassuring.[A.R. is Albert Redden Alexander, brother of F.M. Alexander.]Frank Pierce Jones (“Freedom to Change” – Chapter 8 p68)
Really, it’s all quite simple: as soon as you stop pulling your head back, what else can it do apart from go forward? But you certainly won’t get it by making any sort of movement of the head, although I know that’s what a lot of people, including Alexander teachers, try and do. Let me put it another way: you’re already making the movement by pulling the head back and down, or over to the side or any of the…
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.’…
In trying to sum up what I have said this evening, I would like to say that I consider ‘non-doing’ and ‘direction sending’ the lifeblood of the Alexander Technique, though they are not, of course, the whole of it. I think it might be useful, before I stop, to list the items that, taken together I believe make the Alexander Technique into one unlike any other:– recognition of the force of habit.– inhibition and non-doing.– recognition of faulty sensory awareness.–…
Irene Tasker had some nice advice about walking. When I was working with her at Ashley Place before I went on the training course she told me that as you walk forward, you should think that your whole back is going in the direction from which you have come. It’s a preventative, and it stops you throwing the body forward. It’s wonderful – I think everyone should try it!Marjory Barlow (“Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules” p103)
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….
Alexander’s technique of inhibition must also be described. When Alexander first discovered the new head, neck and back pattern and tried to maintain it in speaking, he found he could not do so. After much reasoning and experimentation, he finally reached the conclusion that there was an inseparable fusion between the idea of speaking and the body pattern always used in speaking. If he was to get rid of the old body pattern that had caused his voice trouble and…
The Alexander Technique might be defined as a method for knowing simultaneously what you are not doing, as well as what you are doing – knowing, for example, that you are not interfering with the “primary control” while you are talking, listening or thinking…The Technique is not a treatment; it is a discipline that, to be effective, has to be applied in the activities of daily life. The reward is an increase in competence and self-esteem and in the sensory…