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DIRECTION Freemail
September 1999
Volume 2, Number 2
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In This Issue
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1. LINK UPDATE - Take a moment to link your home page to one of the Alexander world's busiest sites.
2. CONGRESS 6/99 - Want to get published? DIRECTION is looking for writers for our next issue.
3. WHAT IS A PRAYER? - This is the full text of an article by Wade Alexander from our latest VISION issue. Enjoy.
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We have just revamped our link site to reflect the Alexander Directory in the latest VISION issue of DIRECTION.
Go have a looooook....
http://www.directionjournal.com/links.htm
Is your web page missing? Maybe I removed it because it didn't work, maybe you haven't got around to submitting it?
Well, you should. Easily a quarter of a million people have clicked into our site this year, and we offer all teachers and interested parties with a home page a free click at our site.
If you want to be listed - or you know of a fabulous site that deserves listing - please register it at our site...
http://www.directionjournal.com/linkapp.html
We look forward to expanding and updating this page to offer you a handy place to start your Alexander web search.
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Did you attend? We are looking for writers who were moved by some event at the Congress and would be willing to write about it for the next issue of DIRECTION.
We need anything from 500 to 1500 words, depending on how many events you would like to review.
Please contact me directly: <editor@directionjournal.com> so I can discuss your article with you.
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This is the full text of an article from our latest VISION issue. If you have this issue, then you have this article. For those who don't, please enjoy Wade Alexander's reflections on the deeper meaning of Alexander work...
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WHAT IS A PRAYER?
Form, Content and Evolution of the Alexander Technique
by Wade Alexander
In "Full House, The Spread of Excellence" from Plato to Darwin, (Three Rivers Press: NY, 1996) Stephen Jay Gould presents a very interesting argument about evolution. He calls to question time worn presentations of the way the evolution of species is taught. He uses, as an example, the linear pictures in text books and museum walls which depict equines evolving through time in a straight line. In contrast Gould uses a diagram of a bush to show that equines evolved in a much more complex pattern. He calls this pattern the "Full House" of evolution. I adopt Gould's concept in order to ask that we consider the evolution of our work as a "Full House." This idea can be a means whereby we can continue the sharing of our thoughts in the way that Michael Frederick began when he organised the First Congress. For me the most important aspect of the "Full House" of our evolution as a discipline is to articulate the content of our work. We all are aware of various forms of the Technique so I believe that each of us could label trunks and branches on a bush representing our evolution.
Gould does not accept fuzzy thinking. For example, in Full House he takes his colleague E.O. Wilson (author of The Diversity of Life) to task for using this quote. "Attentive to the adjuration of C. S. Peirce, let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what in our hearts we know to be true." Gould counters, "Nothing could be more antithetical to intellectual reform than an appeal against thoughtful scrutiny of our most hidebound mental habits..."
Later in his book Gould says "such protestations of the 'obvious' stymie thought; the non-obvious is so often true and, when true, usually enormously interesting (if only for the power of breaking through old prejudices.)" He adds, "I do confess to great discomfort when I see such words as 'manifestly', or even 'presumably', attached to conclusions stated without compelling logic or even evidence (or subject to another interpretation simply not conceptualised by the author)."
I believe form has been confused with content in the Alexander Technique community ever since F.M. began training teachers. Those of you who read my account of the Jerusalem Congress (Vol 2 No 5 IAD pp3-5) may recall that I chaired a session there titled "What is our Prayer?" Ora Nelkin asked that question at the end of an excellent presentation by Bruce Fertman at the Sydney Congress. Ora's question was, for me, a metaphor in which her use of the word prayer represented the content of the Technique.
Several highly respected and experienced teachers on the panel (including Ora) and several master teachers from the audience explored Ora's question during the session in Jerusalem. The discussion proceeded with great respect to all views, but there were no agreed upon answers.
What is the content of the Alexander technique? In answering this question I feel we need to avoid the possibility of any of us stumbling into any of Gould's intellectual snares. Especially let us avoid holding a belief in our hearts and presenting it as truth because it is of the heart.
I offer, as a way to begin, one of my favourite F. M. aphorisms in which I believe he articulates [the] content of his Technique. You come here to learn to inhibit and to direct your activity. You learn, first, to inhibit the habitual reaction to certain classes of stimuli, and second, to direct yourself consciously in such a way as to affect certain muscular pulls, which processes bring about a new reaction to these stimuli. Boiled down it all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus. But no one will see it that way. They will all see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that the pupil decides what he will or will not consent to do. They will teach you anatomy and physiology till they are black in the face---you will still have this to face, sticking to a decision against your habit of life. I believe that in this paragraph FM is telling us that thinking before activity makes inhibition possible.
Chair work is form, not content! "Sticking to a decision against [a] habit of life" requires us to think.
To continue, I believe the following quote is a useful exhortation for teachers in any discipline.
"Just don't do anything you've seen me do."
When I go beyond the obvious aspect of FM's words in this declaration I feel that FM is telling me that when I teach, my activity must be based on thinking about what I am doing, what the student is doing, and how these activities coalesce into a coherent learning experience. F.M. knew that in each moment that we teach, different factors come into play. In each passing moment we change and our students change. This combination of change leads us to the necessity of constantly working in a unique way. A form we see another teacher use may not be appropriate.
The following segment from F. P. Jones's paper given at the Constructive Learning Center is, for me, an example of how Jones expressed content of the Technique:
"What distinguishes the Alexander Technique from all other methods of self-improvement that I know anything about is the character of the thinking involved. Other people talk about awareness and thinking, but operationally they mean something quite different from Alexander's experience. To me it is an expansion of the field of consciousness (or of "attention" if you object to the term "consciousness") in space and in time so that you are taking in both yourself and your environment, both the present moment and the next. It is a unified field organised around the self as the center."
Are there several forms available to us in order to operate with an expanded field of consciousness or attention? Yes, there can be as many forms as there are interactions between students and teachers.
Could the above examples of F.M.'s and Jones's writing be a beginning for articulating the content behind the forms we employ when we teach the Technique? In "Body Awareness in Action" (Schocken Books: New York, 1979, p.68) Jones tells us how he was told by A.R. Alexander during a lesson to "Be patient; stick to principle; and it will open up like a giant cauliflower." (a dynamic statement). Of course we have to teach and learn how to "stick to principle" in our training courses, but in addition to the basic principles let's find the means, not only for training courses, but for all of us to consider the "full house" of our evolution.
To conclude, and to propose an additional direction, here is an idea of Virginia Postrel's from her recently published book, "The Future and its Enemies, The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress" (The Free Press: New York, 1998). Postrel argues that our future will emerge from conflict between Dynamism and Stasis, not from the time worn debate between the political right and left. Early in her discussion Postrel says, "The solution emerges. You don't have to have a plan."
I love Postrel's notion, which I paraphrase as the solution emerges in process. I propose that we engage in a process of articulating the content of the Technique. We can end up with a mutually understood solution if we are open and caring towards each other and dynamic during the process.
WADE ALEXANDER Copyright 1999
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That's all for now.
Jeremy Chance
Editor, DIRECTION
September, 1999
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