'THE METHOD OF ME ALEXANDER...'

John Dewey, the eminent American educationist, never tired of praising and practising the Alexander Technique. When he wrote an introduction in 1923 to Alexander's book, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, he declared that people underestimate Alexander's discoveries if they only acknowledge specific results such as improved posture or relief from a bad back. They should be giving "full attention to the method of Mr Alexander instead of its results" and should be doing so in everyday life. Attending to the method would mean continually elevating thoughtful 'means whereby' above the anxious 'end-gaining' pursued so compulsively in modern times.

What a commitment he asks us to make! He had not heard of New Age phrases such as 'present-time awareness' or 'every-moment Zen' but in effect he is exhorting us to embark on 'every moment Alexander'. Now, who would wish to go that far? Only an advanced student or a teacher of the Technique could feel inclined to do so, one who has realised as a result of hands-on lessons and much reading that habit entangles every human being in subtle bonds. From early childhood, habits accumulate within us. We acquiesce in them because they get us through the day's routines and seem to leave us free to attend to more important things. But, sadly, we become overdependent, unaware that habits of posture, movement, attitude and the rest account for nine-tenths of each day's living.

Alexander is in good company when he challenges habit. Great teachers from Lao Tzu and Buddha to moderns like Gurdjieff, Steiner and Krishnamurti have urged our careless species to 'wake up', by which they mean to shake off the bonds of habit. And every esoteric sect promises to enhance human awareness, which of course can only be done through disciplines that break down or break through the adherents' habits.

I, as a long-time student of the Technique, have decided that I'm ready to take up Dewey's suggestion. I'm persuaded that habits limit my flow of awareness. "There is but one disease, congestion, and but one cure, circulation", says an old Chinese adage. I want to break through the congestion of habit to the free circulation of awareness. Still, Dewey is asking me to walk a difficult road. Taken to the extreme, his advice requires me to stop before every movement if I am to employ Alexander's method consciously, thoroughly.

That's daunting enough, yet my recent experiences with the Technique are pushing me to take on even more. I feel compelled in all logic to ask: Why stop only before each movement? No less crucial in our lives are our thoughts and our feelings, especially our emotions. Efforts to limit habit ought surely to be comprehensive, embracing the whole life. That's what I want to attempt&emdash;indeed, I see this as unavoidable if I am to commit myself fully to taking 'the method of Mr Alexander' into the living of my life. I find myself resolving to introspect as often as possible, observing myself in action as systematically as I can.

My past work with the Technique has been intensely practical, preoccupied with body use, conceived almost exclusively as posture and movement. On the rare occasions when I have theorised, I have said that the Technique is a way of replacing unconscious habitual use of the body with a conscious use which tries to approximate to a scheme of best-possible-use as illumined by Alexander's research. This body work has been difficult even when I could lean on guidance from my teacher, Sylvie Collins, but it has also been so rewarding as to keep me wanting to go forward. I know, with boundless gratitude, that Alexander has vastly improved my posture and movement and so made life better.

John Dewey & FM Alexander.

But now Dewey's hurrah for Alexander's method has got through to me. I realise I have been shortsighted in limiting the Technique to movement. My new understanding that habit is the principal obstruction to life-as-conscious-awareness enables me to see that habit controls my thought and feeling no less than it controls my movement. My task then is to confront the whole of life, seen as a psychophysical trinity of movement-feeling-thinking, and to rescue it from habit.

'By twenty most people are programmed,' says a modern author, updating the adage that, 'We are all creatures of habit'. By twenty, indeed, many are hooked on one or another of the principal human addictions&emdash;drugs, sex, power&emdash;as explained by A. E. Housman:

Addictions, of course, are only the most compelling of our many habits. We are also beset by a host of habit-compulsions in our thinking and feeling, two areas which in Housman's last two lines are seen to be closely related. My only quibble is that, usually, feeling precedes thinking. It has a way of being more elemental, more likely to generate or condition thought, in contradiction of the myth that homo sapiens is "noble in reason". "The mass of men," said Thoreau long ago, "lead lives of quiet desperation". We go rushing on, driven by habitual feelings, and our thinking seldom rises above patchy rationalisation of those feelings.

So I'm determined to win back the 90 per cent or more of my life alienated by the trance of habit. I want to wake up. And stay awake.

Alexander shows me that this enterprise must be founded on inhibiting&emdash;that is, on stopping my automatic response to a stimulus. In order to change, he says, I must first stop what I have been doing, really stop, and only then do the new thing and do it consciously. If I fail to stop/negate/inhibit the old, then the old will tenaciously prevail, or it will so modify the new as to make it different from what I intended. Inhibiting means either that I catch myself a split second before reacting or that I notice a reaction in progress and stop it. It puts me, as conscious self, up front in the driver's seat, in control of my life in the present moment.

Academic psychologists have endlessly studied 'the stimulus-response mechanism' (S-R), but they have overlooked what the non-academic Alexander discovered: the significance for human development of saying stop between the two stages (S-stop-R). Several ancient teachings have come close to Alexander's discovery. Some Buddhist exercises, for example. Or a Kashmir manuscript "copied and recopied countless times", which promises to "open the invisible door of consciousness" to anyone willing to 'centre' life on a quintessential discipline such as, "Just as you have the impulse to do something, stop."2

How did Alexander arrive at inhibiting? He had already spent years researching the way he used his body and had found that since birth he, like everyone else, had developed sadly deficient habits of posture and movement. Painstaking self-observation led him to his first great original discovery: that a particular relationship of the head to the neck and back is fundamental to good body use.

But instead of basking in the kudos of that insight, he had proceeded at once to the no less difficult task of searching for a way to teach how to change from bad habits of body use to a new pattern. The search produced the second great discovery: simply (!) to pause between stimulus and response.

To pause? If one did no more than that a score of times throughout each day, taking a second or two between the stimulus and one's habitually immediate response, one would benefit considerably by being more collected, poised, aware. But Alexander's method proposes more.

Each day confronts us with a stream of stimuli&emdash;outer and inner promptings&emdash;which 'push us around' and thus run our lives, so that we say 'it's all go', 'a rat-race', and 'I'm run off my feet'. Mostly we react instantly, triggered into movement (when the phone rings), or into feeling (when someone slights us), or into thinking (when a problem presents). Alexander proposes that we put an end to this reaction-habit by inhibiting, saying 'no' or 'stop', and deciding consciously whether and how we will act.

Since Alexander elaborated his Technique, the growth of general systems theory has lent weight to the importance he attached to inhibiting as a vital early step in the process of conscious change. Each of our three great capacities&emdash;moving, feeling, thinking&emdash;may be viewed as a sub-system which, in the nature of sub-systems, carries within itself two opposed tendencies: on one hand to serve the whole body-mind system; on the other to serve only itself and live its own life. The health/wholeness/balance of the person&emdash;as 'whole person'&emdash;depends on his or her assertion of authority over the parts or sub-systems. This 'whole person' can only be a reasoning self, acting consciously, after inhibiting the 'part person' or sub-system which tends otherwise to go its own habitual way 'on automatic'.

Let me turn to my attempts at practice. I find application of Alexander's method easiest in the area of movement because I have done so much work here under my teacher's direction&emdash;and anyway, movement is external, physical and visible, whereas thought and feeling are internal, subjective and invisible.

The mind is seldom free of some kind of verbal or visual thinking, so I have a continual problem of when to inhibit it. At present I am content to catch my thought-flow when it is being compulsive, trivial, absurd, etc.&emdash;that is, in its more obviously unworthy moments. I say 'no' and then decide what I want to think.

My introspecting has made me acutely aware that thinking is usually associated intimately with feeling. In fact the two are often impossible to separate. And just as it is true that verbal and/or visual thought trickles continuously through the mind, so it is true that feelings are always pushing for entry to consciousness&emdash;feelings in their diverse forms as sense-perceptions, emotions, desires, and instinctive drives or appetites.

I am finding that the inhibition of at least the commonly recurring reaction feelings (e.g. boredom, irritation) is generally easier than the inhibition of reactive thought. I find too that work on the inhibition of some feelings can put an end to a nagging train of thought. For instance, inhibiting anxiety of the 'irrational dread' kind&emdash;a churning in the solar plexus&emdash;can disperse a cluster of 'down' thoughts. All too commonly, I now realise, this or that feeling has been the stimulus of many of my past thoughts. Now, when I inhibit a feeling, I often notice that it takes away the energy which had been generating my thought&emdash;I am of course speaking of unwanted negative thoughts, not of good thinking and feeling which I choose to cultivate. At the same time I realise and accept that the source of some feelings, including several strong and recurring ones, is hidden too deep in my being to locate.

Is the source genetic, deriving, say, from the 'collective unconscious' or from 'existential anxiety'&emdash;or is it experiential, a result of "womb stuff, birth stuff, oral stuff, anal stuff, oedipal stuff, shadow stuff, anima stuff, parent-adult-child stuff, character armour and all the rest of it"?3

The psychologists have never been able to agree whether to search for the source of a neurosis or to deal directly with the neurotic manifestations. I see Alexander as leaving them with this problem&emdash;he simply walks around it. His concern is with the person in this present moment, with putting her or him in 'constructive conscious control' instead of becoming engrossed with either the possible causes or the expressions of neurotic/psychotic tendencies. He simply inhibits, and then gets on with consciously and self-reliantly directing the thinking-feeling-moving that is required for controlling this moment's situation. Of course, this inhibiting is specific and brief, different in kind from the broad states of 'repression' and 'suppression' which loom large in psychoanalytical literature.

Few things have brought me more of a sense of being in control of my life than the attention I have recently been paying to my feeling side. I have grown aware of areas of feeling, and I can often put a finger on these, literally. Indeed, I attribute some of my success in inhibiting unwanted feelings (e.g. of anxiety or excitement) to my ability thus to objectively locate these areas in my body.

My conviction about the value of inhibiting has been doubled by my discovery of two powers which attach to the moment of inhibiting: first, that saying no, or otherwise consciously shifting attention from what I have habitually been doing, always invokes a felt release of solar-plexus tension and opens me to a deep, satisfying, belly-descending breath; second, that I self-remember at that instant, by which I mean that having been operating at a relatively mechanical habit level, I now experience a rise to the level of self-awareness attention.

The latter experience persuades me to accept E. F. Schumacher's view that human self-awareness is a higher level than everyday thinking, which is so rooted in habit.4 I find self-awareness to be fresher, wider, calmer&emdash;indeed, a calm eminence of being. To the extent that it lifts me above the turbulence of feelings and (related) conflicted verbal/visual thinking, my self-awareness becomes high ground from which I can best embark on reasoning my way through the problems each day presents. I glimpse the possibility of at last working consistently to be "noble in reason"… I am firmly with Alexander when he says that his whole purpose is to bring men and women to constructive conscious use of the self. In that purpose I see hope of finding that we humans are not an inherently flawed species as Arthur Koestler gloomily decided&emdash;rather we are incomplete, yet with a potential as well as a responsibility to reason our way to a sane future. Life becomes a search for completeness&emdash;my search being helped incomparably by "the method of Mr Alexander".

I wrote the article seven years ago to clarify my insights up to that point, but then put it aside to test its propositions still further in life.

How much has 'every moment Alexander' become my daily practice? Not every moment, alas. But every day since then, and many times a day, I have 'inhibited' in the ordinary stress of living. That is, I have consciously, briefly, stopped. (Recently I heard something like this called 'the Alexander stop technique'&emdash;not Alexander's term.) Doing so has become significant for me on two levels: in coping with each day; and in aspiring to be humanly better than the habitual state of 'stream of consciousness' or 'monkey mind'.

I live a pressured life and normally work a 10/12 hour day. Not the life of a contemplative. So what goes on in this Alexander-influenced life?

My inhibiting is a small, quiet joy. I have built into my days an 'alarm clock' which rings as frequently as possible to awaken me from the trance of habit. In other systems this is the moment of mindfulness (Buddha), self-remembering (Gurdjieff), objective self-awareness (modern psychology) and so on. When it 'rings', that remarkable thing happens: I find myself drawing a deeper breath. The breath that had been fluttering high in the lungs drives deeper down&emdash;because conscious self has taken over from the subconscious, which had been carrying on in its habitual, dogged, rather anxious way.

Inhibition is the split second of becoming aware, self-remembered, collected. It doesn't even require the words no or stop&emdash;they are simply reinforcing. It opens a space in the flow of consciousness&emdash;thinking, feeling, moving&emdash;wherein something new can be done provided I then will to do it. In short, it opens a possibility of change.

Direction is an order from me to myself, in the moment following inhibition, to embark on willed change. Best it follow immediately! Otherwise, habit promptly reasserts itself. Alexander is saying to us, keep inhibiting-directing if you seriously want to improve, for, "Change involves carrying out an activity against the habit of life".5

I find I'm not nowadays always intent on improving my body-use though I do, in most 'stops', incidentally check and direct my posture/movement in a twinkling. The stops, need I say, are across the board: at any point of felt 'impulse to act', any opportunity to observe trees or clouds, any engagement with the washing-up, traffic, people, whatever.

My invariable gain is at the instant of self-awareness (quiet joy) and deepened breath (added energy). So every conscious awakening&emdash;every 'Alexander moment'&emdash;becomes a gain in awareness, energy, health. I gain thus a hundred times a day now I've built this alarm clock into living … That's as much as I can report on my continuing aspiration towards 'every moment Alexander.

- R. D. (Bob) Walshe

ENDNOTES

1. Housman, A. E., The Collected Poems; Jonathon Cape: London (1977)
2. Reps, Paul, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Anchor Books: New York (1961)
3. Rowan, John, "The Real Self and Mystical Experiences" in Journal of Humanistic Psychology; Spring (1983) p.24
4. See Schumacher, E. F., A Guide for the Perplexed; Abacus: London (1978)
5. Alexander, F. M., The Alexander Technique, Edited By E. Maisel; Thames & Hudson: London (1974) p.3

ABOUT THE WRITER

Bob Walshe has worked in teaching, editing, publishing and environmentalism. He is author of a number of books in History and English. His first Alexander lesson, in 1960, was with Australia's first teacher after FM&emdash;Alan Murray.

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