auspiciousdragon.net

An everyday guide to habit and backache

I’ve been a student of the Alexander technique since 2001. I occasionally get asked something along the lines of “what’s it all about then, huh?” and as I never have an answer prepared I thought I would make some notes here so as to be able to direct people to.

Back in 2002 I read everything about Alexander that I could get hold of – both web and book based. Generally I came away none the wiser. This was partly because the technique is that: a technique. It is not a theory, nor a religion, although there are people who have tried to turn it into both. It suffers from needing to resort to words that we all think we know the meaning of but which it presses into specific technical usage. It is also partly because the technique’s best practitioners spend their time teaching one on one. The book writers seemed to have a tendency to be practitioners without large practices. A further problem is that the original Mr Alexander wrote several books himself and these are treated with a reverence that they don’t deserve. There is even a problem of name. The Alexander Technique seems too wordy, whilst AT is too much for the insiders. I generally refer to the technique as plain “Alexander” which is inelegant but understandable.

I started with Alexander after a spell of acute back pain (a slipped or herniated disc). The teacher that I found had started as a pianist who found he could no longer relax his arms and shoulders. Mr Alexander was an actor who kept losing his voice. The reasons for Alexandering seem too varied to have anything in common, but as I’ll explain, there is a common thread. But first a little about what other experience I gained along the way. I am endorsing one particular technique “because it worked for me” and it is important to realise that I did not leap into the first wacky idea that came along when I was in pain. Either, before starting Alexander, or concurrently with studying it, I investigated:

- Physiotherapy. I have worked with physios and have a nodding acquaintance with their methods. There are various physio endorsed back care products which are designed to help get back joint mobile again. Ironically, given that this is a charge that physios level at other members of the medical profession, I felt that the physio solutions were mostly aimed at treating symptoms and whilst valuable were unlikely to be a long term answer. The physio model of the body seemed too mechanical.

- A kneeling chair. These occasionally fashionable objects aim to change the way we sit which they indeed do. I found mine excellent for changing my habitual sitting slump into a new sort of sitting slump.

- Pilates, and other types of gym work. I found these to be an actively bad thing. The model that said that my problems were caused by not being strong enough seemed all wrong and I felt that I was on the verge of greater injury not improved health (this is not to say anything about cardio-vascular centred exercise. My problem was not my heart).

- Yoga. This seemed to have more going for it, although as there is no definition of what Yoga is it comes in many forms and the then fashionable “power yoga” seemed very far removed from more tradional forms. There is an unfortunate confusion in the minds of many practicioners with a form of mysticism and Yoga as a whole suffers from the fact that anybody can hang up a sign and proclaim themselves to be a master Yoga teacher.

- Massage. In the course of all of this I became a qualified massage therapist (and as far as I know am still licenced to practice massage in New South Wales). Massage has a lot to offer but is definitely a treatment – something being done to a passive patient. In the course of the clinic work during my training I worked on clients who would come back week after week to be “fixed” and who went home feeling fine, but who would need fixing again. A good massage is a wonderous thing, but not many of us can have an in-house masseur attending to our every ache and pain.

So, what is this Alexander thing?

The major propositions of the Alexander Technique are easy enough to write down (and distressingly short if you were hoping to write a book and earn money). My, non-authorised, version is as follows:

Human beings are creatures of habit. Habits are generally good things. They are what stop us freezing up with indecision when asked whether we want sugar in our coffee and what enables good musicians and sportsmen to get progressively better. Our bodies and minds learn patterns, routines, movements and set pieces. In short; habits.

When something is habitual it passes un-noticed. We are tuned to detect change and not constancy.

Many people are end gainers. By this I mean we tend to look for the end result and not the means whereby we achieve that result. Some people do this more than others and it is by no means a universal trait. As a society we value measurable tangible achievements such as exam passes or promotion at work and don’t pay much regard to the mental, emotional or physical costs of these achievements. To use an example from childhood, school expected me to pass my exams. It never mentioned that by sitting badly all day and by gripping my pen as if trying to crush it I would risk chronic back problems to counter my academic success.

A combination of chance accidents and our tendency to concentrate on ends not means produces many opportunities for us to pick up bad physical habits. Bad in the sense that we are using our bodies in ways that are likely to lead to pain or injury later. Once we have these habits we are very poor at recognising them. They become our norm. Unless something else comes along randomly to knock us out of our habits they tend to stick around. Over time these habits accumulate until something goes wrong with us. And even at this point we are hopeless at taking the hint. Every doctor I’ve ever discussed this with (I used to manage hospitals professionally) has said that a large proportion of patients need to be told to change their lifestyles (whether it be smoking or whatever) but this is hard work to do and very unrewarding. What the patient wants is symptom relieving treatment so that is what they are given. Chronic back pain is the complaint that GPs (General Practitioners – general physicians in the UK) despair of the most. Very few cases are curable medically.

Many of the habits that we pick up express themselves in over tight muscles. People tend to slump. Their shoulders tend to be pulled forward. Necks are bent back and chins jut out. Feet tend to point sideways not frontwards. Hands tend to hang palm out not palm in. All of these commonly observable postures are the direct result of muscle tension. Muscles that are doing work that they don’t need to becuase we have lost the ability to recognise that the original cause has gone. A simple practical example is pregnancy. Pregnancy is very hard on posture. Our bodies are not built for the weight distribution that pregnancy temporarily creates. Some people go on walking as if still pregnant for years after giving birth.

All of these posture “defects” are not bad in themselves but because they lead to medical problems. Somebody who turns their feet out will be putting more stress on their knee and hip joints with every step than they need to. A jogger with this habit is expending a lot of energy overcoming the mechanical inefficiencies this causes and damaging their joints.

The Alexander Technique is a method releasing muscle tension. A way of noticing bad habits and helping to unwind habits of many years standing. It is an education in the way our bodies work.

Some anecdotes and frustrations

By the time that my back “gave out” I had a number of muscle related problems which were a result of a lifetime of misuse.

One of the numerous hang-ups the language of Alexander has is that its terms seem value loaded. Misuse? By that I simply mean that I was not attending to the machine that is my body. I was busy getting on with life and like many people, just assuming that my body would go on taking the strain. I was loosely aware that I was not as supple as I wanted to be and had also noticed a few of the normal warning signs without understanding them (more on this later). I also watched in horror as people only a few years older than me started taking days off work with bad backs, or people who became virtually immobile after a spring weekend gardening. But, hey, I was busy. I didn’t have the bandwidth to do more than shove these observations into the “later” box.

During the course of the four years (at the time of writing) that I have been Alexandering I have noticeably changed my posture. I am about an inch taller than I used to be. I have changed the way that I pick things up, now using my arms much more than my back. I have changed the way that I walk and the place on my shoes that the wear shows. I no longer get pain in my thumb joints. I have withstood many days heavy gardening…..in fact the list of small changes is very long (Alexander improvements come in small doses) and would not be an interesting read from the outside. Here are a few highlights:

- I remember the day my back disc slipped back into place. That was a good moment.

- I used to have a jogging route around the harbour in Sydney. My standard route worked out over the months took 30 minues and a few seconds. Say never more than 31 minutes but never less than 30 mins 15. One day I got round the route in less than 25 minutes. At the time I brushed this aside. I must have missed a bit out or forgotten to do the circuit of the park or whatever. But, over the coming weeks I never took more than 26 minutes again and I had to increase the length of the route to regain the 30 minutes that was my target for cardio-vascular reasons. The wear pattern on my trainers noticeably changed.

- One day I bent down to get something out of a low cabinet in the kitchen. I felt my lower back work in a way that it clearly hadn’t for years. I actually felt young again to the point that I spent the next fifteen minutes getting things needlessly out of low cupboards for the simple joy in the feeling. Within a couple of days this new feeling had become normal again – my new habit – and it became impossible to generate the feeling of difference that I had noticed.

Because Alexander is about the unwinding of habits that you do not know that you have it can be a very slow process. And because you are dealing with actions which do not have conscious causes then you need solutions which equally work at the sub- or un-conscious level. If you are told you are slumping and need to stand up straight you can achieve standing up straight for all of thirty seconds or so. This means that an Alexander teacher does not tell you what you are trying to achieve. If they did you would not be able to achieve it. Experience has taught me that this is all true. But in the beginning it seemed counter productive and downright contrary. Just tell me what I need to do was a thought which went through my mind often.

Do you need Alexander?

Probably. But there is no point me telling you that. You need to follow your own journey. However, here are some signposts:

- When you go to a mirror to adjust your tie or check your hair do you automatically straighten up? If you do then you are trying to create in the mirror an image of yourself that no longer exists. When confronted with the mirror reality you need to adjust. Well, slump re-establishes seconds after you turn away from the mirror.

- Do you find that you need to adjust your car’s rear view mirror often? Usually in the mornings it seems to be set for somebody shorter than you are whilst in the evenings it seems like somebody taller than you has been driving the car whilst you have been at work.

- Do your siblings tell you that you are shorter than you used to be?

- Try to catch yourself unawares whilst standing. Which way do your feet point, forwards or sideways (and which way did they point in those horrid family photos of you twenty years ago)?

- Put your hands on the table in front of you palm up. Relax. Do your fingers curl or do they lay flat? If they curl, get somebody to push gently down on them. Do they spring back?

What do you do when doing Alexander?

The essence of Alexandering is NOT DOING. You will probably not understand what this means without the help of a teacher.

Alexander books will explain that you need to lie semi-supine and then recite a routine which makes the whole thing sound rather like a chant. This is my take on what is going on.

First off, lie semi-supine. This is great for your back. If you do nothing else this will be good for you. Semi supine means lying on your back with your knees bent. Put something under your head which is non yielding – like a few paperback books – to get the top of your spine straight, and try to put your legs in a position that you do not have to consciously hold them in place. This takes a bit of practice to get right but roughly right is good enough to begin with. Just stay like that for a few minutes trying to concentrate on the way you are lying.

The chant, which is just what worked for the original Alexander, is intended to be a mind map of the body and a way of reviewing each muscle group and trying to get it to relax. It helps if you know a bit about anatomy but even if you don’t then just using everyday terms will work. Start off by lying semi-supine and just imagine your head being drawn away from your shoulders making you taller. Don’t do anything. You are just thinking. You are trying to send a message to your muscles that their current state is not their most relaxed state and that they can be longer. You have no direct mechanism for this and anyway you think that the muscles already are relaxed. Just go on imagining the muscle longer. Reconnect your conscious brain to the relevant nerves and controls. Unform those habits. Slowly, very slowly, you will feel muscles let go. This may take years. It may happen in minutes. Find a teacher.