Stillness as growth

Sometimes getting still to shed a habit and let something new emerge seems fruitless.

We live in a time and space that emphasizes doing.

Waiting IS doing something.

When you plant a seed, many things happen that you don’t see before a shoot comes up from the soil.

You don’t see how the food you eat becomes fuel for your body and brain.

You don’t see how neurotransmitters create elegant, coordinated action.

Slowing down is under rated.

Give yourself some time and space.

Let the story you tell yourself fade into the background for a short time and find your breath.

Try being still with inner space and inner movement.

From May 2006: The Alexander Technique is a vital tool for managing your stress

I wrote this post for National Stress Awareness Month in May of 2006. I imagine many of your are experiencing stress. The Alexander Technique is a vital tool in managing your stress.

Here are the top three physical symptoms of stress, cited from this website in May 2006:

• sleep disturbances

• back, shoulder or neck pain

• tension or migraine headaches

The Alexander Technique addresses stress and tension from a mental and a physical approach.

On the mental level, students learn to identify their unique stress triggers, and how to slow down the rate at which they react to those situations. For example, when facing an unpleasant event (dental visit, presentation at work, loaded family interactions), learning to recognize the anticipatory anxiety, in the form of self-talk, can allow the student to then notice the physical responses. This can include tightening the neck, tensing shoulder or jaw, and perhaps subtle breath-holding.

Observing inner dialogue, some of my students realize they are feeding their anxiety by expecting negative experiences, or recalling past events over and over. They are able to re-direct where they put their attention, and find they can minimize the affect of their worry.

On the physical level, students can learn to release degrees of tension and contraction in the neck, shoulders, jaw and elsewhere. Even when their thoughts wander to triggers, they can still release muscle tension, minimizing the impact of the stress.

Self-Care: It Feels Good and It’s Good For You!

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash

I was working with a client who had originally come to study with me years ago to help her with her singing. She recently returned to lessons, this time to manage a diagnosis of bursitis in her hip joint. No longer working in music, she was now in the world of Not-For-Profits and business. She’d had PT, and was taking Pilates, and something her Pilates instructor said reminded her that Alexander would be a good tool in her toolbox for self-care and healing.

We picked up almost right where we had left off. Her nervous system still remembered our work in the Alexander Technique, and within minutes of the start of our first lessons, she was pain-free while sitting, which has been one of the challenging activities she had been dealing with for 4 months before reaching out for lessons.

In our last lesson, about 7 lessons since she returned, she was her usual, delightful self. I was surprised when she told me “I really only smile like this when I am at my Pilates sessions or here with you at my Alexander lessons. I sort of feel guilty that I am taking time away from my business .”

“Really? “ I asked.

“Oh, yes, my colleagues and co-workers would be surprised to see me smiling so much. I’m not like this at work.”

“I never thought about it, but by it’s very nature, shouldn’t self-care be pleasurable?”

She paused, and took that idea on board.

What a thought: something that is good for you can be enjoyable?

I shared this obvious, but not so obvious, perspective with my students all week. “This is one of the healthiest professions in the world: I get a great lessons every time I give a lesson.”

One of my students broke out in laughter during his lesson, when I told him this. “I do better when I teach, and your lesson is better when I practice what I preach: ease, calm, poise, and efficient effort in my own system while I put hands on you to help you find an easier way of being in your own system.”

Not all helping professionals get benefits for themselves when they see clients. Massage therapists are often fatigued and find their work physically challenging. Their work can put then at risk for injury because they have to work so hard.

One of my teacher-trainers who was a founding member of The American Center for the Alexander Technique (ACAT), Debby Caplan,, worked as a physical therapist in the 50’s, helping amputees and injured veterans recover from wartime.

In some cases, they had undergone amputations and needed to relearn the activities of daily living. Debby was tiny, about the same height as me, 5’2”, and she said that her daily work was physically demanding, including helping patients transfer from bed to chair to walking. Debby said she managed the demands of her work by coordinating her own movement and activities with Alexander Technique concepts and principles, and she left the hospital each day with more energy, less sore and strained than many of her much larger co-workers in the field.

Debby had been trained to teach Alexander Technique in her late teens by her mother, Alma Frank (who had been trained by and graduated from F. M. Alexander’s teacher certification in England).

So, next time you are in the process of doing something that is supposed to be good for you, and you are enjoying the process, or experiencing greater ease and relief, consider that this happy-product of self-care may be a clue that it’s working! Not everything that is good for you has to be unpleasant…

Alexander jargon: using language in a non-habitual way

There are many folks who are critical of the jargon* we use in the Alexander Technique. I understand their point. Semantics (the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning) can muddy communication. Our terminology can be confusing, de-legitimizing, off putting and inaccessible.

However, consider the definition of jargon: * “special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand”. Alexander students gain skill from the process one goes through to understand the jargon. Alexander’s directions and concepts can invite someone to think in a new way. Language can be used to trigger novelty in perception, making it possible for someone to access change. Alexander Technique is about change. We are looking for ways to bring habituated, automatic responses to a level of awareness where we have more agency to choose how we respond.

I offer Alexander’s main instructions in many variations, in my self work and with my students:

• Neck free, head forward and up, back lengthening and widening, knees forward and away.

• Allow your neck to be free, to allow you head to move forward and up, to allow your back to lengthen and widen, to allow your knees to release forward and away.

• I allow my neck to be free, to allow my head to release forward and up, to allow my knees to release forward and away from each other, to allow my shoulder to widen, lengthening through my arms and out my fingers.

• I don’t have to tighten my neck, I don’t have to pull the base of my skull back and down towards my tail, I don’t need to shorten or narrow my back, I don’t need to pull my arms and legs in.

I find this keeps me from becoming habitual and automatic, reciting words by rote without perceiving their meaning. After all, I can recite the alphabet, count, repeat song lyrics and any other number of string of words without needing to let them register. This is very to the experience that I can drive a familiar route and have the sense that I don’t remember passing the previous three exits. That kind of automated behavior is what the Alexander Technique seeks to remedy.

Another benefit of having a glossary of jargon in the Alexander paradigm is that it brings an awakening to our auditory processing during lessons and in our self-work.

Try This:

• Imagine your head getting lighter and easing towards the ceiling. What do you notice?

• Say to yourself: “I don’t have to hold my breath” as you think of your head being light. What do you notice?

• What does it mean to let your head move forward and up? Does the image below illustrate what you would understand from those words?

The movement Alexander meant by “forward and up”