Alexander Technique in Cheshire CT

Keeping your back in mind

Teaching the Alexander Technique for Postural Education

Sciatica, arthritis, spinal fusion, degeneration, stenosis, scoliosis, injury …

When I am teaching back pain education, this is the beginning of a long list of complaints, all telling individual stories of pain and suffering.

Recent research shows that the Alexander Technique is the most effective non-invasive method for long term relief from back pain.  Developed over 100 years ago by F.M. Alexander it soon became evident that by restoring innate body mechanisms students gained much more than better posture. Alexander discovered that the relationship of the head, neck and back were of primary importance to restore physiological functioning of the whole body, in areas like breathing, digestion, circulation, mood and sleep.

A few months ago Ana came for a first lesson and told me about the severe sciatica that had been plaguing her for months. I saw that she leaned awkwardly towards one side away from her pain. During the next few weeks we explored her ways of sitting, standing and walking in weekly lessons. "I feel as if all my weight was lifted from my back -as if I were an ornament hanging from the eiling" she said one day as her body was better aligned and freed. Now Ana has been coming to see me for almost six months, she can walk awithout pain, and sits "on her sitting bones" no longer putting her entire body in pain because of her narrowed back.

We are usually unaware of the physical habits we have unconsciously acquired over a lifetime of learning, imitation and adaptation to stress or injury. Our increased muscular tension can be compared to driving a car with the emergency brakes on. The spine is quite sensitive to muscular shortening and compression, but likewise it is accessible to an upward release and organization of the vertebrae.

In my Alexander Technique lessons I will help you find out how postural misalignment, unconscious habit and daily stress contribute to your back trouble. You will have some lessons on a massage table, guided by gentle touch and words to increase body awareness. Other lessons will focus on daily activities like sitting, walking, bending for housework, computer and manual work. You will learn how to adapt your sleeping posture for better rest positions and we will increase stability in your torso, develop strength in your legs and improve balance.

Teaching with my hands to give you space. What’s going on in an Alexander lesson?

 

A hand on your shoulder, a pat on your back, a supportive arm, a helping hand. Friends do it. Politicians do it. How many ways are there to touch someone? What types of touch do we appreciate, love, detest? What does touch do for us?

The Alexander Technique is described as an educational interaction between a teacher and a student, the teacher using gentle touch and words for guidance. After a teacher training course of 1600 hours over three years the Alexander Trainee is considered qualified to teach by the American Society for the Alexander Technique and similar associations in other countries. We spend a great deal of that time learning to use our hands. And yet I have recently asked myself again: what am I doing in lessons with my hands?

I imagine you, my audience, small as this group may be, as persons who might have experienced the Alexander Technique and are, in your own way interested in finding out: what is behind the touch of ‘educated hands’.

Allow me to send you on a little journey. I will guide you from various self-explorations to my personal explanation of touch in the Alexander Technique. My lesson plan today is to spend some time helping you to experience space inside yourself, let’s say, space in your shoulders.

What is your mind doing to get this space? You might get slightly nervous and ask: where are my shoulders? Your thoughts might rush through various regions in the vicinity of shoulders; there are shoulder blades; are they different from shoulder joints? Where are the shoulder joints anyway – maybe close to the upper arms? Does she mean the back or the front of shoulders? - Or are you having a calmer attitude and start feeling yourself from inside your chest? Another option is to focus on feeling the skin of the shoulder area from the outside?

Let’s take a break from this searching and feeling. As much as we look in the mirror or go to exercise classes, we are not really trained to feel our body in any reliable way. Words, like shoulders, can trigger reactions, images or emotions. Because of the unreliability of our feelings F.M. Alexander said: “When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won’t want to use it.” Consequently in the Alexander work we don’t want to rely on feeling, and I would now like to take you a step further.

Imagine that you wear epaulettes on your shoulders. This gives you an idea of the upper outer border of your shoulders. A similar effect can be achieved visualizing shoulder pads that women wore in their jackets a few years back. If we want to think of a larger area in the shoulder region imagine the light gossamer fabric of a cloak draped around you. Let me state right away, that this is not the Alexander Technique either; this is visualization, which might be helpful as an intermediate way to get an image of shoulders.

It is time to drop that image. Has the visualization of coverings on your shoulders helped? Do you have a sensation of your skin enveloping muscles and bones?

As a teacher of the Alexander Technique I will guide you more and more towards the use of thinking -as opposed to feeling- as the means whereby we access the body. Can you think of your ribs and the space between them, ribs available for breathing because they are not fixed to the chest bone and have muscles between them? Do you have a notion of ribs under your armpits? Are you aware of movement? Can you sense the distance between your left and right shoulder or even better, can you think wide to the left and to the right shoulder simultaneously? And beyond? Can you think out through both your shoulders into the space outside of you? Do spend some time on this! And what is happening to the space between your upper spine and your chest bone or sternum? How deep are you there?

Now that we have explored variables in the Alexander student’s options to experience physical space through feeling, visualizing and directional thinking, I will talk about the added quality of the skilled touch by an Alexander Technique teacher. The hands are regularly and correctly described as non-doing. But what does that mean? It is easier for me to say what I am NOT doing when I put my hands on your shoulders. I have no agenda for you, which means that I neither want to act on you nor intensely feel you. There is no rubbing, stroking or smoothing. I put my hands on your shoulders and wait. I am not setting out to feel tightness or temperature, but I might receive such sensations including a deeper sense of your skeletal structure. I am tuning into the space inside you and despite a clear touch, I tend to my hands as open and receiving, spacious themselves, not just the hands but inside my arms towards elbows and shoulders. Through my spatial thinking and sensing I am building a connection between your structures and space and my structures and space. The sensation of skin is easily transcended in order to appreciate what’s underneath. There is the weight and size of a bone, the release of a muscle acting less on that bone, the thought of room and the notion of breathing movement enlarging that room. This waiting and this kind of thinking towards the body will increase our awareness for whatever needs attention. My intention is to experience space in your shoulders, not to want that space for you and to do something to create it. This good intention might enable you to become more aware of width, length and depth, a letting go of what’s not needed, an emergence of a structure or support. Through Inhibiting and Directing I am allowing space inside myself in order to help you experience space for you.

Over time, through practice and lessons, your own awareness and skill will grow. You will become able to dialogue with your own self and its space with more ease.

 

 

 

 

 

I am on a Julia Child craze.

My friends and family think I am a good cook, I am not sure my German mother would agree. I learned cooking in this country and am a product of the fast and easy, eclectic cuisine with unusual combinations of flavors and textures. I have a few folkloristic items from the old world on my menu, but I never accomplished the laborious doughs and dumplings, the beautifully decorated Christmas cookies, the multilayered butter cream filled cakes… The reason is: they would need lots of practice, just like American pie crust.

Last week in preparation for a road trip I went to our public library and picked up the Audio CD of Julia Child’s book “My Life in France”. Since the art of French cooking always seemed daunting to me I had never so much as opened one of Julia’s cookbooks in a store or in a friend’s kitchen. I knew only that she discovered food late in life and that she brought French cooking to America. My only less iconic piece of knowledge about Julia is her quote “I hate health food”.  What I learned in my audio book about this woman astounded me. She repeated and practiced recipes over and over again when she went to cooking school, and later when she adapted French recipes for the American market. She wanted to understand every single step of transformation from an animal to a meal, from basic ingredients to a sauce or Baguette, she looked into the science of flour types and limitations of ovens, but most of all she repeated and reworked and then did it once again - just to be sure. After she had already been a highly accomplished home cook and started to teach – a friend! - she cooked the dish in the morning in order to be prepared for the lesson in the afternoon. She checked and re-checked all the recipes that went into her first cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, which took about a decade of preparation.

When I am teaching the Alexander Technique I sometimes hear students complain during the second or third lesson that something is difficult. Immediately I feel inadequate and pressured to assist them better with my hands and words. In the back of my mind I feel I should fulfill some of the great promises and discoveries this work holds during my first three introductory sessions.

The fact of the matter is however that Alexander Teachers go through a 3-year 1600 hour fulltime training in order to qualify as teachers, that they continue to exchange with and take lessons from colleagues – more or less for the rest of their lives, and that they lie down regularly to practice elements introduced in the first few lessons: neck to be free, head forward and up, back back, knees away, etc. It is this practice of conscious control, this mastering of basic ingredients that enables us to produce specialties and delicacies like the preparation for an artistic or athletic performance, the resolution of a persistent pain, the managing of a psychological or emotional crisis.

F.M. Alexander did not accept anyone as a student unless the person committed to a minimum of 30 lessons, daily, five times a week. He knew how to be successful. So did Julia Child, as well as many other people who are accomplishing in unusual ways. My young daughter’s first violin teacher quoted Shin’ichi Suzuki when she told us “you don’t need to practice every day, only on the days you eat” – in Suzuki teaching figures in the range of 10,000 repetitions are being mentioned to accomplish a next step.

Do you remember this old joke? A man walking in Manhattan asks a passer-by “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The other replied “Practice, my friend, practice.”