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.

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