Alexander technique

The Alexander technique, named after Frederick Matthias Alexander, sets out to teach people how to avoid unnecessary muscular and mental tension during their everyday activities. It is an educational process rather than a relaxation technique or form of exercise. Most other methods take it for granted that 'one's awareness of oneself' is accurate, whereas Alexander said that people who had been using their musculature wrongly for a long time could not trust their feelings (sensory appreciation) in carrying out any activity or in responding to situations emotionally. Practitioners say that such problems are often caused by repeated misuse of one's musculature over a long period of time, for example, by standing or sitting with one's weight unevenly distributed, holding one's head incorrectly, walking or running inefficiently, or responding to stressful stimuli in an exaggerated way. The purpose of the Alexander technique is to help people unlearn maladaptive psychophysical habits and return to a balanced state of rest and poise in which one's musculature is functioning as an integrated whole.

Alexander developed the technique's principles in the 1890s as a personal tool to alleviate breathing problems and hoarseness during public speaking. He credited the technique with allowing him to pursue his passion for Shakespearean acting.

There is little good medical evidence that the Alexander technique confers any health benefit.

History

Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955) was a Shakespearean orator who developed voice loss during his performances. After doctors found no physical cause, Alexander reasoned that he was inadvertently doing something to himself while speaking to cause his problem. His self-observation in multiple mirrors revealed that he was contracting his entire stature prior to phonation in preparation for all verbal response. He developed the hypothesis that this habitual pattern of pulling the head backwards and downwards needlessly disrupted the normal working of the total postural, breathing and vocal mechanisms. After experimenting to develop his ability to stop the unnecessary and habitual contracting in his neck, displacement of his head, and shortening his stature, he found that his problem with recurrent voice loss was resolved. While on a recital tour in New Zealand (1895) he began to realise the wider significance of head carriage for overall physical functioning. Further, Alexander observed that many individuals commonly tightened their musculature in the same pattern as he had done, in anticipation of many other activities besides speech.

Alexander believed his work could be applied to improve individual health and well being. He further refined his technique of self-observation and re-training to teach his discoveries to others. As part of his teaching method, he also developed a unique way of imparting the improved kinesthetic and proprioceptive experience to his students. This approach to using the hands also allowed him to re-arrange the working of a person's entire supportive musculature as it functions in relation to gravity from moment to moment. He explained his reasoning in four books published in 1918, 1923, 1931 (1932 in the UK) and 1942. He also trained teachers to teach his work and to use their hands in this unique way from 1930 until his death in 1955. Teacher training was continued during World War II between 1941 and 1943, when Alexander accompanied children and teachers of the Little School to Stow, Massachusetts to join his brother, A. R. Alexander, who also taught his brother's technique. The American teacher training course included Frank Pierce Jones, who went on to conduct research work to explore aspects of the Alexander Technique at the Tufts Institute for Psychological Research, and he published many of his studies in professional journals. Since the 1960s, numerous training schools for teachers of the Alexander Technique have started up in the United States—some based upon the standards of training laid down by the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique established in England after Alexander's death in 1955 and others established by those who had not undergone the required length of training. In 1987, The North American Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique was established to maintain high teaching standards. It is now called The American Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique and is affiliated with the original Alexander society in London.

Famous people who have studied the Alexander Technique include actors Brian Bedford, Michael Caine, John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Judi Dench, Suzanna Hamilton, William Hurt, Jeremy Irons, Hugh Jackman, Sir Ben Kingsley, Kevin Kline, Patti Lupone, Paul Newman, Maggie Smith, Mary Steenburgen, Hilary Swank, Jessica Tandy, and Robin Williams; musicians Madonna, Paul McCartney, Yehudi Menuhin and Sting; playwright George Bernard Shaw; writers Roald Dahl, Robertson Davies, and Aldous Huxley; and Nobel Prize winner for medicine and physiology Nikolaas Tinbergen.

Process

Alexander's approach emphasizes mindful action. The technique is applied dynamically to everyday movements, as well as actions selected by students.

Actions such as sitting, squatting, lunging or walking are often selected by the teacher. Other actions may be selected by the student, tailored to their interests or work activities such as hobbies, computer use, lifting, driving or performance in acting, sports, speech or music. Alexander teachers often use themselves as examples. They demonstrate, explain, and analyze a student's moment to moment responses as well as using mirrors, video feedback or classmate observations. Guided modelling with a highly skilled hand contact is the primary tool for detecting and guiding the student into a more coordinated state in movement and at rest. Suggestions for improvements are often student-specific.

Exercise as a teaching tool is deliberately omitted because of a common mistaken assumption that there exists a "correct" position. There are only two specific procedures that are practiced by the student; the first is lying semi-supine; resting in this way uses "mechanical advantage" as a means of redirecting long-term and short-term accumulated muscular tension into a more integrated and balanced state. This position is sometimes referred to as "constructive rest", or "the balanced resting state". It's also a specific time to practice Alexander's principle of conscious "directing" without "doing." The second exercise is the "Whispered Ah," which is used to co-ordinate and free breathing & vocal production.

Freedom, efficiency and patience are the prescribed values. Proscribed are unnecessary effort, self-limiting habits as well as mistaken perceptual assumptions. Students are led to change their largely automatic routines that are interpreted by the teacher to currently or cumulatively be physically limiting, inefficient, or not in keeping with best use of themselves as a whole. The Alexander teacher provides verbal coaching while monitoring, guiding and preventing unnecessary habits at their source with a specialized hands-on assistance. This specialized hands-on skill also allows Alexander teachers to bring about a balanced working of the student's supportive musculature as it relates to gravity's downward pull from moment to moment. Often, students require a great deal of hands-on work in order to experience a fully poised relation to gravity in both movement and at rest as they react to all life's stimuli. The hands-on skill requires Alexander teachers to maintain in themselves from moment to moment the improved psycho-physical co-ordination they are communicating to the student.

Alexander developed terminology to describe his methods, outlined in his four books that explain the sometimes paradoxical experience of learning and substituting new improvements.

Constructive Conscious Control

Alexander insisted on the need for strategic reasoning because kinesthetic and proprioceptive sensory awarenesses are relative senses, not truthful indicators of a person's factual relationships within him/herself or within the environment. A person's habitual neuro-muscular relation to gravity is often sensed internally as normal, however inefficient. Alexander's term, "debauched sensory appreciation" describes how the repetition of an action or response encourages the formation of habits as a person adapts to various circumstances or builds skills. Once trained and forgotten, completed habits may be activated without feedback sensations that these habits are in effect, even when only thinking about the situations that elicit them. Short-sighted habits that have become harmfully exaggerated over time, such as restricted breathing or other habitually assumed adaptations to past circumstances, will stop after learning to perceive and prevent them.

End-gaining

Another example is the term "end-gaining". This term means to focus on a goal so as to lose sight of the "means-whereby" the goal could be most appropriately achieved. According to Alexander teachers, "end-gaining" increases the likelihood of selecting older or multiple conflicting coping strategies. End-gaining is usually carried out because an imperative priority of impatience or frustration justifies it. Excessive speed in thinking and acting often facilitates end-gaining.

Inhibition

In the Alexander technique lexicon, the principle of "inhibition" is considered by teachers to be the most important to gaining improved "use." F.M. Alexander's selection of this word predates the meaning of the word originated by Sigmund Freud. Inhibition, or 'intentional inhibition', is the act of refraining from responding in one's habitual manner - in particular, imposed tension in neck muscles (see Primary Control). Inhibition describes a moment of conscious awareness of a choice to interrupt, stop or entirely prevent an unnecessary habitual "misuse". As unnecessary habits are prevented or interrupted, a freer capacity and range of motion resumes and a more spontaneous choice of action or behavior can be discovered, which is experienced by the student as a state of "non-doing" or "allowing."

Primary control

This governs the normal or abnormal working of our postural mechanisms in relation to gravity from moment to moment, and there can be either a correct or incorrect employment of our "primary control" in every waking moment in reaction to the stimulus of living. The correct employment of the primary control involves a particular quality of head, neck torso, and limb relationship as we respond to gravity and all life's stimuli. Our responses are influenced for good or ill by the qualities of head and eye direction at the inception of a reaction. A subtle projection of intention for the neck to be free, the head to flow forward and up, the back to lengthen and widen serves to counteract the common backward and downward effects of the startle pattern that can often be detected at the beginning of every reaction to a stimulus from within or without. Students gradually learn to include attention to their lengthening in stature as a basis for their new means of initiating and continuing an action, responding to stimuli, or remaining constructively at rest.

Directions

To continue to select and reinforce the often less dominant "good use", it is recommended to repeatedly suggest, by thinking to oneself, a particular series of "Orders" or "Directions." "Giving Directions" is the expression used for thinking and projecting the positive aspect of how one's self may be used in the most unified psycho-physical way as conveyed by the teacher's hands during a lesson. "Directing" is suggestively thought, rather than willfully accomplished, because the neuro-muscular responses to "Directing" often occur underneath one's ability to perceive how they are actually carried out neurophysiologically and neurocognitively. As freedom of expression or movement is the objective, the most appropriate responses cannot be anticipated, but are observed and chosen in the moment.

Psycho-physical unity

Global concepts such as "Psycho-physical Unity" and "Use" describe how thinking strategies and attention work together during preparation for an action or for withholding one. They connote the general sequence of how intention joins together with execution to directly affect the perception of events and the outcome of intended results.

Uses

According to Alexander Technique instructor Michael J. Gelb, people tend to study the Alexander Technique either to rid themselves of pain, to increase their performance abilities, or for reasons of personal development and transformation.

As an example among performance-art applications, the Alexander technique is used and taught by classically trained vocal coaches and musicians. Its advocates claim that it allows for a balanced use of all aspects of the vocal tract by consciously increasing air-flow, allowing improved vocal technique and tone. Because the technique has allegedly been used to improve breathing and stamina in general, advocates also claim that athletes, people with asthma, tuberculosis, and panic attacks have also found improvements. The technique has been used by actors to reduce stage fright and to increase spontaneity. By improving stress-management, the technique can be an adjunct to psychotherapy for people with disabilities, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, panic attacks, stuttering, and chronic pain.

The technique is a frequent component in acting training. It is part of the curriculum in many conservatory programs.

Method

The Alexander Technique is most commonly taught privately in a series of 10 to 40 private lessons which may last from 30 minutes to an hour. Students are often performers, such as actors, dancers, musicians, athletes and public speakers, or people who work on computers, or who are in frequent pain for other reasons. Instructors observe their students, then show them how to hold themselves and move with better poise and less strain. Sessions include chair work and table work, often in front of a mirror, during which the instructor and the student will stand, sit and lie down, moving efficiently while maintaining a correct relationship between the head, neck and spine.

To qualify as a teacher of Alexander Technique, instructors are required to complete at least 1,600 hours, spanning at least three years, of supervised teacher training. The result must be satisfactory to qualified peers to gain membership in professional societies.

Effectiveness

In 2015 the Australian Government's Department of Health published the results of a review of alternative therapies that had sought to determine if any were suitable for being covered by health insurance; Alexander technique was one of 17 practices evaluated for which no clear evidence of effectiveness was found – no good body of supporting research existed.

A 2011 review said that The Alexander technique was cost-effective in the management of chronic pain.

There is moderate evidence that the technique helps reduce the disability associated with symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Evidence suggests that Alexander technique lessons may help performance anxiety in musicians, but studies of the technique were inconclusive in improving music performance, respiratory function and the posture of musicians.

No adequately designed clinical trials exist that allow evaluation of claims that the technique helps people with their asthma.

Influence

The American philosopher and educator John Dewey became impressed with the Alexander technique after his headaches, neck pains, blurred vision, and stress symptoms largely improved during the time he used Alexander's advice to change his posture. In 1923, Dewey wrote the introduction to Alexander's Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual.

Aldous Huxley had transformative lessons with Alexander, and continued doing so with other teachers after moving to the US. He rated Alexander's work highly enough to base the character of the doctor who saves the protagonist in 'Eyeless in Gaza' (an experimental form of autobiographical work) on F.M. Alexander, putting many of his phrases into the character's mouth. Huxley's work 'The Art of Seeing' also discusses his views on the technique.

Sir Stafford Cripps, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Irving and other stage grandees, Lord Lytton and other eminent people of the era also wrote positive appreciations of his work after taking lessons with Alexander.

Since Alexander's work in the field came at the start of the 20th century, his ideas influenced many originators in the field of mind-body improvement. Fritz Perls, who originated Gestalt therapy, credited Alexander as an inspiration for his psychological work. The Feldenkrais Method and the Mitzvah Technique were both influenced by the Alexander technique.

See also

• Feldenkrais Method
• Mitzvah Technique
• Posture release imagery
• Semi-supine position
• Somatics
• Squatting position
• Systema

Further reading

• Alexander, FM Man's Supreme Inheritance, Methuen (London, 1910), revised and enlarged (New York, 1918), later editions 1941, 1946, 1957, Mouritz (UK, 1996), reprinted 2002. ISBN 0-9525574-0-1
• Alexander, FM Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, Centerline Press (USA,1923), revised 1946, Mouritz (UK, 2004) ISBN 0-9543522-6-2
• Alexander, FM The Use of the Self, E. P. Dutton (New York, 1932), republished by Orion Publishing, 2001, ISBN 9780752843919
• Alexander, FM The Universal Constant in Living, Dutton (New York, 1941), Chaterson (London, 1942), later editions 1943, 1946, Centerline Press (USA, 1941, 1986), Mouritz (UK, 2000) ISBN 0-913111-18-X, ISBN 978-0-913111-18-5, ISBN 0-9525574-4-4