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Breaking Down the Alexander Work - Directions, Part 2

3/27/2019

I’m an Episcopalian. It means a lot to me to have this religious affiliation, but I mostly keep it to myself as a deeply private belief. One of the things I love most about the Episcopal church is the repetition of the liturgy from week to week. Before I became an Episcopalian I used to think that I would find the repetition incredibly boring, but the truth is, it’s very comforting. No matter what is going on in the world, there is a lovely set of words to return to, week after week, day after day, that don’t change. Words that provide comfort, assurance, even easing tensions and pains from daily living.

Alexander’s directions,“Let the neck be free, to let the head go forward and up, to let the back lengthen and widen,to let the knees go forward and away” can have the same effect on me as the liturgy. Because I have had much experience from the hands of Alexander teachers, all I have to do is think these words and I experience comfort, an easing of physical tension, and I sense my place in the physical world. These words bring me home to myself.

As a beginner to the technique, without a lot of experience, these words meant nothing to me. As a teacher, I often hear beginning students ask me “But how do I free my neck?”

In recent years, people have made some adaptations of Alexander's directions to be easier to understand and more accessible without a teacher. I think this is all good. I’m thankful that innovative directions exist and that people are continuing to explore new and effective ways to communicate our work.

Two ways to get out of a chair:
On the left, with the head tipped backwards and pulled down, the direction of motion is towards the floor. No wonder it's so hard to get up!

On the right, the person is directing themselves forward and up out of the chair. You can learn how to do this in an Alexander lesson.

An early adaptation of directions came from Missy Vineyard in her 1997 book “How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live.” Missy came up with the idea of negative directions. Instead of saying “let your neck be free,” the corresponding negative direction would be something like “my neck is not tense.” Negative directions work, but the very inference of the word “negative” is something I really don’t enjoy bringing to my work. I have to say that I have seldom used these in my teaching.

My colleague and friend Jennifer Roig-Francoli, who is a wonderful boundary explorer in the AT world, has created “Freedom Directions.” Instead of all of Alexander’s words, the Freedom Directions simply say this:

·      My neck is free
·      I am free
·      My breathing is free
·      My legs are free

When I use the Freedom Directions, I notice that they give me a lot of space for interpretation of the given moment. In my own teaching, I like to remind students that “directions” can also refer to mental letting go, as well as physical letting go. Often, one informs the other – but using something as simply as “I am free” allows me to let go of whatever is NOT free in my body or my mind.

If the differences between these types of directions intrigues you, there are even more variations out there. You can find links to different kinds of directions on Robert Rickover’s website, Up With Gravity.

In my teaching, I like to use directions that help students to find the ground as well as finding the way “up.” I rather enjoy asking people to direct themselves from their center of gravity, allowing Up to pass through the crown of the head at the same time as allowing Down to go down into the floor. I find this particular helpful for actors, who need to have all of themselves on the stage.

I also like to tell students that directions are what we ask ourselves to do instead – and this asking comes through thinking, not through physical pushing or doing. This kind of directing can be done with virtually anything – a mental task, or a physical one.

Mental directing of what we would like to change in our physicality is an essential part of the Alexander Technique. In any given situation, how we direct and what we direct are up to us.

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When Life Gives You Lemons, Inhibit and Direct!

3/20/2019

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My clearly stated intention last week was to write a blog post on “new explorations in Alexander Technique directions” today. Well, folks, that’s not happening. Postponed until next week. It’s already 3:45 pm, and this is the first time today I’ve had to sit down and even think about writing, never mind think about writing something that requires quoting and accuracy. Please accept my apologies and know that I will write that post, next week.

What happened today had nothing to do with my usual nemesis, procrastination. I love my inner procrastinator. I have to. She’s not going anywhere. This could have unfolded as exactly my usual situation of choice:
1) I waited until the last minute to do the research I needed,
2) I fooled around playing Words with Friends instead of sitting down to write,
3) I went outside and got lost in the garden and forgot all about it.

But it didn’t.

So what did happen?

Out on Arabia Mountain with my dear friends on Monday.

Let the record show that I did the research I needed last Friday. I wrote down websites, I re-read Missy Vinyard’s book chapter having to do with negative directions, I got started so that all I would have to do today would be to write. I knew that the next few days were packed.

On Saturday, I taught a full day workshop on Alexander Technique and Kodaly music analysis to cello students. Boy was that fun! Boy was that exhausting. On Sunday, I cleaned and organized my house for house guests, who arrived that evening and stayed until this morning. I love these folks, and I haven’t seen them in over a year. I wanted to really be with them, not around them while working from home. Yesterday I did go to the office while they touristed, and in the short time between clients I got two important calls as simultaneously, unexpected visitors showed up to consult with me about renting my studio space.

My guests were scheduled to leave this morning fairly early. They rolled out at noon. I had to teach an afternoon piano lesson. Instead of writing between twelve and two thirty, as I'd planned, I found myself catching up on all the other work things that had been piling up since Monday. No Words With Friends today!

Sometimes, life is just like this.

I could have spent the rest of the afternoon beating myself up. Or, trying to get the promised work done and producing an inferior product, which would have greatly upset my inner perfectionist. Fifteen years ago, I know I would have made one of those choices.

I could have chosen to be very anxious about all of this. I could have worked myself into a tizzy that would have prohibited me from getting even this post done. Believe me, I’ve done that, too.

So – I didn’t get a post done in the morning, I didn’t procrastinate, I didn’t beat myself up, I didn’t get anxious. What I did do was to accept the circumstances and realize that I am doing all I can do. I decided to take the small time I have left today and write a little more about inhibition and its relationship to direction, in order not to miss my deadline and let my subscribers down completely. This, at least, keeps my sense of integrity intact.

When circumstances are completely out of our control, we have all of the choices I mentioned above. And maybe a few more you can think of, if you take the time to pause and consider the choices in front of you. And that’s inhibition and direction in a nutshell, in the real world.

The next time something like this happens to you, I invite you to treat yourself with kindness. Do what you can. Enjoy the time you have with people you love. Know that everything else will get done in its own time (unless you procrastinate.) Oh, and laugh about it. That makes everything better, at least in my world.

Here’s to doing what we can do, staying grounded and in integrity with ourselves, and loving our lives and our friends.

Happy Spring!

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Breaking Down the Alexander Work – What is Direction? (Pt 1)

3/13/2019

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One of the things that I dislike most about the Alexander Technique is that it is simply riddled with jargon. It’s very difficult to describe in a straightforward way, particularly if one wants to quote Alexander’s own words. The jargon and special terms FM Alexander created often get in the way of people understanding easily what it’s all about. Part of my goal in this blog series has been to break down the jargon. The great news is, I’m not alone. Many other Alexander Technique teachers alive and practicing today have taken the time to try to describe Alexander’s Directions in ways that make sense to all of us. In this post, I’ll be quoting some of their work for you. No sense in re-inventing the wheel when others have said it so well.

In my last post I talked about Inhibition, the pause that allows us to see the choices available to us for action. Sometimes, as in the driving and slamming on the brakes example, the choices available to me are clear – I can respond with road rage, I can let it go, I can play with my driving after the incident to reduce the effort I’m using. But sometimes, the choices are not so clear. For example, I just spent a wonderful and amazing long weekend at the Myrtle Beach Alexander Technique and Energy Work event, hosted by AT teacher Renée Jackson. Even after the long drive home, I’ve been feeling physically and mentally stress-free.

Our view of North Myrtle Beach.

I had a full day of work yesterday, and at the end of it, I was pretty tired and noticing some returning stiffness in my shoulders. My husband came home and let me know he was upset with me about a few seemingly unimportant things that were obviously important to him. (You all know that situation.) I felt my internal stress level rising, even as I was sensing that this was less about the small things that I hadn’t done, and more about something deeper that was bothering Dave. As the stress rose, I noticed my neck stiffening in addition to my shoulders. I was breathing more shallowly. As he finished, I decided to pause before responding and see what came up for me. I realized that I was not angry with him. What I was not liking was my physical reaction to the situation. Where was all that freedom I’d been enjoying? How was I going to get that back while diffusing his anger at the same time?

When the choices are not so clear, the default decision in the AT world is to go back to Alexander’s Directions. In FM Alexander’s words, the Primary Directions are as follows:

·   Let the neck be free
·      To let the head go forward and up
·      To let the back lengthen and widen
·      To let the knees go forward and away

Ted Dimon points out that the use of the word “to” makes it clear that these four directions are linked together, given “one after the other and all together” as Alexander said. (If you are interested in seeing maps of muscles that are released in following the directions, I highly recommend Ted’s website and the explanations there.)

Hilary King explains on her website that the term Directions has two meanings, which overlap:

1) Directions are mental instructions we learn to give ourselves before and during an action, in order to bring about changes in the way we use ourselves whilst performing the action.
2) The instructions that are given also indicate the “direction” in which we wish to release and lengthen muscles – for instance, allowing our knees and thighs to release out and away from our hip joints.

I agree with Hilary that this distinction is important – describing both “things to do” and an actual “direction” in which releases and length should travel.

Adrian Farrell says on his website that Alexander’s directions are “giving consent” to the body to release its habitual behavior. That’s a nice image. Without instruction from a teacher, however, these directions can be difficult both to understand and to implement. Let me try to explain what I did yesterday to follow them.

Let your neck be free:  I sat back in my comfortable chair and took a breath. I thought about releasing tension in my neck muscles, and noticed that my jaw was also tight, so I let that go on the exhale. Ah, better.

To let the head go forward and up:  This one is harder to explain. What Alexander is asking us to do is to allow our head to rest gently on top of our spines, like one of those bobble-head dolls. If my neck is free, my head can gently return to neutral, and that lovely feeling of freedom allows my head to move easily in all directions on top of the atlas, the highest vertebrae of the spine. Having had lots of hands-on work with AT teachers over the years, I know what that feels like, and I can ask myself to go there after I free my neck. Ah. So much better.

To let the back lengthen and widen: On my next breath, I can allow two things to happen – on the inhale, I can sense my back widening against the chair. As my lungs expand, so do my ribs. My shoulder blades gently take a ride toward the sides of my body. I allow this sensation of width to remain with me. As I exhale, I notice my spine lengthening from sacrum to the crown of my head. Such a lovely feeling.

To let the knees go forward and away:  This one is a little harder to experience sitting down. I imagine that my hip joints are expanding as my legs release away from my torso. I have space. My legs feel free. If I were standing, I could actually feel a change in my knees as they soften.

These basic directions are my go-to when I need some refreshing ease back in my life. Last night, a quick check-in with the primary directions allowed me to really sense my physicality. I felt the support of the ground coming up through the four legs of the chair. I turned to Dave and asked him questions, rather than responding with anger.

In recent years, people have made some adaptations of these directions to be easier to understand and more accessible without a teacher. Next week, I’ll talk about the evolution of directions in the twenty-first century.

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Breaking Down the Alexander Work – What is Inhibition?

3/5/2019

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When I first started studying Alexander Technique, I was in a lot of physical pain. My mid-back was a mess, and I often had a lot of neck pain, too, from carrying my head forward like a turtle. I can remember distinctly the first time I really started working on using the principles of the Alexander Technique. It was 1994, and I had just been to a full-day Alexander workshop given by the wonderful teacher Freyda Epstein. I walked out of there feeling great. Thanks to her fabulous hands-on work and some terrific constructive rest lying down at the end of the day, I felt about three inches taller than usual. I sat down in the driver’s seat of my car and adjusted my rear- view mirror to accommodate my new fuller stature. I had about an hour to drive home.

About a quarter of the way into the drive, I noticed something. My head had moved far away from the headrest, and my nose was now approaching the dashboard of the car. Suddenly I couldn’t see anything in my newly adjusted mirror. Just like that, my body was reverting to the position that I thought was “normal,” with my head forward and my eyes wanting to be closer to the windshield of the car. I pulled over to the side of the road in order to give myself my full attention.

What does this pre-AT photo of me from 1992 have in common with the guy on the right in the other photo?

I had learned in the workshop that day that if I tried to pull my head back, or “sit up straight”, I would be using a lot of unnecessary effort to both get there and to “keep” my body upright in that way. I had just been feeling so effortless, so light and comfortable. I wanted to get back there without forcing myself upright. I remembered that Freyda had talked about Alexandrian inhibition as a way to release my old pattern. So there on the side of the road, I asked myself to release out of my familiar way of holding my head. Once the tension was gone, I asked my head to float up and rest on top of my spine, using the idea of Directions. And what do you know, it worked! By allowing myself to simply pause and not try to “do” anything, the “right thing did itself”, as FM Alexander said in his writings. My body had enough of a remembrance of the place where Freyda’s hands had guided me over and over that day that it could return there effortlessly. I drove home, using awareness to notice when I was leaving this new place of comfort and ease and then allowing myself to pause until I released up out of my old habits. I arrived home much less tense than I could imagine from that drive.

That, friends, is what the pause Alexander called “inhibition” is all about when we talk about changing physical habits. It’s important to communicate to you that the pause can also be a mental activity related to our emotions and reactions to stimuli of thought. I’ll give you another example that comes from driving.

Bruce Fertman once said to me that “your car can be your best Alexander Teacher.” I believe that’s true, and I’ve had a lot of experience playing with that idea. Driving back and forth to Philadelphia for Alexander training back then, and now driving in notorious Atlanta traffic every day, I know that I can respond in one of several ways to the stress of being behind the wheel. Road rage is a great example. When I drive, I like to give myself enough space between my bumper and the car in front of me so I can react to whatever happens and respond without slamming on my brakes. It drives me crazy when a car from a neighboring lane decides to pull in front of me and close in that gap I’ve worked hard to create. My instant reaction is often to slam on my brakes, and my body goes into adrenalin production in overdrive. Even if nothing serious happens, my body gets pretty stressed and riled up. Worse, my response to that reaction is often to get angry. Really angry. I forget I have a choice, and I yell. I call the other driver “stupid” and a variety of adjectives I don’t wish to put into print. Occasionally there’s a finger in the air, or flashing brights, or all manner of emotional response. I know I’m not the only person who has these feelings and responses – I see them (and worse) playing out every day on the highway in Atlanta traffic.

Time out for a bit of discussion on the difference between reaction and response. Reaction comes from our limbic, animal brain. The tiger is coming down the road, we produce adrenalin, we run. We get cut off in traffic, we produce adrenalin, we slam on the brakes. We are wired to keep ourselves safe and alive. We don’t have a lot of choice in this once the limbic brain takes over. BUT – we do have a choice to notice this reaction and how it feels inside ourselves – to pause, and then to choose a response that feels appropriate to the situation.

So, in that moment of pausing after slamming those brakes on, I have a mental, emotional choice in front of me. I can choose to respond in anger, with road rage. Sometimes that feels pretty good. Sometimes that’s extremely dangerous to the cars around me. Sometimes it’s downright inappropriate to the situation. (Our responses are always on a continuum – there’s the full range of that one.) On the other hand, I could choose to ignore what that person did and just let it go. I could choose to consider that perhaps they are late for work and anxious. Or on their way to visit a relative who was rushed to the hospital. Or just oblivious because they are driving distractedly. Many choices present themselves, and in the pause, I get to see them, experience the continuum, and then decide how or if I want to respond. It’s amazing how much we can consider in the split second of pausing.

When I really check in with myself in the pause, I can notice my reaction to something mental may also affect me physically. I often find that when I get angry on the road, I am gripping the steering wheel for all I’m worth. Sometimes I enjoy playing with how little effort it actually takes me to hold and turn the wheel. When this situation arises, that is often my response – can I let go of all that tension and see how little work I can make this drive? It’s amazing how that game affects my thinking and my body, too.

I hope this gives you a sense of what Alexandrian Inhibition is all about. Simply put, it’s the pause that allows us to see a range of choices in any given situation. It’s not how we resolve the situation – the actual response we choose comes under my next topic, which will be Directions. It’s hard to write about one without the other, but the pause is what comes after our physical or mental innate reaction to a stimulus. It’s what we can allow ourselves to experience before deciding on a response to a situation – a moment of freedom where many choices are possible and judgement is suspended.

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Day 21 - The Journey Continues

2/25/2019

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Last month, I set myself a challenge to establish a new habit of writing. Every day for the last 21 weekdays, I have gotten myself out of bed at least an hour early to sit with my notebook, a cup of coffee, and the sounds of the birds waking up to write a daily blog post on the power of habit. The writing has been challenging and fun. The getting out of bed has been a different kind of challenge. In the beginning, getting up this early was darn near impossible and I slept through my alarm more than once. If you know me, you know that I’m an “I don’t do anything before 10:00 am person.” (I normally wake up around 8:30 am. I’m also up past midnight, given my own diurnal rhythms.) I was, however, an elementary teacher who had to be alert and in a classroom at 8:00 am for 25 years, so I know I can do it. I still have to do it for three weeks every summer teaching Kodály at George Mason University. It’s just not my body’s preferred routine, and since I’ve stopped teaching full time, getting up at the crack of dawn has been a habit I have very consciously and joyfully let go.

Imagine my surprise this morning, then, when I woke up at 6:49 am ready to write. My first thought was, “I did it! I have a new habit!” My second thought was “It’s the last day, I don’t have to do this anymore!” Truth be told, I’ve enjoyed observing the quiet of a sleeping household, watching the sun rise, and putting my thoughts on paper – something I’ve not been disciplined enough to do for a long time. When I’m not rushing off to work first thing in the morning, the changing light through the trees is something truly beautiful to be able to simply sit and observe. Falling in love with early morning has been a pleasure I never expected to experience. Without a change in my morning habits in order to try something new, it never would have happened.

Here is a video I shot from my deck the other morning in the incredible mist and fog.

I hope that I have challenged you to do more exploration around the power of habit in your own lives. We looked at examples from my life about such diverse subjects as practice habits for musicians, habits of protecting ourselves from injury, how habit allows us to “multitask”, and challenged habits around cultural biases. We’ve realized that not all habits are “bad.” We’ve used the principles of Alexander Technique to help us explore the difference between reaction and response. Hopefully I’ve got you pondering that in every situation, we always have a choice in how we choose to respond. If there is anything I have learned this past month, it’s that habit is truly everywhere (for better or for worse) in all aspects of my life. This challenge has led me down some personal pathways I never expected to explore, particularly in a public forum. I’m so glad you came with me.

Many of you have asked me if I will continue writing now that this challenge is ending. The answer is yes. I will be cutting back to once a week, on Wednesdays, and I’ll be finding another topic. I’m out of ideas to write about just now, and a break is important for my creative juices and continued desire to keep blogging. I have been absolutely floored by the positive response to my writings. Thank you all for staying with me on this journey, for your interesting comments and thoughts, for sharing my work with others when it has resonated for you. I’m so glad I have something to say that many people can relate to.

I am grateful that many of you have been reading and sharing on Facebook. I’ll continue posting my blog there, but the algorithms are weird enough that you could miss a once a week post easily. I have a specific blog mailing list that I plan to keep active, as it will motivate me to keep my promise to write every Wednesday. If you didn’t subscribe and you’d like to now that things will be coming to your inbox only once a week, here’s a link to subscribe.

If you’re interested in continued examination of the power of habit in your own life, and you’d like to study with me, I’ll be offering a four session evening class called “Exploring the Power of Habit” starting on Tuesday, March 12. Class size will be limited to seven, so you’ll need to pre-register if you want to join me on this journey of self-examination. If you want to know more about the freedom and ease Alexander Technique can offer you, the power of habits in your life and how to change them, and how to live fully in your body, then this class is for you. Click the button for full details.

Exploring the Power of Habit Class Series Info

I wish you well on your journey into the very-well known habits of your lifetime!

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Day 20 - Living What I Teach

2/22/2019

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Five years ago I slipped and fell on the stairs in my house. It was midnight. Dave had left the house a few hours before to get on a plane to South Africa for a business trip. I was tired, and I came down the stairs holding my computer in one hand and a half a glass of water in the other. Before I go any further in this story, you need to see a visual of these stairs – they are a little hard to describe.

As you can see, it’s a long flight. Both the top and the bottom curve a bit so that the stair treads are uneven in size. See the basket at the bottom of the stairs, above the pile of papers? We keep the basket there (and frankly, the papers that pile up there, too) to keep anyone going down the stairs from being on that side of the steps, where they get really narrow. Five years ago there was not a banister on the wall side of the steps, either – just the long board on top of the open side to rest your hand on. Interestingly, I’d had many dreams about falling down that flight of steep steps since moving into this house.

At the time, we were getting ready to remodel our kitchen. As I kissed Dave goodbye, I promised him that I’d have most of the kitchen packed up and ready to go by the time he got back at the end of a week. Optimistically, I started the process that evening by removing artwork, which included the basket from the stairs.

So, there I was at midnight, coming down those stairs in my stocking feet. Without the basket there, sure enough, I moved toward the outside of the staircase about 3 steps from the bottom. I put a foot down, and there was nothing there but air. It was one of those moments where time stood still – I saw it all happening clearly, and in slow motion – yet there was nothing I could do other than try to keep myself from tumbling down the stairs. My legs went out from under me, and I went down hard, landing on one sit bone on the same crooked step I’d slipped off. The water in my glass went up, and right back down into the glass. I didn’t drop the computer!

I sat there for a minute or two, assessing the situation like any good Alexander Technique teacher would do. Was I breathing? Yes. Let’s calm down a bit before we try to stand up. Ok. Was there anything broken? Well, I don’t think so. My legs are fine. Then I stood up, my feet on the kitchen floor below. Wow. My pelvis hurt. A lot. I made my way to the freezer and found an ice pack and shoved it down the back of my pants. Better. What to do now? It’s after midnight. I don’t want to go to the emergency room at midnight. It’s going to be crazy over there and I just want to sleep. I know! Call the doctor now, let her know what’s going on, and then try sleeping until morning. Great plan. The doctor said, “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the ER now?” I told her I was going to try to sleep and see her in the morning.

It was all fine until I tried to take my pants off. I couldn’t do it. The pain was too intense. Totally in shock, I got myself slowly out to my car and drove myself to the emergency room.  Once there, I couldn’t sit down any longer, so I stood for about 90 minutes with the ice pack still in my pants until they could see me. A series of x-rays showed that I had dislocated my tailbone and fractured S3, one of the bones in the sacrum. They basically couldn’t do much for either thing, so they sent me home and gave me a prescription for painkillers. I don’t know how I did it, but I drove home. On the way I called my friend Janet, a night owl, to tell her what had happened. She said she’d rally the troops in the morning to come take care of me, and she did. Look at that – I asked for help, and within a day the word spread so quickly that friends came over from far and wide and packed my kitchen for me, in addition to feeding me and keeping me drugged and loopy until Dave got home. (After the kitchen remodel, it was such fun unpacking all those boxes that friends had packed! I had no idea where anything was. It was like a treasure hunt.) You can imagine Dave’s dismay at getting this news upon landing in South Africa 20 hours later. Poor guy. He did cut his trip shorter than originally planned to get home again.

The recovery from this particular injury was longer and harder than any other injury I’ve had, and I couldn’t do it alone. I was in PT for months. I found a chiropractor up in Virginia who finally figured out that my spine completely jammed upwards when I landed, taking all my organs with it. He relocated my tailbone for me, ending months of pain. My pelvic floor was locked and a PT specialist released that. A craniosacral therapist friend helped me realign my sphenoid and the bones on the roof of my mouth.  I am so grateful to each and every one of those healers, and others who tried to help me along the way. It was a good three years before I started to feel like myself, and just 6 months ago I went back to a challenging fitness class in the gym for the first time. In all of that recovery period, I had to use every resource I had as an Alexander Teacher to learn to trust my body again. It was a revelation to have an Alexander Lesson a year after the injury and have the teacher show me that I still wasn’t sitting fully on my sit bones.

I’ve had my fair share of injuries in this lifetime, and I know what it feels like to not trust parts of your own body to work again. I know what it’s like to experience fear, and to not believe your physical therapist when they tell you that you have your range of motion back. And so one of the things I specialize in and enjoy most is working with people after they have finished their PT.  I love to help people come to grips with those fears, to understand their initial reaction of holding and gripping, and then to learn to thank that for showing up and let it go. It brings me great joy to assist people in their self-discovery and to be with them to witness their pleasure in finding themselves whole again.

When considering types of bodywork, most people begin by looking for help that gives them a one-time "fix" and sends them on their way.  You have the choice to instead ask for help from someone who can meet you gently where you are now, and through the process give you back the gift of your whole self. You won’t just heal - you will grow.With Alexander Technique you will, like me, learn the tools to understand the power of habit in your life.

Thanks to the interest in this blog series, I’ve decided to offer an evening class called “Exploring the Power of Habit.” Class size will be limited, so you’ll need to pre-register if you want to join me on this journey of self-examination. If you want to know more about the freedom and ease Alexander Technique can offer you, the power of habits in your life and how to change them, and how to live fully in your body, then this class is for you. Click the button for full details.

Exploring the Power of Habit Class Information

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Day 19 - The Nature of the Spiral

2/21/2019

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One of the things I most love about the Alexander Technique is the spiraling nature of what it has to teach me. I circle around my habits, over and over, but each time a little differently, a little deeper, with a little more clarity. This is the gift and the curse of spiral education. Nothing ever disappears, it just comes back in another form.

A lot of my professional development days as an elementary school music teacher found me sitting around a table with my colleagues, bored out of my gourd as they discussed yet another way to teach math. The professional days I most enjoyed were the ones on educational theory, because there was something that suited the analysis geek in me and gave me something that I could actually apply to what I taught. Over the years there were a number of methodologies – 4-MAT, Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, etc. – that all talked about the power of the spiral in education. In the Kodály world we talk about it, too – we see the same children in our music classes every year until they leave our school, and we work our way around the same concepts on a deeper level each time. This spiraling methodology makes so much sense to me, and the day I saw it in Alexander Technique, I got even more excited about it.

In Day 11 of this blog series, I talked about transition and reinvention in my own life as being times when it was easy to let go of old habits and start over. These moments are dramatic and few, and in them, it feels to me like anything is possible. Here’s the trick, however – once I settle in to my new life, home, position, whatever, how do I keep my old habits and behavior patterns from coming around that spiral once more and settling back gently into my life? I’ve also talked a lot about self-worth. If you’re a person like me who will very easily fall into “I’m not good enough,” then how do we stop that negative thought pattern from creeping back into our lives?

Spiraling DNA strands in the human body

In my personal experience, this is where the genius of the Alexander Technique has come in to the rescue. Do you remember those old cartoons where Bugs Bunny would have a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, trying to tell him different things to do? I often have the feeling that there are a couple of significant people sitting on my shoulder whispering things into my ears. “That’s too hard, why would you do that? You might fail.” “Be careful! If you do that (exciting new thing, move in the gym) you might get hurt.” Periodically, my grandmother arrives and says “What did you do to your hair?”

Here’s what I do when these lovely people and thought patterns arise. I go back to the basics of Alexander Technique. 1) Awareness – who are these people, and why are they showing up right now? What am I doing in my body in response? 2) Pausing – Okay, let’s put the pause button on those thoughts they’re sending into my ear, and really see if what they are telling me is valid. Do I have another choice? (Remember, we always have another choice.) I’m going to let go of any physical responses I noticed – tension, pulling down, and just be here for a minute. 3) Directions –Habits of protection (you’ll get hurt!) usually show up in situations that at one time or another might have caused me injury, like all my shoulder dislocations. Then, I needed them to keep me safe. It’s okay that they showed up, but just now I don’t need them anymore. My first response in directions will be to kindly thank these thought people for wanting to take care of me. Then I show them a little love and send them on their way. As far as habitual thoughts of not measuring up, well, I really don’t need them anymore. I know in my heart that what they are telling me is not true. So those, I just shoo away. Then, I attend to myself. Is my neck free? Can I think “up” right now? Am I breathing?

Habits, whether in thinking patterns or in physical body patterns, have a way of coming back into our lives. Just when I think my habit of bringing my head forward towards the computer screen or the piano music is gone, I catch myself there in the middle of work. The spiral in action here is that I no longer put my nose on the keyboard, it’s more like I just start to feel the strain in my trapezius muscle and then I realize my head is not balanced over my spine. So this habit is more subtle each time it returns, yet my own level of education about it is deeper so I can catch it more quickly than I used to. This is a lifelong challenge for me that is probably not going to go away, but I can continue to refine my awareness, pausing and my response so that I catch it earlier and earlier each time it spirals back.

Conch shells spiraling in nature.

If you’re wondering how I’m able to sense these habitual patterns and then correct them, it’s because of all the Alexander lessons I have taken over the last 27 years. The gentle hands of many teachers have helped me to understand where “neutral” is on the continuums inside my body, and at this point, I know how to get there on my own. I also have had enough practice with the thinking patterns that are the most significant parts of AT to allow them to be habitual. All I have to do is pause, and ask myself to start finding an awareness of what is bothering me, and off I go into my three steps.

If you’re just starting your Alexander journey, playing around with awareness, pausing and directions on your own is a great way to start – but without the hands, eyes and skills of a teacher to help you find balance, poise and ease in your own body, you won’t get very far. Alexander Technique is not only mental, and not only physical. It’s been called Psychophysical for a good reason – it involves using our whole selves, bringing us back to the present moment, being embodied.

If you’re looking for a teacher in the Atlanta GA area, I’d be happy to help you start down the road of your Alexander journey.

What patterns of habits return over and over in your life?
Are they different now than they were ten years ago? If so, how?
Are you ready to start your Alexander journey?

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Day 18 - Going Gluten Free

2/20/2019

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Harriette said, “Seriously, Robbin, have you thought about giving up gluten? Wheat gluten is just like glue that gums up your joints.”

It was the fall of 2012, and Harriette and I were sitting in her living room. Her kitchen had just been certified as a gluten free commercial kitchen, and she’d brought me over her not only to show me what she was doing, but also to try to get me to listen to the message she’d been hinting at with me for months.

I saw Harriette sporadically, usually at dance weekends where her catering business, True Color Cooking, provided us delicious meals with many dietary options. Since she only saw me once in a while, Harriette was the perfect person to notice the physical changes I was going through.

In the last year or two I had started putting on weight. This was fairly unusual for me – I had always kept my weight steady in the upper 130s. At this point I had ballooned up to 163 lbs and I weighed more than during my pregnancy. Nothing I did seemed to help. I was also having intense gas and bloating every afternoon. It got worse if I took a nap, which I seemed to be doing often. I looked exhausted, and I was. Harriette couldn’t help but see all of that.

The most frightening part of this was the swelling and arthritis pain in my hands. I couldn’t bend my right thumb at the first joint more than about a quarter of an inch. As a person who literally works with her hands, I had already become scared enough to go to a rheumatologist the January before.

That doctor tested me for every autoimmune disease possible. RA, Lupus, MS, Lime… all the big ones came back (thankfully) normal. Since he couldn’t figure out what it was, the doctor diagnosed me as having psoriatic arthritis without psoriasis because there was actually no test available for that. He put me on methyltrexate, a chemotherapy drug often used to treat RA. The side effects included exhaustion. I began sleeping about 12 -18 hours a day.

By the time I saw Harriette that fall, I had never felt worse in my life. And still, I didn’t really want to listen to what she was telling me. I loved bread. I ate a bagel every day for breakfast. I craved pastries, and cookies. Life without wheat was unimaginable. I actually believe now that I was addicted to carbohydrates and sugar. I am basically not an addictive type. Drugs, alcohol, clove cigarettes – I was a casual user in my younger life. I never felt the need to continue with any of it. The only other thing I can get very hooked on is coffee, and I’ve been on and off of that more times that I can count for my own health. At this point I actually didn’t see or understand the wheat and sugar cravings I was having. Harriette started to open my eyes. Still, I said to myself, maybe there was something to what she was saying, but let’s try all this other stuff first. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

By Christmastime I knew I couldn’t go on like this. I made an appointment with a new, highly rated rheumatologist for the beginning of February. And on New Year’s Eve, bloated and sick and unable to fit in my dress I’d planned to wear, I decided that my New Year’s resolution was going to be to give up gluten.

My wonderful new doctor, Teresa Lawrence-Ford, said she’d heard about gluten intolerance (that was a new thing in 2012 – it was celiac or nothing in the medical establishment) and that the only way to find out if I had celiac was to go back on all that food I’d given up and then have an endoscopy. So, I went on my “Farewell to Gluten” tour. I had Krispy Kremes, and poppyseed scones and hamentashen, and bagels, and rolls…. And within a week I was SO sick that I never wanted to eat any of them ever again.

I had the endoscopy, I didn’t have celiac, either. Dr Lawrence-Ford looked at me and said, “Robbin, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.” She began the process of weaning me off all that medication I didn’t need, and within about 3 months of giving up wheat I started losing weight and feeling like myself again.

It was a long road back to health, working with Dr Lawrence-Ford, dietary doctors and integrated medicine physicians to help cure my leaky gut and make sure I was eating what my body needed. But I now remain within my normal weight range, I feel better, and my arthritis bothers me very little.

In terms of giving up an addictive habit, I don’t think there’s anything to do other than go cold turkey, as hard and unpleasant as that is. When my body craved bread, I had to learn to find ways to pause and listen to what else my body might like to eat that would be healthier for me. I also had to learn to say “no” to myself. Now, I’ll never go back to eating wheat. We’ll probably never know if it’s gluten itself, the protein gliadin created by hybridization of wheat, or side effects of pesticides, but whatever it is, I don’t need it in my body.

My healing here was both physical and mental. I wasn’t crazy, I was really sick. I had to be my own body detective to figure it out, and then find the right doctors to help me. I will always be grateful to Harriette for opening up my eyes and suggesting what turned out to be my solution.

Have you had to address habits that are harming you?
How did you do it?
Have you considered becoming your own “Body Detective?”

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Day 17 - The Dreaded Question

2/19/2019

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“So, what is the Alexander Technique?”

Ah, the dreaded question. There I am, having a lovely conversation with a stranger, and they ask me what I do for a living, and I tell them, and then…. That Question.

Alexander Technique teachers spend hours trying to craft their individual “elevator speech” – that magical, one sentence habitual answer that will sum up what we do. In fact, I once went to an entire class on it at Sweetbriar, led by Michael Fredrick. A group of about 60 teachers and trainees went at trying to craft a single definition that suited everyone in the room. Abject failure. I wrote down a bunch of things that people said that resonated with me at the time. I read them over recently, and none of them do the trick for me today.

In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here are my short rote speeches about several of the other things I do:

“The Kodály Method is a Hungarian system of music education that uses folk music to teach children music literacy.”

Boom. Clear. Understandable. If that’s all that people want to know, we’re done.

“Contra dance is a form of social dance from New England, where you and your partner travel together up and down a long line of partners. Eventually you dance with everyone else in the line as well as your partner.  It’s a lot of fun, you should try it sometime!”

(More questions usually follow, but they’re easy to answer.)

“I teach piano lessons to people from 4 to 80 years old. I use an approach that reflects my years teaching Kodály and Music Learning Theory, and I adapt this using a wide variety of materials. I love teaching beginners – it’s never too late to start.”

(Leads usually to “What is Kodály and/or Music Learning Theory”, but that’s ok. See Kodály definition above.)

At this point, those answers practically pop out of my mouth when someone asks what I do. I don’t have to think much about them, and they make sense to people.

I believe that Alexander Technique is much more difficult to describe, because it is a technique, not a curriculum. It’s also a life-long learning, as opposed to a 3 summer certification course or a Master’s Degree. When I graduated with a Master’s in Kodály, I was young and still learning, but I was considered an “expert” in my field. When I graduated from Alexander Technique teacher training in midlife, I was a “beginning teacher.” It took about five years before I really felt that I knew what I was talking about and that my internal assessments of students are usually accurate.

Music education methodology, contra dance and piano lessons are specific things that people choose to learn.  Alexander Technique is nebulous, since as a technique it can be applied to anything else you choose to learn about, including my other three areas above. This, I believe, is the heart of the problem. It’s much easier to define a specific curriculum than to define a technique which helps you to do virtually anything more easily.

I can hear other Alexander Technique teachers arguing with me now, saying “But there is a set of directions! Let your neck be free, let your head go forward and up, let the rest of your spine release in sequence, knees forward and away.” Well, yes.
I was trained, however, to apply the Technique in activity – which is more than just getting in and out of a chair, although I can (and do) teach that, too.  So applying those directions, or, better, adaptingthose directions to someone’s choice of activity (which can vary from lesson to lesson) means that the directions I help them with change from lesson to lesson as well. Of course, always, neck free, head forward and up. But then…. choices present themselves.

I don’t want to get too esoteric here, because I’m primarily writing for people who are not Alexander Teachers. If you want to discuss this further, send me an email!

So, at this point, you’re probably wondering “Well, Robbin, what IS your definition of the Alexander Technique.” My answer is that it varies depending on who I am talking to. If I sense that someone is asking to be polite and that they are not at all interested, my answer is different than if someone seems genuinely curious. I can say that my definition always includes the words “ease and comfort in your daily activities” sometimes includes “restoring your natural poise and grace”, and almost never includes “posture.”

I hope that if you’ve been reading all of these blog posts – we’re up to #17 today! – you’ll have a sense of what I think the Alexander Technique is all about, at least as it relates to the Power of Habit in our lives. Which, fundamentally, is also what it’s all about – a technique to assist us in letting go of habits that no longer serve us. It’s an un-doing, rather than a doing more.

Even as a teacher, I’m still figuring out what the Alexander Technique is all about. My ideas keep expanding, kind of like the universe. I don’t expect that to stop, so my definition will never be habitual. It will continue to evolve and grow through the next decades of my life. I hope that’s a satisfactory answer, at least for today.

Do you have a habitual “elevator speech” to explain what you do for a living?
Is what you do for a living easy to define?
If not, what approach do you take to try to explain it?

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Day 16 - The Proverbial Onion

2/18/2019

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Have you ever heard a process compared to “peeling an onion?” This phrase comes up often in Alexander Technique studies in reference to the releasing of old habits and what you find lurking underneath. In fact, every time I’m in the kitchen chopping onions, I think about it.

I don’t peel actual onions very often, at least not beyond the outer brown layers of skin. I do chop a lot of them by hand. I learned a few years ago that if you cut off the top and the bottom of the onion, then lay one of the flat sides down and slice the entire onion in half, it’s a lot easier to get the last of those thin, tough brown layers off. Once I’ve done that, I can also see the core of the onion and decide whether or not to use it – if it’s an old onion, sometimes it is yellow-green in there as the core tries once again to send a shoot out into the world. We can’t stop growth.

An onion is a great metaphor for habitual behavior, as well as for truth telling. The armor we put on to the world, that thick brown skin, protects what is soft and vulnerable and makes us cry on the inside. It’s the peeling down, down, down and the stripping away of what no longer serves us that brings us to our own core beliefs, and from here we can opt for new growth.

Almost 12 years ago, I left my Baltimore suburban neighborhood of exclusively middle class whites and moved to the largest upper middle class African-American community in the Atlanta metro area. Moving here opened my eyes (and eventually my heart) to a completely different cultural experience. I had never considered myself a racist, but it turns out on some deep levels I was. Growing up in the north in a New York suburb, white folks told countless ethnic jokes. I can remember my grandparents using some horrible ethnic slurs referring to people of other races and ethnicities. I also remember telling them why this wasn’t appropriate. I was, however, exposed to all of this as if it were normal. Judging only by what I see on Facebook, a lot of my high school acquaintances still think it is both acceptable and ok to put that stuff out there, in print, for the universe to validate.

My first few months in Atlanta just going into my local Target challenged every deep-seated cultural norm I had. I was often the only white person in the store, which was an eye-opener to what it feels like to be in the minority. Occasionally, initially, I felt fearful. That wore off pretty quickly – this is, after all, an upper middle class neighborhood. We don’t have a lot of crime here. My neighbors are good, upstanding citizens who want a safe place to raise their children. Amen for common ground. I do remember that for the first few months I couldn’t understand a single thing store clerks said to me. A lot of that was the southern accent. It took a while for my ears to attune to the softness of the language here, to peel off that first layer of armor and to learn how to listen.

There’s a hair or weaving salon in every shopping center here, which initially made me curious. I learned why by listening to my female neighbors talk about the amount of time they have to spend on hair (and nails.) I’ll just say that the majority of white women have no idea what our black sisters go through, and leave it at that. (FYI - If you want some good insights into the African-American female mindset about a lot more than hair, tune your device into “Red Table” sometime. It’s an unflinching education.)

I had to get honest with my habitual white-person-thinking about African-American culture, face my personal unfounded fears, open myself to listening, and learn to trust my neighbors. And the rewards for this have been (surprisingly) warm acceptance in my community, a few highly valued friendships, and the most honest, deep conversations about race I’ve had in my life.

None of this would have happened without pausing, without suspending judgment and losing assumptions, without stripping off layers of myself that were preventing me from facing my underlying unconscious racism, and above all, without real listening. I don’t pretend to be perfect. Of course I can’t viscerally understand the deep wounds of another culture. What I can do is listen without judging, be a witness, ask honest questions, and maybe open the door a crack further to seeing our shared humanity while celebrating our differences. Have I reached the core of this particular onion? Not by a long shot. New shoots of growth are emerging, however. I couldn’t stop them if I tried.

Do you find yourself reacting habitually to people of another culture?
For better or for worse, do you make assumptions about race?
What personal “onion” are you peeling in your own life?

After writing this, I checked my email and read my daily "Note from the Universe." There are no coincidences, so I'm sharing it with you.

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Robbin Marcus

I challenged myself to create some new habits around writing from Jan 27 - Feb 25, 2019. For this blog series, Exploring Habits, The Power of Habitual Behavior, I wrote a post every weekday for 21 days. You'll find that entire series here.

An occasional post from me, about stuff that interests me.

Breaking Down the Alexander Work - Directions, Part 2

When Life Gives You Lemons, Inhibit and Direct!

Breaking Down the Alexander Work – What is Direction? (Pt 1)

Breaking Down the Alexander Work – What is Inhibition?

Day 21 - The Journey Continues

Day 20 - Living What I Teach

Day 19 - The Nature of the Spiral

Day 18 - Going Gluten Free

Day 17 - The Dreaded Question

Day 16 - The Proverbial Onion

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Exploring the Power of Habit Blog Series

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Exploring the Power of Habit Blog Series

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