Learning how to See

Webinar 1 ⇒ December 2018

                                                                                                    

How to find a way of knowing 

how you are inhibiting and directing?

A theoretical and practical webinar workshop

Clearly, to “feel” or think I had inhibited the old instinctive reaction was no proof that I had really done so, and I must find some way of “knowing.”

Alexander, F.M.; The Use of the Self, Its Conscious Direction in Relation to Diagnosis, (Third Ed. Centerline Press 1946), p. 21.

What is the initial Alexander technique?

It is time to remember that when F.M. Alexander invented his technique, he was alone in a room, i.e., with no-one to make him feel what somatic touch-teachers believe should be the “good use of the self as a whole”.

F.M. was an actor, more or less self-trained, who found that his manner of organizing the different parts of his body in his routine reactions, based as it was on the guidance of his feeling sense, lead him progressively to lose his voice at a very young age. He refused to accept that fate and started to investigate and experiment with mirrors to see how he could change his habitual reactions –as they appeared in the mirror. At first he saw very little, but progressively he noticed in the mirror what he called “a series of bad movements” which happened beyond his control everytime he wanted to project his voice to an audience, or when he reacted to an “unusual demand” that he made on his organism. He observed the core of his habitual gestural reaction constituted of a series of coordinated movements of all the different parts of the torso, all happening at the same time, and which felt ‘right’ to him, but which nonetheless were creating harmful conditions of functioning throughout his organism. 

Learning to see these movements happen or not is pivotal in his initial technique, i.e., the technique he taught himself and his brother A.R. Alexander, “without ever laying a hand on him“. 

If you care to experiment on a friend in this act of rising, you will observe that in the movement as performed by an imperfectly co-ordinated person the same bad movements occur, tending to stiffen the neck, to arch the spine unduly, to shorten the body, and to protrude the abdominal wall.

Alexander, F.M.; Man’s Supreme Inheritance (Third Ed., 1946), p. 171.

Using verbal instructions [orders] as means, he discovered that he was able to refuse to give consent to the performance of definite ‘bad movements’ which he could not feel but SEE and, at the same time, to give consent to a new series of concerted movements which he had reasoned as best for his purpose[1] but which he had never felt: his initial technique was as much a technique to formulate decisions[2] (conscious guidance) of synchronized movements as a technique to follow up these decisions in activity (conscious control), in other words, a training to obey conscious orders of concerted movements especially when they were bound to feel “wrong” because they were totally different from his habitual reactions.

He had invented an anti-somatic/anti-embodiment technique of guidance based on the process of conscious guidance and conscious control with verbal orders to direct his mind. He had found a way to carry out an activity against the habit of giving consent to anything but what is felt as ‘right’. He had opened a revolutionary path toward freedom by making a stand against the tyranny of the feeling sense. 

Faced with this, I now saw that if I was ever to succeed in making the changes in use I desired, I must subject the processes directing my use to a new experience -—the experience, that is, of being dominated by reasoning instead of by feeling, particularly at the critical moment when the giving of directions merged into “doing” for the gaining of the end I had decided upon. This meant that I must be prepared to carry on with any procedure I had reasoned out as best for my purpose, even though that procedure might feel wrong. In other words, my trust in my reasoning processes to bring me safely to my “end” must be a genuine trust, not a half-trust needing the assurance of feeling right as well.

Alexander, F.M.; The Use of the Self, Its Conscious Direction in Relation to Diagnosis, (Third Ed. Centerline Press 1946), p. 36.

He had invented a “new practical experience”, that of ordering his reflection in the mirror with structured series of verbal instructions.

When he was able to stop the ‘bad movements’ from happening in the mirror and to replace them by a new correct series of concerted movements, i.e., when he became able to do what felt wrong in order to be right, he saw that his gestural reaction changed in the mirror and found out later that his troubles with his voice disappeared in the process. But the main point of his discovery was not that correct conditions of functioning can be obtained AFTER the ‘work’ of coordination has been done, when the “position of mechanical advantage” is achieved—another form of “cure”—, but that any individual, me, you or any pupil can be made the ‘actor’, the ‘agent’ or ‘authority’ of that change in the process of conducting experiments of conscious guidance and control of our gestural routine reactions when facing unusual demands. In order to construct his own conscious authority, the pupil (a) must learn to give himself a series of orders of movements including orders of definite inhibition and orders of definite performance and (b) he must also learn to stick to these decisions—he must learn to translate verbal orders into activity— when responding to unusual demands.

This is very far from the modern Alexander technique advocates who maintain that “hands-on is an essential and defining part of anything claiming to be “Alexander technique”, but if you take the position of the pupil for one second, you will see that the problem of guidance is not of receiving a refined sensory experience, but that of making decisions contrary to the feeling guidance.

You are not making decisions: you are doing kinaesthetically what you feel to be right. (Alexander, F.M.; Teaching Aphorisms, in Fischer, J.M.O, “Articles and Lectures”, 1995, p. 196

In the first place, his technique was devoid of ‘manipulations’ or ‘expert touch’ as his first pupil was obviously himself. The point of his lessons of “conscious guidance and control in the spheres of re-education, re-adjustment and co-ordination” was self-re-education, self-re-adjustment and self-co-ordination. The point was not for a teacher to re-educate the pupil’s “feeling self” by repeatedly manipulating the ‘correct coordination’ in his/her body but for the pupil himself, the real agent of change, to experiment with the process of directing the ‘character’ in the mirror [his reflection] to perform whole body gestures according to rules no matter how wrong they felt. He quickly found that ‘ordinary individuals’ could benefit from his discovery borrowed in the field of actors’ direction. He had invented not a postural technique, but a technique of constructive conscious guidance and control. 

These experiments of conscious, reasoned directions of the movements of the different parts of the torso using verbal orders of movements projected in a mirror is what I call the initial Alexander technique. Historical analysis tells that Alexander stopped his recitals in 1893 because of vocal problems, that he was back on stage with a full voice in 1894, just after a little more than a year —he had obviously re-educated himself by teaching himself his initial technique—, that no later that 1895, he started giving regular lessons while touring New Zealand, and that at the end of 1896 he was already training his brother A.R. Alexander —without ever lying a hand on him— so that he could help him to give lessons of the initial Alexander technique to his pupils. This was the time of the ‘evolution of the technique‘. From that revolutionary beginning, as every Alexander technique teacher will know, it took him more than ten years to perform the involution of his initial technique of conscious guidance into the somatic body work which we know now as the “Alexander technique”, but which I prefer to call the “modern Alexander technique“. 

The re-education of the “directive agent of the sphere of consciousness”

And the process by which this is achieved is simply a readjustment of the parts of the body by a new and correct use of the muscular mechanisms through the directive agent of the sphere of consciousness. This change brings about a proper mechanical advantage of all the parts concerned, and causes, thanks to the right employment of the relative machinery, such expansion and contraction of the thoracic cavity as to give atmospheric pressure its opportunity.

Alexander, F.M., “Why we breathe incorrectly”, 1909 cited in “Man’s supreme inheritance”, Chaterson Ltd 1910, reprinted 1946, p. 88.

If you think in terms of the ‘first-pupil perspective’ —Alexander teaching himself his technique— you will realise that the readjustment of the parts of the body is not the result of external manipulations of a touch-teacher, but that of internal concerted decisions[3] of the pupil to give consent to a series of orders describing a series of movements and to refuse to give his consent to unwanted movements triggered by the attempt to perform the desired movements. The lessons of the initial Alexander technique are not lessons given to the “feeling body”, but to the directive agent of the sphere of consciousness. The ‘practical experience’ which Alexander is refering to is not a ‘sensory experience’ given by a touch-teacher but an executive experience of simultaneous decisions[4] carried out by the pupil. The art of the teacher is to create a learning space where the pupil can observe concretely the effects of his own decisions. 

We don’t believe a person inhibits unless we SEE the concrete result. This concreteness is one of the things that differentiates us from New Thought and other isms and cults. We will not deal in so-called mental things as such. Every mental order we project has a discernible physical aspect, a concreteness.

F.M. Alexander; F.M. Alexander’s Aphorisms, by Westfeldt, L.; 1931-34.

The lessons are about developping a “skill”, the “executive skill” which functions[5] allow us to organize our psychophysical behaviour over time and override immediate demands in favor of long-term goals.[6] The obvious result of the lesson is that the pupil is seen objectively and concretely lengthening, widening and directing his head forward and up, but this mere result is covering up the real and much more fundamental goal for which the readjustment of the parts of the body is just a concrete training ground: in each experiment of conscious guidance, a great object lesson is given to the controlling mind. 

Nor must it be forgotten that in this process of reeducation a great object lesson is given to the controlling mind. In the very breaking up of maleficent co-ordinations or vicious circles which have become established, a new impulse is given to certain intellectual functions which have been thrown out of play. The reflex action which is setting up morbid conditions can only be controlled and altered by a deliberate realization of the guiding process which is to be substituted, and these new impulses to the conscious mind have, analogically, very much the same effect as is produced on the body by the internal massage referred to above. The old accumulations of subconscious thought are dispersed, and room is made for new conceptions and realizations.

Alexander, F.M., “Man’s supreme inheritance”, Chaterson Ltd 1910, reprinted 1946, p. 173.

You may ask yourself, “what are the intellectual functions of the ‘controlling mind’ which have been thrown out of play and that we want to train in the lesson?” The first one is the “discipline of description”, i.e., how we can spell out the movement of a part in space and time with words so that we can understand in advance what it is we have to inhibit (refuse to give consent to) and what series of movements we have to give consent to (doing) in order to obtain indirectly the required movement of the part concerned. The second one is ‘working memory’, a verbal skill indispensable to continue to have in mind a series of orders of movements so that they can be projected “Altogether, one after the other”, i.e., making sure that the whole (altogether) is effectively the coordination of each order after the other, and not a rather vague and conglomerated idea of the means whereby the readjustment is guided. The third one is “sustained attention”, the capacity to continue to direct our mind toward the performance of concerted movements with definite orders of movements when we are hit by sensory experiences which feel wrong. The fourth one is ‘follow through’, how to see that the old instinctive reaction has been inhibited and the new reaction has been performed, i.e., how to monitor our thinking process in the concrete solving of an unusual demand? 

A practical webinar for “learning to see”

This first webinar of a series is just an introductory contact to the teaching of conscious guidance and control. A little time will be dedicated to explain some central concepts written down by the young Alexander, but the most important part of the webinar, in time and import, will be experiments of conscious guidance performed by different participants [volunteers] working with me while the assistance will be watching the interaction between the “pupil” and the “teacher”. I propose to show the principles of conscious guidance and conscious control in action, exactly as they are ruling the long distance lessons I give to pupils all over the world. I will explain how the teacher and pupil can find some way of knowing whether the pupil is learning to inhibit and direct his use of the whole self, whether he/she is dominated by feeling or by reasoning at the critical moment of gaining an end which had been decided in advance. 

For the webinar to bear fruitful results, it is all-important that each participant can record every minute of the webinar in order to come back to the concepts and the demonstrations given in real time during the one-to-one-lessons I will give of these principles. In this way, each participant will be able to criticize accurately the informations which will be discussed during the webinar and make his own mind, contrasting what she sees when he/she is playing the part of an observer (objective position) and what she feels when playing the part of the pupil (subjective position). This recording is allowed by the Webinar platform we are going to use (Zoom), but it is important that you follow the guidelines for preparing for the one-to-one-lessons.

To prepare for the practical work, make sure that your camera is set up so that you can be filmed from the head to the toes, sideways, with the chair to sit on propped against a wall. It is better to wear light clothes against a dark background. For better contrast, make sure that the light is not directed toward the camera but toward the subject of the conscious guidance experiment. 

Prepare also a few tools of “conscious control” which will help to describe and control accurately the movements of certain parts consciously coordinated by the pupil: a small two dimensions plane (like a book or small plank of wood), a few pencils or straight sticks of woods (like drum sticks), a flat ruler of 30 to 40 cm, a longer stick of 1 meter (a broom stick).  

In case several teachers choose to share the same room during the webinar —there will be only one camera for the room— install in advance where the camera must be turned and where the ‘learning space’ (the chair against the wall) will be set so that the decision to practice an experiment of conscious guidance can be implemented without losing time. 

The details of the webinar, date, time, price are all going to be posted on a FaceBook page.

[1] “As I hope to show fully in what follows, any attempt on man’s part to bring about changes in his own reaction or that of others must begin by throwing overboard the conceptions and beliefs that are associated with the feeling upon which he has previously relied for guidance and control in the use of himself in carrying out all his activities. He will need to substitute for these a new conception leading to belief in new procedures, if he is ever to understand what is necessary to the making of fundamental change in reaction. This will call for a change in guidance and control in carrying out the new procedures that have been reasoned out as best for his purpose, but as these lead to changes in the use of the organism which are associated with unfamiliar motor and sensory experiences, sometimes disconcertingly so, much more is needed than a belief arising from intellectual considerations alone, if he is to hold to this belief during the employment of these procedures. (Alexander, F.M.; The Universal Constant in Living, (Third Ed. 1946).pdf, p. xxxvii)

[2] “The experience involved enables a person in time to carry out decisions which are at variance with his habitual use of himself, and he learns to consciously guide and control his activity in conformity with the new concept he has decided to adopt as best for his purpose, although the sensory experiences associated with the consistent carrying out of these new means, being unfamiliar, “feel wrong,” the crux of the whole matter.” (Alexander, F.M.; The Universal Constant in Living, (Third Ed. 1946), p. 104)

[3] “I may briefly explain orders concerning definite inhibition by stating that the teacher will have to deal with incorrect movements unconsciously performed. These movements occurring at the moment when the teacher dictates the orders (conscious guiding orders) necessary to bring about coordination of the different parts of the mechanism assert themselves and become primary, and hinder the performance of the correct and coordinated movements as ordered. It is, therefore, as necessary to order the inhibition of incorrect and unconsciously performed acts as to give orders (conscious guiding orders) which will secure the coordinated use of the mechanisms involved”. (Alexander, F.M.; “Re-education of the Kinaesthetic System”, 1908)

[4] “I venture to assert that if the gap is to be bridged so that the self may enter into and enjoy the fuller benefits of “man’s supreme inheritance,” it will be by means of a knowledge, gained through practical experience, which will enable man to inhibit his impulsive, “subconscious” reaction to a given stimulus, and to hold it inhibited while initiating a conscious direction, guidance, and control of the use of himself that was previously unfamiliar. (Alexander, F.M., “*The universal constant in living*, Chaterson L.t.d., 1942, third edition 1947, p. xxxi)

[5] Executive functions are responsible for directing and managing thinking, emotions and behavior, particularly during problem solving. Executive functions work together to help sustain goal-directed behavior by giving the person the ability to manage time and attention, switch focus, plan and organize, remember details, curb inappropriate speech or behavior and apply lessons learned from past experiences to new situations. https://www.laparent.com/helping-your-child-organize-plan-and-follow-through-at-school/

[6] Dawson, Peg, & Guare, Richard (2004). Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents. Peg Dawson, Richard Guare. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v0. 557.