Hitting the wall

Everything we do changes the environment, with or without consciousness. Everything we think changes ourself, with or without consciousness. Change happens anyway, anytime, albeit our perception of life might ignore this simple truth. Every breath we take slightly shift the balance between oxygen and CO2 in our immediate proximity, simultaneously the same chemical balance within our organism changes.

Once we start observing life from the perspective of permanent change, we can develop a better sense for the quality and direction of change. And we can develop an understanding that 'stable' patterns in our life often indicate obstacles rather than solace.

The direction of change subscribed to by the application of Alexander's principle's has a definite, yet fuzzy direction: Forward and up. If our habit pointed into a different direction, experiencing forward and up literally shifts our perspective. We apply Alexander's principle when we organise activity of our organism in accordance with the evolutionary mechanisms we inherited.

We can find forward and up approximately here and now. When we stay present with what happens within us and around us while we interact with our environment, we move forward and up. Although we are born with the ability to go forward and up, we need to learn to widen our attention to unify intention and action, internal and external sensations.

Whether we like it or not, the relation between head and trunk reflects our embodied attitude in life. A tense neck interferes with incorporating the procedural intelligence embedded in our structure, which means our decision making process uses less information than the total amount the system provides.

When I began learning the Alexander Technique, my attitude in and towards life looked worst than I thought, or would have confessed to. My structure reflected the tension I produced by swinging between defensive and aggressive patterns. Like a slave to my habits and living memory of untransformed trauma of my past I stumbled through my life, skilled in many ways yet without any clear direction.

The observer influences the experiment, states Heisenberg, and once we start to observe our self, we inevitably change our perceptions and consequently our interactions. During my twens, when I innocently moved forward and up, conscious yet with limited knowledge, I experimented systematically with ideas to 'blow my mind'. I learned to use my self as laboratory, and enjoyed most results of serendipitous interactions with other people.

I understood somehow the pattern character of human behaviour and thinking, yet only in a disconnected, disembodied way. Scrutinising, analysing, dis- and reassembling, discarding, creating my own thinking patterns became for some months or even years a hobby of mine.

As I understand it now, this strategy helped me dealing with the unresolved trauma I carried with me. It didn't resolve it, nor did it prevent the inevitable side effects of an embodied flight, fight or freeze response. It made me a 'functional' member of society, financially relatively independent yet somehow unhappy.

I didn't care too much about the pattern of unhappiness that evolved over the years. I consider it as part of the up and downs in life, and stopped wondering about the weeks of my life I felt unable to do more than absolutely necessary, waiting to wake up again in anticipation instead of dread. Which so far, always happened.

At some point, I started observing this pattern more closely, and noticed its detrimental influence of my use. At its heart, the habits connected to my depressed states fulfil the desire to escape from the present moment, using my life energy to keep a trauma vortex active.

Knowing more about the nature of the depressive phases of my life doesn't make them go away yet. It became easier to step back to become observer, and to stop judging myself. I felt a bit shocked when I went through the self diagnosis for depression and anxiety some month ago for the second time, and noticed how my answer had changed. I don't take a self diagnosis too serious, mainly because these tests ignore mostly the wholeness of our existence and experience.

We have identified the enemy, and it is us. I gave up the fight, and accepted the current co-existence of self-destructive and self-healing patterns. Now I need to find a way to get the embodied pattern that harm me transformed. A small step for a quantum, a leap for the ego.

Little things with big impact

Every environment you visit on a regular basis becomes co-creator of habits. Even before I started learning Alexander Technique, I had developed a kind of sense for the new (and some of the typical) ways of interaction in serendipitous situations.

Going to school certainly fosters new habits, and usually you will encounter a schedule or timetables as frame to attach various new behaviour patterns to. Luckily, David's school for Alexander Studies prevents 'over-habitualisation' by inviting one or two 'master teachers' per term, interrupting the routine and offering fresh perspectives.

Cathy Madden visits our school at the moment, for the third time while I study there. I still remember some of her observation from prior visits. She reminded me to use my clavicles when I move my arm, she encouraged me to investigate my speech patterns by switching between German and English, and besides that provided a great example of applying AT when she worked with our group.

I felt quite elated and 'ready for action' after both days of Cathy's weekend workshop, although I didn't seem to have advanced much. However, just by attending the workshop I surrounded myself by a nurturing, positive environment with the opportunity to learn more about a different approach to teach the technique.

Cathy knows well the typical Alexander lingo, yet she doesn't bring up such terms unless requested to. Her language keeps simple, and with questions gentler than a lot of AT teachers hand she elicits useful information from the student.

She picked up on my habit of stating a lot of things in directly and indirectly negative ways, by noticing a shortening when airing bits of negativity. I had a great learning moment when I observed this pattern in another student, and Cathy's elegant way to reframe the students desire in positive terms. Even without Cathy's explicit reminder my understanding of this pattern grew, and confirmed the usefulness of simply observing a good teacher in action.

I missed the opportunity to ask her to help me teaching until today, and still needed to convince myself that I wanted to get up and do it. I had a positive intent how to approach the situation, but noticed that I lost my coordination pretty fast. More precisely, when I wanted to speak more activity than needed happened. Cathy stopped me and put her hands on, while I had my next go in talking to my student.

I could not figure out what I did in this critical moment, and Cathy went on to explain bits about the mechanics of voice production. She noticed that I pulled my tongue back to produce sounds, so she simply asked me first to hum, and then to speak trusting that I don't need to do this.

I guess I must have looked quite surprised when I played around with a new pathway to make some noise. All of a sudden, the tiny movement my tongue made stood out sufficiently to allow me to let go of it, to reorganise myself so that I have a new plan I can follow when I want to speak.

I wonder what else I do with my tongue, yet it seems blindingly obvious that additional tension in my tongue affects my neck, and therefore my entire coordination. Playing around with speaking still feels odd. Allowing my tongue to do less seems to reactivate saliva production, and sometimes I get the impression that my speech gets a bit slurry.

The tiny bit of information about me pulling my tongue back to 'prepare' for sound production took an entire mountain off my chest. At some point of my journey of learning the technique I came across the fact that I did something extra to speak. Not knowing what but noticing that 'I did it again' became a relatively steady source of frustration, and contributed to the diffuse perception of my social awkwardness.

Besides observance, guidance with our hands, verbal explanations we teach AT by applying its principles, using subconscious mechanisms to model freedom in activity. My concern about dis-coordinating myself while speaking slowly dissolves, and I look forward using my voice in a new way.