YaATT: yet another Alexander Technique thread

August 28, 2009 at 12:55 AM ·

Greetings, 

I have just caught up with the post in question and with all due respect I thought it was a bit of a shame.  Part of it reads*

>Normally the body naturally takes on a position which is comfortable.

Not the whole picture.  The comfort is only relative to the current misuse of the body.  Typically what is comfortable to the body is what it habitually does according to what is called homeostasis. After misuse  one may well have to go through apparent discomfort (not pain) to return to natural use of the body.  I`m afraid the above is a thoroughly misleading statement.

>Telling the body (artificially, or externally) how to relax itself, either by focusing on posture, breathing, etc, is not natural, and will block (eventually) your ability to release yourself, and give out your own interpretation of a piece.

Let`s clear up some straw man points here.

AT -never- involves:

1) telling the body to relax directly.  It is a result achieved through process.

2) focuses on something called posture (in AT `posture` is virtually a taboo word)

3) FM Alexander was absolutely against attention on breathing

With all due respect,  if one knows virtually -nothing- about a subject then it is really out of order to try and guide people in this area by setting forth other wise impeccable professional qualifications in another field.

Buri

August 28, 2009 at 02:38 PM ·

Yes, I totally agree with Buri. Alexander was completely against anything that involved breathing techniques that would cause a significant aritifical reduction in heart-rate, such as yoga.

The Alexander Technique is about "good usage of oneself" - especially the relation between the head, neck, shoulders, and spine, etc. It is about finding a better way to do things with your physical structure - finding how to do the same things, but doing it in an easier way. We, as humans, typically develop unconscious habits that actually involve more effort than necessary. For instance, why have your shoulders raised if there is no reason to do so? Why have excessive tension in your legs while you are sitting? Why have your jaw held up against the teeth if there is no reason for it? Why have your head forward and your chest collapsed forward since that causes more strain on the neck and spine than is necessary? The AT is about helping one to become conscious of things such as this. It is education, not therapy.  It is not about maitaining any ONE good position (that is more what "posture" is), but rather, it is about maintaining a good relative connexion between body parts while doing whatever task or movement you are doing - or, using the way with less resistance, finding an easier way to do things. Patrick Macdonald, an AT teacher who studied with F. M. Alexander, said, "If at first you don't succeed, never try again -- at least not in the same way." Why continue to ram your head against a brick wall in an attempt to smash through it when all you are going to end up doing is hurting your head? One should recognise after the first failure that they need to try something different to achieve the desired task.