Tips4Teachers – Thought, energy and the atlanto-occipital joint
The physical aspect of “head forward and up” I have written about in another post (see Tips4Teachers – Head Forward and Up).
Here I want to discuss the way in which the freedom of the atlanto-occipital joint and the tone of the sub-occipital muscles are intricately connected with mental and emotional states.
The point at which the base of the skull sits on the atlas can be thought of as not only the physical connection between head and spine, but also the place where mind and body interface; a two-way flow of information and feedback.
Sensitive hands can detect subtle energies flowing through this area. These energies relate to and are influenced by mental and emotional processes.
In order to allow energies to flow freely, one has to, as Patrick Macdonald put it:
“….learn to get out of ITS way.” 1
The “it” cannot be exactly defined, but we can discover what needs to let go in order to get out of the way.
At this level of work it is not about releasing muscle tension; it is about the “something” that generates the tension. We could call it a mental or emotional state, an attitude or even a belief. At the core however, it is a sense of ‘self’ sustained by a collection of personality traits and their associated sensory habits; “It feels like this to be me!”
The teacher is advised to explore the process of ‘getting out of the way’ outside of the teaching room in his or her daily life, otherwise even this most subtle aspect of hands-on work can become seeking out states or experiences for their own sake.
Nevertheless, when a moment of “getting out of the way” is facilitated through a multi-level interaction with the pupil, it is transformative:
“The old accumulations of subconscious thought are dispersed, and room is made for new conceptions and realizations.” 2
This, provided it is not confined to the rarefied atmosphere of the teaching room but is ventured in the reality of Life. is the most difficult, most challenging but ultimately most rewarding aspect of Alexander’s teaching, It can be scary, exhilarating, liberating; it is the unknown.
To paraphrase Lennon and McCartney:
“What do you see when you get out of ITS way?
I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine.”
1. The Alexander Technique As I See It, Patrick MacDonald; Notebook Jottings. Published by Rahula Books, 1989 (back to text).
2. Man’s Supreme Inheritance, FM Alexander; Notes and Instances (back to text).
© John Hunter 2014
Equilibrium: Tradition and Innovation
(This article was first published in ExChange: Journal of Alexander Technique International, August 2013, Volume 21 No. 2)
Human nature being what it is – ever subject to the same laws – it is not to be wondered at that the followers of F M Alexander are facing the same difficulties as have countless followers of countless innovators in every sphere of activity throughout human history. Did we really expect to avoid the fate that beset Sunnis and Shiites, Papists and Lutherans, the rightful heirs or the usurping pretenders, the guardians of tradition or the great reformers?
To give a context to a discussion about tradition and innovation we should, I think, also consider two other pairs of contrasting terms: form and content, orthodoxy and heresy.
Beginning with the last, we might say that orthodoxy represents an acceptance of Alexander’s primary tenets; use affect function, the necessity of saying ‘no’ to a stimulus, the capacity to direct, the unity of the organism, recognition of the force of habit, non-doing, the Primary Control, the means-whereby principle rather than end-gaining. Heresy would be to deny or ignore these principles in applying and/or teaching the Technique which bears Alexander’s name.
Form I see as the ‘procedures’; semi-supine, chair-work, monkey, lunge, hands on the back of a chair, going onto the toes, whispered ‘ah’, squatting – largely accepted by STAT and the Affiliated Societies as the bedrock of learning and teaching the Technique.
Content is, for me, experiencing a free attention and the consequent physical liberation in an actual moment of inhibition and direction in oneself, be that in a lesson or – more significantly – in Life.
Tradition for me refers to that which is handed down from generation to generation. It is what we learned from our teachers and can be traced back to Alexander. It is connected with a line or lines of transmission (though some have been so dominant that others are almost disregarded).
Innovation is the introduction of something new or making changes to something already established; a change nevertheless consistent with the essential principles, hence not a heresy.
It can be helpful to look at any differences between teachers, teaching styles or even organisations in the light of the above criteria. Does the innovator enrich our understanding because he or she sheds light from another angle on the timeless truth of the formless content, or is it the indulgence of a strong personality, down-playing one or more of the principles in order to avoid some personal difficulty, or to appeal to those who want an easier, more marketable, version?
Is a ‘traditionalist’ rediscovering moment by moment – in the best tradition of the early teachers – the ‘inner work’ that can be accessed through a conscious use of the procedures, or merely hiding behind the safety of ‘form’, churned out day after day in some well-rehearsed routines devoid of any spark?
Then how to avoid having fixed ideas about being free?
Professor Bryan Niblett shared a story about F M Alexander and Professor John Dewey at a talk he gave a few years ago to the Friends of the Alexander Technique. Alexander sent the text of Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual to Dewey, asking him to write an Introduction. Dewey complained about the length of the title, asking FM to drop “of the Individual”. FM’s response was that that would be to leave out the most important word. So it is a path of individuation. I tried to express this in a lecture I gave some years ago:
It is good to admire and respect our teachers; to be in a line of transmission. But then we have to find something for ourselves. What does all of this mean to me? How can I make something of these ideas? Alexander said to his students: “Don’t do what I do.” In other words, don’t be an imitator.
I have always been struck by the fact that the first generation of teachers, to whom we all owe so much, are so different from each other – and yet true to a principle. These people all found something for themselves. Coming afterwards, as we do, there has been a tendency, perhaps inevitable, to fix the form in the way that we each received it. To an extent that is understandable, but a lot of the life, the sense of discovery, can be lost. We must be careful in setting up this huge infrastructure – necessary though it may be – of lessons and teachers and pupils and training courses and students and “bodies” – that we are not just creating an artificial, rather precious environment in which certain experiences can be repeated as ends in themselves: a kind of “Alexander virtual reality”. We need to take this new knowledge about use and put it to the test in our own lives. This is the link that needs to be made. To inhibit the desire to get in or out of a chair is one thing. But then we have to take that into the real world and find out for ourselves what is really going on.
Then, as Miss Goldie would put it “You’ll be making discoveries, and …you’ll be surprised at what you find”.*
* Making the Link: The F M. Alexander Memorial Lecture, delivered to the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique, July 2002. (First published in The Alexander Journal No 19)
© John Hunter 2013
Equilibrium: Rights and Responsibilities
“They will see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that a pupil decides what he will or will not consent to do” 1
FM Alexander
In contemporary times, particularly in the West, many people have a sense of entitlement; the words ‘human rights’ are heard all too often. But what about ‘human responsibilities’? Not on a global, national, regional or even local level, but on a deeply personal level. Am I or could I be responsible for myself?
Take some situation in your life about which you find yourself inwardly complaining. (Best to start with something small.)
Stop!
Coordinate yourself!
Consider your options! Doing nothing at all, carrying on in the same way or what I call “The Monty Python Option”, i.e. doing something completely different.
You may think you have no options, but try and find some- even ones that you would in no circumstances do such as, perhaps, letting people down or being reckless (if you need some help with this you could always read The Diceman).
Then make a choice!
You may find that you choose to do the thing you are already doing, but now you are doing it because you chose to do it and, hopefully, in a more coordinated way. No one else to blame. Your choice, your responsibility!
This experiment can be a step towards taking responsibility.
It’s so interesting that in English we have this expression “take responsibility”. In all Romance Languages it is “assume responsibility”. The language reminds us that it calls for something active.
1. Teaching Aphorisms: The Alexander Journal No 7, 1972, published by the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique. Also published in Articles and Lectures by Mouritz (1995).
© 2014 John S Hunter
Being With Erika: #14, Munich 1995
My good friend Renate Hoffman, who trained in London – first with Patrick Macdonald and then with Misha Magidov, lived in Munich. She was a pupil for many years of Margaret Goldie and revisited London often to continue having lessons with her. Renate was very keen to meet Erika, who spent many of her childhood years in Munich and still had friends there. Erika had also maintained for many years a correspondence friendship with Sydney Holland’s daughter Mary; Erika and Mary, who ran a training course in Munich, had never met. The conditions all seemed very favourable for organising an “Alexander trip” to Munich with Erika, and so Renate set to work to arrange things while Erika was in Europe again in 1995.
We visited two teacher training courses, at each of which the tea break proved to be a feast, and Erika finally met her correspondent Mary Holland.
There was also a weekend of workshops for teachers. One never quite knew what to expect from these events. Even though I had by now been to numerous such gatherings, they were always different. She never planned what she was going to do. To break the ice, she often began by recounting her own early experiences with her Aunt Ethel Webb (she loved to imitate Miss Webb saying “Keep your length, Dear!”). She was, so to speak, feeling her way into the situation, gauging where people were in themselves , how they might be getting in their own way and seeing what they needed.
It is a curious fact in the AT world, however, that we use the same words to refer to different processes and experiences. Renate told me that she overheard two of the participants discussing their reactions to the first morning of the workshop.
“I think we are doing that already, aren’t we?” asked one.
“Yes I think so” said the other. “I think we’ve already got it.”
“Yes I agree. We’ve got it. We don’t really need to stay for the rest do we?”
“Not really!”
Another participant, let’s call her “X”, who had picked up some crumbs from Marj Barstow’s table at one of her Swiss workshops, came face to face with her nemesis when she insisted on the importance of slumping.
It is true that some Alexander students and teachers fall into the trap of trying to go up at the front (which can lead to a phenomena knows as the “£10,000 chest“) and to maintain such a posture at all times. Marj would often remind people that slumping is not per se a bad thing; it is part of one’s flexibility. She would even invite students to “have a little slump” before directing up out of it and into movement.
The aforementioned participant at Erika’s workshop had latched onto Marj’s point in a distorted form, concluding that slumping was good and that this was some kind of Alexander esoteric knowledge that Marj had transmitted to her. But Erika was having none of it. Although I had heard her say many times something similar to Marj, Erika recognised the misconception in the participant and confronted it (see also Note 2 in Traps, Pitfalls & Culs-de-sacs: the £10,000 Chest).
“Erika was fantastic” Renate told me afterwards. “She was like a Zen Master. She wouldn’t let X off the hook. X insisted that she was right but Erika just laughed and told her she was wrong; she had misunderstood.”
For X this was like a koan. She found herself in an impossible situation. She would have to let go of her misconception or ……… Or what?
In the end her misconception, together with her sense of feeling special, was more precious to her than the opportunity to move on. She decided to leave.
It was touching to watch others, more open, allowing their understanding to be transformed – if only momentarily – especially when Erika put hands on them and they had the experience of a different quality of energy flowing through them. A moment can, after all, be short in “outer time”, but deeply significant in “inner time”.
Yet it was the more informal times that were the most delightful and illuminating. There were dinners at Renate and her husband Peter’s apartment, full of light and serious conversations; there were trips to Munich’s wonderful Konditoreien.
Walking past the Opera House, she reminisced about her childhood, telling us about the “Opera Line”. It seems that in the 1920’s it was already possible to ring the operator and ask for a direct connection to live performances.1
Erika introduced us to Munich’s artistic community at a party. She had kept in touch with people there who fondly remembered her from their childhoods fifty, sixty or seventy years before, It was a sight to behold when they, already themselves no longer young, came face to face with someone from the distant past – but still so full of life.
1. Thanks to Pia Quaet-Faslem for contacting the Bavarian State Opera, who confirmed that the Théâtrophone was in use there until around 1930 when radio broadcasts made it redundant. See Wikipedia: Théâtrophone
© 2014 John S Hunter
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