109. Direction and Position
“There is no such thing as a right position, but there is such a thing as a right direction.”(Taken from “Articles and Lectures – Teaching Aphorisms p194”)
94. Moving
“So long as we’re alive, we are moving. We are, to a considerable extent, being carried. It’s very much up to us to see that we’re not carried in directions that we don’t want to be carried in.”(Taken from “Thinking Aloud” – Wishing, Willing and Fairy Tales p19)
91. Talk to it Nicely
“It seems to me that telling yourself subvocally, ‘the head to go forward and up’ and so on is a very, very powerful stimulus to do it. If I tell myself things, I usually tell myself to do things. I’m not so subtle in conversations with myself that I just tell myself to give consent to do something. I don’t just say, you know, ‘Come on, old fellow, just let it happen.’ I say, ‘Wake up at the back there!’…
89. Learning How to Learn
Thinking, directing, “giving orders”, or however you wish to describe it, is not an end in itself. It has value and meaning only as it is applied to the pupil’s own life.(Taken from “Freedom to Change” – Appendix D p193)
88. Weight and Movement
Just to recap, in ordinary everyday life, we suffer from weight, we suffer from being heavy, from being relatively immobile. We can say we suffer, because we are creatures constructed for movement. Movement is what our lives are all about. You’ve got to mobilize weight and control it and regulate it, and you do that by and through energy. So, learning to use yourself properly is learning to regulate direction and control the flow of energy.(Taken from “Thinking Aloud” –…
58. Forward and Up
Now the phrase “forward and up” has led to more confusion than any of the other ones used in teaching the Alexander Technique, and its explanation affords considerable difficulty. In the first place it must be remembered that Alexander coined the phrase in response to what he saw himself and others doing wrong. He noticed that he was pulling his head back and down, and he came to the conclusion that this was an interference with proper use. “Forward and…
57. On Position
The Alexander Technique does not teach position. It teaches proper co-ordination in all normal positions. If the little extension of the spine that Alexander demanded is operative then it matters little what position the body adopts. That is not to say that positions have no importance. There are some positions in which proper co-ordination is difficult or impossible. For instance, it is difficult for anyone to sit in many so-called “easy” chairs without collapsing their spines. These chairs are much…
54. A Re-educational Process
And we must always keep in mind that what distinguishes the Technique from other disciplines is that it’s a re-educational process. The pupil has to become aware of what it is that he or she is doing, and find out what’s wrong in order not to carry on doing it…Really, this is the magical thing about the Technique if it’s properly taught. The teacher doesn’t merely point out to someone what’s wrong, but instead shows them how to prevent it…
50. Inhibit the Effort
All I want you to do is to give certain directions for me, and then inhibit the tremendous effort you are making to be right.FM Alexander (“Articles and Lectures” – Teaching Aphorisms p204)
47. Emotional Reactions 2
For example, as training course students he used to tell us that if we were waiting for a bus and it was a long time coming, or if we were caught in a traffic jam there was no point in getting upset about it. He would say: “Don’t get angry, give your orders [directions] instead. In that way, you can begin to extend the Technique to your emotional reactions.”Marjory Barlow (“Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules” – part 1 p65)
36. Be Persistent in your Wanting
If you’re not clear about what you want, you’re very unlikely to get it. You also have to remember you want it, because we want all sorts of different things and our wants and wishes change from moment to moment. If you’re going to make a change in habit from pulling down to going up, you have to be very persistent in your wanting. You can’t afford to forget, because every time you forget you’ll revert to your habit.Walter Carrington…
The Experts On… Directions and Directing – Part 1
“All I want you to do is to give certain directions for me, and then inhibit the tremendous effort you are making to be right.”F.M. Alexander (Articles and Lectures – Teaching Aphorisms p204) Introduction PM: A large part of this audience will have been through the experiences which I am proposing to touch upon, but there will be others to whom giving directions is little more than a verbal concept and it is possible that this lecture may clarify their…
The Experts On… Directions and Directing – Part 2
“There is no such thing as a right position, but there is such a thing as a right direction.”F.M. Alexander (Articles and Lectures – Teaching Aphorisms p194) (…continued from Directions and Directing – Part 1) Back to lengthen and widen LW: We can now discuss the final parts of the pattern, the lengthening and widening of the back. But before we begin to consider the back by itself, let us realize that we can never possibly consider the back by…
24. Directing
“Neck free (or free your neck), head forward and up, back to lengthen and widen” and, very importantly, “knees to go forward and away.” He [Alexander] said to me, “If I stand beside you and say those words, you can’t go wrong. But I can’t be with you all the time so you’ve got to learn to do that for yourself.”Marjory Barlow (“Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules” – Part 1 p29)
22. Freeing, Not Trying
So when we say think about your neck being free, it isn’t a matter of trying to feel whether it’s free and then trying from there to free it. You don’t have to try to free it. Trying to free it implies making some sort of effort to free it, and freedom is not going to be brought about by effort; stiffening is brought about by effort. If your neck is stiff, it’s because you’re stiffening it. If you stop…
15. Off to a Good Start
Then first thing in the morning when you wake up, don’t leap out of bed otherwise it will be 11 o’clock before you even think about freeing your neck. Stay there for a while with the knees drawn up and give your orders. Then get out of bed slowly – don’t rush it. It’s not good for you to go from lying on your back for hours and then to spring out of bed. Then you can work out the…
13. Knees Forward and Away
When people stand, and when they try to stand tall and straight, they have an inevitable tendency to brace the legs, which involves the hyper-extension of the hip joint, the knee joint, and the fixing of the ankle. This tendency is there all the time, stimulated at the drop of a hat, and that is why we need the constant reminder of the opposite.Walter Carrington (“Thinking Aloud” – Knees Going Forward and Away p160)
12. Back to Lenghten and Widen
One thing that it is important for us to realize in considering the thoughts given to the back is that the back includes the pelvis; it does not stop at the waistline. And what Alexander meant by “lengthening the back’ is that one must think the whole back, including the pelvis, upwards.Lulie Westfeldt (“F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work” – Chapter 13 p140)
11. Head to Go Forward and Up
“Head forward” might have several meanings. Most people think of it as head forward in space. Alexander in using the words meant head forward in relation to the neck. It took a long time and hard work to find this out. One realized in time that his hands, which he used in demonstrating and teaching, were always tending to take the neck back and the head forward in relation to it. Once one had discovered this, one could ask him…
10. Let the Neck Be Free
Let the neck be free. You will notice that the phrase starts with “let”. This is important. It means that the pupil should avoid stiffening the neck – not that he should do something to free it. I frequently find pupils going through all sorts of contortions in the belief that they are “freeing the neck”. They are usually, in fact, producing an extra stiffening by so doing.Patrick MacDonald (“On Giving Directions, Doing and Non-Doing” – STAT Memorial Lecture 1963)
The Experts On… Learning the Alexander Technique 1
“Under the ordinary teaching methods, the pupil gets 19 wrong to 1 right experience. It ought to be the other way round.”F.M. Alexander (Articles and Lectures, Teaching Aphorisms – p196) An Unstructured Group of Quotes Related to Learning AT MB: There’s a ‘still point’ as Elliot would say, where, I don’t say it’s unaffected, but it’s not pushed off its perch – you’re able to keep something going whatever happens to you outwardly. And that’s the secret of life really….
4. Walking
Irene Tasker had some nice advice about walking. When I was working with her at Ashley Place before I went on the training course she told me that as you walk forward, you should think that your whole back is going in the direction from which you have come. It’s a preventative, and it stops you throwing the body forward. It’s wonderful – I think everyone should try it!Marjory Barlow (“Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules” p103)
3. Direction
It is the persistence, the keeping on, on, on. If you realize that your body is shrinking, that you are contracting, that you can see that instead of your shoulders going out as they should, they’re hunching in, keep hunching in, and go on hunching in, then you’ve got to direct the energy for them to go out. You’ve got to keep directing the energy to go out, and you’ve got to keep right on at it persistently and continuously….
The Experts On… Learning the Alexander Technique 2
“I ask you to do nothing, but you act as if I had asked you to do. I have got to train you to act according to your decision where the habits of life are concerned.”F.M. Alexander (Articles and Lectures, Teaching Aphorisms – p196) An Unstructured Group of Quotes Related to Learning AT FPJ: When I knew F. M., he had very little to say about “directive orders” or “thinking.” I assumed that he was satisfied that I knew how…