For everyone, including those new to the technique
“I find the Alexander Technique very helpful in my work. Things happen without you trying. They get to be light and relaxed. You must get an Alexander teacher to show it to you.” – John Cleese You’ve never heard a clarinet played before, so I loan you mine. You sit down for a couple of hours and work out how to make a few sounds, some not too bad. It may even pass for music. You think you have a…
In modern Australia there can be some status attached to having a convict ancestor. This was not the case in F.M. Alexander’s time. Alexander’s four grandparents were convicts, transported to Tasmania in the 1830s and 1840s when just teenagers or in their early twenties. One stole a dress. Another destroyed a threshing machine in an uprising of agricultural workers. Once in Tasmania, all survived and prospered, and in 1869 their grandson Frederick Matthias Alexander was born in north-west Tasmania. In…
What shape are you in at the moment? But how do you know? Do you know how many senses you have? The usual answer is five, but in fact we have many more than that, as discussed in this BBC article. As well as the five we are all familiar with, we can also sense temperature, pain, and balance, among others. And then there’s our kinaesthetic sense, which is our sense of body awareness. It tells you where in space…
There have been a few articles over the last few years which talk about the dangers of sitting, and comparing sitting to smoking. Here is a word in defence of sitting. While there is no such thing as healthy smoking, there is such a thing as healthy sitting. It is possible to sit comfortably for long periods of time without causing harm or damage. And while you can’t learn to smoke healthily, you can certainly learn to sit healthily and…
Roger Federer is quite precise about his tennis racquets. According to this article in the New Yorker, he has nine racquets prepared for each match, with “three racquets to be strung at twenty-six kilos, five at 26.5, and one at twenty-seven”; and he likes “natural gut for the sixteen main strings and polyester for the nineteen cross strings”. Federer knows how to get the most out of a racquet. He has thought and practised a lot, to be able to…
It is easy in today’s society to think of life as being complicated. If we could live in an earlier time perhaps life would be simpler, without the stress and strain that goes with the modern world. Perhaps. “Many years ago Confucius said, ‘Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated’. He must have been thinking about post-war airport consultants.” – 1949, Aero Digest I’m pretty sure Confucius had no such thing in mind because I’m pretty…
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.” – W. C. Fields We’re one week into the Olympics in Rio, so there’s already been a lot of trying, and some succeeding, going on over there. Sport is certainly one area where the “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” philosophy gets a run, but it is certainly applied in many other areas of life as…
Do you know how likely it is you’ll get back pain? Do you know how likely it is you can get long term benefit for your back pain? Firstly, you have about a 10% chance of experiencing “chronic, impairing low back pain” at some stage, according to a 2009 University of North Carolina study. This was up from 3.9% just three years earlier, so if you’re reading this in 2020 (or later), it will probably be higher. The effects of…
“About 10 million working days a year are lost to stress” in the UK, according to this article in the Guardian. They don’t say how many involved bears. There’s a bear in there You hear a noise to your left, and you quickly look up. There’s a bear, looking at you. What happens next? You immediately go into the fight-or-flight response, preparing you to deal with the threat. Some muscles in your body tense, to provide you with the extra…
There’s a cartoon you may have seen which features two men standing before a large sign that reads, ‘Stop and Think’. One of the men says to the other, “It sort of makes you stop and think, doesn’t it.” Some of us stop and think on a regular basis. A golfer, before teeing off, will compose themselves, take some time, and when ready will then complete their stroke. A diver will step to the edge of the platform, and then…
“There’s a number that is all the buzz these days in the world of autonomous vehicles: 94 percent. That’s the percentage of car crashes caused by driver error.” – Washington Post, December 10 2017 You have a friend who crashed his car into a tree. Bad luck, you say, I bet that won’t happen again. Two months later it happens again. Bad luck again, you may say, though you’ll be having doubts. Two months later and there’s another bonnet in…
Did you make any New Year’s resolutions this year? And two weeks into the year, have you managed to keep any? “Around 50 per cent of Australians make a New Year’s resolution and there’s around an 88 per cent failure rate” according to this article from the Sydney Morning Herald. So how do you manage to stick to your resolutions, at least beyond January? This recent piece in the Guardian points out that “there is no magic, one-size-fits-all solution… In…
Alexander Technique was born of acting. Alexander himself was an actor in Melbourne, Australia in the 1890s when he began losing his voice, an affliction known at the time as Clergyman’s Throat. He regained his voice thanks to the discoveries he made, and he went on to teach his methods to many people, including numerous actors, over the next sixty years. One of his most famous students was Sir Henry Irving, forgotten to many of us today. In his day…
George Bernard Shaw: I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend—if you have one. Winston Churchill: Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second—if there is one. The above quote probably refers to George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which was first produced in 1912 when Shaw was fifty-six years old. Twenty-six years later, in 1938, he received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his adaptation of the play to the…
Operations can be painful, and not just for the patient Like many of us – dentists, musicians and hairdressers, for example – surgeons are required to perform at their best while maintaining a potentially damaging posture for long periods of time. A 2010 study looked at whether the Alexander Technique could help surgeons deal with this situation. Research from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center looked at “the effectiveness of the Alexander Technique at improving the surgical posture and technical performance…
A few years ago, in 2013, many people announced that the English language was broken. As the Guardian reported at the time: “Literally the most misused word in the language has officially changed definition. Now as well as meaning ‘in a literal manner or sense; exactly’… various dictionaries have added its other more recent usage. As Google puts it, ‘literally’ can be used ‘to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong…
“Mr. Alexander has done a service to the subject by insistently treating each act as involving the whole integrated individual… To take a step is an affair not of this or that limb solely, but of the total neuromuscular activity of the moment.”– from “The Endeavour of Jean Fernel” by Sir Charles Sherrington, Nobel Prize winner in medicine (1932). In sporting clashes it’s often said that a champion team will beat a team of champions. This saying appears as far…
In the current US election campaign, politifact.com tells us that Trump’s statements have been 15% mostly false, 43% false, and 18% pants on fire. For Clinton, the numbers are better than Trump but still not good. It’s a little early in this Australian campaign to have any numbers, so here they are for the previous election: Tony Abbott – 23% half true, 40% mostly false and 8% false; and Kevin Rudd – 26% half true, 5% mostly false and 37%…
1. The right thing does itself Like all life on earth, the human body has evolved with gravity ever present. We aren’t just designed to simply cope with gravity, we require it. The force of gravity produces an automatic response which engages our postural muscles, and these muscles then hold us up easily, freely and naturally. This is not something we need to consciously manage – just as our hearts beat and our food is digested, being upright should happen…
How do you have your stake? If you want your tomato plants to grow upwards, you might want to tie them to a stake, to guide them in the direction you wish. So if you choose a nice straight stake they’ll follow its shape upwards. And if you don’t, they’ll tend to meander across the ground. We’re a bit like tomato plants. We also grow in the direction we’re guided. In our case it’s not a piece of wood that’s…
It is easy to see gravity as a problem – something that takes us downward and which needs to be overcome. But this is wrong. Would you like to go to Mars? It’s a one-way ticket, leaving 2026. You’ll need to pack light, and you’ll have to get used to being indoors – higher radiation levels restrict outside time to just one hour a day. Also, your bones will lose density and strength and your postural muscles will weaken, no…
The familiar versus the beneficial Are you addicted to sugar? Apparently most of us are, and it’s not good for us. It is now claimed there is “hard and fast data that sugar is toxic irrespective of its calories and irrespective of weight.” (TIME) And once sugar has become part of our make-up, those who indulge will carry on indulging, even when conscious that it is gradually undermining their health. “It shows that in the case of sugar, for instance,…
A crooked clarinet will make a crooked sound “There are musicians – some say there were more of them in the past – who get as much pleasure from a performance as they give, who always perform easily and well, and who use themselves so efficiently that their professional lives and their natural lives coincide. There are others, however, with equal talent and training, to whom performance and even practice are exhausting, and whose professional lives are cut short because…