“They won’t try and get out of the chair unless they feel they have that something that will get them out of the chair! That something is their habit.”
F.M. Alexander (Articles and Lectures, Teaching Aphorisms – p198)

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Introduction

FPJ: I can’t talk about the Alexander Technique without using the word “kinaesthesia”. So I’ll start out by defining it. Kinaesthesia is a Greek word – it is too bad there isn’t a good English word for it like “sight” or “hearing” or “touch” – it means literally “the sensation of movement” but it is used to cover sensations of position, weight and tension as well. It gives you information about yourself as opposed to information about your environment. Aristotle did not list it among his five senses and it has received very little attention in textbooks of sensory psychology. From a practical point of view, however, kinaesthesia is the most important sense of all. It is the one sense you can’t get along without.
(Freedom to Change – Appendix E p197)

LW: When Alexander began his experiments, he used, as we will remember, a mirror. When he first tried to apply the new pattern to his reciting, however, he was not using a mirror. He thought that he was maintaining the new pattern; he felt that he was maintaining the new pattern; but the difficulties with his voice returned. This made him suspect that he was not doing what he thought or felt he was doing. He therefore decided to check, and using three mirrors (placing the outer two at different angles to the middle one so that he could get several different views of himself), he was enabled to see that at the moment when he was about to speak he put his head not forward, as he had intended, but back. He was doing the opposite of what he had believed and felt he was doing.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 14 p146)

FPJ: From this and from similar experiences with the mirrors he concluded that his senses were unreliable and that he could not depend on instinctive or habitual guidance if he wanted to make a change.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 3 p17)

LW: Now, for the first time, he asked himself whether he had any definite guiding principle for determining the way he used himself; he could only answer that he had none. He simply used himself in the way that felt right and natural to him. His feeling was his only guide, and now he knew that his feeling was unreliable…
‘Surely,’ he argued, ‘if it is possible for feeling to become untrustworthy as a means of direction, it should also be possible to make it trustworthy again.’
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 14 p146)

FPJ: It has been recognized from the time of Plato that the senses are unreliable. No one, however, (before F. M. Alexander) made the obvious inference that, since this is the case, it is necessary to restore this reliability before progress is possible – indeed that it must be restored to prevent further degeneration.
(Freedom to Change – Appendix E p197)

Discussion

WC: The re-education of feeling very much involves it becoming an efficient alarm system rather than a guide. In fact, the analogy of an alarm system isn’t a bad one. You wouldn’t want an alarm fitted to your car that tells you all the time it wasn’t being stolen, would you? You only want to know when it is. It’s then that the alarm should sound.
(Personally Speaking – part 3 p124)

LW: One day I had a wonderful new feeling as I walked down the hall at Ashley Place. I tried to accentuate this feeling, thinking I was doing something to aid my new walk. As I pranced along, A. R. Alexander, F.M.’s brother, appeared in the hall and started swearing at me. He had a rich vocabulary, but most often his swearing signified regard or interest. He made it clear to me that I was just feeling something out, and instead of strengthening my new condition I was destroying it. This condition could not be obtained through feeling but only by the bringing to life of the head, neck and back pattern through conscious thought.
It was my first personal experience of Alexander’s discovery that our ‘feelings’ were unreliable. Here I was doing harmful things to myself and completely unaware of it.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 2 p27)

FPJ: Once I had experienced the kinaesthetic effect, the reward was so great that I tried to recapture it directly and to hang on to it when I had it. This proved self-defeating, however. It was the indirect effect of a psycho-physical process and could only be obtained by not trying for it. Its chief function in the learning process was to indicate by its presence that I was on the right track and to provide a background of feeling tone against which maladaptive response patterns could be recognized for what they were.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 2 p10)

PM: Teacher, tapping pupil on shoulder: “Did you feel that?”
Pupil: “Yes.”
Teacher: “Did you try to feel it?”
Pupil: “No”
Teacher: “In the same way, when I co-ordinate you with my hands, you need not try to feel what I do. If you do try, you will only interfere with what you ought to be registering.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p2)

MB: FM used to say that the danger of a static position is that you’re trying to feel it out rather than letting the messages carry you to somewhere different, which they will do if you allow them to.
(Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules – part 2 p95)

FPJ: In working out a method for conveying his experience to his pupils he found that the big stumbling block was sensory deception – the feeling that you’ve got to do something the way you have always done it before.
He solved the problem by using his hands to change the pupil’s postural set – by preventing change in the head-trunk axis – while the pupil carried out the activity in question-in this way the pupil has the experience of doing something he knows how to do but doing it without the effort he has used before – after you have had the experience you learn how you did it – but the experience always comes first and learning second (this can be perplexing at first to a person whose learning has largely been verbal learning).
(Freedom to Change – Appendix E p198)

WC: The reason, Alexander said, that re-education procedures usually failed was that they did not take into consideration the wrong mental attitudes that were inextricably bound up with wrong physical conditions. If a person was mal-coordinated, he would not have a reliable sensory standard to guide him in making a change. In trying to carry out the instructions for a specific exercise he would use far too much effort and this would produce side effects as undesirable as the original conditions the exercise was supposed to correct. In the pamphlets Alexander explained that it was to deal with this important problem of “faulty sensory appreciation” that he had developed his technique.
You might say, to stand up or sit up against the downward force involves muscular effort. Of course it does, obviously. But, the muscular effort to go up comes second to the sensory awareness and the sensory input. The process of going about on two legs or sitting on two seat bones involves first and foremost a sensitive sensory mechanism that monitors what is going on.
What are the muscles going to do, how are the muscles going to work, how is the muscular system going to work, except relative to the sensation, to the feeling, to what the sensory mechanism registers? So the working of the sensory mechanism is of preeminent importance.
(Thinking Aloud – Generating the Energy to Go Up p30)

PM: A pupil of one of my colleagues was once told in a lesson not to close her eyes. She said, “If I don’t close my eyes, I can’t concentrate.” My colleague said, “I don’t want you to try to concentrate.” “But,” she said, “if I don’t concentrate I can’t feel what is happening.” “I don’t want you to try and feel what is happening,” he said. “But,” she replied, “if I don’t feel, how can I relax?” “I don’t want you to try and relax,” he said. That was a wonderful conglomeration of wrong ideas.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p32)

WC: Someone’s reactions from sit to stand and stand to sit will be habitual and subconscious. That means that the changes a teacher makes will feel wrong and, for some people, be quite disturbing. The teacher’s task is to allay nervousness and anxiety, because only then will it be possible to get any sort of rational thinking going.
(Personally Speaking – part 3 p112)

FPJ: Stiffening the neck is in some degree a constant in everyone and because it is constant the individual is not aware of it, just as one is unaware of a constant velocity when travelling. Acceleration (or deceleration) reaches the consciousness. So in the Alexander work the pupil must first be made aware of the increase of tension that accompanies activity. It is only after noticing this increase that he can become aware of the ordinary tension.
(Freedom to Change – Appendix E p198)

Conclusion

MB: If you memorise your feeling, you’ll never change.
(Direction Magazine Vol 2, No 2 – The Barlows p49)

PM: Pupil: “I feel that I am losing my balance.”
Teacher: “Quite right. Your idea of balance is a bad idea, the sooner you lose it the better. You must get a new balance and I will give this to you with my hands. You must be prepared to lose your old familiar one. This is a practical demonstration of the value of the old esoteric saying about having to die in order to come alive.”
When you feel something that you know to be right, do not try to keep it. Any trying of that kind will smother it immediately. When you get something good, let it alone. Some of it might stay with you.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p3)

WC: Alexander describes this as trying to be right. He says that you have the fairly strong stimulus of wanting to do what you are supposed to do, wanting to carry out the teacher’s instructions, and if you are going to try to carry out the teachers instructions and do what you are supposed to do, you will inevitably be guided by your feelings and you will do what feels to be the proper thing to do in order to gain success. You’ll do what feels to be right in the circumstances. This is what is going to get you into trouble.
(The Act of Living – Saying and Meaning No p135)

FPJ: Ultimately a pupil must be able to make reliable kinaesthetic observations of himself in activity. Such observations, however, cannot be performed by the suggestions of the teacher. The purpose of lessons is to sharpen the kinaesthetic sense and to increase self-knowledge and self-control.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 14 p156)