Inhibit the habit to mentally beat myself up about pain, misuse, confusion, the state of the world in general
One of the downsides of AT is that it offers perfectionists like me a wonderful stick to hit themselves with (like I needed another one...). Unreliable sensory awareness, the opposite of wrong is wrong...when you're not in high spirits in the first place, it's quite easy to slip into some kind of gloomy, "see, I'm wrong again, there's even an official theory about it, I won't ever get it, and even if I do, I won't know it, because I don't know when I'm right" state.

So, when I do end up in a situation of physical pain or emotional discomfort, the first thing I try to stop, is the start of the blame-game. Instead of noticing pain and feeling irritated about it, annoyed by it, or guilty because I must have done something wrong, I just try to register the situation as it is, which is simply "I feel a nagging sensation at the back of my shoulder, and it is starting to physically hurt". I try not to judge. I try not to be hard on myself. I try not to distance the part of my body or mind or soul that's hurting from the rest of me. Although it may sound terribly simple on paper, this part of my strategy probably took me the longest to learn.

Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes, I'm just what I am. Not everything happens in a logical or rational way. Which is not the same as accepting the situation and leaving it at that.

A while ago, Nick M. posted the following on the Alextech list:

I do, though, wonder what it is that you do, when confronted with the ache of
a stiff neck, apart from feeling irritated. Do you have an Alexander
strategy for these times whose purpose is to 'let the neck be free'? If
you do, can you describe it?

You may wonder why I ask what someone's 'Alexander strategy' is since
the outline of that strategy - inhibition and direction - is hardly
secret; but the finer details of what this might mean to an individual,
in an actual, living situation, is, in my opinion, woefully documented.

I really liked thinking about this question. Especially because articulation and 'AT confidence' seem to go hand in hand. In my first AT-less period, I still felt very dependent on something outside me, a teacher, a book, an authority or just knowledge. Perhaps too dependent, but I guess that's something you always face when you learn something new and valuable that you don't want to lose. This dependency has taught me a lot, though. I've consciously used every lesson I've taken since to develop my own AT strategy; something that wouldn't have happened if I'd just kept having lessons every week or so.

This list is an outline of my own AT strategy. I'll discuss each point in a separate post over the next few days.
1. Inhibit the urge to mentally beat myself up about pain, misuse, confusion and the state of the world in general.
2. Don't use AT to fix a broken leg.
3. Don't be serious.
4. Find my sitting bone.
5. Work my way up along the spine.
6. Free my neck.
7. ...even now...and now...

Some months ago, I realised that I didn't really know much of Alexander as a person, apart from the "actor-who-lost-his-voice" story, so I purchased F.M. - the life of Frederick Matthias Alexander, a biography put together by a student of Walter Carrington. What an extraordinary story.

And what an extraordinary, puzzling and contradictory man. I think that, as with all great teachings, it is hard not to let some of the teaching rub off on the teacher. It's very tempting to assume that a teacher will be the ultimate example of his own teachings. Alexander wasn't. Or was he? Apparently, people who met him were struck with his lightness in movement, his clearness of mind and his overall presence, even when he grew older. So, in that way, AT worked for him. But how come that I'm left with the impression of Alexander as someone who's so afraid? Afraid of attachment, afraid of people stealing his ideas (because without them, what would he be?), afraid of being wrong, afraid of people who had more status or more education than he did, afraid of being caught, afraid that people might find out who he really was andnot love him for it? It strikes me as sad that someone who has taught others how to make most out of life seems to have been in survival mode most of his own time. I hope that others can contradict me, but he doesn't seem to have had many moments of relative hapiness or peace. Losing his voice almost seems like the smallest of his problems.

Also, I hadn't realised the era in which Alexander lived. Of course, I already knew that Alexander lived quite a long time ago. But it really hit me when I read that he left from Australia for London on 19 April 1904 on the Afric of the White Star Line. That's the same company that eight years later launched Titanic. It's only ten years after the Lumiere brothers scared the hell out of an audience by showing a short film of a train arriving at a station. Film was still such a novelty that people's mental schema's did not yet cater for the notion that something on screen is not real, and they thought they were going to be run over. Against this background, Alexander's discoveries stand out even more. But it also makes me wonder how much validity one should contribute to his quotes about yoga being bad for you etc. I've never put too much importance on those sayings to begin with (it's the process that matters, as always), but I think that yoga now, compared to yoga 100 years ago, is quite different both in concept and content, so taking his words literally doesn't make much sense to me.



The state library of Tasmania offers online access to historical archives; I found some pictures of Wynyard, Alexander's birthplace. There's more where that came from, although I found very little on Tasmania in relation to the Alexanders.

Fascinating stuff indeed. It's interesting to see how Alexander was a man of his time; if you look at how he writes, the words he uses, the concepts and the ideas, he's very much an industrial revolutionist, raised in an age of large technological inventions which, even more than today I think, changed men's perception of life. This must have caused such a sense of confusion and exhilaration at the same time; on the one hand everything was possible. But on the other, everything was possible. Oh dear. And to discover that it's really not about that, that what other people see as advancement is actually deterioration, as one of the few people of your time. That's impressive.