Note: This is a post on my learning process during the Alexander Technique teacher training course, and it might not reflect my current understanding of the technique.
Recently I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with a “ heart-centered awake awareness” style of mindfulness in my daily life. It’s a nondual approach to awareness popularized by Loch Kelly, and it’s very much in contrast to the ‘deliberate’ styles of mindfulness that are so popular now – in fact, he’d claim deliberate styles, such as “one-point focus” are all just training wheels, not the main point. I’ve been rather amazed by the implications for how I approach my somatic, emotional, and cognitive experiences. It’s offering me glimpses of aliveness and freedom and ‘basic goodness’ that I just had no idea were possible.
Anyway, I strongly suspect that when we get into a true “AT style” headspace, we’re in touch with what Loch calls “awake awareness”. But how exactly do AT and awareness relate? I think I’ll be teasing out that question for decades to come. I guess I suspect that awake awareness – the seat of our consciousness, or the awareness that’s aware of itself – is always with us, but the more spaciously embodied we are, the more our awake awareness can accurately sense what’s going on with our ephemeral states. The more sensitive we are to such states, the more aware, the more we can let them come and go with love. Sounds woo-woo, but it’s very experiential and practical. And the Alexander Technique is an in-road to awake awareness, a pointer toward it, as well as a facet of intentionality within awake awareness.
Perhaps I should just state it simply: I used to (and sometimes still do) walk around using the A.T. to berate myself (gently, but still). “Oops, you’re going down”. “Why don’t you think your directions right now, it’s something you should do!”
But at this point in my journey…that doesn’t feel good. I’d much rather go into a sort of nonconceptual awake awareness, get centered in my heart, let thoughts (words and images) mute down a little, and then get very indirectly intentional with my A.T. thoughts in order to help maintain that state of awareness. For example, thinking “I’m not sitting” as I sit and imagining directions generally, as Missy Vineyard recommends in her excellent book “How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique to Explore Your Mind-Body Connection and Achieve Self-Mastery”. Then the point of directing and inhibiting is not some sort of externally motivated self-improvement, but rather just the desire to stay awake, using whatever tools – such as the A.T. – that I have at my disposal. It reminds me of something Walter Carrington (a famous A.T. teacher) said. I’ll paraphrase, but it was something like, “if it sounds boring to think your directions and inhibit all the time while you move, then you’re missing the point”. Yeah. The point is, as Loch Kelly would say, “shifting to a different operating system”.
]]>Note: This is a post on my learning process during the Alexander Technique teacher training course, and it might not reflect my current understanding of the technique.
So I’ve been making a lot of progress in the last semester on directing my limbs in the service of coming up through the torso and no longer hunching my shoulders. It feels immensely freeing both emotionally and physically, and it’s a skill I’ve been impatient to learn for a long time.
I had a nice proof of these new skills recently: I carried a somewhat heavy backpack around while my family and I went to a Christmas lights festival outdoors. Normally, backpacks always hurt my shoulders. When the backpack started to hurt this time, I thought, “wait a minute! I have some skills around this now!” I directed and inhibited till I felt I had a really strong “up” from my heels to my shoulders. And guess what? the backpack didn’t hurt me for the remaining 40 minutes that I carried it that night.
In other good news, I had an attack of my old hip pain (mostly piriformis pain) a couple weeks ago, so bad that I was on crutches for a day. Why is that good news? Because I didn’t freak out! I had confidence my A.T. skills would allow me to recover, so I didn’t go to the emotionally painful places I remember from my hip surgery days, even though the discomfort was pretty bad. This approach worked. I had a lesson with my teacher that relieved the pain in the moment despite some twinges, and that gave me confidence that I was headed in the right direction. After a couple more days of pain … it just dissipated! (well. first it migrated from my right hip to my left hip, which I found amusing. then it dissipated). A.T. isn’t just about preventing pain; it’s about resilience in the face of pain, and I felt like in this case, it served me very well.
]]>Note: This is a post on my learning process during the Alexander Technique teacher training course, and it might not reflect my current understanding of the technique.
When I first started practicing the Alexander Technique, I used to imagine that my self-awareness would expand like a lightbulb that evenly and gradually brightened in a previously dark, square, empty room. But my experience so far is more like multiple lightbulbs in a twisty cave full of nooks and crannies; some of them brightening more quickly than others; others are still completely dark; some combine forces to dissipate shadows neither alone could have vanquished. I’m hoping for more and more of that last!
For example, I believed that if I successfully overcame some painful habits in my right hip (on which I had surgery), then perhaps my left shoulder pain might automatically improve ‘for free’ even without conscious directive thought in that area. Well, yes and no…but mostly no. It was two years ago that I first changed the trajectory on my hip habit, and only now am I beginning to gain traction and clarity on that painful shoulder habit in the context of a larger pattern.
[commentary 2/24: An update on this: In conversation with my teacher, I’ve come to the conclusion that habits that have a strong resonance with emotions, beliefs, traumas, etc – in other words, really charged habits – won’t resolve “for free;” they’ll require conscious process. Other less charged habits might dissipate without such conscious process. ]
So yes, unity of self, and also, parts in the context of the whole.
The experience resonates with quotes I ran across while reading about meditation:
sometimes something comes up in my life that’s so massively flawed in my personality, that I marvel that I could have ever made such subtle meditation practice when I was overlooking this big elephant, a problem that I can triangulate on > and work to fix because it is so basically wrong. I’m definitely not a perfect human being. All of these are true and they don’t seem to conflict anymore. There seems to be a middle path that continues which isn’t constrained by awakened > or unawakened in the same solid sense anymore. source: shargrol
and:
The various compartments of our minds and bodies are only semi-permeable to awareness. Awareness of certain aspects does not automatically carry over to the other aspect, especially when our fear and woundedness are deep. This is true for all of us, teachers as well as students. Thus, we frequently find meditators who are deeply aware of breath or body but are almost totally unaware of feelings and others who understand the mind but have no wise relation to the body. source: Jack Kornfield
This uneven A.T. progress recently let me admit to myself that I possibly wasn’t aware and mindful in another important domain: my gut. To explain, I had an attack of pain-predominant IBS over 10 years ago while pursuing a master’s at a classic music conservatory. I believe it was triggered by acute performance anxiety brought on by a major mismatch between my technical and aesthetic musical beliefs and those of my teacher. Since then I’ve been largely healthy, aside from having to avoiding onions and garlic or risking a pain attack. But after a series of stressful events starting 2019 (2 cancer diagnoses in the immediate family; gave birth to my second child; was laid off from work; started a business, covid19 hit), I’ve experienced chronic, mild to moderate stomach pain – and my previous diet modifications no longer work.
So the long and short of it is, I’ve started a mindful journal around my gut, using ideas from psychologist Dr. Jennifer Franklin of donthateyourguts.com. I’ve found that when I’m strongly attracted to a philosophical or psychophysical framework, I usually need to temper my beginner’s enthusiasm to actually get the most of out said framework. Frameworks tend to have absolutist statements, but the human self is such a complex mystery that only paradoxes can accommodate absolutes. So yes, I believe in acceptance AND change; nondoing AND doing, not ‘controlling’ my symptoms but also reducing GI pain in the short term where possible, etc. I also accept that usually a combination of different frameworks work best for me, and that what works in a time of crisis may not be the thing that works long term (for example, immediately after hip surgery, Feldenkrais was enormously helpful, but long term, Alexander Technique is the most fruitful path for me).
Here’s to exploring!
[commentary 2/24: Wow, I’ve come such a long way since this post with respect to my gut pain! Actually, “healing” my pain set me on a path to waking up in my everyday life – in the nondual/nondeliberate meditation sense of the word – and gave me new insights into the A.T. I’ll have to do a separate post on this at some point.]
]]>Note: This is a post on my learning process during the Alexander Technique teacher training course, and it might not reflect my current understanding of the technique.
I had a private lesson with my teacher today, and had a really great moment of noticing that when I extend my left arm in front of me, I’m more likely to engage in that “spinny-twisty” habit pattern of mine (if you want a visual idea, see the ‘trauma reflex photo in this hanna somatics practitinoer’s blog; like me, she had a labral hip tear). I also noticed that I could inhibit it happening, at least as far as my lower right back ribs area was concerned. So that was exciting! And then I was biking my small kids home from daycare and realized …. hey! I’m extending my left hand out to grasp the handlebar, could that be creating my twisting habit pattern and contributing to knee pain, and is it something I could inhibit? I experimented with taking that hand down to my side and looking to the right while extending it out again to the handlebar, and I think it might be a new pathway to tackle my habit. That’s exciting, because I’ve been struggling with left knee pain during all activities that engage my legs for…forever. More experimentation needed!
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