F M Alexander, an Australian actor, (born in Tasmania in 1869, died in London 1955), devised the Technique that bears his name in an effort to restore his ailing voice. When he gave dramatic recitations he surrounded himself with three mirrors, in order to discover what he was he did when speaking. He found that he made three unnecessary actions when reciting, retracting his head backwards and downwards, depressing his larynx and sucking air in audibly on the inbreath. He found that the only thing that he could do directly was to prevent the retraction of his head and when he did so the other symptoms were markedly lessened. He also saw that the same predispositions to the ‘misuse’ of his vocal apparatus was apparent, to a lesser degree, in his everyday life.
He practised inhibiting his immediate response to acting on his first impulse, allowing him time to work out a more appropriate means whereby he could achieve his end. In doing so, he discovered a totally new way of discovering unconscious habit patterns in the way we use ourselves and gave us a logical sequence of thoughtful practice by which we may discover, and possibly change many habits of behaviour, of which we might be unaware.
He called this system The Primary Control of the Use of the Self.
My teaching of the Technique
I came to the Technique when I was in a very parlous state, having lost my father and a month later been involved in a car crash on dust roads in Tanganyika, where I had been living and working with my parents. The upshot was that I had one badly broken ankle, a skull cracked at its base with damage to the atlas and axis vertebrae, facial scarring, also losing a lot of blood. My mother and I were flown back to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in the UK where medics proceeded to try to mend us. After a year my bones were mended but I had developed a spastic twitch that would occur at embarrassing moments, sending objects flying. As well, my facial muscles would not work properly and I had difficulty in speaking.
We all have a Primary Control of the use of ourself, which works more or less efficiently, depending of the alignment of the head, neck and back.
When I first went to meet Dr. Barlow I had only just heard of the Alexander Technique and had little idea of what it entailed. Alexander had no time for half-baked theories – he looked at a problem, studied it intently, and tried to work out a means whereby it might be solved. Alexander work demonstrates how to recalibrate the relationship between the head, neck and back, the Primary control of the body, thus improving the whole Use of the Self.
The means to do this is to inhibit our habitual responses to a given stimulus at the moment of receiving it. Once we have consciously refused to react there is time and space to reason out what an appropriate response might be. In that moment it is possible to discover what your habitual response might have been, had you completed the action, and to identify a different means of performing the action if you should so wish. Or simply to decide not to proceed with your decision. (The scientist Sir Charles Sherrington wrote “to refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one, because inhibition is co-equally with excitation a nervous activity”.)
I have worked with his Technique for over half a century and am discovering that his dictum to his students in the 1930s that “when the world comes to test out all of my practice, it will find that everything I have postulated is true”.
In my own teaching I try to encapsulate all that his niece Marjory Barlow taught me about the work of her uncle. I use my hands to link a new experience to the words that F M himself used, giving people a different experience of how to use themselves with the least effort for the greatest result.
But we have to do the work and test things out for ourselves, using his principles and practice of close and accurate observation of what we are doing. That is what I try to encourage my students to do, to apply the Alexander Technique to all our little habitual actions, thoughts and belief patterns, observing them without trying directly to alter any of them. By “stopping” our immediate reactions to stimuli we can reason out and discover alternative responses to automatic behaviour and find new ways of solving problems.
Aldous Huxley said of Alexander’s work that the greatest obstacle to change was everybody’s desire to gain their end directly, without sufficient thought as to the means whereby those ends might be gained. Over time, as we inhibit our first response to stimuli
giving ourselves time to send new guiding orders to complete the task, we create new neurological pathways in the brain that can prevent the recurrence of habitual behavioural tendencies.
Over the last fifty years I have had ample proof that Alexander’s work practised in its entirety gives us a structured means whereby we can reorganise ourselves to the optimum. Above all, practising his method has given me a life of infinite variety, whereas in my twenties I had little prospect of surviving, let alone of finding a meaningful life.