Intelligence in Action
Useful Medicine & the Evolution of a Technique
by Graeme Lynn, GCFP, CSTAT
F. M. Alexander's unique discovery and what he determined to be the 'missing link' in medical diagnosis and treatment was a process that he came to call use. When he first began to teach and demonstrate his method's remarkable success in resolving issues as diverse as inflexibility, back and neck pain, stress, stutter, poor breathing, asthma, poor posture, and most other functional disabilities, and improving such varied activities as acting, dance, music making, singing, and the performing arts in general, as well as golf, running, athletics, and the martial arts, his work was acclaimed by some of the most prestigious members of the contemporary British medical profession. But then - the early 1900's - as now, his work was unable to influence or infiltrate the medical establishment to any significant degree. And any hope of its doing so in our time in the face of the technocracy of modern medicine and the method of symptomatic treatment dominant today is even more remote. And yet, the Alexander Technique, as his work came to be known, offers a uniquely effective alternative and supplement to common healthcare practices.
How Alexander came to the development of his technique for human improvement is a remarkable story.
He was born, Frederick Matthias Alexander, the first of a large family, in Tasmania in 1869. He grew up in a very rural, even pioneering, situation and no doubt learned self-reliance early. As a youth, he was often troubled by respiratory difficulties, which subsided by his high school years. When he was nearing the end of his schooling, the headmaster withdrew Alexander from his class in order to tutor the young man personally, with the hopes of Alexander's succeeding him as headmaster.
But Alexander had a calling for the stage, and, after his formal schooling, went to mainland Australia to pursue this interest. While working at various jobs he managed to take training in the skills of acting and to contribute to the welfare of his family left behind in Tasmania. It was from this training that he learned at least one of the habits of self-presentation, which he would have to unravel in the years to come. By the early 1890's, he was having some success in his vocation and had a circuit of gigs in southern Australia, which he traveled, giving one-man performances at local theatres.
After a very few years pursuing his career thus, the problem that would change his life - but first ruin the fulfillment of his vocational ambition - beset him: he began to become hoarse on stage. In spite of frequent rests between shows, as per his medical advice, the problem became worse and worse, until it reached a point where Alexander realized that he simply could not go on without a real solution. According to medical examination, there was nothing at all structurally wrong with the vocal apparatus that might be the source of the hoarseness apart from a concomitant irritation of the throat and larynx. And the doctors' only remedy - rest - was simply unsuccessful in resolving the repeatedly arising problem.
This lead Alexander to two truly remarkable conclusions, which, though rarely realized, are actually right and natural when faced with a problem in life. These conclusions are, in a significant way, the backbone of the Technique: Alexander's first conclusion was that - since there was nothing wrong with the body, that is, nothing wrong with the structure - and since there was nothing wrong with what he was doing - acting and speaking - there must be something wrong with how he was doing what he was doing, that is, something wrong with what he came to call the use of himself, in fact, something wrong with his use and functioning, the former having an inextricable influence on the latter; the second remarkable conclusion Alexander reached was that it was he alone who was responsible for the misuse and dysfunction - responsible both in the sense that it was he alone who was doing it and in the sense that it was he alone who could, and would ever be able to or be in a position to, do anything to remedy it, because ultimately every action or reaction that I do is an action which only I myself do. And so, seeking passive treatment in response to any such use- or function-based problem must be inherently, priorly and ultimately ineffective.
Alexander realized that he must actually change his manner of action or use. What perhaps made such a realization possible for him was that he seems to have had a pioneering and indomitable spirit and strong sense of will and self-responsibility. He was certainly an acute observer and brilliant pragmatist.
The story Alexander tells of his development of the Work in the chapter, 'The Evolution of a Technique', in his third and most readable book, The Use of the Self, is amazing and profound. He began to observe himself reciting in front of a mirror, and eventually an arrangement of mirrors. What he noticed as significant was that, in everyday actions but especially when reciting or when attempting something stressful or demanding, he pulled his head down and back relative to his neck, decreased his stature, and narrowed his back: that is, he contracted upon himself, in towards his centre and down along the length of his core. He found that he contracted in a manner unique to himself via the head, neck, trunk (including the rib-cage), and the pelvis, and even the shoulders, arms, legs and feet. He came to notice that all of himself was involved in this pattern of contracting. In time he would come to notice that this self-contracting in the instigation and process of action, unique in each case but with aspects common to us all, was virtually universal to others as well. This was the first important discovery that he made in the process of his self-investigation.
And so, in order to correct this in the most straightforward manner, he determined to not do this anymore and, in addition, to do the opposite. Thence came his second remarkable discovery, which was that he could not not do the contracting and could not effect the opposite, in the process of performing an action - in his practice, the action of speaking - in spite of his wish and intention to do so and even in spite of his feeling that he was doing so. The mirrors belied his feeling, his self-sensing. He visually observed (or sensed) that he was not doing what he sensed kinaesthetically that he was doing and what he meant to be doing, having determined what was best to do! In Alexander's own words: 'I was ... suffering from a delusion that is practically universal ... that because we are able to do what we will to do in acts that are habitual and involve familiar ... experiences, we shall be equally successful in doing what we will to do in acts which are contrary to our habit and therefore involve ... experiences that are unfamiliar.'
Alexander was nonplussed. He began exploring his movement anew and came to that discovery just referred to, namely, that, in the process of carrying out any action, all of the parts of himself and all of the functioning and organization of those parts are involved in every moment of action, and that the pattern of interference with the optimal use of himself in the process of action equally involves all of himself, all of his parts, and the organization and functioning of those parts. Furthermore, he realized that the pattern of interference, which was particular to him - and each of us has his or her own unique such pattern of interference with the optimal use of the self - was habitual and unconscious, that is, he was unable to observe or sense it 'inwardly' (kinaesthetically) or to be responsible for it. The very habitual wrongness of his manner of doing and feeling was, he came to realize, an irresistible force in determining the manner of action and not to be easily overcome by a mere intention to do right. And it effectively undermined his ability to rightly sense what in fact he was doing and intended to do, because the processes of self-sensing (or sensing kinaesthetically) and motor function are organized in the nervous system as in a cybernetic feedback loop wherein self-sensing informs movement and movement informs self-sensing.
In Alexander's own case, he recalled that he had indeed cultivated some of his habits, thinking at this time that he was cultivating what was right and that he was able to willfully do what he thought was right in the cultivation of these habits. As he said, 'the belief is very generally held that if only we (decide) what to do in order to (do what we want), we can do it, and that if we feel we are doing it, all is well. All my experience however goes to show that this belief is a delusion.' Furthermore, he found that this cultivation of what were in fact negative habits - or habits that undermined the optimal use of his physical mechanics and had come to be a cause of his limitation in function - seemed to be of greater force than merely unconsciously acquired habits, and this because, in cultivating such habits, one naturally believes that one is doing right. Such habits therefore suffer the added emotional charge of 'the feeling of my being in the right', even though in actuality, they are wrong or ineffective or mal-coordinated.
Later he found that what has even greater force is our dependence on 'natural' means to achieve our ends, or means that feel right and familiar based on how we habitually feel and habitually function. When these means are found to be the source of pain and dysfunction, a better alternative way to go about achieving our goals, the use of conscious intelligence (of the right means whereby to attain our ends) is rarely chosen, because of our habitual dependence on these so-called 'natural' means, because we tend to focus on the goal or end of the action instead of the present means and direction of the action, and indirectly because the right means, that is to say, the optimal organization of the body in action, was never made explicit before Alexander's process of self-discovery.
Alexander discovered that the right organization of any and all action is determined by the integrated use or intelligent self-aware control of the whole self in action. He discovered that the whole somatic self is epitomized in what he came to call 'the primary control' of our physical mechanics. This 'primary control' is the dynamics and coordination of the relationship of the head with the neck and of the head-neck relationship with the back and, via the centre, with the rest of the body. This right organization is sequential, instant, and integrated, and must be intentionally directed, that is, messages must be intentionally projected and energy so conducted to the use of the physical mechanisms in order to obviate the habitual organization. Thus, it was Alexander's conclusion that the use of self-aware and consciously directed intelligence is necessary to overcome or undermine the force of sensorimotor habits. This is fundamentally what he meant by 'right use'.
Remarkably, Alexander was not done. At this point in his quest, he met another momentous obstacle. He found that the right organization of his physical mechanics via the right use of the primary control felt terribly unfamiliar and, so, felt utterly wrong! Not only was he tending to depend on his own faulty self-sensing to determine that he was doing what he thought he was doing - which right sensory determination is necessarily impossible because it is habitually faulty - but, in addition, he was seeking to have a sensation that felt right, in spite of the fact that it was necessarily bound to be completely unfamiliar!
Through remarkable persistence, he overcame this conundrum by being more committed to doing right than feeling right, that is, by doing, deliberately and step by step, what he had determined by profound, painstaking, and intelligent consideration was right for the optimal working of the physical mechanism: keeping his attention and intention firstly directed to that which he determined to be the necessary first (or next) step in the direction of any action, combined with the best use of the primary control, and only secondarily directed to the apparent goal of the action itself, and not at all to any good feelings and feelings of familiarity. As he has said, he got there by 'sticking to principle'.
His strategy was to direct and evoke the best coordination of the primary control and then, while keeping that intention forefront and foremost, change the intended action, delay it, not do it at all, or do it anyway without 'attachment'. By distracting himself thus from the 'end' or 'goal' of the action and thereby weakening his compulsion thereto, he indirectly strengthened his commitment to the means whereby the goal - or any goal - is best achieved.
In time, the habitual manner of doing and the habitual manner of feeling became obsolete through non-use, and Alexander came to enjoy a new manner of use, better functioning, and a greater feeling of well-being than he had ever before experienced in his life. And in the years that followed, he developed the means whereby he could teach this improved manner of use to others.
All of this research into his faulty thinking and the faulty workings of his physical mechanics and his learning the optimal working thereof took some nine years of intelligently directed labour! And it was another nearly forty years of private teaching before Alexander was persuaded that he would be able to formally train others to teach what he was teaching and some years beyond that when he allowed others to train others to teach. In the intervening years, several of his assistants and his brother, A.R. Alexander, apprenticed to F.M., as he was called, and learned the Technique and to teach others. But it wasn't until 1931 that Alexander began his first formal teacher-training course wherein he would begin to train as teachers a group of about a dozen interested men and women who had had lessons with him.
During the period of his exploration and discovery in the 1890's and then, more quickly afterwards, Alexander taught what he learned to others, especially those in the theatre in Australia and New Zealand. At first, he told people what to do and found that such verbal instruction was not particularly effective. It was thus that he happened upon the use of his hands to manually organize a person's movement and coordination, a skill that obviates a person's having to discover through the same painstaking research as Alexander the optimal coordination of the physical mechanism, a skill that for many years was unique to the Work, and a skill that he developed and refined even into his eighties. Although in the beginning he was known as 'the breathing man', he soon found that his technique had more universal applications.
As his success grew he was inspired to seek his fame and fortune in the capital of the then Empire, London, and was encouraged by friends and associates, especially and remarkably in the medical field, who were referring many of their patients to him and recommending his work highly. In Alexander's typically flamboyant style, he paid for his passage to London from the winnings of a horseracing bet. And so, with letters of recommendation to the doctors of Harley Street, Alexander set sail.
For many years, he taught privately in London and, during the wars, on the eastern seaboard of the United States. His success grew, but then, as now, the Technique faced the daunting task of overturning the medical and materialist paradigms. It was partly for this reason that it took Alexander so long to risk attempting to train others in the Technique and put to them the difficulty of making their way in the face of such a cultural bias.
The first course was to last three years, but at the end of that period, Alexander believed that his trainees were not yet ready to teach and so, he added another year to the program. Subsequent trainings in the Technique were to last three years, and even then, the successful completion of training was left to the discretion of the training school's director, which, in Alexander's day, was himself.
It turned out that Alexander was not a trainer of teachers. This had a great impact not only on the competence of the first groups of teachers, many of whom never taught the method, but also on the nature and details of subsequent trainings altogether and on the development of the Work itself. Remarkably, the same kind of unfortunate influence from the founder has occurred in the training of practitioners in the Feldenkrais Method.
Not only do the principles of the Technique contradict some of our most highly cherished beliefs about the nature of reality and about ourselves in particular, but also the learning and practice of the Technique challenges our very sense of identity. It is a most subtle process, both in terms of its concepts and in terms of the physical changes stimulated. And it requires tremendous commitment and patience to stay with the process of unknowing and change.
Alexander wrote four books wherein he tried to communicate his revolutionary ideas and principles and to explain the nature and practice of the work. Although some of the content of these books is of questionable value, the practical basis of the Work and the associated ideas are of a most profound and useful nature. These ideas and principles were at the time and are still heretical to the prevailing zeitgeist.
One can easily gather from the personal force expressed in these books that he clearly knew the cultural force he was up against. But Alexander never lost his passion for the Work and taught until only a few days before his death at 86.
Alexander was not only a very passionate man but evidently a delightful companion and friend. He had a deep love for children and a great and gentle respect for all who came under his care. He was a wonderful storyteller and a trickster, and carried a love for theatre, equestrianism, and gambling to his grave.
In the years following Alexander's death in 1955, the Alexander Technique's popularity waned. Then, with the advent of the New Age and the realization that the Technique is in fact one of the seminal disciplines of the real New Age, founded on and putting into practice the very principles that define it, the Technique has burgeoned again in popularity, now widely recognized as a highly effective method of transcending physical limitations and of enhancing human well-being.
These days, the Technique is taught to interested individuals privately and in groups. Although some still argue about it, undoubtedly the most effective means whereby the best use of the self is learned is the direct transmission from person to person. Alexander typically began pupils with thirty lessons, five lessons a week for six weeks. This frequency of lessons is unfortunately hardly possible today except among the most interested and well-to-do. But this standard is an excellent ideal to pursue. This is so because the habits of poor use are inveterate in most of us, and are, unfortunately, 'practiced' at all times we are not applying the Technique, that is, unless a greater force for change is applied to undermining our habitual patterns via self-awareness and intelligence in action. Like any learning, whether it is riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument and so on, the greater frequency of practice speeds the process of mastery. In this work, of course, the instrument one is seeking to master is oneself.
The Alexander Technique is a unique and uniquely effective method of somatic or sensory-motor re-education, founded on the principles (and values) of self-awareness, embodiment, holism, learning or self-realization, and transcendence of habit or freedom. These principles, which emerged from Alexander's profound and persistent practical self-exploration, establish the Alexander Technique as good philosophy and a primary discipline of good health and put him far ahead of his time. Because of these its profound foundations it has implications that exceed its humble purposes. That is why Alexander believed that the Work, as he called it, could serve to reverse the 'vicious' downward spiral of civilization, could even serve humankind's conscious evolution. Indeed, his principles of intelligent action continue to gain wider and wider acceptance as more and more people take up the Technique and take advantage of its great benefits. His work has had a significant positive impact, not only in ordinary people's active lives, but also through its influence on some of the most renowned scientists, educators, thinkers, psychologists, and artists of the twentieth century.
Still, it is in its address to the health of ordinary and extraordinary individuals seeking an alternative or adjunct to conventional treatment modalities - which modalities rarely understand the pervasive effect of use on functioning and use and functioning on health - where the Technique's comprehensive approach continues to demonstrate its superior effectiveness.
So, the definition of the word 'use', from Webster's dictionary, most relevant to Alexander's work of self-improvement, is 'the constant continued practice or exercise' (of something) - in the Alexander Technique - of oneself as a sensorimotor process, as a self-aware moving being. More specifically, in the Technique, 'use' is defined as 'the measure of intelligent awareness and control applied to the coordination of function'. So what in our actual experience are these words pointing to? And how does use affect our state of health? How is it what Alexander called 'a universal constant in living'?
The limitation of language is the reason why and how Alexander discovered that he had to place his hands on people and give them experiences, via gentle and refined manipulation, of what he had discovered and what he was trying to communicate with his words. It was Alexander, in the West certainly, who first learned to use his hands and himself in this way. ('Manipulation' here indicates the strategy of touch and handling and does not imply brusqueness, force, or psychological coercion. In fact, in the Technique, the manipulations are subtle, informative (rather than formative), refined, and gentle, and their purposes are freedom, awareness, and intelligence in action, purposes quite different from most treatment modalities.)
'Measure' refers to degree or proportion and implies, in this context, constancy through time, the constant continued exercise.
'Intelligence' is evidenced in play, exploration, learning, knowing, investigation, discrimination, insight, and so on. Intelligence is to wonder, to consider - in the senses of care, understanding, and reflection. All of this is the intelligence to be brought to one's body in the Alexander Technique. 'How does it work? How do I work?'
'Awareness' can be illustrated thus. Pay attention to your right big toe... Now, there is no scientist who can locate or measure or quantify what you just did, and that indeed is one of the fundamental limitations of science. It has no access to your and my experience, my awareness of myself, which is, however, completely real. It is thus also the limitation of medical science, which attempts to address the human body as a thing. But it is no limitation on the Technique and its address to the bodily self. In fact, the experience of being the body 'from the inside' is exactly the purview of the Technique.
The significance of 'control' - or we might even say, freedom - can be conveyed in this way. For a moment, make a fist. Having made a fist, open the hand. Again, make a fist. Now, simply do not make the fist anymore; just let it go. Remarkably, nobody knows how your intention to make a fist or unmake a fist and so on produces a neuromuscular response. It is known how, once the impulse 'appears' in the motor brain and limbic system, the impulse travels to the muscle, but how the impulse 'traveled' from the 'intentional mind' to the brain is completely unknown. As it is written in Fundamentals of Neurophysiology, revised edition (1988), 'When thought leads to actions, the neurophysiologist is forced to accept that thinking can change the neuronal activity of the brain... Such conversion of thinking and intent into cortical impulse patterns remains, for the time being, far beyond the limits of our understanding.' That is, nobody knows how the mind moves the brain - we simply know that it does so, and that we can free and control the physical mechanism in this way, via 'thinking and intent'. And, in learning the Alexander Technique, we learn to refine that freedom and control more and more with time and practice.
'Coordination' is a sequential integrated organization. Imagine, for a moment, standing and reaching with the right hand for an object high on a shelf above you to the left. You can imagine then that the right heel would lift from the floor in a certain way. If the object were high above you to the right, the heel would lift in a different way and at a slightly different angle. The body always functions thus, as a whole. Whether the movement is sitting, standing, walking, reaching with the arms, thrusting with the legs, turning the head, or lunging with the trunk, whatever action is performed, it is always done with all of oneself, with more or less of each part involved in the action of the whole. In human movement, as with non-humans, this organization of movement occurs sequentially.
Imagine, again, this time the motion of a snake. Anyone can recognize the manner of movement of a snake. Some might even say that that distinguishing manner of movement is its 'snakeness'. But, in reality, there is no thing there, no snakeness entity, in some subtle or deep form. Rather, it is a manner of moving that snakes exhibit, which worms - whose essential structural form is the same as snakes - as a contrast, do not. Humans too, with our unique structural form, organize movement in a unique way. And it was Alexander who came to understand and communicate, both verbally and manually, that manner of organizing movement, which he came to call 'the primary control'.
'Function' refers to our movement, our always-dynamic response to gravity, our interaction with the environment, our handling of things, and our coordination altogether.
All of these combined are use. And use can be cognized both outwardly, which cognition is the basis for the hands-on skill of the Alexander teacher, and inwardly, the basis of the ability to 'work' on oneself. And the manifestation of use is as obvious as a snake's 'snakeness'. Or perhaps not so obvious because of the endemic poor use in the general population, something not common in snakes! And it is this that is missing, in Alexander's day, as now, in medical diagnosis, that is, how a person uses him- or herself. And without accessing that, a person has no effective means of improvement, indeed must rely only on passive treatment, which negates self-responsibility and participation in one's own healthcare. And without this responsibility for one's use, the habits and practices that brought about the degenerative processes associated with ill-health will inevitably undermine any strictly passive treatment modalities. Of course, more and more today, some people do want to take charge of their own health. The Alexander Technique exemplifies this approach to wellness, indeed embraces it as a 'conscious exercise'.
The Technique is an exceptionally effective means of facilitating improvement in use through refined and gentle manipulation and through enlisting a person's innate capability for self-awareness and, with the teacher's gentle guidance, one's sensorimotor self-exploration and growing capacity for freedom and control of the physical self.
Although a doctor, massage therapist, chiropractor, or physiotherapist and the like may palpate tissue or move various parts of the body and so on, as a teacher of the Alexander Technique does, the purposes are fundamentally different. A teacher of the Technique is seeking to understand how the person is organizing him- or herself in terms of the core dynamics of movement and in terms of movement and the response to gravity altogether, and to understand how and what the person is thinking and sensing in terms of the physical mechanics of function in general. A therapist has no such ideas in mind because such a therapist does not typically clearly conceive of him- or herself as working with sensorimotor intelligence, awareness, freedom, control, and the ability to learn.
So the Alexander Technique works from the 'outside', as medical science and its related modalities do, but the Technique does so in a uniquely holistic manner, which medicine, with its symptomatic approach, does not. And the Technique works from the 'inside', which medical modalities can never do. The Technique works from the inside in two ways: by facilitating the 'pupil's' own self-exploration, understanding, and self-awareness and by the teacher's unique ability to use his or her own hands to both sense and reform the person's core dynamic, the uniquely human manner of coordinating movement.
Even if you have managed to follow the thesis elaborated so far, still, words remain inadequate to describe a lesson in the Alexander Technique. As a picture is worth a thousand words, a lesson, which involves at least six senses, mind and cognition, and continuity through time, is impossible to describe. At the same time, the kind of learning facilitated in an Alexander lesson feels remarkably familiar, in fact, is natural to us, for we all learned this way unconsciously in our own development from virtually helpless newborns, able to perform only a few simple reflexes, to children who could walk, run, swim, skip, skate, and so on, and thence to adults with multiple motor skills. The Alexander Technique facilitates and nurtures this kind of sensorimotor learning consciously, for many of us have since unconsciously un-learned that ease and fluidity through faulty development, imitation in youth, emotional patterning, character strategies, core beliefs, lifestyle, occupation, stress, injury and traumas of any kind, surgery, disease, and other factors.
By learning to use oneself more effectively and gracefully, one avoids living out the myths of ageing - pain, affliction, and limitation. Organic diseases have a less easy hold on a fluid body. Moreover, when a person is loose and open in physical terms, the heart, lungs and viscera have more space and organic processes work without restriction. Blood flow to the internal organs is improved. So-called idiopathic hypertension, stress-induced syndromes, and related issues are obviated in place. Remarkably, all of these benefits and more have been researched and demonstrated by medical science itself. (cf. The Alexander Principle, Wilfrid Barlow, M.D.)
The Alexander Technique reverses the downward spiral of unconscious deterioration whose inevitable side effects are the functional root of many disease processes - what are misnamed lifestyle and idiopathic diseases - the major health problems of modern times. It initiates a regenerative cycle from which spontaneously emerge both general and specific improvements in health - from the marked diminishment of self-stressing reactions to the challenges of life - and new and higher levels of ability and awareness, thus quickening our advance towards wellness and the realization of our full potential.
To schedule lessons, please contact Graeme in Toronto, Ontario, at 416-964-7026, or click to email.