Franis EngelI'm thinking back at what originally attracted me to Alexander Technique. It was 1976. My motivation for learning wasn't to improve my twisted limp, which had to have been a sad sight in someone who was 23 years old. At the time, I had no idea Alexander Technique could be used for such a purpose.
I wasn't thinking about my terrible posture at all when I got to know this guy as boyfriend material. He was fascinating to me because I thought his easy posture and challenging mind meant he could naturally experience changes of consciousness. For me, an easy ability to move indicated the capacity for enlightenment. Still now, I often recall how he would reach up to smooth away the worry lines in my forehead that I didn't realize I was doing to myself. For not having that line in my forehead forty years later, I still quite often feel affectionate gratitude towards him, even though we only spent about four years with each other. What a wonderful gift!
When I met him, he was studying Alexander Technique privately; eventually he was invited to join the teacher training class that he completed, but never set up shop as a teacher. He did not come to study the Alexander Technique because of any physical limitation, but from a professional interest after being Jack Painter's teaching assistant for Postural Integration, which was a spin-off of Rolfing. He thought training to teach was the only way to really learn Alexander Technique at that time, and he was probably right.
I eventually accompanied him to teacher-training class, which was an interesting experience. Having been trained to see efficiency in motion from being fascinated with easy posture as an expression of consciousness, I had watched Aikido and Oscar Ichazo's Arica. In the people attending Alexander Technique teacher training class, I thought I recognized a demonstration of higher consciousness, or at least the capacity for it. To me, the trainees all looked as if they were emanating light. Because I knew that people who could move easily do not necessarily know the potential in it for possible enlightenment, I questioned them. I asked if what they were doing had to do with sharpening awareness. The students wouldn't answer. After some eye-rolling looks, some of them finally replied that what they were re-educating movement ability. From the eye-rolling I wondered if this was some sort of cult to which you had to become initiated. So I questioned them further and found the apparent exclusiveness was more a matter of being inarticulate. I decided at the time that evidently the movements they were learning stupefied their descriptive abilities.
What convinced me to continue to study and train to teach A.T. on my own and what made it fun was the Technique's indirect effectiveness in being able to change my consciousness. The means of learning were also attractive. Alexander Technique didn't use the coercion of an Iron Will to affect change. Mysteriously during lessons, this indirect something else made my analytical ego attachments go away and a sense of wholeness would flood my senses. I understood why people were left without words to describe this state. When they talked, I could see they instantly lost what they had gained.
Externally, the teacher trainees experienced me as a limp doll. I would take their "Direction" to move out of my limitations, but as soon as they took their hands off me I'd sag back down. They could not answer me when I asked them, "what is the difference between how they wanted me move and why it was better?". They told me to look at how I had collapsed. So what? Obviously I knew how to do that, why should I not collapse and move differently? I could not feel any difference. In fact, the lack of explanation frustrated me. I resolved to be the person who would put Alexander Technique into words, without short-changing it.
With a teacher's hands-on, an all-points-awareness was a signature state of any lesson. The potential in me that lessons could evoke for my mind was very exciting. Often I'd have creative flashes of insight, a shift into a heightened state of awareness that would last for hours in spite of my lack of awareness of my body. It seemed my ability to pay attention was ever so slightly waking up. Sometimes there would be a leap of new awareness and insights that transformed my self image, my past and my potential power to choose my actions that I had not previously known. My motives to keep learning A. T. were now driven by having a means to address a split I noticed between my intentions and how I mostly floundered around to bring about change. It gave me a means to improve my abilities and a new motivation to practice at my talents. Before that time, I seemed to be allergic to sticking with anything.
Later, I realized my whole body was a lot happier too. I wasn't getting more limited in my ability to move as I got older as medically predicted. Instead I felt easier, freer. My body unwound, as did my worries and my ability to fall asleep whenever I wanted to sleep.
As I continued lessons and applied the Alexander Technique to learning to sing, it gave me a significant insight. I discovered that I kept half my throat was closed. This turned out to be the key to my twisted posture.
My parents had told me that I had been born with a very slight birth defect; an ear gristle grew unattached that would have allowed me to wiggle my ears if it had grown attached correctly. At that time, doctors thought the remedy of tying off the gristle with a rubber band was preferable to holding down a squirming child and snipping. Unfortunately, this rubber banding trained the baby to tense its neck. This was why I had shut off half my voice. Keeping my neck tensed as I learned to walk and talk affected how I grew as a toddler. As I grew up and learned to walk and talk, I accommodated and adapted to the posture this squinting irritation had trained. "What fires together, wires together."
Everything seemed fine for me as a child. But as my skeletal hips matured and became one piece in my late teens at 16, I began to have a mystery problem with my knee. No doctor could tell me why my knee was becoming damaged when there had been no external injury. I had to seek out a third opinion before I could even find a doctor in the 1970s who would admit nobody knew why!
My parents saved a "funny" picture of me with a squint on my face as a baby. Of course, as a child, my unformed bones were able to accommodate this constant expression of head and neck tension without much affect. But as I grew into an adult, there came a time when the structure must reflect the cause. It was my knee that took the brunt of the three weeks of rubber banding had trained me to do as an infant.
Humans get better at whatever they practice. After 16 years of tension, my matured skeletal system torqued everything I did so fundamentally that it actually stopped the blood flowing to my femur at my knee and caused the bone to crumble. At 16, a year of being in a cast and surgery to fish out the piece that had broken off didn't help. I still had the limp at 23. If I hadn't stumbled onto Alexander Technique, I have no doubt that by now I would have had to have my knees replaced before my forties.
All this came clear when I talked to a younger person who had the same rubber-banding done to their ear when they were an infant. They had since been informed by their doctor that this practice was the cause of many back, neck and hip problems for those infants who had experienced that procedure; it only showed up in their late teens.
Although I was attracted to Alexander Technique for spiritual reasons, it had a significant benefit for the longevity and quality of my health that was not, at first, apparent to me. With my sights set on a spiritual path, I did not really realize the significance of what it meant to have an operating manual for my coordination that Alexander Technique provided. From my point of view, I never realized that changing one's external manner of moving could affect the inside in such a powerful way. But it did. I grew 3/4 of an inch at 26 and another quarter inch two years later.
Sometimes a person doesn't know what they have to gain from a course of action until they do it and find out for themselves what they are getting from it. Sometimes this finding out takes time, especially when the course of action involves routines you are giving up.
When faced with loss, you know full well what they are. What you may have to gain can feel like only a promise; an uncertain elusive conviction of faith or a whisper of potential. Often, you can't have both - you must choose either the old comforts you know well or the leap of faith; because you can't go in two directions at once. There was a stage in learning when I couldn't quite do what I knew was possible, but what I had been doing was a tragic trap that I struggled against. Once that door was open, I couldn't close it. Fortunately, persistence, my peers and my teachers helped me though that stage. Leaping into the unknown still feels like a complete willingness to risk everything. As to why anyone would want to take the risk - that's up to each of us. For me, it was a "noh-brainer."
