These challenging times
Jeremy Woolhouse
Creativity, spontaneity and adaptability to change were described by A. R. Alexander (a master teacher) as the hallmarks of Alexander Technique. These qualities may be the best antidote to the challenges of life during a pandemic.
Covid is no longer called ‘novel coronavirus’: the novelty wore off long ago, and the world is weary of the persistent struggles the pandemic has caused. Aside from the medical alarm, a rapid loss of context for familiar routine and uncertainty about the future plague us all. When considering how Covid triggers anxiety, the principles of Alexander Technique have some startling relevance.
Managing symptoms of stress
The environmental context of rapid rule changes, impositions on freedoms, financial pressures and the mortal threat of the virus understandably creates anxiety, which manifests as tension - sometimes making itself known through bodily sensation before anything else. Alexander Technique increases sensitivity and decreases tolerance, so that those who have acquired familiarity with the Technique may be quick to notice tensions in their bodies and swift to intervene. Alexander Technique helps us to recognise and release non-productive tensions so that we may either find more ease in the situation, or, more effectively, act to remedy it.
Cancelling flights and fights
Anxiety is invariably connected with the perception of a threat, as the psyche and body prepare for the worst and trigger a ‘fight or flight’ response. Our civilised life rarely calls for either and we can logically see that our responses are extreme - but we have them anyway. Alexander Technique may help both to bring us down from a ‘fight/flight’ response and to challenge non-conscious or habituated reactions in general. During the pandemic, the stress triggers have been ceaseless. Aside from the restrictions that impact our lives directly, we are bombarded with stories of atrocities overseas and the threat of new strains of the virus. How can we maintain equilibrium through all of this? Using the Alexander Technique’s practices of inhibition and direction has a profound effect. When you become aware of the physical sensations generated by the current environment and respond to these with intentions for coordination, you connect with reality. Despite the very real threat that the pandemic poses, right now, in this very moment, there is nothing to run from or physically fight. Connecting with the relative safety of the present moment helps us to create contextual responses. When we can see our physical reactions are inappropriate for addressing the perceived threat, there is scope for choosing a response that imposes less psychological or physical strain.
Facing the unknown
Training in Alexander Technique invariably involves learning to interrupt the habitual and familiar response to a stimulus. In an Alexander lesson, the capacity to change such a response is commonly learnt through banal situations like getting in and out of a chair. Under the teacher’s guidance, pupils move into standing not knowing if they will fall or if they will move at all, but learning to keep expansive, dynamic coordination regardless. In this way, the student learns to desist from familiar responses and face one of the most frightening things: the unknown. They learn to embrace unfamiliar sensations as sources of positive (as well as negative) potential. Fear subsides when ‘facing the unknown’ becomes a conscious and familiar experience. When stimuli are existential threats, the impacts are profound - on one’s health, livelihood or loved ones. However, the experience of the unknown, as already faced in everyday situations during Alexander lessons, builds a certainty that permeates life in a pandemic: whatever will happen, there is a conscious intention that will help me organise myself and respond well.
Creative responses
When we are unchained from habit, natural human creativity blossoms. There are suddenly so many ways to move out of a chair! ‘Stuck in habit’ is a state of mind as much as a physical state, but learning to open oneself through movement and poise is inevitably associated with increasingly creative responses. One of the remarkable aspects of Alexander Technique is its resistance to becoming irrelevant: you can improve on any motion with conscious, holistic intention, and because it deals with human comfort and functioning, there is always a need. The principles on which it is based have proved to be fundamental to our human experience. Alexander Technique is about stimulus and response: whatever the stimulus is, our conscious intervention can improve our response. The chair is a conventional teaching aid used to demonstrate this principle, but the practice of Alexander Technique is formless: most of all, it is a constructive framework for that conscious intervention, and when faced with business losses, travel restrictions and disrupted plans, it helps us to notice our reactions and choose something constructive.
Furthermore, when presented with challenging situations like these, coordinating oneself makes more responses available. Covid has been the catalyst for many creative adaptations, of which the most personal and physical may also be the most profound. For example, videoconferencing is blamed for causing teachers’ vocal fatigue, however, some have used the video platform’s self view for observation and thereby improved their coordination when teaching. When faced with extended hours of computer use, some who created variety in sitting furniture found it helped them to access their Alexander Technique skills and maintain awareness and mobility throughout the day.
Riding out the pandemic
As we learn to move differently, we are learning to think differently. When we get stuck in our minds and bodies, using the indirect procedure of Alexander Technique helps to lift us out of a rut of habit and see more possibilities. Alexander Technique is described as being ‘indirect’ as rather than pushing straight for an outcome, it attends to coordination and quality as indispensable and fundamental steps in the process. Students of Alexander Technique present their teachers with an infinity of new challenges for navigating physiologies, psychologies and pathologies. In their turn, teachers help the students go beyond personal and unconscious limitations to cultivate new, positive neurological pathways. We associate these most readily with movement and posture, but they are invariably emotional and psychological too. ‘Nature’, FM Alexander wrote,’ works as a whole and not in parts’ (1). Stepping into the unknown, we can figuratively and literally tighten in fright, or expand to find new possibilities. In this way, Covid’s challenges become a springboard for creativity.
No silver bullet
Alexander Technique is not a panacea that resolves all woes. It can help us to moderate our responses to situations but, in itself, is not going to resolve all the pandemic’s challenges. By the time we know we are reacting, we have already reacted, and although we may lower our reactivity by being in easeful coordination, we are human and our stress responses are still triggered by dramatic events! Further, to adhere to the Alexander Technique principles one hundred percent of the time is an unrealistic expectation. Nonetheless, it is something to aspire to. Every time we engage in the process, we are doing something positive for ourselves that builds resilience to the challenges of our times.
1. FM Alexander (1910) Man’s Supreme Inheritance, Chaterston, 3rd edition, page 33