Subtractive, indirect, immediate

These are some working notes on my experience of learning the Alexander Technique. I've found it hard to explain what it even is and what I'm doing, and I also found most explanations confusing before I started. I think that part of the reason it's so unusually hard to get a grasp on is because the method for learning it is subtractive, indirect, and immediate. I'll explain what I mean by these terms below.

Note that I am just a person having lessons and not some expert.

Subtractive

By subtractive, I mean that you're learning how to stop doing habitual things, rather than how to start doing new things. It normally improves your posture, but there are no special exercises you do to change your posture. Instead, the technique helps you drop your habits, and the posture you have when you drop your habits turns out to be better.

This was unintuitive to me, to say the least. I've always been clumsy and poorly coordinated and that felt like an intrinsic thing. The idea that there was somehow a coordinated person buried underneath sounded like the most ridiculous kind of hippie woo-woo nonsense.

But still, my movement has freed up somehow, and is lighter and easier. A lot of tension at the back of my neck has gone away (I didn't realise quite how much tension I was holding there). My arms swing a lot more while I walk, presumably because my hips have loosened up and rotate more or something? I don't have a clue how I'm doing any of it, it just happens.

In contrast, if I'd deliberately tried to "improve my posture", I'd have added some extra thing like "trying to stand up straight", and just contributed extra tension to the existing mess of habits. The subtractive approach seems to work a lot better.

The funny thing is that I didn't go to Alexander lessons to change my posture, and in fact most of my lessons have been over Zoom. I was living too far away to attend in-person classes regularly, and the main thing I wanted to work on was anxiety while talking, which could be worked with over a video call. I'm now finally making a big dent on that anxiety, but that's pretty new, and I got the posture effects first.

Indirect

Subtractive work is already hard to think about, but it gets worse because the Alexander Technique is also indirect. By indirect, I mean that you can't directly subtract away the bits you don't want, like a sculptor removing stone. There's no way to directly drop the habit, humans just don't seem to come with one.

Instead, there's a layer of indirection where you learn to do something different to the habit, and then the habit somehow drops away by itself. It's kind of similar to how a car can't go directly sideways, but you can still get to a place to the side of you, you'll just have to use the controls you do have available to do some indirect combination of turning and moving forwards and backwards.

The different thing you learn to do is to make your awareness very wide, out towards the horizon and up into the sky and down through your feet. You don't want to just be statically aware that these places exist, either, you want them to show up in such a way that you have freedom to go to them if you chose.

I was already used to expanding my awareness from the type of sitting meditation I do, but the "freedom to" part took longer to get a handle on. It's distinctive, though. If I'm having trouble getting back to that state I'll crank it up very deliberately by saying stuff to myself like "I could turn round and go to the bus stop. I could go downhill to the river. I could go to the supermarket", naming places that are well distributed around me (it's particularly easy when I'm already outside and walking). After a few rounds of that something kicks in and I can feel more aliveness in how I move.

These are the instructions I learned, anyway. Probably it varies with the teacher. I know F. M. Alexander originally had his students follow instructions like "relax the neck" and "head forward and up" and that worked too, somehow. It's all very weird!

Immediate

Expanding awareness is an indirect method, but immediate in terms of timing. You always apply it right now. Then you lose it and apply it again.

This one is maybe not so unintuitive but it's so integral to the flavour of the experience that I made it a separate point. You can't get it and keep it so you have to keep renewing it. You strengthen the intensity of the Alexander state by going there again and again and again.

One thing I found confusing when reading descriptions of the Alexander Technique before I started is that there's often so much emphasis on things like "non-doing" and "the natural state" that I couldn't figure out what I would actually be learning. If it's that's natural, why aren't I doing it already? Why would I have to go to all these lessons, and what would I be doing in them?

The answer is that you're practising expanding awareness again and again. You're not doing anything directly to your habits, they will sort themselves out over time, but you are doing something. A full day of Alexander teaching is very tiring!

But I do now understand why the descriptions are weird. "Subtractive, indirect, immediate" is a weird type of doing, and your default notions of how to do something will give you the wrong idea.

Some background: I've been learning Alexander Technique with Peter Nobes at the South Bank Alexander Centre, as advertised by Michael Ashcroft at Expanding Awareness / on Twitter.

That sentence reads like an ad, and it kind of is – I highly recommend going there! – but also it seems especially important to state the specific teacher because the Alexander Technique world seems very fragmented into subgroups and the experience at other places could be very different. I don't have any grasp at all of how the subgroups vary, but I do get the idea that some teachers focus a lot more on helping with your immediate problems, while Peter's group is trying to get you to a place where you can generate the effects for yourself. This is maybe confusing and frustrating if you just want to fix your back pain quickly, but it goes a lot deeper.