The Alexander Technique:
A Fundamental Skill That Deals
With a Fundamental Problem: Suffering
THE PROBLEM: SUFFERING
To one degree or another we suffer. We experience frustration in achieving goals, executing skills or accomplishing tasks. We experience pain, whether acute or chronic, debilitating or low grade, physical or psychological. We may even have accommodated and adjusted so much to our situations that we become unconscious of our suffering. We may accept our suffering as inevitable or unavoidable, yet it may not be.
There are many powerful therapeutic modalities to treat symptoms that can bring remarkable relief from suffering. However, there is an alternative to treating symptoms: eliminating the root cause of suffering. We can use therapy to relieve our symptoms or we can learn to do something different, to change our behavior so that we do not experience symptoms.
Living well requires the ability to behave in ways consistent with our design and best interests. When we notice ourselves repeatedly acting against our own best interests we say we have 'bad habits'. Despite good intentions, over time we accumulate many harmful habits, some we recognize, some outside our awareness, all preventing us from acting in our own best interest. And so we suffer.
To the degree that suffering results from our own behavior, then prevention of suffering must involve learning to behave differently. However that is easier said then done, there are a few complications:
COMPLICATION 1: OUR CONCEPT OF OURSESLVES
(Six Blind Men and The Elephant)
Six blind men were asked to determine what an object (an elephant) was by feeling different parts of its body. The blind man who felt a leg said the elephant was a pillar; the one who felt the tail said it was a rope; the one at the trunk felt a snake; the one touching the ear a large bat; the one facing the belly believed it was a wall and the one who felt the tusk said the elephant was a spear.
Like the blind men attempting to understand an elephant, we attempt to lean about ourselves by dividing and studying ourselves in pieces: conscious mind, subconscious mind, physical brain, body, soul, anatomy, physiology, psychology.... Much to our own detriment we use ourselves as if we were a collection of separate parts and think we can alleviate our suffering by focusing on specific aspects of ourselves.
However, when it comes to our behavior, we cannot fully understand how to accomplish change if we conceive of ourselves as a composite of parts. All behavior is the product of our whole being. If there is something about our behavior we would like to change, it is important to understand how we operate as an integrated psychophysical whole.
COMPLICATION 2: HOW VS. WHAT & WHY
We know that clear how-to instructions are valuable when it comes to assembling or operating a new piece of equipment. However when it comes to our own behavior and suffering we tend to focus on the 'what' and 'why' and not the 'how.' When dieting to lose weight it may be interesting to know the psychological reasons we overeat, or why the brain is not registering satiation. But it is only when we see how our personal habit of overeating operates that we have the means to change our behavior and lose weight. When we are suffering back pain, knowing why our lower back is hurting, i.e. which particular muscles of our lower back are strained and spasming, is helpful in the therapeutic treatment of back pain. But learning how we habitually use ourselves and how to correct that use, can eliminate the root cause of the pain and the need for therapy.
We tend to be more willing to spend time and money seeking expert opinions from others about the specific “what' and 'why' of our symptoms and rarely does it occur to us that the solution, the 'how' suffering is created, might be found in ourselves, by observing how we use ourselves in all our activities.
COMPLICATION 3: LEARNING AND HABIT
Part of our design is that learning is retained and operates subconsciously. We may use our conscious minds to learn something new but then most learning becomes subconscious. Subconsciously learned behavior (habits) are meant to be stable, reliable and often automatic. If this were not so we would be severely limited in the amount of learning we were capable of, the number of activities we could carry out simultaneously and the ability to have instantaneous reactions in emergency situations. Man may not have survived if he had to rely on conscious reasoning instead of immediate subconscious action when his senses picked up signs of danger. Although it takes children conscious effort to learn addition and multiplication soon their subconscious mind is able to retrieve the answer to the question “two times two” faster than the time it takes to consciously hear the question.
However, having stable, automatic and reliable habits makes changing our behavior difficult. Anytime our brains receive a stimulus to 'do' anything our subconscious mind initiates a set of behaviors that determine how we use ourselves in response to that stimulus. Without our knowing, or conscious control, our subconscious minds initiates the 'ready, set' to all of the 'goes' of living. If the 'ready, set' of our behavior is even slightly dysfunctional then we will be harming ourselves to one degree or another every time we do anything. If we decide we want to change our behavior we have to contend with the fact that aspects of our behavior are initiated automatically and outside our normal level of awareness.
SOLUTION: THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE:
Most of our suffering results from our own behavior. Since our behavior emanates from a complex self, subject to subconscious guidance, prevention must involve first learning how we currently misuse ourselves and then learning, against the power of habit, how to reestablish a better use of our self as an integrated whole. These are the principles and the the philosophy behind the Alexander Technique.
