The Alexander Technique: Zen Paradox

The Alexander Technique

Zen paradox …

Or a user’s guide to the human body?

BY Susan Slattery

At Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, actress Tod Randolph takes a drink of water. A simple thing, right? She reaches for the bottle, a heavy re-purposed juice jar, and her right shoulder constricts, lifting toward her ear, and as the bottle nears her lips, her chin comes forward.

“So wait,” she says, plunking the jar back on the table. “If I take a moment here, and I think about a soft neck, I let my neck go.” She sits for a moment, and exhales. Something about her seems to rise. “The weight of my head is released from my spine,” and here, she lifts the bottle to her lips, the shoulder is relaxed, the chin stays put, and her neck is long. She is demonstrating the mysterious and often misunderstood Alexander Technique.

“The drink of water is a very different experience,” she says, setting the bottle down. She has brought consciousness into the movement.

Local businessman Micheal Mah is a tennis addict. He’s been taking lessons for 10 years. He watches the pros in the U.S. Open and says the ones he likes are graceful as dancers. “I always thought you had to grunt and scream and tense up your body,” he says. “But their movements are almost like slow-motion.”

About six months ago, Mah started studying the Alexander Technique under Gary Adelman at Berkshire West Athletic Club in Pittsfield. “Everything changed,” Mah says. “Tennis is now a more fluid experience for me. I’m not a big guy. I can only get so much exertion out of my body.” He also started to notice that the things he learned carried over into his skiing. “That freaked me out,” he says. “I was skiing in a different way.”

“We are such repetitive creatures.” This is Jim Nowicki. He’s been taking AT lessons with Adelman now for something like six years. “Old patterns are hard to break,” Nowicki says. That is why he keeps going to these lessons. “You get more in tune with what’s going on in your body, where you hold, where you put your weight.” As a massage therapist, he says “I’ve learned more about how I posture my body, if I lean too much or kind of collapse, I start getting pain in my back and arms and hands.”

“I think we’ve learned patterns of movement from early childhood,” Nowicki says. “To change those patterns takes a lot of awareness. I keep going, because when I go out into the world my old stuff starts creeping in, and it’s hard to remember.”

The Alexander Technique, like many other alternative healingtype practices, has enjoyed a burgeoning popularity in the last 10 years. It was developed back in the late 1800s by Shakespearean actor and elocutionist Frederick Matthias Alexander, who, in an effort to cure himself of hoarseness, observed himself in a full-length mirror as he spoke in normal conversation and also when he recited Shakespearean verse. When he was reciting the verse, he saw a pattern of total body tension develop. It began with a stiffening of his neck, a tightness at the very base of his skull. Later he noticed that he was also gripping the floor with his feet and pulling his shoulder blades together, what he called “narrowing” or “hollowing” his back.

Over time Alexander discovered the importance of the relationship between the head, neck, and back. Eventually, he corrected what he called this misuse of his body and regained his voice. The technique for changing these patterns of misuse was developed over the next 50 years, and, says Adelman, today there are some 6,000 teachers of the Alexander Technique worldwide.

Adelman and Randolph were both certified to teach the Alexander Technique in the early 1900s. Randolph was exposed to it at Juilliard, where she graduated in 1988. “It was an integral part of the program,” she says. “I was fascinated by it.” She recalls one of the senior teachers, the late Judy Liebowitz, as an inspiration. “I remember she had polio as a teen,” Randolph says. “She had something like only one muscle in each leg that worked, but she could walk after she learned AT.” Liebowitz was in her 60s when Randolph met her. “She was tiny,” Randolph says. “Only 5 feet tall, but she had the most incredible hands. The feeling that came into my body from her hands is hard to describe.”

The trainer’s hands are the primary messengers when teaching the Alexander Technique. It looks a little strange to the observer. Working on Mah’s tennis game recently at Berkshire West, Adelman stands behind him and puts one hand at the base of Mah’s skull and another near the base of his spine. You don’t really see anything, but Adelman says, “Good. That’s it.”

And at Shakespeare and Company, Randolph wraps her fingers around fellow actress Catherine Taylor-Williams’ throat while Taylor-Williams practices the role of Mary Shelley from the play “Bloody Poetry” by British playwright Howard Brenton. She stands relatively still, with Randolph’s hands around her throat, but she fills the room as the words tumble out of her. It is not just her voice.

“As actors we need to make ourselves bigger energetically,” Randolph says. “I work with them to help them become bigger by sending their energy in all directions.”

“The teacher embodies the technique,” she says. As a teacher of AT she says that direction is in every cell of her body. “It travels out through my hands and into the other person.”

Adelman puts it in another way. “Skin is an extension of the nervous system. Through touch I send the message of how they can let go and expand.” So that is what you don’t see.

But Adelman says it is not even something internally muscular.

Another client of his, Bill Stoll, a computer programmer at Kripalu, says, “Gary will stand there and tell me, ‘I want you to have the thought of lengthening and widening you back,” Stoll says. “So I might stand a little taller, or imagine my shoulder blades widening, but then Gary will immediately say, ‘No, you’re doing it. I just want you to have the thought.”

“It’s a subtle thing,” Adelman says, “The difference between doing and not doing.” There is an emphasis in AT to let things happen as opposed to making them happen. Allow the response without physically doing anything.

Randolph says AT is a kind of energy work grounded in anatomy. “It’s very much about bringing consciousness into movement, and moving and living from an interior sense of expansion.” She studied the technique under Joel Kendall at the Studio for Alexander Technique in N.Y.C. Kendall had been classically trained, but by the time she knew him, he was moving away from the formal languaging of AT.

Randolph teaches AT during Shakespeare and Company’s January Intensive, as well as during the Summer Training Institute. She has students in these intensives walk around the room while she drops in direction. She closes her eyes, trying to put herself back there. “Float the head, soften the breath. Let the neck be free. Float the head again. Free your feet from the floor, and move through space.”

She says she never gets bored teaching it. “All people have unconscious patterns of tension. AT allows you to shift into a pattern of freedom and ease.” This is a pattern that is helpful for actors. “You need a lot of freedom in your body to take on characteristics that are not your own.”

“Processes are stimulated by thought,” Adelman explains. This is what Alexander called Inhibition and Direction, stopping the wrong way of doing something and moving into the right direction. “There isn’t a right position,” Adelman says, “it’s a direction you’re moving into, where the head is really poised, the whole spine is lengthening, the beach is expanding and widening.”

Alexander himself believed that use influences coordination, and by better using the body, one has more coordination. Broken down, AT is about first bringing your focused attention to your body and to what you are doing. Then discover the habitual ways you “misuse” your body, like Randolph’s attention to her hunched shoulder during the drink of water, or how for example, right now this writer is hunched over her laptop, writing this.

Adelman says people come to AT for all kinds of reasons, to alleviate pain in the neck and back, for depression, for breathing constriction. “People come in like this,” he says, hunching up his shoulders. His neck disappears. “Their whole life and gravity have compressed them. But after a few lessons, all of a sudden their whole body starts to open and lift.” Adelman starts his clients with chairwork, “getting up, sitting, standing, walking, bending over, daily activities,” he says.

In group classes, which he sometimes leads as a kind of introduction to the technique at Berkshire West, Adelman uses the wall-to-wall mirror in the studio. “It’s very helpful,” he says. “Habits are deep within the nervous system, even before you do an activity, say. Hitting the ball, you begin to contract.” He says he works with the thinking that’s behind the movement, to create new programming.

This is something his client Stoll can buy into. Stoll has been taking AT lessons from Adelman for about 15 months. He does yoga every now and then for about a week (remember, he works at Kripalu) and then gives it up again. “I’d rather spend my time doing something else.” That’s what he likes about AT, the thinking part of it, and also the fact that it can be done all the time, while you are doing all kinds of things. “It’s a Zen paradox,” he says. “That’s the challenge of it.”

“The technique can be applied to any human activity,” says actress Randolph, “from the mundane to the most sublime.”

Like Mah, Stoll is a big of a tennis addict. He initially tried AT to see if he could improve his tennis game. Stoll says, “It’s definitely changing me. I’m adapting my use and as a result, every stroke I have now feels funny.” But he also says that physically, he thinks the technique is helping him avoid injury.

Before he tried it, he also says he got sick with the flu and other respiratory problems probably three or four times a year, but since he started AT he’s only been sick once. And he’s been able to cut back his visits to the chiropractor.

“It’s definitely raised my awareness of bad posture,” he says. He particularly notices this posture when he walks. He says he keeps his legs bent while he walks, and sticks his back end out like he’s going to be sitting down. Sound quirky? “I’m a big guy, 6 feet,1 inch, trying to fit into a world of shorter people.” He finds himself using AT to try and allow himself to fill more physical space.

Mah is all bound up these days. He had a very unglamorous spill on the ice in his driveway while taking out the garbage, and has ripped his left biceps and shoulder muscles right off the bone. “It’s nothing but spaghetti in there.” Still, he went out onto the court and played tennis with his son, and then even later, he cast off the bindings for some photos for this article. “I’ve figured out that to hit the ball, I have to use my hips and rotate my torso. I have to use my whole body like a kinetic chain.”

“Now he is relaxing,” Adelman says, lobbing tennis balls over the net at him. Mah says for him, AT is all about balance, “I was like the leaning tower of Pisa before. The ball has no energy when you are like that.”

In his work, Mah often gives lectures to organizations.

“People tighten up,” he says. “They tighten up on the court and in business. It’s hard to be flexible and dynamic when you’re tight. You don’t have the ability to respond to the changing business environment. Like in tennis, when the ball is coming at you.”

On some levels, AT seems so simple. Why do people take these lessons for months and months and years, even?

Nowicki says it’s like any other discipline. “It takes time. It’s not just one or two lessons. The deeper you go, the deeper your understanding. It’s important to do these lessons, because it’s easy to forget.” What he means, one thinks, is that it’s easier to just not think about it. “I enjoy what it’s doing for me,” says Stoll, “but I am not expecting quick results. Did you ever read “Zen and the Art of Archery?” It’s all about having a conscious detachment from the result. As long as you are trying to get it right, you’re not going to do well.”

“It’s a constant process of self-observation,” Randolph says. “I could teach in 10 lessons everything someone would need to know, but that does not mean they’ve developed the habit of employing AT in their life.”

And think also about all the years of your life before now, before you knew how to move and be.

“With a computer, you know,” Adelman says, “you get a user’s manual. But no one has been taught how to efficiently use their body. We end up developing bad habits and we don’t know how to stop.” Alexander Technique is the training manual you might have been looking for. “It is a way of using the body in a more natural, efficient, and easier way.”

‘Processes are stimulated by thought, Gary Adelman explains. This is what Alexander called Inhibition and Direction, stopping the wrong way of doing something and moving into the right direction. ‘There isn’t a right position, Adelman says, ‘it’s a direction you’re moving into, where the head is really poised, the whole spine is lengthening, the back is expanding and widening.

Alexander Technique… was developed back in the late 1800s by Shakespearean actor and elocutionist Frederick Matthias Alexander.