Mindfulness and personal growth through the Alexander technique

It is in the pause between stimulus and response that freedom resides.

The Alexander technique is mindfulness that includes the body. It is mindfulness ‘embodied’. When viewed this way, the body becomes an instrument for self-discovery and transformation.

FM Alexander once said, “My work is the study of human reaction”. As such, the Alexander technique can provide us with a lifelong classroom for exploring our physical and emotional reactions to situations. We can use it to help us respond to the events and dramas of our lives with greater awareness and compassion.

In the Alexander technique, mindfulness and observation are combined with the technique’s core principles and means whereby – the inhibition (stopping) and non-doing of our habitual reactions to stimuli and the sending of anti-stress directions to the body and the allowing of new responses – to re-educate our sensory perception and improve our whole mind–body functioning.

At the heart of the technique is the central principle that we function as a united psychophysical organism and the connections between the mind and body create the Self.

While the skilful touch and mindful presence of the teacher’s hands conveys a new way of being that supports us in using ourselves more economically and effectively in all areas of our lives, we also learn about non-doing/allowing, awareness, and being in the present moment as a daily practice.

This not only enhances our quality of life but can lead us into a state of expanded awareness.

The practice of presence

Alexander technique can help us return to and connect with ourselves. It uses feedback from our senses to anchor us in the present moment. For example, a tense neck becomes a sign we need to stop and direct our body to allow the release of tension. Being in the present moment increases our awareness and leads to increasing insight and knowledge of our habits and the self.

Working with the Alexander technique brings an expanded consciousness. To be fully present, we need to allow the release of unnecessary tensions because our habitual tensions obstruct both our inner and outer freedom, leaving us feeling trapped within our bodies, and in our lives.

Alexander technique gives us a path to do this. Actively stopping tensing and allowing tension to release lets the body organically and effortlessly release into expansion. We begin to develop an inner kinaesthetic awareness and a sensation of life in the body. We transform externally through our improving sensory perception and sensory feedback and our improving postural behaviour.

Over time, the Alexander technique increases our awareness from just our thoughts (many of us experience ourselves as a ‘head on a stick’) to include our bodies and our entire selves.

We also transform internally. A mind that allows the absence of tension, without mental or physical grasping, is in a state of expanded awareness. It is present and attending to the unfolding moment. Our self-knowledge and its accuracy grows as we can increasingly trust the perceptions we receive through our senses due to our improving sensory appreciation. At its heart, our self-knowledge is really our ultimate authority rather than looking to any external authorities.

The Alexander technique can help us build self-acceptance and allow us to be completely in the moment — to be fully in the here and now. It can help us to be where we are how we are, beyond any ideas of rightness and wrongness, without the need to control, or to be right or perfect. We also become increasingly able to be present to the full range of human experiences and emotions, rather than only those we consider constructive and acceptable.

The Alexander technique also helps us balance both what is going on in our inner world and what is happening outside of us in our external environment. Feedback from our senses takes us out of our heads and any obsessive internal rumination and grounds us fully in our environment. We become more aware of what is happening in the world around us (the ground beneath our feet, where we are in relation to others, and the dynamics and events occurring around us).

Paradoxically, this balance between our inner and outer worlds makes us more aware and understanding of the boundaries between us and others, but also helps us engage in life without as much identification and reaction, particularly as we work with our responses to stimuli with the technique.

Comparing Alexander technique and sitting meditation

In both meditation and the Alexander technique, we can get beyond our normal mode of thinking and what is referred to in Buddhist meditation as our grasping ‘monkey minds’. We can drop into the wider awareness and knowing that we can access when we are present to what is happening while it is happening.

The Alexander technique brings the same attitude of non-judgemental observation and awareness to our mind-wandering, our brain’s various opinions and judgements, our different emotional reactions, and our physical stresses and tensions as we see in sitting meditation. In different forms of sitting meditation, we may be told to ‘just sit upright’. The Alexander technique can provide additional help.

We can apply the Alexander principles of inhibiting, direction sending, and working with our alignment to our sitting meditation so that we can sit comfortably with minimal effort, without interfering with our breath, or tensing, bracing, and causing ourselves pain and discomfort.

We can allow ourselves to sit in a poised, upright position on our sitting bones, with our spine rising vertically, and our head balanced freely on top of our spine. We can turn our attention to the condition of our limbs and then come back to our head–neck–back alignment. We can notice any tension and holding in the chest and allow it to release. We can allow our shoulders to widen away from each other. We can notice our breath.

Then, aware of our body's inner liveliness, we can notice whatever emotional reactions may be flowing through us and how our thoughts come and go, as we observe without judging and discard judgments of what is right or wrong.

With the Alexander technique, we also take our expanded awareness beyond the cushion. We take our expanded awareness into the events of our daily lives as we deal with and react to the stimuli and varying demands we face in our environment.

Being present and fully in the moment needs to be practised daily, not just from time to time, and the Alexander technique gives us a chance to do this in daily activities. The practice of presence creates new positive habits and new pathways in the brain that deepen through repetition.

These pathways deepen more quickly when presence is worked with beyond the meditation cushion.

Alexander technique philosophy and Eastern thought

The philosophy behind the Alexander technique has much in common with that seen in Eastern thought, particularly as expressed in Taoism, Zen, Buddhism, and different Asian martial arts and healing methods. The Alexander technique has a similar focus on ‘appropriate tension’ and ‘not doing what you don’t need to do’ to that in various martial arts for example.

Importantly, the Alexander technique principles of inhibiting (stopping), non-doing/allowing, and directing also correspond with the Taoist concept of ‘wu wei’. There are also other aspects of the Alexander technique with much in common with different Eastern disciplines and forms of mindfulness.

The Alexander technique and wu wei (‘doing without doing’)

Wu wei is often translated as ‘actionless action’ or ‘doing without doing’ and directly equates to the core Alexander idea of non-doing/allowing – where things are allowed to occur and are done or happen in a non-doing way, without forcing or applying unnecessary stress or tension, and without mental or physical grasping. (The Alexander directions themselves are ‘allowings’ rather than ‘doings’ or actions that are muscularly done.)

To embody wu wei or to ‘allow’ and fully follow the Alexander means whereby in living is to live in a state of alignment with life’s flow and to respond increasingly effortlessly to the needs of diverse life situations without resorting to stress, strain, or force.

When we apply these ideas to our wider lives, we recognise we are not ‘master of the universe’ and that, while we are responsible for the things we do, we do not control all of life’s outcomes. We also accept that everything in life has its own flow and occurs at its own pace.

As a result, we stop trying to control life or to force it in a desired direction so we stop or ‘inhibit’ our related unnecessary actions and responses. Instead, we surrender and allow life to move through us by aligning with its natural ebbs and flows. This results in a state of flow, marked by effortlessness, ease, and allowing the right action to unfold at the right time in the right manner.

Contrary to modern western culture with its obsessive focus on achievement and doing ever more and more, with more and more stress, much of wu wei and also the Alexander technique is about learning when to not act and not rush in with habitual reactions.

Both wu wei and the Alexander technique recognise that responding to stressful situations with more stress is not productive. Stress clouds and distorts our thinking, making it harder to view situations objectively and to respond appropriately. When we are feeling calm and balanced, our minds are relatively clear, and we can more accurately see, gauge, and respond to situations. Answers are usually there or present themselves when we step out of the way and stop creating obstacles to flow.