How FM Sabotaged The Alexander Technique

"Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has constructed purely for convenience."
V. S. Ramachandran

V. S. Ramachandran was the first physician to successfully amputate a non-existent arm. Materially the arm he amputated did not exist; experientially it did.* After Gettysburg in the American Civil War, Silas Weir Mitchell first noted that many of the soldiers whose arms and legs had been amputated complained about pains in these missing limbs.

It was Mitchell who first coined the term "phantom limb" which has stuck to the modern day.

However, Ramachandran was the first to successfully demonstrate that your brain's "image" of your arm exists separately from your actual "material" arm. In everyday movements - fantastic as it seems - the truth is you don't experience your actual limb, you experience your projected image of it.

For teachers of Alexander's Discovery, the implications of this are mind boggling. And far-reaching in terms of our teaching technologies. Misunderstanding this has led to a lot of nonsense in our Profession, and the source of this clearly started with the old man himself.

Here's how that works…

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Your illusionary concept and experience of your limbs is projected on to your actual limbs. Regardless of how inaccurate you are, you will still try to move your arm in the way you believe it works, not in the way your arm actually works.

Imagery trumps reality, but only every time.

This neuroscientific insight is the basis of BodyChance's most popular module – BodyThinking. In this program, students undertake a systematic renewal of their movement imagery.

In a renewal program such as this, the first step is to align your imagery to the truth of your movement structure. We are already so confused, so full of nonsense, that we need to start with what is known to be actually there.

This is why I am not a big fan of movement metaphors: waterfalls, floating heads and all that. When did you last see a piece of string coming out the top of someone's head?

Luckily, Anatomists have chronicled more truthful information on how humans move for hundreds of years now - that job is basically done.

However, it is only an approximation - you still have your own work to do. No one person has an identical structure to another. I'd guess that a least 20% of people have unequal numbers of bones and muscles compared to the majority. Certainly ROM can differ for each person, dependant upon your individual structure. Ballet dancers have differing ranges in their hip joints for example - flexibility is often just a bit of genetic good luck.

Alexander did a great disservice to his own work when he discouraged this exploration of anatomical imagery, simply because anatomists had not benefited from the information themselves.

Of course they hadn't - they needed Alexander's work to benefit! Duh.

Alexander failed to appreciate that their information, combined with his discovery of the primacy of head/spinal influence on co-ordination, could render this same information highly effective and beneficial, beyond what Alexander himself had to contribute.

There are still teachers in our profession who are actively proud of their ignorance in this regard. The sins of the father and all that. Frankly, it is nothing to be proud about: kinaesthetic sensitivity and nuanced concepts of perception urgently need to be linked with a systematic renewal of our moving self-imagery. Alexander's discovery of head/spinal influence on movement is a keystone concept that organises this process of renewal most successfully.

How we are constructed and move is a mental brain-based activity. You can be a paraplegic and still run down the street mentally. Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharantsy survived 400 days of solitary confinement in a freezing 5 x 6 foot cell by mentally playing chess against himself.

In his extraordinary experiment with novice pianists - which was highlighted at the first Lugano Congress - Pascual-Leone demonstrated how imagining practising the piano can significantly increase your ability to play.

Fundamentally, our brain is not so good at knowing the difference between what is real and what is imagined, since all of it is imagined - even the real. Amputated arms, remember?

Alexander also observed this in MSI Part II when he (anonymously) mentioned "a person" (it was Alexander) who taught himself to ride a bicycle simply by studying/imagining it first:

"I have personal knowledge of a person who, by employing the principles of conscious control which I advocate, mounted and rode a bicycle downhill without mishap on the first attempt, and on the second day rode 30 miles out and 30 miles back through normal traffic."

Why oh why didn't Alexander make the connection?!

When you do this very same bicycle process by instead imaging accurate movements of all different kinds, you facilitate restoring your coordination to a manner that co-operates with your design.

Instead of this, we have all this nonsense like: "the back going back" or "widen across the arms" or "coming up in the front".

What do they mean?

You have to undertake some mental gymnastics to align these messages with the actual system you have. What results are hordes of students introducing weird and subtle additions that convince their brains they have complied with this spurious conceptualization of human movement.

It is for this reason alone that it is often so easy at a Congress to spot who a teacher trained with.

The first task of any student of Alexander's discovery - wishing to help their Self and others - is to systematically reconstruct their brain's imagery of movement.

How can this be done?

Like building a house - you start with the structure, add the joints, layer on the muscles then start analysing all kinds of different movements. Getting in and out of a chair is fine, and there are literally thousands of alternative movements to study in addition to that.

If you are going to spend hundreds of additional hours of your life lying in semi-supine, I suggest using that time even more constructively by generating accurate images of your movement. Luckily, you can do that while still lying in semi-supine - simply start by mentally rehearsing the location of all your joints. Heavens - you can even imagine getting in and out of a chair if you like. Then graduate to other movements, all the time imagining the head/spinal relationship that most efficiently serves your specific imagined movement.

Your teachers will be delighted at your next lesson, I promise.

Of course touch is a powerful learning tool to discover new information. And other choices are available to you. In numerous experiments with large groups of people, I have found that by:

1. simply mapping the location of the brain (above the eyes and ears); then
2. retelling its massive weight (5 kilos when you include bones, tissues and organs); and finally
3. directing people to think of moving this imagined brain as they look around the room…

…has led to the same kind of pleasant reorganisation of the head/spinal musculature you would normally only expect from an "Alexander touch" type session.

I still use touch - all the time - and it is only one tool of many that I use. Using imagery this way in a group is certainly more efficient than trying to touch them all. This is how you can successfully teach Alexander's discovery to larger groups of people.

It is also arguably more enduring: the person has gained a skill-building practise to continue at home. How many students have asked you:

"What do I do to practise this?"

Well, now you have an alternative answer to replace that stock-in-trade one: "Practise semi-supine" (Many of my regular readers know I am not a big fan.)

Instead, you can now say: "Practise moving your brain around in space."

The wonderful thing about learning the truth of your moving structure is how readily this information is available. This is not a "touch exclusive" approach to learning - it scales wonderfully to large groups of people, and is based on solid neuroscience to boot!

To put this into a marketing perspective - which I always do - if you were a student, what would you rather have?

A. A really delicious but expensive experience - that involved spending a lot of your time and monetary resources?

or

B. A milder and still pleasantly surprising experience - one that is instantly replicable any time you want, even while doing whatever you are doing?

I'd go for the B and save my time and money for a holiday in Italy, and so will many students.

Why do you think BodyChance is so successful? We care enough about our students to be fanatically dedicated to finding more efficiency and effectiveness in our teaching methods. Paradoxically, your students don't care how much you know, they want to know how much you care. I can't believe that most of our profession is still obsessed with taking people in and out of chairs, and lying them on tables, when there are so many other rich possibilities available to enhance the learning of our students.

And yes, yes: taking people in and out of chairs is fine for learning too - I should know, I did it that way for 10 years myself. It's just that today, I can clearly see the inherent limitations of that approach...

Alexander's work does not need to exclude itself to a rich, upper echelon of people on our planet who can afford to be touched in a special way for 30 minutes by another highly trained human being (who mostly isn't making much money anyway)…

BodyChance's vision is Alexander's discovery accessible to everyone on the planet.

This can be achieved by both niching and scaling our work: based on a bit of modern neuroscience, with a bit of compassion for our students and some common sense marketing and biz development.

I often need to remind my Self that what we offer is something people already have!

It's nice to think we have something exclusive - and "You must have our touch to get it" - however the inconvenient truth is that this simply isn't true.

*For Further information about Ramachandran's work, see Norman Doidge's book "The Brain That Changes Itself."