What’s Wrong With the Alexander Technique?

In January 2016 I am coming to London with a team of teachers to answer the question this blog is posing. We've even set up a free online course at this link to warm you up! I also endeavour to answer this question below...

Alexander’s discoveries are my passion; they have been my life and work since the age of 20, and I intend to be living and teaching them up to my last breath.

Alexander first started teaching in Australia in the 1890’s, yet the impact of his work on modern, mainstream Society is hard to fathom or see. Today, Alexander’s passionate vision of transforming education and the health of human society has withered away, leaving in its wake a profession which continues on largely on the fringe, a profession whose members overall are about as much in demand as the actors who wait tables in New York.

A significant number of those who undertake the three years of teacher training will not create a full-time career teaching: they will struggle to find pupils; some might instead make it their ‘hobby’; others think of it as their ‘vocation’, while keeping their day job; some co-opt it into their original career as some kind of performing artist. Compared to the numbers who have trained, precious few occupy their lives as full-time professionals.

In over 100 years—is this all we can manage? It is deeply disappointing to me.

I believe something is wrong with this picture, don’t you?

If Alexander’s discoveries are of such significance—and I personally rank them with the discoveries of Einstein and Newtown in terms of their potential impact on humanity—then why do Alexander’s discoveries continue to wallow in obscurity? Why does “The Alexander Technique” mostly manifest in our society today as an also-ran amongst a plethora of modern day mind or body techniques? Pilates, Yoga – most consumers have heard of these, but very rarely have they heard of Alexander Technique! Why are so many others doing so well, while the work that Aldous Huxley described as “the father of the non-verbal humanities in the Western world” does so poorly?

The answer, I believe, is contained within a nascent 21st century question that is beginning to pop its inconvenient head into the Journals of modern day science, namely: “What is human consciousness?” Today there is a coalition of scientific disciplines, collected together under the general denominator of “cognitive science”, that is beginning to challenge the prevailing materialistic view of our world by asking difficult and currently unanswered questions about the true nature of human consciousness.

If the 20th century was all about discovering the nature of matter, then I predict the 21st century will be about discovering the nature of our human consciousness. But this is an altogether different scientific problem, requiring an altogether different methodology to explore it. The idea that knowledge can exist separately from the person possessing it, which lies at the heart of our modern day research and education edifice, is finally on the verge of being challenged by mainstream science.

It begins with the emerging discovery by medical science that our mind, in mysterious and unexplained ways, has the power to influence the health of our bodies: through prayer, through meditation, through mere thought alone.

In 1967 the Harvard Medical School began conducting experiments to detirmine the effects of meditation on our well being, and have since evolved a theory of a ‘Relaxation response’ as a counterfoil to the “fight or flight” response we have to stress. The mechanism remains unexplained, but if one follows a certain procedure, its effect can be reproduced every time. To those associated with Alexander’s work, that sounds very familiar!

Alexander’s work is situated within this emerging coalition of scientists, all working to bring legitimacy to a branch of scientific research dismissed up until now as ‘soft and fussy’ compared to the ‘hard’ sciences that explore the material world. The first world war, with its devasation of an entire generation of male youth, coupled with shattering the illusion of an advanced, intelligent civilization, nipped in the bud the blossoming movement led by such Western thinkers as William James and John Dewey and instead ushered in an era of behaviouralism which only began to be discredited in the mid-fifities. Interestingly, as scientists begin returning to these questions, Alexander’s name keeps popping up in old literature!

Every new scientific advance of our understanding of reality needs an innovation of observation, a new instrument from which to see the world afresh, so that data previously collected but not apprehended coherently, can be re-interpreted within a radical new context. Sometimes this new innovation is an object, such as a telescope, sometimes it is a new idea, such as “the earth is round”.

Alexander’s work offers scientists exactly this kind of observational innovation. Alexander’s simple discovery of a governing relationship between head and spine, which in turn integrates other bodily systems is so simple it is breathtaking. It explains and organises data in a way that has not been possible before, offering a previously unknown, but now unparralled mechanism for consistently and reliably calibrating the condition of our mental and physical health.

Alexander teachers spend all their time exploring this simple discovery in lessons: how it affects your physical pain and discomfort, your capacity to breath, your ability to move, your relationships with others, even your ability to think. Alexander lessons practically demonstrate that the origin of this dramatic mechanism—that has such a global, systemic effect on every aspect of our living—originates within the field of our human consciousness, it originats within the way we think. Is thought or consciousness a material thing? If it isn’t, what exactly is it? What kind of relationship does this mechanism of consciousness—so demonstratably ‘there’—have with the known material world? These are the kind of questions that cognitive scientists are beginning to ask.

Underlying these questions is a new premise: nothing exists independently from you. Although simple, I am sure you don’t think like that. I am sure that you, like me, have been brainwashed into believing that there are things that exist, and can be measured and objectively understood, separately from my own subjective consciousness of that perception. However, practically all materialistic science and research is premised on this assertion of independently existing phenomena.

Or at least that was so until Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” hit the scholarly airwaves. He proposed the preposterous idea that the person observing the phenomena affected what was being observed. What happened to “objective” science, with its idea of independently existing absolutes? From that day, this view of the world started to crumble, and another began slowly emerging to take its place.

The evolving scientific methodology to explore this view, first proposed by Varella, does not go along with the idea that there is separate “objective knowledge” that can be ascertained independently of the person ascertaining it. Instead this new methodology assumes that the subject, the experimenter and the objective results—measureable by 'hard science' are in a relative relationship; therefore no result of an experimental process can be considered valid unless there is an account of all these factors within that result. If you think about it, that's a pretty radical idea.

And in case you didn’t know it: this is exactly what happens in an Alexander lesson. Your lesson is an experiment in human consciousness, as applied to the problem of the neuro-muscular ‘co-ordination’ of your system to do ‘things’. When I use the words ‘co-ordination' and ‘things’ I mean them in the widest sense: not just how you move from A to B, but how you problem-solve, how you relate to others, how you handle a crisis, how you breathe. In every instance, ‘something’ is responsible for co-ordinating your activity. That ‘something’ is your human consciousness: a poorly understood phenomena that sits at the heart of everything we do, yet until now has inspired only passing interest within the confines of conventional scientific research. It is 'eel' of modern science, something that is so ubiquitous it slips away every time we try to look at it. Yet this is what Alexander researched; this is the subject of your every lesson in the Alexander Technique, and lessons demonstrate conclusively that the cognitive manipulation of this energetic phenomena can yield immediate and dramatic results.

When you have an Alexander lesson, you can experience significant and amazing new discoveries about the nature of your being. For you, the information will be specific, effective, original and nothing short of revolutionary. Then you leave your lesson and try to explain to your friend what happened. You can’t: there are no specific exercises to describe. There is nothing special that you did. It is easy to describe what you do in a yoga class, or a pilates class, or during your gym training, or while getting a healing of some kind: it is almost impossible to do the same for your Alexander class…

“What do you do in your lesson?”

“Oh, we sat in chair. Then I stood up again. Then we sat again.”

“Oh really?”

“But it was amazing! I learnt so much.”

“I see.”

If scientific researchers have avoided the question of how to understand and organise human consciousness for so long—because it is so hard to get a handle on—is it so surprising that mainstream society has difficulty in appreciating the subject? Scientific discovery usually leads the consumer to new things, so if science is lagging, no wonder Alexander’s work has proved so unsuccessful in gaining a significant following in the market place.

It’s my mission, and BodyChance’s mission, and the mission of ATSuccess to change this story. Join me and a group of teachers for a London Symposium on how we can best generate success. Click here to join the free online seminar preview!

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