1/15/2016 0 Comments The Hidden Value of Humor.Its been a tough week. Whether you are Motorhead lover, a Bowie devotee, or most recently, a fan of the outstanding actor(and proponent of the Alexander Technique) Alan Rickman, there is a lot to feel down about. When combined with the Chicago winter, it makes it easy to feel sad and serious. The term 'feeling down' is an interesting cultural motif. Feeling down is not just an emotional thing--it shows up in our posture(as shown in new research from Tal Shafir, Rachelle P. Tsachor and Kathleen B. Welch). We literally become 'depressed' in our spines when we feel sad(or more accurately, we depress our spines and feel sad as a result). When we allow ourselves to have our natural buoyancy and 'up'(as the above study shows happens as a result of Alexander Technique work) we actually become happier(more on this in a later blog). Moving from 'down' to 'up' is much harder than it sounds. But one strategy which can help(and one most of us employ every day) is humor. Genuine laughter physiologically helps to break up the postural sets that pull as down and give us a chance to free up into a different state, which is why comedy can be so cathartic. The act of laughing gives a pulse to our muscles that gives them a chance to release. This is one of the reasons why I work hard in lessons to 'break a student up'(another interesting cultural phrase) if they are getting overly focused and serious. It almost always results in a 'pull down' that doesn't allow the student to change. Alexander knew this. Humor is a crucial component in a classical Alexander Technique exercise, the 'Whispered Ah'. If you are having a rough week, give this a try and see what happens. The genuine humor is the most important part of the exercise. Whispered ‘Ah’: This exercise helps you to release the jaw and neck and associate exhaling with extending through your spine rather than collapsing. 1. Breathing through your nose, allow your jaw to drop open in increments, until it hangs in a easily released position. Be mindful of not tilting your whole skull up as you do so. 2. Allow a genuinely funny or joyful thought to trigger an inhale through your nose(Dad jokes always work for me, but you might have a better sense of humor-- here is a link to lolcats in case you need inspiraton). Allow yourself to smile with it. 3. Allow your exhale to drop out of your mouth on an extended whispered sigh on an 'Ah' syllable. As you breathe out, picture a column of air moving up your spine. 4. When the breath is over, allow your jaw to gently close without clenching. Breath through your nose a couple of breaths, then try the Whispered Ah again as desired. Happy lightening up!
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Stress. The Enemy. For years scientific research has pointed to connections between stress and ill health, even to the point of establishing a connection between it and mortality. The study that inspired Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal to give the above TED talk tracked 30,000 adults in the United States over the course of eight years. People who reported high stress levels had a 43% increased risk of dying. This substantially supports the theory that stress is bad for you. But there is a twist. That 43% increase is only true if you believe that stress is harmful. People who reported high stress levels but believed that stress wasn't bad for them not only showed no increased risk of mortality, but had the lowest mortality rate of any group in the study. The implications of this are staggering. What is suggested is that it is not stress itself, but the way we interpret it that leads to negative effects on the body. F.M. Alexander, the developer of the Alexander Technique, used to say the purpose of a lesson was to "to be able to meet a stimulus that always puts you wrong and to learn to deal with it". Essentially, it is the science of choosing whether you will respond to any given circumstance with freedom or whether you will let your habitual negative reaction restrain you. This translates physically into responding to a stimulus by using it to send you 'up' (lengthening in the system with a sense of space) or 'down' (contraction and shortening). Interestingly enough, in the above study they found that individuals who believe stress is bad for you experienced constriction in their blood vessels as a result of that belief, while those who had no such association had no corresponding physical reaction. They believe this might account for the difference in mortality among the two groups. One of the possible explanations for this is that if you believe stress is bad for you, the experience of it would introduce a fear response in your system, which causes constriction throughout the body (as detailed in my earlier blog 'The Physicality of Fear'). So by countering that response and introducing length into the system when one encounters stress (as one does in an Alexander lesson), one may be able to avoid negative physical consequences. This might explain why after a lesson my students often report feeling 'less stressed', or after a course of lessons they will report more freedom in their overall life. It's not that they are less stressed, but that they no longer pull down around it. And that can make all the difference. This is really just a riff off of Dr. McGonigal's excellent talk, which I HIGHLY recommend watching or reading the transcript of (there is a link above just below the video). Her work is a testament to the power of the mind to effect the body and to change our lives. I would like to leave you with one of my favorite quotations. "[...] for there is no thing good or bad, but thinking makes it so" --William Shakespeare, Hamlet By Jeremy Cohn
All of my clients report one activity as being consistently challenging--an activity I am participating right now: working at a computer. Whether at an office job, working at home, or just messing around online, using a computer is an Olympic level activity in terms of avoiding back, neck, and shoulder pain, repetitive strain injury, and general discomfort. Much of working well at a computer has to do with sitting well, which is a deceptively difficult activity. This topic is a subject I could give hundreds of tips on, but we are gonna stick with some basics for this blog-- here are a couple of things to consider that might add some 'up' to your workday: 1. The Body is Not Meant to Be Static One of the things that makes sitting at a computer for extended periods of time is that it is sedentary. The body is not meant to be still--it is meant to be in an ever-changing dance with gravity(i.e. movement) any time we are upright. Having to face a computer in a seated position for hours on end works against this, and most office chairs have outdated ergonomics that encourage a collapse into the back of the chair, locking the body into a deadened, slumped position from which it is very hard to move. To avoid the doldrums and aches, introduce a little movement into your everyday typing routine--take periodic breaks to get up and walk around, turn your head from side to side mindfully to break up the linear over-focused set of your muscles and introduce some pleasurable spirals into your torso, and allow a subtle forward and back rock in your hip sockets balanced on the sits bones to help you make sure you aren't holding yourself too tightly upright. Most of these movements will be impossible, however, unless you....... 2. Ditch the Back of Your Chair and Get Optimal Support Your chair back is wonderful as an occasional support, but leaning back into it forces your spine either into a slumped curve or puts your head behind your shoulders(or both); ironing out the natural curves of the spine and putting an enormous amount of pressure on your system, leading to back and neck problems. In addition to putting your head out of alignment, it tends to curve the bottom of the spine, placing pressure on your sacrum(really your fused lower vertebrae) which is not meant to be load bearing in this way. Instead, sit towards the edge of your chair and balance on your 'sits bones', the two rocker shaped protrusions on the bottom of your pelvis meant to bear your weight. You can locate these by sitting on your hands for a moment and rocking back and forth-- you will feel the bones sticking out from underneath your tush. Sitting on these not only allows you to keep your alignment and gather support to keep you upright more easily, but will allow you to introduce the movements described in number 1 into your sitting. Another source of support is your legs--we tend to forget about them while sitting in chairs, bringing them up to be cross-legged or kicking them under the chair, but they can be a great secondary source of support in sitting. If you let both the heel and ball of the foot have contact with the floor, they will serve as a 'flying buttress' to the cathedral wall of your pelvis, helping to stabilize you. This will also help to keep your hip sockets from tightening while seated or your pelvis from being pulled out of alignment from below. Allowing movement will make this position much more sustainable, but this poised position might seem daunting for a long workday. Which is why it is important to know that...... 3. Its Okay To Slump While its good to avoid being trapped in a constant C-curve against the back of your chair, it can be just as harmful to over arch(what most people think of as 'good' posture). Its best to let your spine be easy and natural in sitting. When working at a computer, a little bit of flexion is to be expected, and will naturally happen whenever your arms are in front of your body. However, there is a world of difference between allowing the spine to have easy flexibility to respond to the body's movement and complete collapse. A certified Alexander Technique teacher can help you to think 'up' along the spine and have healthy length within any position. In lieu of that, try alternating the position of your spine to keep it from getting too fixed or pulled down--if you feel you have been in a long slump, give your spine a moment of easy arch; if you have been over-arching, give your self a 'suspended slump', or give yourself a brief hang-down from the edge of your chair. 4. Focusing on your Screen Draws your Head and Shoulders out of Alignment The mechanics of using your keyboard well are complicated beyond the scope of this blog, but there are a couple of tips that can help you when it comes to relating to your screen. There is a natural draw of the head towards whatever we are looking at--the smaller and more focused the point of attention, the more the head tends to travel towards it. When the head is pulled forward off the top of the spine(approx between your ears), it puts a lot of pressure on your body and moves you into that unhealthy C-curve. A little mindfulness to resisting this pull by having a sense of your back can do a lot to counter this unhealthy tendency. A similar process can happen when you type--it is easy for your shoulder blades to be pulled forward off your back when you type. You can counter this shoulder pull by mindfulness and making sure your chair is not too far from the keyboard, causing you to over-reach. I hope these have been helpful--further info on working well will be a subject of future blog posts! If you have questions feel free to comment below or email me at freedominmotionat@gmail.com 11/20/2015 1 Comment The Physicality of FearEarly this week, I received a message from an old friend from Theatre School.
A native Staten Islander, she was in New York during the September 11th terror attacks. For years afterwards, she suffered from paralyzing anxiety flashbacks related to trauma from the event. She wrote me because, though she thought she had left them behind long ago, the events of the Paris attacks last Friday had brought them roaring back. She had found some success in conquering them using AT in college and wanted to ask my advise on how AT could help her current situation. Emotions are tricky. Despite all of our scientific sophistication, we still don't have a concrete, full picture of how they work. In terms of the emotion my friend was experiencing, fear, I do have some insights to share on how our Use interacts with it. Judging by my Facebook stream over the week since the attacks, there is an awful lot of fear in various forms going around right now, so, with my friend's permission, I thought I would share a little of what we discussed. Fear always manifests as physical tension in the body. We often think of tension as something static('I have stiff shoulders'), but it is anything but. Tension is muscles firing in a continuous stream, causing constant, not fixed, contraction. In terms of fear, tension manifests in a specific reaction called a 'startle pattern'. It starts with a contraction of the neck,pushing the head forward, traveling to the shoulders, which jump up, and down the spine. If you don't have a reference for what I am talking about, think about the feeling you get when you hear an unexpected car horn behind you(you might have experienced a pang of fear just thinking about the memory and a touch of the pattern in your body--sorry). This reaction is thought by some to be an evolutionary response, meant to give us a quick burst of adrenaline and a muscular jump to escape predators or dangerous situations. It is useful in the short term, but is stressful on our system as a whole and has a tendency to stay in the body after the fear event which caused it is long gone. Even in small doses, this tension, if not released, can accrue and create chronic stress. In extreme situations, the reaction in the body can be quite intense, and correspondingly difficult to let go. Additionally, in truly traumatic events such as the one my friend went through, experiencing a physical reaction similar to ones that occurred previously(such as hearing about the Paris attacks) can instantly call ones memories back to the event, reinforcing the pattern of fear, warping reality, and effecting breathing, energy, and quality of life. So what is the solution when one notices a startle reaction happening in one's system? 1. Don't fight it. Struggling against a startle pattern tends to reinforce its energy and cause it to deepen. A wonderful mentor I once had used to say to me "The root of the word 'emotion' is 'to move'". So rather than feeding your panic, I recommend a process called tracking to allow the reaction to move through. Non judgmentally, watch your physical reaction to the stress, and make yourself available to listening to it. Don't do anything, don't try to make it feel better, just 'be with it'(as one of my teachers Betsy says). Make some space around it. And often, like a child trying to get attention, once the emotion knows you have noticed it, it will disappear of its own accord. 2. There are a number of strategies a qualified A.T. teacher can show you to help counter the physical reaction in your body.This is one of the greatest benefits of the Alexander Technique I have found--it actually counters these stuck muscular patterns and can help the emotion trapped in the muscles move on, creating a freer, more responsive, more open and less stressed person. Simple versions of this include practices such as constructive rest, directing, feeling breath in your back, and feeling support underneath your feet, many of which have been detailed in previous blogs. Sometimes, just allowing an extended breath rhythm can be the answer. Try lengthening your exhales until all of the breath is out of your body and letting an inhale fly in to slow down your breathing and counter the breath pattern of a panic attack. 3. Make regular space to create the optimum wellness conditions in your life. Most chronic tension won't go away overnight--the tough but true fact is that if you really want to free yourself from these reactions it will take as much time to undo them as it took to create them in the first place. Tension is cumulative--no one moment of release is going to solve your problem. In terms of trauma, reducing your regular stress level can sometimes create enough space around the 'big reactions' to allow it to move through. Small, subtle, profound change is the key to happiness. And once it has, the practice becomes preventative--the more space you make for wellness when you aren't experiencing problems, the more likely you are to prevent future recurrence. It becomes a pleasant practice integrated into your everyday life. I counseled my friend via a phone session, and she was able to put some of the strategies I gave her into practice and felt some ease in her anxiety and the worst of her startle pattern unwind after about a day. This practice is not going to solve all of the world's problems, but it can help individuals see more clearly and be less reactive in a macro-connected world. And that could add up to a lot. 11/6/2015 0 Comments PRO TIP: OPEN AGAINST THE COLD! Don't let this unseasonably warm week in Chicago fool you. Whether you believe in La Nina or Snowmageddon(we usually get at least one of each forecast a year), there is only one thing besides death or taxes which is for certain. Winter is coming. Chicago has one of the highest rates of seasonal depression in the country. Sunlight is confined to a few hours a day, temperatures plunge, and we are reduced to squabbling over parking spots we have dug out for ourselves or stolen(I look forward to learning your position in the comments below). I think depression in the city has another, more insidious contributing cause. And it is pulling down against the cold. 'Pulling Down' in the Alexander world refers to the act of compressing the body to meet a stimulus. This reaction is often linked to fear--we instinctively pull away from unpleasant things in order to protect ourselves. You can study this reaction in yourself in instances ranging from hearing a car horn behind you to shaking hands with an unfamiliar person. It most often starts with a compression of the head and neck, and it is this reaction which A.T. largely seeks to teach you how to resist.
We certainly do this in response to the cold, especially as the weather changes and our bodies haven't adjusted to the temperature yet. Notice your response next time you feel a cold gust of wind. Do you remain open or clench up? And though we eventually come inside and get warm, we carry this compression with us, causing discomfort, injury, and depression. The word 'depression' itself is a word that has literal connections to pulling down, as does our slang of describing 'feeling down'. I believe our physical state has a profound effect on our emotions, and the less space you have in your body the less room you have emotionally. This doesn't help a city which faces at least three months of winter horror every year and doesn't have a lot to enjoy once you get past the holidays. So not carrying that tension with you might help you to recover from an emotionally draining and challenging time. There is more to this, An additional reason we pull down against the cold is to try and keep ourselves warm by compressing into our body heat and putting pressure on areas so we can't feel our own discomfort. And this makes sense and provides temporary relief. However, it might not actually be helping us. Compressing our bodies actually slows circulation of blood, and as a result our body heat goes down. So with exposure of more than a minute or two, we actually lose comfort and warmth in the exchange. When my Teacher, Daria Okugawa, first recommended expanding into the cold rather than compressing to me, I had a 'yeah right' response. However, when I tried it, I soon found she was right. So what I suggest is instead of fearing the cold when the weather starts cooling off again Friday, open yourself, embrace it, keep your blood flowing--and get some really nice thermal gear, which will keep your body heat from escaping. Don't get me wrong. This won't turn Chicago in February into Miami Beach--and that's a good thing, because....eww. But it might help you a bit with the only circumstance in life you can ever control--your own reactions. And in a tough Chicago winter, that little bit of wiggle room might make all the difference. I love my legs. They misbehave. They are often tense. But I love them for it. When I started training as an Alexander Technique teacher, some unrealistic part of me fantasized that by the time I was certified I would have perfect 'use' of my system. My tension would be gone. I would be transformed. Near the beginning of my third year of training, I was beginning to get worried. Early in my first year, we had identified a tough habit of mine--I had a very difficult time directing my legs, particularly my right one. They were often tense beyond my control, I had trouble allowing movement in my hip sockets or giving the weight of the leg over to a teacher when on the table. Two years in, not much had changed day by day. Every once and a while, I would achieve a mysterious freedom in my lower body, but I would never be able to trace the methodology by which I had achieved that ease and within a couple days(if I was lucky) the stiffness was back. I had serious concerns that this problem would be with me forever and would limit my ability to be a good teacher. So I started to focus a ton of work on them. And they got worse. You might identify with this phenomenon. You have a problem clearly identified that you know needs solving. It is urgent in a way that causes you anxiety. And so you tackle it to the best of your ability. And it backfires. Why does this happen? In Alexandrian thought, the above process is an example of the pitfalls of 'endgaining'. Endgaining is simply going after a result with brute force of will rather than a method which addresses the cause of the problem. This is made especially difficult because causation can be very hard to determine. The reason for this is that the problem that needs work is not always the same as the symptoms. An example. People who come to me with back pain often assume its because of something structurally wrong with the alignment of their back. However, I often find that it is the poise of some other part of their body that is causing them trouble--most often habitual tension in the head and the neck, but also habits to do with the person's use of their shoulders, their elbows, their legs; both in general and in specific activities. A pianist I worked with had trouble with pain in her hands; but after working together we discovered the pain in her hands was actually caused not by the way she used them but by inadequate support for her truck caused by the way she used her pelvis and legs while sitting at the piano. With my legs, I have not yet figured out an exact cause. However, my moments of freedom have come when I have given excellent organisation to my own head and neck and allowed that to connect to my pelvis, allowing my legs the ability to function on their own and not have to be tense to make up for poor use in my trunk. Often this is tied to a sense of confidence in myself. I stop worrying about how well I'm using myself when I'm fully connected and good use of my legs comes as a side effect. This is especially interesting as I noticed something in my third year of training. My legs would get more tense whenever I was feeling more nervous and less confident in myself. So when I was trying hard to 'correct' what I saw as a major fault in myself, my nervousness was actually fueling and reinforcing the thing I was trying to change. This was a major breakthrough for me. Since then, every time I notice tension in my legs, I refocus on treating my self as a whole well. My legs have become the canary in the coal mine that tell me when I need to be taking better care with my use and the way I think about myself. If I catch myself over-criticizing them, I just take a breath, say "**** it"(which was some of the best advice my Trainer Daria every gave me), and move on. And as a result, I have transformed a cycle of dislike towards them into gratitude for the gift of information they give me. And as I've worked to transform this cycle of dislike, they've slowly started to change into better organisation. They aren't perfect. They probably won't every be. If I am conscious of them being close to perfect, that will be the moment I lose it. But they have gotten better with time. And mostly, I've learned how to be better towards them. What's life without a little mystery?
I would be lying to you if I claimed we knew exactly what happens when an Alexander teacher does 'hands on' work with a student. This aspect of teaching is perhaps the most unique facet of Alexander work and the most pleasurable. In my experience, trying to describe, or listening to my students try to describe, what it is like to have hands on work done usually results in a squint from the listener and a response along these lines: 'So its like massage?' or 'So its like Reiki?' It is human nature to try to try to categorize experiences by what we already know--even when the experience is completely foreign. This usually results in simile that prompts a response such as'well, I can't really describe it, you'll just have to try it' from the person trying to communicate their experience. Which sounds snobby. Many teachers will refuse to even attempt to describe the 'hands-on process' to a student under the rationalization that it could lead to misleading ideas about the Technique or out of reverence for the 'mystery' of the process. I, however, think that in order for someone to try something new, they deserve to know a bit about what that new thing is before they do it. Otherwise, why would they? So, here is my stab at explaining how Alexander Hands work, or at least one perspective on it. I believe that Alexander Hands primarily have a relationship to a field of Neuroscience called body mapping. Most of my understanding on this comes from the excellent book 'The Body has a Mind of its Own' by Sandra & Matthew Blakeslee. The basic concept is this: every touch cell in your body has a corresponding cell in your brain, arranged vaguely in a miniature map of your body. When you are touched by something, the corresponding cells light up on the map in your brain.. Not every part of your body has the same number of touch cells--the hands and the mouth, for instance, are loaded with them, while your back and torso is a no mans land with relatively few cells. The body map in your brain reflects this. When an Alexander teacher puts 'hands on', they are lighting up part of the body map in your brain, most often parts that do not often receive much attention. This awareness gives the student a wealth of new information--of the relative position of the part in question, the level of tension in it, and its relationship to the whole body map. So the first thing the hands give a student is self-awareness. The second thing the hand gives is a slight coaxing for the area touched to release--really a pause in the constant stream of tension in the muscles under the skin. This can be compared to the refusal to respond habitually so paramount in the Alexander process known as 'Inhibition'. This is communicated through the openness of the hand and its quality of release, which we are able to sense. The third thing the hand communicates is a sense of what in A.T. is called Direction. For the purposes of this blog, I am going to define Direction as a 'thought nudge' which helps to coax the muscles in question into better, more natural and functional Use. This is maybe the most fascinating aspect of the body mapping connection. Besides mapping our sense of our own body, the brain also extends our sense of touch to map anything we touch. This is why when you ride in a car and go over the bump, you can feel the wheels hit the bump even though all you are touching is your seat or the floor under your feet. Or why when you hit a baseball you feel the ball hit the end of the bat when all you are touching is the handle. So when a teacher touches the student, they are 'sharing' their body map with the student. The student is then able to compare their sense of how the teacher is using their body with their own heightened awareness of part being touched, and can use this information to subtly encourage their own use to mirror their teachers. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a teacher's Use of themself makes a difference in the quality of their teaching The result of this process-- heightened awareness, encouragement to pause ones habitual use of ones muscles, and learning how to Direct from the teacher's Use--is that the student makes subtle decisions about how to employ their muscles and let go of tension(or increase connection--every person is completely unique in what they need and how it connects to their whole system). So rather than the teacher 'doing' something to the student, the teacher facilitates the student to help themself. What it usually feels like is very simply becoming more present--and a sense of shift as your system incorporates the new use of the part into the body as a whole, possibly accompanied by a sense of release. These decisions then become more and more conscious and habitual, allowing you to have a more energized body map and make better decisions about how to use yourself even without your teacher. Okay. Clear as mud? Why don't you give it a try! 9/17/2015 0 Comments On Humility and Glacial Change: How Does Learning in the Alexander Technique Work?The American educational philosopher John Dewey, though a rock star in his day, is little known to 20th century folk. However, his ideas of 'learning through experience' have had possibly the greatest impact on modern education of any 20th century theorist. Dewey was a great supporter of the Alexander Technique. He came to it as a possible solution for problems with his health, chronic pain, and difficult breathing. By the time he finished lessons, he not only found relief from these, but had discovered what he called an embodied philosophy--a way of taking his theory of direct experiential learning and making it a reality. He saw the process of learning how to let go of habitual tensions blocking new ways of doing things and progression from the "known to the unknown" as "learning how to learn"--a way to free oneself to move into greater and greater psycho-physical space and unlocked human potential.
In fact he claimed: "It (the Alexander Technique) bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other activities."* However he also said: "I had the most humiliating experience of my life, intellectually speaking. For to find that one is unable to execute directions, including inhibitor ones, in doing such a seemingly simple act as to sit down, when one is using all the mental capacity which one prides himself upon possessing, is not an experience congenial to one's vanity" This dichotomy of coming up against ones basic limitations in order to make progress on complicated activities is one experienced by virtually all Alexander Technique Students. With years of experience, I still sometimes dread the beginning of chair work--the simple, empty form of getting in and out of a chair to observe ones movement habits and work on letting go of unnecessary tension which Alexander considered most useful of his procedures. The thought that I might still not have control of my right leg--my perennial problem spot which has a mind of its own-- or how my pelvis relates to my lower backno matter how sophisticated I get at external skills such as interpreting Shakespeare's text or calculus(this second example is theoretical) is discouraging. But it is because it is so 'basic' that the work is so valuable--the way I 'use' myself has an effect on everything I do. In the end, the material we use to create our own lives is our selves--and every physical tension, every blank spot on our self knowledge, every missed connection with ourselves has an impact on the quality of that creation. It is this 'universal constant'--our relationship to or 'use of' ourselves--which every Alexander session seeks to improve--whether the end goal is physical wellness and relief, increased mastery of a skill, or more openness to the blessing of life. It is because of this close connection--because the learning is done so near to us--that students are sometimes puzzled after a couple of lessons. "I understand the concepts intellectually, and I feel change during the lessons with your hands and that I move differently afterwards, but how do I apply the Technique for myself?" they ask. It is an excellent question, well worth clarification and discussion. There are ways to practice the work outside of lessons--procedures such as constructive rest, monkey, DART work, lunge, and others can help to carry forward work on your own. But the best application is mindfulness. The Alexander Technique is far from 'Technical'--a word we associate with mechanical skill. It is a growth of internal awareness through direct experience. In order to 'apply' the technique, no extra effort is needed--merely allowing your altered awareness, conceptually and kinaesthetic, to filter into your life is application. We crave ways to actively strive in our lives--work harder and everything will come to you. We have a hard time believing that letting go--allowing--ourselves to function naturally can be effective--we like to feel the effort. In the end, it is an ego issue--an issue of humility. A lot of faith is required to trust that one's basic self is enough. But it is. Because change in AT is so subtle and close, I like to refer to it as 'Glacial Change'--only the tip of it is visible, However, an enormous amount goes on below the surface. And though a glacier moves slowly, whatever it moves over is changed irreversibly and profoundly. Are you willing to let go of your habitual life and find out what it is that lies beneath? *Quotations are taken from Dewey's introduction to Alexander's third book 'The Use of the Self'. Other quotation marks indicate terminology commonly used by Alexander himself and other teachers. There is an age old debate in acting: Do you use your own experience to create a character — essentially presenting “yourself” as the character — or is the character something outside of your experience that you create using your imagination and step into?
Both of these approaches can be limiting in their own way. The “imagination” route can sometimes result in representational acting — presenting ideas in a self-puppeting, superficial, self-conscious ways. This creates hollow artifice, and even if very skilled, an audience can “feel” something deceptive about it — that there is nothing behind the curtain. On the other hand, the “I am the character” method can create limited performances — recycled mannerisms and easily accessed emotions and actions which carry over from character to character without actually serving the story at hand. Which, after all, is the actor’s job: to use their self to serve the story, not the other way around. So what is the solution to this problem? When I started college at Boston University, I definitely was in the imagination camp. I was a shy kid, and I saw acting as a way to use my imagination to communicate with others in ways I couldn’t in my real life. As a result, while I let my imagination and my ideas cover my outside like a collage, my interior life was locked away safely. I would even say that I took a certain pleasure in feeling like I was “putting it all out there” while still being safely sequestered inside myself. But what I didn’t know was that very little of my rich, imaginative life was translating externally. Instead, I was stiff, stilted, and unbelievable on stage. My professors helped me to become aware of this and let this eternal shell go to the best of my abilities. So I tried to do the opposite method, but soon ran into a different obstacle — when I thought of using my “self,” I realized the self I thought of was boring. I tended to be lead towards emoting and expressing a feeling of shame on stage, which I felt I could accurately inhabit (I had a lot of practice at this one). And my vocal work was cautious; I wanted to sound authentic, but I just ended up sounding flat. So, yeah, that didn’t work either. Two classes made a huge difference in helping me to find the balance. One was a semester of Meisner Technique with David Demke of Shakespeare & Company. This taught me more than anything else that acting was not about “doing and creating,” but instead about being present and responsive. The other, which I’m going to focus on here, was the three-and-a-half years of Alexander Technique I took with Betsy Polatin. Alexander Technique taught me to think of myself not in limited terms, but as a vast thing that could encompass experiences that weren’t even part of my personal biography. I realized a lot of what I identified as ‘me’ were habitual tensions — both physical and mental, which were associated with anxiety and fear. These tensions painted a picture for me of what I was and wasn’t, which I had become strongly identified with. By helping me to become aware of these tensions and ultimately let them go, Betsy erased this limited self and opened me up to a vaster potential. Alexander Technique helped in my personal life, too. I was able to be much more open, to feel new things, and to act differently with people. When I returned to acting, a new universe was opened up to me. Instead of being restricted to imagining things that “were or weren’t me,” I realized that characters could have emotions, perspectives, and ways of moving that weren’t so much foreign to me as they were unexplored. Rather than a way of expressing a limited self, acting became for me a way of exploring a vast universe and my boundless intersection with it. Whether I was playing a blind, Welsh sea captain; a closeted, middle-aged Oscar Wilde-obsessed Irishman; or an Iranian civil rights lawyer, all of them were myself without being the same. Betsy called this “stepping outside your habitual self.” As I have started working with Alexander Technique students of my own, I have come to think of it as helping people to work with an “expanded self” — a way of acting without the constraint of the habitual self. Through this, my students can find an ease in their acting — less of a struggle and more of an unlocking. They don’t have to force themselves there. They can just let go of their constraints and let the character come to them. Next time you feel stuck while connecting to a character, instead of trying to find a way to find the character in yourself or create them, see what happens if you let go of whatever is keeping you from them, and expand outward, moment by moment, into someplace new and familiar. 3/26/2015 0 Comments WORKSHOP AT GREEN SHIRT STUDIOHey guys! Exciting news! I am partnering with my good friends at Green Shirt Studio to bring workshops and group classes on AT to the Chicago Theater Community! I will be presenting the first of these workshops at Green Shirt at Clark and Montrose on April 24th from 7:45-9:15 pm. The focus will be on learning how to use the Alexander Process to become less tense and more present in your performance. Participation will be limited to an intimate group of twelve. Don't miss this chance to explore this life changing work. Cost is only $20. Click on the button below for more info or to sign up! |
Thoughts on what is going on in the work and the world right now. Many posts to come. Archives
June 2021
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