The Alexander Technique and Focusing
© Kevin McEvenue
Alexander Technique is concerned with unconscious automatic body functioning, and the way these "habitual" responses interfere with the natural flow and functioning of the organism as a whole. Alexander realized early on how difficult it was for one to change these deeply embedded physical response patterns. His life work was to find a way to change unconscious physical habits that undermine healthy bodily well-being.
Alexander teachers focus on change at the level of automatic spontaneous bodily function. We attempt to replace bad habits by becoming aware of and stopping the old physical response patterns from being acted upon as a first step. We then consciously "inhibit" the desire to correct, fix or change the pattern ourselves thereby avoiding what Alexander described as the desire to "end gain." By "inhibiting" the desire to do anything, and giving ourselves a set of orders to further prevent some form of efforting, we make room as, Alexander says, "for the right thing to do itself."
In my own story these new response patterns often seemed to be imposed on the organism from outside, either from the hands of an Alexander Teacher or some internal thought of how I should be without making room for my own inner voice. The technique did not address the story of why the habit was there in the first place. It only addressed the fact that the habit was destructive and that the teacher knew a better way. I concluded that the object of the teaching is for the student to learn to take on this better way of functioning as if it were my own. This is done through a conscious giving a set of orders or directions to the body as a way of overriding the old response patterns, and at the same time inhibiting the desire to end gain, as the teacher adjusts the body to give it a better experience.
I was never fully comfortable with this approach as that inner voice part of me never felt fully heard or appreciated. One day, through a powerful physical experience with a Shiatsu teacher, combined with my own inner teacher, I experienced that change could happen out of my body's own inner wisdom. In fact, change of functioning that came out of my body's own wisdom not only embraced all that I knew from Alexander, but so much more as there was life in it that I could identify as my own. I began to move spontaneously while at the same time having a sensed vision of where I came from and where I might be going. Both inner directed spontaneous movement and inner knowing were happening at the same time. As often happens in Focusing, I seemed to get in touch with my own inner blueprint of how I can be in a very physically alive way. I realized in that moment that what Alexander imposed from without could be awakened from with in, in a form even better than Alexander or I could have imagined.
