For as many teachers of the Alexander Technique, there may exist that many Alexander Techniques. The technique in and of itself is not a thing, but a way of working, a process, that is with respect to the inherent toolkit of awareness and attention within our given subjective experience of life. F.M. Alexander was someone who acted as a consolidator for different ways of working with the self. Ultimately one cannot invent or innovate the realm of experience for another person because what is being constantly self-generated is the subjective experience itself. How we navigate that experience is influenced by cultures, by the internet projection of culture, by environment, by colonization, by the economy, by the people who raised us, by the people who raised us up, by language, by the grammatical divide between mind and body, by time space gravity, by the ways we were shown love, by the ways we wish to be loved, by the people at the holiday dinner table, by the phase of the moon, by the time of year, by the recurring sensation you’d rather not think about, by the recurring sensation you’re working with to find some relief, by that yelling guy on the subway, by that friendly neighbor and so on. What remains constant is us as the respective person receiving this experience. The use case of the Alexander Technique is to guide the attention within a field of awareness to consciously affect navigating the experience at hand and give agency to the self with respect to sensation of self in time and space. Choice.
The choice to become aware of the walls around, above, and below me as I continue writing this article.
When we guide the attention through awareness of an experience we move through it and derive information to offer the subconscious processes and then apply our current understanding to the questions or circumstances of life that we may be working through or towards. How we frame the experience, the questions we ask ourselves, where we guide the attention, and what elements constitute our field of awareness are some of the factors that influence how we move through a given experience which then yields sensory information or reactions that serves or clarifies the intention of movement at hand.
Noticing the angle of the eyes as you read this sentence in relationship to your seat or floor, to the walls of the room.
Body As Instrument — Consciousness expresses itself through the medium of the body. The body is the instrument that resonates consciousness. We attend to the paint brush, the guitar, the baseball bat, the chemistry of the actor, the body of water, or the kinetic impulse with respect to gravity etc. In all instances it is an expression of consciousness through the body onto an environmental canvas which starts with space itself. In dialing up our focus on an aspect of the experience with respect to our environmental canvas we can start bring an awareness to how we’re moving with that. Living on earth, for example, is an environmental canvas. Everything I do on Earth, I do with the instrument of my body.
“It’s the thought that counts.”
This is the gift of agency we give to ourselves when we decide to engage with our attention to stay with the wholeness of an experience as we ride the passage of time. That time filled with our emotional, intellectual, spatial, and corporeal existence.
When we return to the habitual experiences of daily life with this engagement of attention we can then find more wholeness of that experience and by extension more ease in the wholeness of self. I tend to think as pain as the friction between integration and dimensionality. So as I move to pickup my coffee cup with an awareness of the joints of my fingers and visualize the muscle tone in my jaw blooming like a flower in counter balance I seek to engage a process of wholeness through responsivity. These experiences in everyday life serve as something that can expand our awareness with respect to patterns of moving and being. We can refine our ways of working with attention as we find discernment in those patterns as we move through life itself.
Staying with the breathing in the space, knowing you’re coming to the end. Take your time, connect, and then move on.
This brings up the question then, how do we move through intention? How does the currency of attention that we pay in movement reinforce or re-pattern our process of being? How do these patterns of moving influence how we think and feel about the world or ourselves? How does the way we think or feel about the world or ourselves directly influence how we move through it? This is where the conscious attention comes into to play to facilitate change. When we practice awareness and tolerance of being through the different areas of life, internal and external, we can start to move physically and energetically through intention with attention to imprint concepts over time that alter our understanding and process of being. This, in my humble opinion, is what the Alexander Technique seeks to address. You can also ask me tomorrow and I might say something different! It’s always moving.
Christian Cepeda
December 19th, 2024
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.