Tag Archives: Alexander Technique

Mastering Semiflexion in the Alexander Technique – Effortless Movement with Seán Carey

January 3, 2024 – 3:31 pm

In this exclusive excerpt from his new book Exploring the Alexander Technique with Walter Carrington: Lessons and Games, Seán Carey reveals how mastering semiflexion, a simple bend of the ankles, knees and hips, can unlock effortless movement, create better balance and facilitate an energising release in tension.

Semiflexion is a bending movement using the ankles, knees and hips and ranges from a near-vertical to a deep squat. Although the action is straightforward, most adults in the developed world find it extremely difficult to perform this basic functional movement competently due to deeply ingrained habits of shortening or compressing themselves. 

Learning to acquire competence in semiflexion often requires sustained hands-on assistance from a teacher to maintain proper form and prevent the triggering of ingrained habits.

On the other hand, if performed correctly, semiflexion represents a dynamic position of mechanical advantage. As you descend from a fully upright position to an intermediate or even a deep squat, there will be a beneficial redistribution of muscle tension. At the same time, your rib cage contracts and expands elastically and your feet open onto the ground.

When you return to upright from semiflexion, you may experience a powerful release and noticeably improved muscle tone. The dynamism of this attitude has been created by the antagonistic muscular actions of the body parts releasing in opposite directions – ‘head forward, knees forward, hips back, one against the other’ – as Alexander, by way of encouragement, often said.

Each day of the training course Walter offered hands-on work to all students and teachers, which usually involved chair work, but during some sessions he showed me different ways of moving into and out of semiflexion. 

On one occasion he stood to my left and used his hands to help me find a better balance. As my neck column released upward, my back opened out, and my feet released onto the ground, he instructed me to direct my head forwards and up, saying, ‘Don’t do anything, just think it’, and guided me into semiflexion.

Walter then told me to think of releasing my ankles even more so that my shins ‘fell up and forwards’, while directing my thighs ‘back and up’ or towards my pelvis. Still in semiflexion I was also asked to direct my torso to follow the lead of my head.

On another occasion Walter emphasised the importance of lengthening and widening the torso to perform semiflexion. He had me stand behind him and place my hands on either side of his rib cage. 

Next, Walter moved into the position of mechanical advantage by bending his ankles, knees and hips. I could feel with my hands that he was not sinking into his legs because he was maintaining the lengthening of his spine and the widening of his back. 

Walter then guided me through the movement. As I stood, he placed his hands on my rib cage and asked me to direct my back ‘back and up’ as he took me slightly up and back from my ankles. Because my back was elastically releasing this made it very easy to bend my ankles, knees and hips. 

To exit semiflexion Walter gave me two options. First, he recommended thinking of my head moving back to its full height, which would cause my legs to straighten without any clenching or pushing required. Alternatively, he steered my hips back and down, explaining that allowing the tail to drop slightly would cause my head to rise, much like a seesaw. As a result of this guided movement, I discovered I could move my head away from my heels to stand upright without using unnecessary muscular effort.

However, there are other effective ways to transition from semiflexed to upright that you can play around with. For instance, if your back muscles are properly engaged, you can walk forward without wobbling and gradually, without stiffening your neck, lifting your chest or pulling your back in, come upright. You can also walk backwards, directing your back back and then gradually return to a vertical attitude. 

Seán Carey’s book, Exploring the Alexander Technique with Walter Carrington, is now available. This exclusive hardback book offers practitioners an insider’s perspective into Walter Carrington’s profound teachings and approach. 

Order your copy of this limited edition today via the HITE website or Amazon.

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The chronic lower back pain conundrum – Seán Carey

March 10, 2018 – 11:44 am

Sitting posture

Much excitement over a recent article by The Guardian’s medical journalist, Dr Luisa Dillner, in which she canvasses the views of a physiotherapist, an osteopath and a ballet teacher on the vexed topic of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ posture, with a special focus on the latter’s effects on health and well-being.

There were several strands to the argument but the main theme was that so-called bad posture – ‘usually defined as slumping, leaning forwards or standing with a protruding belly’ – is not the primary reason why so many people in the UK experience chronic lower back pain.

This is not a new argument. As I explain in my book, Alexander Technique in Everyday Activity: Improve how you sit, stand, walk, work and run, the reasons why people develop chronic lower back problems are multiple and complex:

‘Although the precise cause of chronic back pain is often difficult to pinpoint, it is usually related to conditions such as herniated disc – the so-called slipped disc – and by a variety of inflammatory processes in the musculoskeletal system, as well as age-related degeneration, especially in those over 65.’

I also highlight that lower back pain is linked to anxiety and stress.

And in my book, I offer some advice to those suffering from chronic lower back pain – namely, that it is very important to obtain an accurate medical diagnosis in order to rule out any existing medically treatable pathological problem of the spine.

Interestingly, the physiotherapist and osteopath interviewed by Dr Dillner did concede that once someone has developed chronic lower back pain ‘posture may affect it’ and that ‘sitting for a long time’ is best avoided.

But what wasn’t mentioned in The Guardian article (though it is covered in my book) concerns an important discovery made in 2006 by a team of Canadian and Scottish scientists.

It is that how we sit on a chair has enormous implications for spinal health. The team, which used an innovative whole-body MRI scanner to investigate 22 adult volunteers with ‘healthy backs’, found at the start of the study that despite being asymptomatic 12 of the group exhibited a significant degree of disc degeneration or disc protrusion.

The scans then revealed that sitting on a chair with feet touching the floor in either a forward slouch or an upright 90 degrees, ‘good posture’ position, had a significant impact on the vertebral column, since the lower spinal discs in particular were already showing signs of deformity.

In fact, this effect was greatest when subjects adopted the sit up ‘straight’ position. In as little as 10 minutes fluid was leaking out of the inner core of the discs. This finding is highly significant, considering that the 23 sponge-like intervertebral discs constitute around one third of the total length of the spine, and play a critical role as shock absorbers in everyday movement, especially in bending and twisting motions.

From an Alexander Technique point of view sitting up ‘straight’, as most people in our culture understand it, is in fact over-straight. Simply put, it’s just another way of tightening the neck, raising the chest and hollowing the back. In turn, that misuse lifts the sitting bones from the chair and transfers body weight on to the thighs, creating inappropriate downward pressure along the spinal column, including the discs. The alternative of slumping isn’t much better.

Instead, in order to sit upright painlessly and efficiently we need to learn the skill of giving our weight to our ischial tuberosities – the sitting bones at the base of the spine.

Only then can our anti-gravity and non-tiring support muscles transfer the weight of our head, upper body and arms into whatever support surface is available. This could be the ground itself, or a raised surface such as a chair, tree stump or rock, or moving surface such as a horse, elephant or camel.

To make this clearer you can try this experiment. Locate your sitting bones by sitting on a flat surface, such as a wooden chair, and put the palm of each hand under each buttock. Through the skin, fatty tissue and thick muscle you will feel a bony protrusion under each hand. At this point let yourself slump so that your spine assumes a C-shaped curve. You will notice how you roll on to the back edge of your sitting bones and your weight transfers on to the rear of the pelvis and towards the tailbone (coccyx).

Now try sitting up ‘straight’. Chances are that you are now arching your back. If so, you will experience how your support contact moves on to the very front edge of your sitting bones, in such a way that much of your weight is taken by your thighs.

By contrast, see if you can find a way of sitting in balance so that your weight is taken more or less by the middle of the curved arch of your sitting bones, with your double S-shaped spine extending upwards and your head freely poised on top of it.

This is balanced sitting. It’s easier said than done, of course. But it’s the only way to sit to avoid exacerbating chronic lower back pain, while also preserving the long-term integrity of the discs of your spine.

You can read more about an Alexander approach to sitting and other movements in Seán Carey’s Alexander Technique in Everyday Activity: Improve how you sit, stand, walk, work and run

Available through Amazon with free P & P

 

 

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Rounded shoulders and the relevance of the Alexander Technique – Seán Carey

June 15, 2017 – 4:28 pm

Biker posture

Biker posture ©Shutterstock

I’m driving slowly along Commercial Street in London’s ultra-fashionable East End when a young female cyclist passes me on the inside. Her expensive-looking bicycle has drop handlebars, though I observe that she is not using her hands to grasp or rest on the lower parts, the curving ends, but the central sections attached to the stem. Nevertheless, I notice that rather than maintaining the length of her spine by leaning forward as a unit from her hip joints, she is curving her back and pulling her head back and down on to her neck as she lifts her face to look forward. She is also pulling her shoulders up and forward so that they appear ‘rounded’. (You can see the same effect in the stock photo attached)

A number of my Alexander students are keen cyclists so I always point out to them that they should think about and organise themselves well if they are to avoid practising unnecessary stiffening while they are out and about on their bicycles. Why? Well, if they are using unnecessary tension and effort to cycle, they are not just adversely affecting their functioning (including breathing, circulation and digestion) but they are also affecting their structure, especially the structure of their spine, rib cage and shoulder girdle, more generally. This can have long-term consequences. In fact, I have been struck over my many years of teaching how stiff in the torso, shoulders, arms and hands almost all my enthusiastic cycling students are.

But it’s not just cyclists who are prone to stiff upper limbs, pushed-forward necks and rounded shoulders. This pattern of mal-coordination tends to affect anyone who uses their arms and hands to touch or manipulate objects. For example, people obliged to sit in front of computers for most of the working day exhibit a similar pattern – postural collapse involving distorting their double-S shaped spine resulting in pushed-forward necks and rounded shoulders. Alas, these poor habits do not magically disappear when someone stands up and goes for a walk or goes down the gym – instead, they become part and parcel of people’s everyday psycho-physical repertoire, affecting everything they do.

Which is why the Alexander Technique is so relevant. Here it’s useful to point out that FM Alexander, the founder of the technique, never made the mistake of thinking of the shoulders as specific entities to be manipulated, but rather he considered them to be part of a total neuro-muscular pattern that required kinaesthetic re-education. That said, he recognised that sometimes the shoulders did require specific attention. In his early years of teaching in the UK Alexander sometimes invited students who were rounding their shoulders to give their ‘orders’ or ‘directions’ for a better integration of the neck-head-back relationship and then add on another order for the shoulders to release ‘back and down’. However, after discovering that this order encouraged most people (no doubt influenced by popular concepts of ‘good posture’) to actively do something rather than simply give their mental directions he then opted to provide the relevant kinaesthetic experience without accompanying words. In short, he decided the less said the better.

Of course, one way of diminishing the amount of unnecessary muscular tension in your body, including undoing rounded shoulders, is to regularly perform Alexander-style lying down – what’s popularly known as the semi-supine position. This involves lying on a firm surface, such as a carpeted floor, with your head supported by a pile of books, your knees pointing towards the ceiling and your feet flat on the floor, comfortably near your pelvis about shoulder-width apart. Your arms can be placed by your sides. Lying down in this way uses gravity to good effect and helps to decompress your spine, and uncurl your shoulders without you having to ‘do’ anything.

For more information on rounded shoulders and the effect of Alexander-style lying down read Seán Carey’s Alexander Technique in Everyday Activity: Improve how you sit, stand, walk, work and run

Available through Amazon with free P & P

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We know about the head but what about the feet? by Seán Carey

December 20, 2016 – 6:41 pm

Standing male postureFM Alexander famously said that improved coordination comes ‘from the head downwards’. Does that mean that he neglected other parts of the body, including the feet? Definitely not. He knew from observing himself using a three-way mirror arrangement that while standing (and in motion) that as well as interfering with the balance of his head on his neck he was also making unnecessary muscular tension in his feet. In fact, he was contracting and bending his toes downwards in such a way that he was throwing his weight onto the outside of his feet, creating an arching effect, which in turn interfered with his overall balance.

Many of us will be able to identify with that or a similar type of misuse. For that reason we need to keep in mind that we do not possess the flat, extremely elastic and prehensile feet of ot
her primate species, such as apes and monkeys, which are so useful in tree climbing. In fact, one very important function of your parallel aligned toes is for balancing and feeling the ground. You can explore this by standing on one foot and then flexing your toes upwards so that none of them are in contact with the floor. It’s difficult to maintain balance, isn’t it? Your toes also play a vitally important role in locomotion. So you can also experiment with walking forward or backward with similarly upwardly-flexed toes on both feet. You will discover that this results in a tightening of your leg joints and torso and a pattern of movement which is very stiff and awkward.

The big problem is that most of us stand with too much weight on the front of the feet. However, this often goes with a pattern of general postural collapse – pulling the head down on to the neck, pulling the lower back in and stiffening the ankles, knees and hips. So if that’s what you’re doing in everyday life then you need to find a way of coming back from the pivot point of your ankle joints in such a way that the three contact points of the feet – areas around your heels, big toes and little toes – are equalised. But this is not just a matter of thinking of your feet in isolation; instead, it is a function of your general coordination. Put another way, balancing on your two feet is achieved not by ‘doing’ anything specific with your feet but by giving directions for your head, neck and back and then adding on suitable orders for your ankles, knees and hips joints and making a movement, such as walking forward, backward or sideways, so that as you move all your body’s joint surfaces are opening away from each other and your feet are releasing into the ground. As Alexander told those on his first teacher training course: ‘Everything in the body should be moving away from its nearest joint starting from the head.’

For more information read Seán Carey’s Alexander Technique in Everyday Activity: Improve how you sit, stand, walk, work and run

Available through Amazon with free P&P

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Secrets of the Moving Body

July 25, 2016 – 10:24 am

Eric the skeleton, in trilby hat, looks bemused as a lady mounts a chair and stands on it whilst her torso is bound diagonally in red and yellow tape. Ted Dimon’s workshops are nothing if not graphic. The tapes follow the muscle spirals identified by the anatomist and Alexander Technique devotee, Raymond Dart. “Secrets of the Moving Body”, a 2-day HITE seminar in April in London, mirrors Dr Dimon’s latest book: Neurodynamics: the Art of Mindfulness in Action.

 

He begins by breaking down some of the more intimidating technical language which can obscure rather than aid understanding and mostly describes simple everyday shapes. He is not an anatomist, he says, but had to penetrate the mysteries of anatomical language himself in order to pursue his research and teaching in the Alexander Technique. Dimon aspires to offer a field of knowledge, a theoretical structure, which is specific to the Alexander Technique, and the special dimension of anatomy and physiology which he presented was felt to help everyone understand better what is happening in a lesson. No unnecessary jargon was used, only plain English, with liberal touches of humour.

 

We are suspended from the head, he says, with a perfectly designed system of levers (bones) and motors (muscles) which work together, and curves which counter-balance each other to sustain upright posture and absorb shock – a Lamborghini on orders of magnitude, he remarks.

 

He takes us through stages of evolution with entertaining illustrations of how we arrived at what is arguably a perfect tensegrity structure cooperating with gravity. We must allow it to function properly, respecting the working of the musculo-skeletal system, and this significantly depends on a constructive partnership of head balance and sacro-spinalis lengthening. The sub-occipital muscles and the hyoid bone also play key roles in our self-management, says Dimon. And primary control, a concept specific to FM Alexander’s work, is closely related to the autonomic nervous system.

 

So why does it go wrong? Why, with a body designed for effortless movement and daily tasks, do we unwittingly inflict harm on healthy muscles, ending up with chronic muscle pain? Do we need little men on the ground holding us up by guy-wires as in one of the illustrations, or a course of AT sessions to help us to make more reliable judgements about how we’re using our body? Mindfulness, says Dimon, must be grounded in an understanding of psychophysical functioning and not just in meditative practice.

 

Dimon manages to steer you from the simple to the complex in a painless way, richly aided by the illustrations . He has an engaging teaching style, with anything important being presented several times in different ways. He believes in frequent short breaks and there is never time to get tired. Participants appreciated this and also the opportunity to ask plenty of questions at the seminar – including many they’d never dared ask before. Participants who had read his books felt that this seminar brought them to life.

 

People attending the event came from an unusually wide range of backgrounds: physiotherapy, shiatsu, osteopathy, chiropractic, rheumatology, as well as students from the 3-year Alexander teacher-training courses and experienced Alexander teachers. Surprisingly the teachers were few, perhaps not realising that this seminar would offer new material. Writing as a teacher of the Alexander Technique I always appreciate Dimon’s passionate commitment to the work and take away new ways of explaining and teaching it. He feels that teachers of any subject would benefit from applying the principles involved in this work.

 

It was gratifying that so many different professions were represented and that their evaluations were extremely positive. Conversations overheard in the toilets suggested that non-AT professionals were enjoying the seminar, learning new material and would be thinking differently about the Alexander Technique in the future.

 

There was a plentiful supply of tea, coffee and tasty biscuits, a hallmark of HITE’s events which always goes down well.

 

Anna Cooper, MSTAT

 

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Should you run in shoes or run barefoot? by Seán Carey

June 21, 2016 – 9:21 pm

Running_shoes_display

Last week it was the effect on the feet of wearing high heels that was in the news. This week it’s whether running wearing a pair of trainers is better for you than running barefoot. University of Queensland researchers found that the cushioning and arch support features found in most modern trainers and running shoes can potentially impair ‘foot-spring function’– though with the important caveat that shod running may contribute to other advantages in a runner’s foot muscle function, especially in the activation of the muscles along the longitudinal arch of the foot. The researchers concluded (as researchers tend to do) that more research was required to explore the relationship between the foot and the muscles around the ankle and knee joints during running.

Certainly, all the top athletes I’ve observed in recent years wear some sort of shoe when competing. On the other hand, many elite middle and long-distance runners, hailing from rural areas in countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia, have grown up not wearing shoes or only wearing them occasionally. In fact, there is a huge advantage for all of us at least to walk barefoot whenever possible. Why? Well, the sensory nerves on the bottom of your feet provide important proprioceptive information about the ground you are walking on. Your brain and the rest of your nervous system interpret these signals to keep you upright with the minimum amount of effort in locomotion. This process is made more difficult if shoes are worn – and interestingly the more cushioned or stiffer the shoes, the worse the problem. In fact, even wearing socks on your feet interferes with this proprioceptive process.

However, walking barefoot and running barefoot are not equivalent activities. Most experts, such as Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, recommend that if you are used to running with shoes but wish to make the change to running barefoot or using minimalist shoes you allow plenty of time to make the transition. And, from an Alexander Technique perspective, it’s not just your feet that you need to be concerned with. Much more important in many ways is the balance of your head on your neck. You want to keep your head freely poised so that your back musculature provides the necessary support for your body weight and allows your legs to move freely. Tighten your neck muscles and you’re pulling your head down on to your shoulders and compressing your whole body from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet. In short, you will run heavy and feel heavy. And that’s true whether your feet are shod or not.

For more information on walking and running read Seán Carey’s Alexander Technique in Everyday Activity: Improve how you sit, stand, walk, work and run

Available through Amazon with free P & P

 

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Should you wear high heels? by Seán Carey

June 10, 2016 – 5:13 pm

Shoes Modelled ATiEA

High heels are in the news again. Women, who have been told to wear high heels at work are being invited to tell their stories to a group of MPs in order to gain legal clarity about whether UK employers can force female employees to wear such footwear. The initiative by parliamentarians came after a petition calling for a ban on women being obliged to wear high heels in the workplace gathered more than 142,000 signatures (mine was one of them).

In fact, the use of footwear is a relatively recent development in human history. The world’s oldest preserved shoes were constructed from sagebrush bark fibre by Native Americans keen to insulate themselves against freezing temperatures in the Pacific Northwest around 10,500 years ago. Many contemporary populations living in warm climates in the developing world never wear shoes. Such barefoot people tend to have wide feet, pronounced arches and evenly distributed plantar pressure. By contrast, habitual shoe wearers have narrower feet, exhibit very high focal pressures at the heel, big toe and ball of the foot, and often suffer anatomical abnormalities, such as weak toes, bunions and flat feet.

High heels are particularly significant in this regard. Evidence suggests that extensive use of such footwear, especially ultra-high heels, is linked with significant physical problems. It’s associated with marked shortening of the highly malleable muscle fibres that make up the calves as well as thicker and stiffer Achilles tendons. Long-term use of high heels is also correlated with the development of on-going foot pain and restriction in the range of movement of the ankles. Unsurprisingly those problems show up more in ageing adults.

When people ask me in my role as an Alexander Technique teacher what shoes they should wear, I ask them what footwear would they select if they had to walk or run quickly? High heels, platform shoes, and flip-flops would not be a good choice, even for the very well-coordinated. They all interfere with your balance and alignment and decrease your potential speed in walking or running. The optimum choice is well-fitting shoes, with thin, flexible soles that follow the movement of your feet without the need to try to hang on with your toes.

So it’s probably best to wear a pair of Christian Louboutin-type heels only on very special occasions. If you do put them on try to walk on the balls of your feet rather than landing on the heels – though be aware that you are using around 50 per cent more energy compared with a normal heel-sole-toe movement as you would do if you were walking barefoot or in thin-sole shoes.

For more information on your feet and other parts of your body-mind continuum read Seán Carey’s Alexander Technique in Everyday Activity: Improve how you sit, stand, walk, work and run

Available through Amazon with free P & P

 

 

By athite | Posted in Age, Alexander Technique, cosmetic benefits, High Heels, Lessons, posture, Sean Carey, Youthful | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

Why F M Alexander name checked the latissimus dorsi muscles – Seán Carey

April 19, 2016 – 4:40 pm

FM Alexander, the founder of the Alexander Technique, rarely mentioned specific skeletal muscles in his writings but he made an exception in his account of the hands over the back of a chair procedure detailed in his second book, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, where he name checked the latissimus dorsi muscles.

Latissimus dorsiThe flat, fan-like latissimus dorsi muscles are part of a group of what anatomists term “superficial muscles” – that is, they are to be found just under your skin. In fact, you can easily locate part of one or other latissimus dorsi muscle by using your fingers and thumb to pinch the widest part of your back behind your armpit.

But why would Alexander specifically mention these muscles? Well, firstly because he was always interested in anything involved with breathing. Although the latissimus dorsi muscles are not primary breathing muscles, they do assist with the contraction and expansion of your rib cage. The second reason he was interested is because the latissimus dorsi muscles are the only ones in the body that connect the pelvis to the arms as each muscle runs from the lower back, travelling up around the outside of the rib cage to pass through the armpit and then attaches to the inner side of the upper arm bone, just below the shoulder joint. Although thin the latissimus dorsi muscles are incredibly powerful. Furthermore, even though Alexander did not explicitly spell it out these muscles play a hugely important role in any number of everyday movements in which you use your hands to manipulate objects. For example, you employ the latissimus dorsi muscles to open a fridge door, remove clothes from a washing machine, pull weeds out of the ground, or with your hand on a banister pull yourself up the stairs. If you are an athlete you will also be interested to know that also you use them in running, throwing and swimming.

As anyone familiar with the Alexander Technique knows, it’s best to use our muscles at their optimum length. But the intriguing characteristic of the latissimus dorsi muscles is that unlike other muscles, such as erector spinae, that run from your tailbone to your head and help to maintain or create lengthening in your body, your stretched or released latissimus dorsi muscles act to both lengthen and widen your torso. Which is good news because that helps your legs to release away from your trunk so that you experience what Alexander called “lengthening of the stature” – the ongoing stretch or release between the crown of your head and the soles of your feet. That’s beneficial because you will then breathe more easily and more deeply without any need to focus directly on breathing (as in popular activities such as yoga, Pilates or mindfulness). Furthermore, tight latissimus dorsi muscles can cause chronic neck, shoulder, middle or lower back pain, and rounded shoulders.

So, Alexander was right to draw our attention to the latissimus dorsi muscles not in an abstract or “academic” sense but because it’s to our advantage to develop awareness of them at a sensory level through an activity such as hands over the back of a chair to restore or maintain good general muscular elasticity and coordination.

For more information on the body-mind continuum and the hands over the back of the chair procedure read Seán Carey’s Alexander Technique in Everyday Activity: Improve how you sit, stand, walk, work and run.

Available through Amazon for £18.99 with free P&P.

Private one-to-one Alexander Technique sessions can be booked with Seán Carey on Thursdays afternoons with HITE Ltd, 10 Harley Street, London W1G 9PF. Tel: 020 7467 8461

By athite | Posted in Alexander Technique, Lessons, posture, Sean Carey, Standing, Youthful | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Is your mind like a foraging squirrel in a park? Seán Carey

March 17, 2016 – 10:02 am

“The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone-screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in the knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock,” says Sarah Bakewell in her excellent new book on phenomenology and existentialism, At The Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails.

Squirrel

In the analogy of the mind as a foraging squirrel there’s no doubt that Bakewell provides a pretty good description of how many of us experience the world while we are awake. However, whether everyone in all cultures, or indeed at all times, experiences life in such a frantic fashion is an interesting question. I would argue not. Why? Well, partly on the grounds that Bakewell’s list of attention-demanding objects or experiences is so thoroughly Western, urban and post-modern (think of people working in cities such as London, New York, Paris or Tokyo who make their livelihoods through listening, talking and typing and take frequent coffee breaks but probably not East African hunter-gatherers digging for tubers, collecting baobab fruits or chasing baboons), and partly on the grounds that those of us who have had lessons from a competent Alexander Technique teacher know very well that when the head achieves a better balance on top of the spinal column, allowing the neck and back muscles to provide support and stability for the whole body, this results in a less strained, more rhythmic pattern of breathing as well as clearer vision. At this point our experience of ourselves in time and space is no longer dominated by a habitually restless squirrel-like mind with a subordinate, barely-felt body but is transformed into an experience and also an appreciation of how one’s body and mind are so profoundly interconnected.

For more information on using the arms and hands read Seán Carey’s ‘Alexander Technique in Everyday Activity: Improve how you sit, stand, walk, work and run’

Available through Amazon for £18.99 with free P&P.

Private one-to-one Alexander Technique sessions can be booked with Seán Carey on Thursdays afternoons with HITE Ltd, 10 Harley Street, London W1G 9PF. Tel: 020 7467 8461

By athite | Posted in Age, Alexander Technique, cosmetic benefits, existentialism, History, Lessons, mind, posture, Proof of age, Sean Carey | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

How do you use your hands?

February 7, 2016 – 10:06 pm

pencil_grip3

What’s the difference between you and your nearest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos? Well, not too much in terms of DNA percentages but quite a lot in terms of how the hands work. One key difference is that while chimps and bonobos have long fingers but short, weak, immobile thumbs, you have relatively short fingers but long, strong, mobile thumbs. The result is that, unlike your great ape relatives, you can you fully oppose your thumbs and the pads of each of your fingers, a pattern that enables you to grip or pinch objects with great precision. You employ it all the time in everyday life – for example, when buttoning your shirt, text messaging, or holding a pencil or picking up a coin.

Interestingly, healthy, young children are very dextrous – typically, toddlers can easily hold a round object such as a ball much bigger than their hand by elastically opening the hand very wide, thumb angled away from their other fingers, and then making contact with the top or side of the ball with a minimum amount of flexion or grip. It’s as if the child’s hand is sticking to the ball. How many adults are capable of this? Not many because most of us create too much muscle tension not only in the hands and arms but also in the rest of the body’s musculature, especially in the upper torso. Which is a great shame. But you can learn how to undo excess muscular tension by paying attention to how you use your hands in conjunction with what FM Alexander, the founder of the Alexander Technique, called the ‘primary control’ – maintaining the balance of your head, while your supportive back muscles lengthen and widen to provide stability not only for your head but also for your arms and hands.

By Seán Carey PhD

For more information on using the arms and hands read Seán Carey’s ‘Alexander Technique in Everyday Activity: Improve how you sit, stand, walk, work and run’

Available through Amazon for £18.99

Private one-to-one Alexander Technique sessions can be booked with Seán Carey on Thursdays afternoons with HITE Ltd, 10 Harley Street, London W1G 9PF. Tel: 020 7467 8461

By athite | Posted in Age, Alexander Technique, Children, Pointing, posture, Sean Carey | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)