The Alexander Technique in Education [video]

July 9, 2015 admin

by Brooke Lieb Produced by STAT and The Alexander Trust, "Alexander in Education" is a film about how the Alexander Technique is helpful for students, in developing skills for life.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOMlc0f0orA

Alexander’s greatest wish was for his method to be integrated into primary and secondary education as part of the standard curriculum. This video, from the UK, shares firsthand accounts from students of many ages, who were fortunate enough to have Alexander Technique as part of their education before college or adulthood. The Alexander Technique not only gives us tools for managing the physical demands of life, it teaches us critical problem solving. For education to be fully rounded, a knowledge of our own inner workings seems like an obvious foundation, and yet there is little in the US curriculum that teaches us about ourselves in the practical, concrete way the Alexander Technique can.

In my own practice, I have found children are just as subject to stress and anxiety as adults. By virtue of the fact that they are younger, their habits and beliefs is not as entrenched as with adults, so often they are keen students, they grasp the concepts quickly and successfully apply the ideas to change their behavior. They change more quickly.

There are no short cuts for certain things in life, and just as you need to floss, brush and take care of your teeth to keep them healthy, taking care of your mental and physical wellbeing is one of those things. Whether you are young or old, a course of study in the Alexander Technique can give you a lifetime of skill at reducing the effects of stress, tension and wear and tear on your system, as well as improving performance and adaptability.

To find a teacher near you, visit http://www.acatnyc.org/main/find-a-teacher/

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://www.acatnyc.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Brooke1web.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]N. BROOKE LIEB, Director of Teacher Certification since 2008, received her certification from ACAT in 1989, joined the faculty in 1992. Brooke has presented to 100s of people at numerous conferences, has taught at C. W. Post College, St. Rose College, Kutztown University, Pace University, The Actors Institute, The National Theatre Conservatory at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Dennison University, and Wagner College; and has made presentations for the Hospital for Special Surgery, the Scoliosis Foundation, and the Arthritis Foundation; Mercy College and Touro College, Departments of Physical Therapy; and Northern Westchester Hospital. Brooke maintains a teaching practice in NYC, specializing in working with people dealing with pain, back injuries and scoliosis; and performing artists. www.brookelieb.com[/author_info] [/author]

Video: "F. Matthias Alexander and the Alexander Technique"

February 6, 2015 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon Here is an interesting short film about F. M. Alexander culled from footage available on YouTube, and information from Wikipedia.

This video was posted to YouTube by Lisa Block.

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://www.acatnyc.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/After-crop1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]WITOLD FITZ-SIMON has been a student of the Alexander Technique since 2007. He is certified to teach the Technique as a graduate of the American Center for the Alexander Technique’s 1,600-hour, three year training program. A student of yoga since 1993 and a teacher of yoga since 2000, Witold combines his extensive knowledge of the body and its use into intelligent and practical instruction designed to help his students free themselves of ineffective and damaging habits of body, mind and being. www.mindbodyandbeing.com[/author_info] [/author]

The Nature of Thoughts

January 22, 2015 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon “Invisibilia” is a new radio show/podcast from NPR that combines science and personal stories to explore the unseen forces that shape our behavior. In their episode “The Secret History of Thoughts,” they use the story of an unfortunate young man who is suddenly overwhelmed with violent thoughts as the medium through which to look at the way the mental health profession has evolved its understanding of thoughts and the way they do or do not define us.

In the segment “Dark Thoughts,” we meet “S,” a normally easy-going man, who is triggered by a film he watches into seeing violent images over and over again. He begins to identify with them to the point that it begins to impact his life, causing him to withdraw more and more. The piece is a story of his search for help as he attempts to understand and deal with his thoughts, and through it, we are introduced to three major ideas about thoughts and their significance to the whole person. According the piece, the first stage of "thought history" grew out of the work of Sigmund Freud. According to Freud, and those who follow his ideas, the content of "S's" thoughts would be an indicator of a problem in his psychological make-up. They revealed some inherent quality about him. The second stage grows out of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which would say that "S's" thoughts do not say anything particular about who and what he is. Instead, they would be the result of some form of prior conditioning or stimulus, either internal or external. Whereas in Freudian psychoanalysis, patients go through an extended exploration of their lives, thoughts and feelings, in Cognitive Behavioral Therapies, the patients are given strategies to directly challenge and deal with the thoughts. A more recent "third wave" approach is Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy, where the patient is taught to allow the negative thoughts to just be and, in so doing, disarm their power to contribute to negative side-effects such as depression and addiction.

Though not a form of psychotherapy, the Alexander Technique has its own way of dealing with negative thoughts that ties in quite nicely with some of these ideas. F. M. Alexander was one of the first Westerners to realize that mind and body were all part of the same, larger whole of the individual person. A person's thoughts are a part him or her as are their arm or leg. Your arm is part of you, but it is not in any way all of what you are and can be. The same can be said of your thoughts. As part of the larger whole of who you are, your thoughts have an impact on both the structure and the physiology of your body. A thought can create the constriction and tension of anxiety as much as it can create the lightness and freedom of joy.

The Release of Inhibition

Alexander originally called his technique "Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual" (the title of one of his four books). The name is a bit of a mouthful, but with it he was attempting to convey how it is possible to live consciously and constructively. This is to say, we each have many instinctive or habitual ways of thinking, reacting and being, but as thinking, rational people, we have the capacity to choose. Do we live at the mercy of these instincts and habits, or do we live with a mindful, embodied relationship to ourselves and our environment?

One of Alexander's great discoveries was that of inhibition, although his use of the word is very different to Freud's. Alexander's "inhibition" refers to our capacity to neurologically inhibit our responses to a stimulus. We can choose to react habitually or we can pause and let the habitual reaction go. It is a release of energy, of tension, which can bring the body and mind back to a state of ease and poise.

The American Center for the Alexander Technique is home of the oldest training program in the United States. If you are curious about finding out more about the Technique and how it might be able to help you find poise and ease in your daily life, contact one of our teachers in your area.

“Text-Neck”: a Modern Epidemic and its Elegant Solution, The Alexander Technique

November 21, 2014 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon The internet has been a-buzz this week with the publication of a new study by surgeon Kenneth Hansraj, M. D. Using computer modeling, he was able to determine how much stress we are actually doing to ourselves when we drop our heads and collapse to look at our cell phones.

An adult human head weighs anywhere between 10 and 12 pounds. When posture is good, with the top of the spine in a neutral position relative to the rest of the body, and the head poised in balance on the top vertebra, that weight is safely and effectively transferred down through the spine to the feet and the floor (or to your ischial tuberosities—your sitting bones—and to your chair if you are seated). If you take the head and the top of the spine forward by 15°, so Dr. Hansraj has determined, that weight effectively becomes 27 pounds. At 30° it becomes 40 pounds, at 45° 49 pounds, and at 60° it becomes 60 pounds. If you spend any amount of time with your head dropped forward, it’s as if you are carrying the equivalent of several large bags of groceries around at the top of your neck. Dr. Hanraj estimates that people spend an average of 700 to 1400 hours a year with the head stooped like this, and speculates that the average High School student might spend 5,000 hours a year like this.

Fixing a problem like this might seem simple. All you have to do is not drop your head. The reality of this is quite different. Dropping your head to look at your cell phone can be such an ingrained habit that you don’t even realize when you’re doing it. And when you do, just pulling your head back is not going to be the best solution. If you do that, you will have taken the tension in your neck from having your head forward and and added to it the tension of pulling your head back. A better solution is to learn how to free your neck and allow your head to remain poised on the top of your spine while you negotiate your phone in the first place. Luckily, the Alexander Technique can help you do just that in a simple and effective way.

The America Center for the Alexander Technique has a 50-year tradition of excellence in training Alexander Technique teachers. If you would like to find out more about the Technique, find one of our affiliated teachers here.

"Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life" by Marshall Rosenberg

November 6, 2014 admin

by Tim Tucker Note: The ACAT Faculty began working with NVC to meet our need for effective and empathic ways of communicating with our teachers-in-training. Alexander's work asks us to address our use on every level. Many of us found NVC supported that desire in the areas of perceiving, listening and speaking in ways that inhibited end-gaining and allowed us to support ourselves and our students in accessing a non-defensive and thoughtful internal state in which to learn how to teach the Alexander Technique. We added the book to our required reading so our teachers-in-training were introduced to NVC while on the course. All of our students are asked to write a response paper to a number of texts, including NVC, as part of their certification requirements. The following is Tim Tucker's response paper. —Brooke Lieb, Director, Teacher Certification Program

When I arrived at ACAT and reviewed the list of books we would be reading, I was pleased to note the inclusion of Marshall Rosenberg’s “Nonviolent Communication” among the titles. My Zen teacher had already introduced me to Rosenberg’s work, but my knowledge of NVC remained quite superficial and I was pleased to have an opportunity to deepen my understanding of how it works and what it has to offer.

“Nonviolent Communication” is not a long book (212 pages) but the concepts explored in it seem so novel and the information is so dense in its presentation that it took quite a lot of time and effort to read the book. This is probably because I have labored, like so many other people, under a significant degree of confusion about my perceptions and behavior. I was (and often still am) in the habit of inappropriately melding things that ought to be looked at separately, while simultaneously separating things that need to be considered together. Consider the following basic schemas:

Neutrally observe

↓

Identify Feelings

↓

Identify Needs

↓

Make a request of the other person

The NVC model above, which is grounded in vulnerability, compassion and the ability to offer empathy (as opposed to giving advice or reassurance), stands in striking contrast to the way I, and many others, have typically operated:

Judge

↓

React

↓

Blame/Criticize

↓

Spin in self-validated feelings

↓

Try to change the other person

It’s fairly obvious when two alternative behavioral models are laid out this clearly which one will likely lead to better results. Yet NVC, which appears to be a much more direct route for people to get their needs met, is hardly the norm in our society. Analysis, assessment, criticism, diagnosis, evaluation, interpretation and judgment take the place of neutral observation without our even being aware of it. We don’t even see our own behavior, or that the “pain engendered by damaging cultural conditioning is such an integral part of our lives that we can no longer distinguish its presence.” (p. 165) In this state of near-unconsciousness, hypnotized by our habits and conditioning, it’s very easy to never examine feelings or to reflexively attribute them to other people who in our eyes are inevitably at fault and need to change whenever they fail to act in accord with our values and preferences.

I am very interested in why I and so many other people frequently exhibit the self-defeating patterns of communication delineated by Rosenberg, but the book does not delve much into that fascinating question. What exactly is this “damaging cultural conditioning” alluded to by Rosenberg, and why does it happen in the first place? Early in the text, Rosenberg says “I find that my cultural conditioning leads me to focus attention on places where I am unlikely to get what I want.” (p. 4) In the chapter “Expressing Anger Fully,” he comments on a Swedish prisoner’s confusion of the stimulus triggering his anger (external) with the actual cause of his anger (internal), “By equating stimulus and cause, he had tricked himself…This is an easy habit to acquire in a culture that uses guilt as a means of controlling people. In such cultures, it becomes important to trick people into thinking that we can make others feel a certain way.” (p. 136). As for what Rosenberg thinks causes these unhelpful behaviors, a pretty clear indication is given on p. 23:

Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand and pronounce judgments rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and needing. I believe life-alienating communication is rooted in views of human nature that have exerted their influence for several centuries. These views stress our innate evil and deficiency, and a need for education to control our inherently undesirable nature. Such education often leaves us questioning whether there is something wrong with whatever feelings and needs we may be experiencing. We learn early to cut ourselves off from what’s going on within ourselves. Life-alienating communication both stems from and supports hierarchical societies, the functioning of which depends upon large numbers of docile, subservient citizens. When we are in contact with our feelings and needs, we humans no longer make good slaves and underlings.”

Thus, Rosenberg thinks that our communication and behavioral problems actually serve the interest of those in power in our society. He is effectively saying that the dysfunction and pain so prevalent among the mass of people and so vividly displayed in their misguided, violent communication sustains the dominance of the elites who control most of the wealth and resources. Simply put, the proletariat is voluntarily colluding with their oppressors in big business and government without even being aware of it, and on an extremely intimate level.

Whether Rosenberg is correct or not in his view on the genesis of life-alienating communication, it clearly is a conditioned behavior; life-alienating communication is the NVC equivalent of F.M. Alexander putting his head back and down and gasping for breath when he wanted to recite Shakespeare. And just as we find in our practice of Alexander, breaking our habit of life-alienating communication in NVC requires us to rein in conditioned, habitual, reflexive behavior by stopping and thinking before engaging in an activity – in this case, before speaking. This stopping, by definition, requires us to slow down and take more time to do whatever we’re doing.

Consider the following passage from “Nonviolent Communication,” which strongly echoes Walter Carrington’s “Thinking Aloud”:

“Probably the most important part of learning how to live the process that we have been discussing is to take our time. We may feel awkward deviating from the habitual behaviors that our conditioning has rendered automatic, but if our intention is to live life in harmony with our values, then we’ll want to take our time.” (p. 146)

Carrington’s version of this way of thinking is:

“I always say to people, ‘Think about time. Realize how much time is a personal thing, how much time is an individual possession….you’re the only person who can give yourself time. Nobody else can give you time. You’ve got to take the time. You’ve got to be prepared to take the time it takes.” Thinking Aloud, pp. 130-131.

NVC and Alexander Technique both provide lenses for people to look at how they unconsciously and habitually harm themselves, and tools for people to learn to stop and apply the “new, correct messages” that can return them to a more natural and healthy way of being and relating. Both AT and NVC require that we slow down and apply a great deal of scrutiny to how we perform a host of deceptively simple activities we formerly took for granted (and often still take for granted). By slowing down and paying careful attention to ourselves and our behavior, we practitioners of these remarkable disciplines are swimming against the tide of our cultural conditioning. Although the tide of cultural conditioning can seem overwhelming it will, through diligent self-work, be overwhelmed. Put another way, if everyone in our society were to suddenly begin to diligently practice these disciplines, the entire machinery of our frenzied, addictive, commercial culture would quite simply collapse.

[author][author_info]TIM TUCKER, a fourth-term teacher trainee at ACAT, was drawn to the Alexander Technique because of its strong affinity with his Zen Buddhist practice. A former stock market analyst and artist, Tim is very interested in studying culturally promoted patterns of addiction, violence and waste in American society.[/author_info] [/author]

The Alexander Technique and Back Care

October 30, 2014 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon In 2008, the British Medical Journal published the results of their randomized controlled trial of Alexander Technique lessons, exercise, and massage for chronic and recurrent back pain. This is not exactly news for those in the Alexander Technique community, as word of favorable scientific studies travel fast. The results were so positive in favor of the Technique, however, that it is worth giving them another look.

579 patients with chronic or recurring back pain were selected from 64 general practices in the United Kingdom. 144 people were given normal care for back pain that you might receive from any general practitioner. 147 were given six sessions of massage. 144 were given six Alexander Technique lessons. 144 were given 24 Alexander technique lessons. Half of the people in each of these groups were also given an exercise program.

The participants in the study were interviewed three months after their interventions were given, and again after twelve months. As you might expect, the control group showed no improvement after three months or beyond. Of the other groups, all showed some improvement. What is remarkable is what was found at the one-year mark. Those who had received massage reported they still experienced around 21 days of pain in the previous four weeks, whereas those who had taken six lessons in the Alexander Technique reported around 11 days of pain. Those who had taken 24 lessons in the Technique that ended a year previously reported only around 3 days of pain in the prior 4 weeks!

Here is the video that the BMJ produced explaining their study:

http://youtu.be/3GbwzqT9piU

http://youtu.be/BXmimtk381U

The American Center for the Alexander technique has a 50-year tradition of excellence in training teachers of the Alexander Technique. Click here to find a teacher near you.

Alexander Technique Shown to Benefit Business

September 26, 2014 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon In a study conducted in 2011, Alexander Technique teacher Mireia Mora Griso undertook a study of large companies who gave their employees training in the Alexander Technique. If you have studied the Alexander Technique, the results are, perhaps not surprising, but for the business world at large, they should be a wake-up call to Big Business of the power of the Technique to improve productivity and cut health-care costs.

Griso’s research protocol whittled down her subjects to ten major companies:

Victorinox (Swiss knife company)
Unicible (an IT company)
Siemens AG (an electrical engineering company)
Treuhand GmbH (an accountancy practice)
Ville de Lausanne (a town services organization)
D. E. V. K. (an insurance company)
Steuerberaterverban Schleswig-Holstein (a tax consultancy company)
Alliance Insurance Corporation (an insurance company)
Chevron-Texaco (an energy company)
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (a hospital)

In each of these companies, more than 50 people were given significant training in the Technique (more than just an introductory session). In each of the companies, the training was given substantial support as an important part of policy over, at minimum, a three-year period. The Alexander Technique teachers conducting the training all reported that the people they worked with recognized the need to improve their quality of life in the workplace and, despite initial resistance in some cases, the majority of people became positive about the work.

The study produced a fascinating list of benefits of the Technique reported by the participants:

Physical Benefits

Reduced pain and disability
Improved muscle tone
Postural coordination and balance

Psychological Benefits

Stress management
Improvements in self-esteem
Improvements in public speaking
Improvements in creativity
Improvements in conentration
Improvements in team work

Business Benefits

Reduced work hours lost to illness
Reduced accidents
Reduced employment insurance costs
Improved cost-profits relationship
Improved work performance

To read about the study in “TalkBack” the quarterly magazine off BackCare, the U. k.’s National Back Pain Association, go here.

The Alexander Technique and Yoga: Parallel Inquiries Into Freeing The Self

September 19, 2014 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon On the face of it, Yoga and the Alexander Technique would seem to be two completely different disciplines. Comparing them would be like comparing a dog with an iPad. Although they originated in very different times from very different cultural traditions, and would appear to have emerged out of very different intentions, thematically, they do have a lot in common. In a lecture given in 1985, John Nicholls—a senior teacher of the Alexander Technique—sought to put the work in a larger context of world traditions that aim to delve into the deeper nature of humanity. He identified seven general themes common to abroad array of such traditions, including disparate bodies of work as Freudian psychology, Osteopathy and Zen Meditation. The full text of his lecture can be found here.

The seven themes he identified are these:

Consciousness becoming conscious of itself and the unconscious/subconscious
Need to understand and control our reactions
Being out of touch with feelings
The integration of the body and mind
The search for natural functioning (non-interference)
Search for a central core to integrate the parts, a Center, Self or "I"
Renewed interest in "vital force", bio-energy, Chi, Prana, etc.

A quick overview of how these themes interweave through Yoga and the Alexander Technique reveals that, although the terminology and the larger philosophical frameworks of each system might be different, the underlying concerns and observations are quite similar.

1. Consciousness Becoming Conscious of Itself and the Unconscious/Subconscious

The fundamental cause of human suffering from the perspective of both Yoga and the Alexander Technique is an essential misunderstanding of who and what we are. We act and react mindlessly and instinctively to the stimuli of life without clear, conscious reasoning. Each time we do so, we further ingrain the habits, misperceptions and faulty assumptions that have led us to where we are in the present moment.

Both systems hold that the only way to rectify our tendency for this kind of automatic behavior is to undertake the task of self-knowing. In Yoga, an awakening is necessary to discern what is real from the unreal in order to transcend the endless wheel of suffering in birth, life, death and rebirth. In the Alexander Technique an awakening is necessary to become aware of restrictive habits of mind and body in order to create the freedom and wellbeing of proper functioning of the human system. For both, this means, delving into that which is initially obscured from mundane waking consciousness. Both offer clear, well-considered practices and procedures to the student, giving them a framework With which to explore themselves in a formal setting and in the chaotic and uncontrollable outside world.

2. The Need to Understand and Control our Reactions

Both systems understand that it is not so much the doing of things that gets us into trouble as it is the underlying frame of mind that does the damage. In Yoga, every action has a consequence (the law of karma). Each of these consequences further deepens our suffering, be it physical, mental or existential. Some of these consequences will not necessarily come to fruition in the present lifetime, thus hurtling us forward into further births. We must learn the underlying causes of our actions in order to learn to act in such a way that we undo the harm we have done to ourselves.

The Alexander Technique also holds that every action has a consequence, although the consequences F. M. Alexander was concerned with were all of them much more immediate and written on the body. Every reaction based on habit, or the result of the sympathetic nervous system’s startle response, is a compression and a restriction that puts more stress on the body and mind of the individual, that contributes to greater discomfort and deterioration of proper functioning of the person’s entire system, edging them closer to the possibility of emotional upset, injury and disease. Only by learning to observe and inhibit our reactions, and to project specific intentions for more organized, balanced functioning can we avoid and retrain ourselves to greater ease and wellbeing.

3. Being Out of Touch with Feelings

Both yoga and the Alexander Technique have an interesting relationship to the senses of the body. Both are of the opinion that the way we use the senses causes us more harm than good. In Yoga, the thought is that paying attention to the senses draws us away from the Self, where the important knowledge lies, into the outside world. The Alexander Technique shares that thought, positing that we are too quick to respond to the stimuli that the senses bring us. Both believe it necessary to create a dispassionate distance between the object of the senses and the awareness so as to watch and direct the reactions of the self. The Alexander Technique even recognizes an additional sense, kinesthesia (the “feeling” sense), which needs to be regarded with a healthy degree of skepticism for the faulty impressions it can bring.

4. The Integration of the Body and Mind

Both Yoga and the Alexander Technique recognize that there is no separation between body and mind. They are two aspect of the larger whole of the Self. The body can be directed to influence the mind just as the mind can be directed to influence the body. The two must come together and work in unison to create the desired change in the individual.

5. The Search for Natural Functioning (Non-Interference)

In the Indian philosophical tradition, the human body is made up of a network of 72,000 subtle energy channels. These channels feed into seven wheel-like energy centers, or chakras, that align along a central column running from tail to head. If these channels are open, and the wheels are spinning freely as they should, then the snake-like spiritual energy known as kundalini coiled at the bottom of the spine will be free to rise and higher consciousness will be achieved. The goal of a physical yoga practice is to purify and open all these channels so that spiritual energy can flow freely.

From the Alexander Technique perspective, the human system is pretty much perfect when we are young children. Having emerged from the womb a largely blank slate of potential, the infant develops naturally, learning to push and pull, to lift its head, reach and grab, eventually learning to pull itself upright to stand an move about. It is only as it gets older that the child starts to learn bad habits that pull it away from the perfect poise of the toddler. The Alexander Technique aims to undo all the interferences and to get the individual back to that state of wasteful poise.

6. and 7. Search for a Central Core and Renewed Interest in Vital Energy

In some ways, these final two themes are where Yoga and the Alexander Technique are perhaps the most closely aligned. Both gave a strong sense of rising energy along a central channel with the head playing an important role in the final integration of body and mind.

In Yoga, the kundalini energy is encouraged to rise up the central subtle energy channel, the sushumna nadi. When it reaches the head, it blossoms out of the energy wheel at the top of the head and joins with the energy of the universe around it. In the Alexander a Technique, the upward flow of energy is directed through the torso along the lengthening and widening spine where the head is encouraged to balance in a poised state of freedom, leading the movement and subtle functioning of the whole system.

This post originally appeared on Witold Fitz-Simon's blog.

The Shoulders: To Rest or Not to Rest?

September 11, 2014 admin

by John Austin Finding neutral for the shoulders is one of the most challenging things one can do in terms of the use of the self in my experience. Add a complex activity that requires a certain level of ease in the shoulder girdle on top and you’ve got a recipe for paradox and frustration.

Let’s begin with the basic anatomy of the shoulder girdle. When I refer to the “shoulder girdle” I mean the hands & arms, shoulder blades, and collar bone. You may be surprised to learn that the only jointed (bone to bone) connection of the shoulder girdle to the rest of the skeleton is in the front of the torso at the top of the sternum.

Find your collar-bone (clavicle) by palpating the bone and follow it toward the mid-line until find two roundish protrusions at either side of the top of chest bone (sternum). You are on top of the sternoclavicular joint(s) where the shoulder girdle meets the rest of the skeleton.

If you follow the collar bone out from the mid-line toward the arm until it reaches the furthest bony protrusion you’ve found the point where the clavicle meets the shoulder blade (scapula), the acromioclavicular joint. It’s called the acromioclavicular joint because it is where the clavicle and the point of the scapula furthest from the mid-line, called the acromion process (processes are protrusions that allow for muscle and ligament attachment), meet. This should not be confused with the glenohumeral joint where the upper arm attaches to the shoulder blade; there is no direct bone to bone attachment of the upper arm to the collarbone.

Now, palpate your way back to toward the mid-line from the acromion, this time following the shoulder blade until it reaches what will feel like the corner of a triangle. You are feeling the “spine” of the scapula. Depending on your muscle build you may have to press quite firmly and the scapula may seemingly disappear into muscle. The strong muscles of the back are what support and stabilize the shoulder girdle as there are no bone to bone attachments in the back. The structure of the shoulder girdle, while providing extreme freedom of movement, also brings an ambiguousness when looking for a neutral position for the shoulders and arms.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that how we use ourselves in our daily activities has a profound effect on the resting lengths of our muscles. It is this phenomenon that we are observing when we see pianists and people who spend hours at the computer still in the shape they work from when walking, eating, watching TV, etc. In the case of the shoulder girdle this can be quite extreme. Because of the lack of bony structural support, the resting position of our shoulders is almost completely determined by the resting lengths of our muscles. If we overstretch our muscles in daily activity, we run the risk of deteriorating the support that allows the shoulders to find a comfortable resting position.

johnnorest Along the way to becoming a “serious” violist, I was told to keep my shoulders relaxed. So I went about figuring out how to do that. I am meticulous in the practice room and before long I had discovered that I could relax my left shoulder while playing although my right didn’t really follow suit. The static nature of the left shoulder in violin & viola playing allows for a certain amount of relaxation (release of all/most muscle tone) while the larger more dynamic movements of the bow require the arm muscles which originate in the back to be active for movement to occur. The left shoulder can relax even more if you use a shoulder rest as you then virtually never have to move your shoulder.

On the surface you’d think that one less thing to worry about (moving the shoulder to balance the instrument) and a little less muscular effort would be good; so for years I ignorantly thought, “I’m raising my right shoulder, that’s not good.” Yet, after hours of playing it was not my right shoulder that cracked and popped, it was my left. Even after years of receiving praise for my tone which of course comes primarily from the bow, I thought, “But my left is down so it must be better than my right,” and went about trying to lower my right. Needless to say I was unsuccessful.

It wasn’t until years of Alexander work that I realized what I was actually doing was relaxing my left shoulder to the point that it was resting on my rib cage. This was the grinding bone on bone I felt in the form of constant cracking and popping when I moved my arm. I was robbing my shoulder girdle of it’s muscular support by relaxing it and then dragging it across my rib cage.

It turns out that the last thing we want to do when doing any activity is rest. The word activity even contains active! To remedy my issue, I had to relearn to play the viola without the shoulder rest. I found that every little shift was a welcome opportunity for movement in my shoulder girdle. Rather than trying to hold myself still or relax into a blob I was free to move and the movement had an organizing effect on my shoulder girdle which helped remind my shoulder blades where neutral was. I had been taught that raising my shoulder was off limits movement-wise on the viola. How ridiculous a notion it was to make a movement off limits when all of the great violinists and even Primrose himself did this subtle lift of the shoulder.

This rule I assume was a reaction to the common problem of violists & violinists clamping down on the instrument between their necks and shoulders, which isn’t much better. Although, too much tension is less likely to destabilize your shoulder girdle. In my case, relaxing has left me not being able to let my left shoulder be in it’s neutral resting place without pain. I’ve over-stretched the muscles and they now rest on bone and nerves. It takes subtle conscious direction of my shoulder for the pain to subside, which is annoying to say the least.

I’m not sure if it is laziness, bad teaching, or what exactly is at the root of the shoulder rest debate in the string playing world. I’ve already written about the laziness possibility here. String teachers having a very small part of the body of knowledge necessary is possible, pun very much intended. It could just come down to the fact that playing the viola is extremely difficult and the shoulder rest is a seductive little crutch that can allow us to avoid having to learn how to properly use our shoulder girdle in the process of playing the viola, which is not simple and takes a long time to do.

Once again the most healthy option seems to be to stop trying to gain our end without reasoning out a means whereby to attain it; not to mention means that at the very least don’t leave us physically and mentally destroyed and/or with a mediocre end: the music which we care so dearly about.

This post originally appeared on John Austin's blog.

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://www.acatnyc.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/headshot.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]JOHN AUSTIN started pondering and pontificating on the probable and possible reasons for the tragic loss of joy in himself and his fellow musicians as he approached his breaking point in a music conservatory. In fact, he was nearly a casualty of the music “busi-ness" when he stumbled on the Alexander Technique. Since then he's been inspired by his training at the American Center for the Alexander Technique to write in an attempt to better understand what was happening to himself and others. Mr. Austin has an active performing career, blog, and teaching studio in West Harlem, Manhattan.[/author_info] [/author]

Why What "Feels Right" Can Be The Wrong Thing To Do

August 1, 2014 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon Every one of us has a "sixth sense." Unfortunately, it's nothing fancy. It's not telepathy, or the ability to see ghosts, or anything supernatural like that. It is pretty cool, in its own way, even though most of us take it completely for granted most of the time. Our sixth sense is a "feeling" sense made up of information we get from our bodies.

Kinesthesia and Proprioception

This feeling sense, called either proprioception or kinesthesia, works a little differently than our other five senses. Each of the traditional five senses, has its own sense organ: sight has the eyes, sound has the ears, etc. The feeling sense is different.

Instead of getting all its information from one source, your brain takes information from organs in different parts of your body and knits it together into one sense. It compiles information from your muscles, joints, tendons and your inner ear to give you an awareness of movement, effort and the position of your joints and limbs. This awareness, your proprioceptive sense, becomes the foundation for the way you sit, stand, walk around or work at the computer. It informs everything you do.

Why it "Feels Right"

Last week on the blog we looked at habits and how hard they are to break. In an nutshell, this is because our brains take complex behaviors and reduce all the different parts that make them up into a single behavioral chunk. This chunk then gets imprinted into our brains with a positive reinforcement mechanism that includes the chemical dopamine. The way we use our bodies, and the proprioceptive memory associated with that use, is part of that chunked behavior. As a result, it feels good or "feels right" to do the habit in a particular way.

Why "Feeling Right" Can Lead You Wrong

Just because a way of doing something has that feeling of "rightness" to it, that doesn't mean it is necessarily your best choice in any given moment. Your proprioceptive or kinesthetic sense often feeds you bad information. The sense receptors in your muscles, tendons and joints register change. If you raise your arm, for example, they tell you that the position of your arm has changed from one place to another. They tell you that the muscular effort expended by the muscles in your shoulder has changed from one amount to another, as well as the rate at which that change took place. After a while, if there is no more change happening, they reset themselves to this new state. They no longer send information to your brain.

This can lead to two problems. If you do the same thing wrong the same way over and over, after a while your proprioceptive sense will no longer register it. Say you tense your neck all the time you are sitting at your computer, your proprioceptive sense will begin to tune it out. This will begin to carry over into other activities. The misuse will get folded in with all your other behavioral patterns and will begin to feel right. You will only be reinforcing the bad habit.

This, then, leads us to the second problem. In order for your sense receptors to pick up any new information, you will have to create change. If you try and "feel out" a part of your body, perhaps to learn more about it or fix it, you will most likely be adding more effort to that place.

Do the Right Thing

So what's the solution to this awkward situation? Change your relationship to your proprioceptive/kinesthetic sense. Rather than getting caught up in the sensations of your body, open your awareness out to include the space around you as well as the information you get about yourself. Rely on that visual and spatial awareness instead. Staying connected to your other senses and the space around you will give your system the message to be a little less compressed, a little less effortful, a little more expansive.

Better still, try taking an Alexander Technique lesson with a certified teacher. They can show you a whole new way to relate to your body that will help you identify and release your bad habits. They will show you how to repattern the way you use yourself to a more efficient and easeful standard.

Why Are Habits So Hard To Break?

July 25, 2014 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon A recent cover story in Scientific American revealed how the brain creates habits and why they are so hard to break. In their article, researchers Ann Gaybriel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Kyle S. Smith (Dartmouth College) outline three stages to laying down a habit:

Explore a new behavior
Form a habit
Imprint it into the brain

Exploring New Behaviors

As you explore a new behavior, three parts of your brain—the prefrontal cortex, the striatum and the midbrain—communicate together to form positive feedback loops that help you determine whether nor not the behavior helps you achieve your goals.

Let’s take as an example, reaching down to pick up and put on your shoes. When you first learn to do this, you might make the choice, consciously or not, to counterbalance as you reach forward to pick the shoes up by allowing your head to drop back and down. To reach your shoes, you are extending your arm out quite a way beyond the stable support of your mid-line and your center of gravity, and taking the weight of your head back creates a feeling of stability. It may not be the best way to do this, but it works in the moment and, anyway, you are more concerned with getting your shoes on than you are with anything else.

The next time you put your shoes on, your brain remembers the sequence of behaviors you performed to fulfill your goal and sets up an expectation of success or failure. You put your shoes on the same way you did before. It works again. The brain makes a note that this sequence of behaviors is an effective way of achieving the goal. This process is repeated every time you put your shoes on, reinforced each time.

Forming a Habit

A habit, from the perspective of the brain, is a sequence of actions or behaviors that get lumped together into one single unit: a chunk of brain activity. When you are first exploring the action, the brain acts with deliberation. It has no expectations and needs to make conscious choices. Let’s take our example of putting on your shoes. The sequence of deliberate choices to get your shoes might look like this:

You see your shoes.
You reach out and down to pick them up and drop your head back to counterbalance the reach of your arm.
With your head thrown off balance, your back gets stiff as you bend down to get to your shoes, so you support yourself by putting your other hand on your thigh.
You sit down with a plop and slump forward to pick your shoes up and put them on.
You try and stand up from your slumped position with your head back and down and need to push off the chair to get up.

As I said, these might not be the most efficient or elegant set of choices you could make, but your goal is to put your shoes on and not necessarily to bother with the details. After this has happened enough times, the process gets simplified in your brain to this:

You see your shoes
You put them on

Your brain takes all those different choices and lumps them together into one behavioral package.

Imprinting The Habit

Once you have repeated the behavior enough for it have become combined into one single chunk of neurological activity, the infralimbic cortex and the striatum work together to make it semi-permamanent in the brain. When you need to put your shoes on, you use the habitual chunk. As the chunk is in there semi-permanently in your behavioral repertoire, your brain won’t necessarily distinguish between your shoes and a wet towel on the bathroom floor, or anything else that you need to pick up from below your current level, so it uses the same chunk.

What Makes A Habit So Hard To Break?

Once the habit is “chunked” and imprinted like this, very little neurological activity is required to use it. In an experiment, rats were trained to run down a maze and turn left or right when they heard a particular sound to receive a reward. When they were first being trained, activity in the brain was very high. As they started to learn how to respond to the signals they were being given, brain activity got less, except for when they had to make a decision. Once they were fully trained, there was high brain activity at the beginning of the run and at the end, but while they were performing the habitual behavior, brain activity was significantly lower. To say when we do something habitually, we are doing it “without much thought” is a fair description of what is actually happening in the brain. Sometimes, when we do things habitually, we are barely conscious of them at all, let alone capable of breaking down the habit into the successive choices that make it up.

How The Alexander Technique Can Help You Break Your Habits

The Alexander Technique teaches how to think in activity, rather than be at the mercy of habitual "chunks" of behavior. It gives you a framework within which to observe the habits as they arise. It teaches you how to let go of the habitual behavior and how to replace it with deliberate, conscious alternatives. To find a certified Alexander Technique teacher near you, click here.

To read the article in Scientific American click here. (You will need to purchase a copy of the issue to read the full article.)

To read an interview with Ann Gaybriel, click here.

To read a technical article on the research, click here.

Could the Alexander Technique Have Prevented The Great Recession?

June 12, 2014 admin

By Karen G. Krueger

"If we understand how a person's body influences risk taking, we can learn how to better manage risk takers. We can also recognize that mistakes governments have made have contributed to massive risk taking."

These striking assertions are from a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (Sunday Week in Review, June 8, 2014) by John Coates, a research fellow at Cambridge and a former derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.

I was particularly pleased to see this mainstream media piece acknowledge the unity of mind and body:

"Many neuroscientists now believe our brain is designed primarily to plan and execute movement."

"We do not process information as a computer does, dispassionately; we react to it physically."

These statements, and the neuroscience that underpins them, confirm my own experiences in learning and teaching the Alexander Technique. A century ago, F.M. Alexander used observation, reasoning and experimentation to examine and change his own stress response, and then to teach others to do the same.

The stress response that prompted Alexander's inquiry was a form of performance anxiety: he was an actor plagued by chronic hoarseness when on stage. Coates is interested in the responses of traders and investors to financial uncertainty. Unlike Alexander, Coates does not deal (at least in this article) with the possibility that individuals could change how they react to stress. Rather, he recommends that financial regulators use an understanding of human beings' automatic physical responses to novelty and uncertainty to manipulate the behavior of other players in the financial system.

Coates emphasizes the hormonal changes of the stress response: adrenaline, cortisone testosterone and dopamine all make an appearance. He also describes the related changes in heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. Oddly, he doesn't mention the most obvious physical reaction to stress: tense muscles in the neck, shoulders and back. You don't need a functional MRI or a blood test to detect that reaction to stress!

Like all Alexander Technique teachers, I work with my students on noticing how their neuromuscular systems react to stimuli of all kinds, and using Alexander's simple process of thoughtful practice to change those reactions that interefere with efficient, healthy functioning of body and mind. My students usually begin with straightforward goals: they want to learn to sit, stand and move with better posture and less tension, so that their necks, backs or arms will stop hurting. In the process, they discover that learning to change their physical habits has broader beneficial effects, including a greater capacity to choose to remain calm and thoughtful in situations that previously provoked anxiety.

So I couldn't help wondering as I read Coates' piece what would happen if a critical mass of individual participants in the financial system were to take Alexander Technique lessons. Imagine whole trading desks of traders who were able, in the face of financial panic, to stop tensing their necks, calm down their breathing, and take time to think about how to respond. Could they avoid being swept up into the mass unreasoned reactions that Coates describes, and minimize the damage to their own health in the process?

If you are a day trader who would like to stop allowing your hormones to drive your decisions—or just an average stressed-out New Yorker who would like to feel more in control of your life—find out more about the Alexander Technique:

Attend a free introduction at the American Center for the Alexander Technique.
Try a lesson one-on-one with a certified Alexander Technique teacher.

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://www.acatnyc.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Kreuger.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]KAREN G. KREUGER became a teacher of the Alexander Technique after 25 years of practicing law at two major New York law firms, receiving her teaching certificate from the American Center for the Alexander Technique in December 2010. Her students include lawyers, business executives, IT professionals and others interested in living with greater ease and skill. Find her at her website: http://kgk-llc.com. [/author_info] [/author]

Fast and Loose: Protecting Those Hip Joints

May 22, 2014 admin

by Joan Arnold

Yoga Alert

Women! Beware of yoga! So said a November, 2013 article in the New York Times by William Broad, a science writer whose provocative articles have challenged America's current love affair with yoga.* He cited serious injuries women have sustained in extreme yoga postures, concluding that yoga's emphasis on flexibility causes severe hip joint strain among women.

Speaking as a yoga teacher and a middle-aged woman with hip joints, I know that, in the practice and teaching of yoga, generalities don't help. Some women have loose joints, and some don’t. Some yoga forms put practitioners into exaggerated poses, others don’t. As a teacher of the Alexander Technique, I help people – yogic and otherwise – recover from hip replacements by helping them unravel habits developed before or after surgery, and helping them learn how to move well in their daily lives. For prevention or rehabilitation, the most important focus is you how you move. How you walk and sit or perform yoga postures will create strain or harmony in that crucial center of the body. It’s all in how you do it.

Use or Genetics?

Any movement teacher worth his or her salt should know the pitfalls of stiffness and hyper-mobility. Some of our students are tightly strung, others loosely strung. Some are women and some are men.

One aspect of flexibility comes from muscle – muscle fibers’ resting length and the quality of the connective tissue that surrounds each fiber and muscle group. When we stretch to become more flexible, the best approach is to do so gently, increasing that resting length gradually. Another aspect of flexibility is inherited, determined by the length of our ligaments, the connectors binding bone to bone that stabilize the skeleton. Once a ligament is stretched, it stays that way. That's why we need to be clear about what we're stretching and why. When you stretch, your primary sensation should be in the muscle, not in the joint.

Those we call double-jointed are born with longer ligaments. The advantage is that they are naturally flexible, and yoga’s full range of postures come more easily to them. The disadvantage is that their joints are less stable. They need to avoid hanging on their joints – something that can feel good and stretchy – and learn how to more fully engage their muscles to stabilize this genetic laxity. I have one yoga student, a builder who swings a hammer, lifts and climbs all day long, who is hyper-mobile. I coach him to engage his muscles, not to hang in down dog but to lift up, fully engage the shoulders to spare his joints from the over-extension that, to him, comes naturally.

Those with shorter ligaments have the benefit of greater joint stability. Though they’d like to be looser, initially they may hate stretching. In the current culture of yoga, dramatic flexibility is over-emphasized, as is performance over process. These folks may envy those flexier types, but it’s best when they work with their own body gradually, learning how to release muscles and fascia, to make fuller joint movement available.

Do you know your body type? Your muscles may be tight or loose, but it’s good to know whether your joints—your ligaments—are close-knit or loose. A good teacher or physical therapist can tell you, but you can test yourself. Extend one arm out in front of you. If your elbow goes beyond straight, so it rises above the forearm, you’re on the flexible side. If it’s hard to straighten your arm fully, your ligaments probably tend to be short.

Structure & Habit

I’ve had beautiful, accomplished yoginis come to my class, dropping into their shoulder joints in down dog – adho mukha svanasana – or too low in the forward lunge Anjaneyasana, pushing down into the ribs and waist, putting pressure on the hip joints and lower back. In down dog, I help them allow their ribs to come back and up, to spare their shoulders and hips. In lunge, I teach them to come up from the bottom of the pelvis rather than hang on those available joints. Using the Alexander Technique’s idea of lightness at the top of the spine helps them engage their torso’s natural buoyancy. With a gentle hands-on suggestion, I encourage them to stop pushing down and guide the pelvis to tilt up and away from the front leg. Rather than exerting repetitive pressure and misaligning the upper thigh (the femur in the socket of the acetabulum, if you want to get technical), they can spare those delicate feminine hip joints. The result is freedom and lightness as they breathe more fully and build strength with balance.

As teachers, we can determine how a student's habits and genetics interact and what each one needs to learn. Though awareness is considered a priority in yoga, "listening to your own body” may mean that you indulge your preferences and perpetuate unconscious habits that do not further your practice. An insightful teacher can suggest shifts that initially may feel unfamiliar or wrong, but can lead you toward a deeper understanding of your body’s unique needs and a more intelligent practice of the subtle, complex art we call yoga.

* The first, an excerpt from Broad’s book "The Science of Yoga," was a sensational New York Times magazine cover story in January, 2012, entitled How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body. That piece highlighted the prevalence and seriousness of yoga injuries, and has sparked an ongoing and worthy conversation. Here are two among many responses:

"How Yoga Can Free Your Body" by Joan Arnold "Does Yoga Kill?" by Timothy McCall

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[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://www.acatnyc.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Joan.Arnold.png[/author_image] [author_info]JOAN ARNOLD has been a movement educator for over 30 years, teaching dance, exercise, yoga and Alexander Technique. She has a private practice in NYC, Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley and has been quoted as an expert in Fit Yoga, O magazine and Timothy McCall’s 2007 book, Yoga as Medicine. Her articles on health, education and bodywork have appeared in national magazines and online in Elephant Journal. Joan teaches at Jaya Yoga Center in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In July 2014, she returns to Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health to reprise her week-long workshop on Yoga & the Alexander Technique. [/author_info] [/author]

A Nobel Prizewinner’s Perspective on the Alexander Technique

April 10, 2014 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon http://youtu.be/XXr-9kQZ0ow

Nobel Prize winner Nikolaas Tinbergen was so impressed with the work of F. M. Alexander that he devoted almost ten minutes of his Nobel lecture to the Alexander Technique. Tinbergen won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for his “discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns.” Tinbergen, and his fellow prizewinners Karl Lorenz and Konrad von Frisch, performed studies on fish, insects and birds to observe genetically programmed patterns of behavior. They studied what the origins of these behaviors were, how they developed, and what stimulated them to be triggered. Tinbergen’s work had a profound effect in the field of behavioral sciences as a whole.

Tinbergen’s Four Questions

Tinbergen is famous for developing four essential questions that must be asked about any form of behavior in animals, human or otherwise, if the behavior is to be fully understood:

Causation: What causes the behavioral response to be triggered? How is that changed by what the individual or organism might have learned for itself? What are the different mechanisms that come into play as part of the behavioral response?
Development: How does the response change over time as the individual or organism ages?
Function: What impact does the behavior have on the individual or organism?
Evolution: How does the behavior compare in other species? Why might the behavior have evolved in the way it did rather than in some other way.

Watching and Wondering

In his speech, Tinbergen discusses how his time-honored process of “watching and wandering,” as he calls it, can be applied to the relief of human suffering, especially the suffering caused by stress. In the first part of his speech, he looks at Early Childhood Autism. His second example of an application of modern ethological methods (ethology is the term given to behavioral studies) is F. M. Alexander and the Alexander Technique. He praises Alexander for using these methods fifty years before they had become widespread in the scientific community:

"This story, of perceptiveness, of intelligence, and of persistence, shown by a man without medical training, is one of the true epics of medical research and practice.”

The Kinesthetic Feedback Report

One interesting scientific discovery Tinbergen talks about in his lecture (he skips over it in the above video, but you can find it in the written text here on page 12) is the way in which the brain uses the kinesthetic, or “feeling,” sense and how that can cause us trouble:

“There are many strong indications that, at various levels of integration, from single muscle units up to complex behavior, the correct performance of many movements is continually checked by the brain. It does this by comparing a feedback report, that says ‘orders carried out,’ with the feedback expectation for which, with the initiation of each movement, the brain has been alerted. Only when the expected feedback and the actual feedback match does the brain stop sending out commands for corrective action… But what Alexander has discovered beyond this is that a lifelong mis-use of the body-muscles (such as caused by, for instance, too much sitting and too little walking) can make the entire system go wrong. As a consequence, reports that ‘all is correct’ are received by the brain (or perhaps interpreted as correct) when in fact all is very wrong. A person can ‘feel at ease’ e.g. when slouching in front of the television set, when in fact he is grossly abusing his body.”

Tinbergen’s entire speech can be seen here.
You can download a PDF of his speech here. The section on the Alexander Technique begins on page 10.
To read more about Tinbergen, you can find his Wikipedia page here
To read more about Tinbergen’s “Four Questions,” you can find the Wikipedia page here.
To read more about the kinesthetic feedback report, you can find a Wikipedia page on “efferent copies,” the scientific term for the potentially faulty kinesthetic model that the brain stores and uses as a reference for what “feels right,” here.

Fascia, The Body’s Connective Tissue, Can Contract!

April 3, 2014 admin

by Witold Fitz-Simon The standard wisdom is that it is only the muscles of the human body that contact and create movement, but it turns out that this is not entirely true. About ten years ago, research began to show that fascia contained myofibroblasts, cells that have the ability to contract when stimulated.

What is Fascia?

Fascia is the fibrous connective tissue of the body. It surrounds all our muscles, bones, ligaments, tendons and organs, and provides the tensile structure of the body, providing the medium that transfers the elastic pull of our muscles. It holds different parts in place, for example suspending organs from the spine, and allows different parts of the body to move around by creating distinct layers of tissue with surfaces that can slide and glide over each other. Fascia is made up of tight bundles of collagen fibers which are extremely resistant to lengthening. When a person is young and/or healthy, the fibers, bundles and layers are neatly aligned and discrete. As a person ages and the overall good use of their body deteriorates, these fibers can become frayed and stuck together, and can even get shorter. What used to aid and support movement can create limitations and problems. Once fascia gets to that state it can become very difficult to change. It takes serious intervention: either the forceful rearranging of deep tissue massage, or the sustained mindfulness and intention that the Alexander Technique can provide.

Along with collagen fibers, fascia contains extracellular matrix (the stuff that is in between the cells) and fibroblasts, cells that create the extracellular matrix and collagen. The myofibroblasts that have been discovered in fascia are found all over the body and are used in the healing of wounds. As they contract, they pull the edges of the wound together. In fascia, they are found in greater concentration in areas where the tissue is under greater physical stress.

From an article written by Joseph E. Muscolino, author of “Kinesiology, The Skeletal System and Muscle Function,” published in the Fall 2008 issue of Massage Therapy Journal:

“As great and greater tensile forces are placed upon the fascia, more and more myofibroblasts develop from the normal fibroblasts of the fascial tissue. For this reason, myofibroblasts are also known as ‘stress fibers.’ These myofibroblasts can then create an active pulling force that the fascial tissue is experiencing. For this reason, myofibroblasts are found in the greatest concentration in fascial tissues that have been injured and are undergoing would healing. Fascial tissues with high concentrations of myofibroblasts have been found to have sufficiently strong force to impact musculoskeletal mechanics—that is, their active pulling forces are strong enough to contribute to movement of the body.”

Slow and Steady Contraction

The contraction of muscle tissue can be fast-moving, with the ability to respond almost instantaneously to triggers, and is governed directly by the nervous system, either non-consciously through the reflexes of the spinal chord, or directly from conscious intention. The contraction of these myofibroblasts in our fascia is very different in quality, building up over a period of minutes to hours, and was found to be stimulated by changes in hydration in the extracellular matrix of the tissue as a result of stretching. This means that the contraction of fascia would not be directly influenced by the kind of mental intention that direction in the Alexander Technique mode. It does mean, however, that fascia is not as inert as one might have heretofore thought, and this new knowledge gives us a different insight into the mechanism of change that happens over time as the result of continuously applying constructive, conscious direction to the way we use ourselves with the Alexander Technique.

For those more technically-minded, two studies on the topic can be found here and here.

Can Reading a Good Book Improve the Way You Use Your Body?

March 6, 2014 admin

Can reading a good book improve your use? Alexander Technique, ACAT, AMerica Center for the Alexander Technique

by Witold Fitz-SimonResearchers at Emory University in Atlanta recently released a studythat showed that reading a book can increase connectivity in the brain for at least five days. Twenty-one graduates from the university were given sections of a novel to read over a nine day period, receiving fMRI scans before and after reading. Heightened connectivity that remained even after reading was found in two regions of the brain:

Unsurprisingly, the left temporal lobe houses the primary auditory cortex which is associated with language and meaning. It makes sense that reading would stimulate language centers of the brain. Less obvious, perhaps, is the stimulation of the somatosensory cortex, an area which takes information from various sources—such as sensitivity to pain, sensitivity to temperature, and proprioceptive information—and combines them into what we think of as the the sense of touch.

From the study:

“One possibility for increases in somatosensory cortex connectivity is that reading a novel invokes neural activity that is associated with bodily sensations. This is called the theory of “embodied semantics”… Somatosensory cortex activation has been previously demonstrated by the reading of metaphors, especially if they are tactile metaphors… It is plausible that the act of reading a novel places the reader in the body of the protagonist, which may alter somatosensory and motor cortex connectivity.”

Science-fiction and fantasy are genres of literature that take us out of our bodies into new and magical landscapes. Perhaps we could create a new type of literature that takes us into our bodies and changes our use.

Have you ever had the experience of being physically transformed in any way by something you’ve read? Perhaps you had the feeling that a piece of literature unlocked something inside you that helped you relate to the world differently. Let us know in the comments of your favorite transformative works.

Sources: The Independent, UPI, Wired.com, Wisegeek.

WITOLD FITZ-SIMON has been a student of the Alexander Technique since 2007. He is certified to teach the Technique as a graduate of the American Center for the Alexander Technique’s 1,600-hour, three year training program. A student of yoga since 1993 and a teacher of yoga since 2000, Witold combines his extensive knowledge of the body and its use into intelligent and practical instruction designed to help his students free themselves of ineffective and damaging habits of body, mind and being. www.mindbodyandbeing.com