How to make sure the Alexander Technique works for you

Alexander Technique pupils often feel like failures. Some people suddenly stop just when they really start going places. Others keep going but don’t really believe they’ll ever get very far. They believe themselves to be poor pupils. This is sad — and totally unnecessary.

How can you make sure this doesn’t happen to you?

Understand what’s really happening

To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, you really need to understand why it happens.

Here’s why. Your most trusted sense of how well you are doing is always your kinaesthetic sense, your internal sense of “what it feels like”. People may, at times, mistrust the evidence of their own eyes, or their own ears. They may sometimes think they must be seeing or hearing things that aren’t there. Nobody ever mistrusts their kinaesthetic sense. Everyone trusts this sense absolutely and unthinkingly.

Have you ever heard of somebody believing they’re feeling things that aren’t there? Have you ever heard of somebody believing that their body is telling them they’re doing one thing when really they’re doing something different? Of course not. Nobody does. Everyone believes what their body is telling them. It just doesn’t seem possible that your feeling could be lying to you.

Your feeling is lying to you

It doesn’t seem possible and yet, it happens all the time. Your first Alexander lesson proves to you that it really does happen.

Not only does it happen all the time. This mistaken sense of how you are moving is the one major thing that blocks you from making better progress with the skills that are most important to you. It’s why, no matter how hard you try, you don’t seem to be able to do better.

It doesn’t matter whether the skill you’re pursuing is winning the triathlon, singing really well, or just getting out of that horrendous pain. In each case, your biggest block is still the same: you believe the story that your kinaesthetic sense keeps telling you. This misplaced belief in your kinaesthetic feeling has several undesirable consequences.

1. It’s why many people really never believe in themselves

For one, the story they’re getting from their kinaesthetic sense is the most important reason why many people really never believe in themselves. Their friends and mentors keep telling them: “You can do it, get out there and prove yourself!”

…and they never do. They never get anywhere because they don’t believe they can. It’s hard to believe in yourself when, every time you start to do something right, there’s that niggling voice inside you saying you’re doing it all wrong. Every time you get it right, that kinaesthetic voice says: “That was just a fluke, it doesn’t work”.

2. The better your progress, the stronger the negative voice

This is a second undesirable consequence of believing your kinaesthetic feeling. Why does better progress make you feel more negative?

It does because, the better your progress, the greater the difference between what you are now doing and what you were doing before. When there’s only a small difference, your kinaesthetic sense doesn’t complain too much. You tend not to notice a small difference. When there’s a big difference, your kinaesthetic sense complains much more loudly. Here are some of the things your kinaesthetic sense does:–

• It tells you that what you’re doing isn’t working (even though it is working)
• It makes you tired
• It can even make you feel ill

Another reason why you can feel like a failure

Alexander work makes you much clearly aware of how poorly you have been moving and how tense you really are. Whereas before you just accepted that you are the way you are and didn’t give it much thought, now you become very clearly aware of what’s been going wrong all this time.

Since this awareness is new for you, since the awareness wasn’t there before, it easily seems to you like you’re worse than you were before. While everyone else knows what you were like before and can see how you’ve improved, this awareness is new to you. Discovering where you’re coming from, can be very disheartening if it is not seen for what it is.

But this new awareness also creates a new dissatisfaction with yourself. And this new dissatisfaction is the driving force you need, it’s the thing that will prod you on into realising your true potential.

If the dissatisfaction weren’t there, there would be no reason to change. So make friends with it. It’s there to drive you into realising your real potential.

Be dissatisfied but not discouraged. You can do what you’re setting out to achieve, and you will do it — if you don’t let yourself be put off by the inevitable feeling of discouragement.

There really is no other major obstacle

If you can manage to mistrust your existing kinaesthetic feeling enough to allow yourself to change despite the tricks it plays on you…
If you can also manage to be pleased when you realise how badly you were doing before…

If you can rise to these two challenges, the rest is easy. I mean really, really dead easy. So don’t worry about anything else.

Just remind yourself, when you feel like a failure, what that feeling of failure really is: a sign that you’re making very good progress.

Then you won’t follow all those other poor misguided people who, not realising what was going on, stopped just when they were beginning to go places.

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The Smiling Back Method of the Alexander Technique
Copyright © 2007-2012 Philip Pawley
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Philip Pawley

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