The Daily Novel

It’s late but I did not want to go to bed without adding something to my previous post. Because I did not disclose my own experience of the Alexander technique. I was first recommended to try it when I was in my late thirties, by which time I had developed a slight stoop, which is one reason why friends recommended it to me.

I had two series of lessons, one from a pure Alexander disciple and one from a teacher who combined the Alexander technique with Tai Chi exercises. Both experiences gave me a better understanding about how my own mind/body system worked. Both of my teachers were good. But in both experiences, which were a few years apart, I did not keep up the exercises, for more than a month or two, after the lessons ended.

Tai Chi is something that I see other people doing under a special tree on the heath, which is supposed to have special mystical properties. Alexander is an approach which I still use from time to time in my daily life. Which was an important part of Alexander’s teaching. It was not the exercises that were crucial to Alexander, but developing the awareness of how your bodily postures affected your breathing and your emotional reactions to threats or crisises. So I still check what is happening to my body when in crisis.
Alexander set out to cure his own stutter, not to cure ‘old women’s stoop’. He was more concerned to correct the kind of ramrod stiff back upright posture, instilled in many men of his generation by military or cadet training.

So the first lessons urged you NOT to try and stand up straight. But to allow the teacher to ease the tensions in your neck and arrange your head in it’s natural position. While you concentrated on an image of your head floating upwards to its natural elevation.  The lessons did help to reduce my stoop.

It is the only in the last year or two that my stoop has become worse, and that probably sit do with the fact that I have stopped teaching and am doing all the work I do sitting at my desk, rather than standing before a class.

So, if I am not too tired when I finish this, I shall do an Alexander favourite. Walk around the room balancing Alexander’s slim book, called ‘The Resurection of the Body’ on my head.

Good Night.