Stimulus & Response
AKA The force of habit
I know I’ve always had bad posture and I’ve heard Alexander Technique can help me with my posture.
Over the past several posts, I’ve written and drawn quite a lot of anatomical stuff. So far, I’ve shared at least a dozen drawings on the head, neck, and back. I’ve taken the time to draw the various directions of the muscle fibers. And I’ve even made a feeble attempt at describing how you can allow your sense of feeling to traverse your structure and ask for release in the various muscles and joints. So if you think that the goal of the Alexander Technique is about forming and having a good posture, you’d absolutely be well within your rights to think that (at least based on my more recent articles)!
But there’s a big difference between attempting to directly generate an upright posture via an exercise program and MAKING your posture good and studying the Alexander Technique…
A Little Piano Exercise
When I was training to teach the Alexander Technique back in 2018/19, I decided to sit at the piano and do a little experiment. I sat at the piano and closed the lid on the keyboard. Placing my hands in my lap, I sat and reminded myself that I was not going to play any music. During this time, I could feel tension leaving my neck, back, and arms.
After roughly 1 minute, I decided to place my hands on the closed wooden cover. I did this slowly. One hand at a time. And did my best to not let the neck, back, shoulder, or elbow stiffen/jolt up with tension. I had to continuously remind myself not to stiffen up as I moved, but I managed to move my arms with a smooth-ish ride.
HOORAY!!!
As I relished in my supreme victory1, decided to continue and slowly lift the lid over the keyboard so that I could SEE the black and white keys. As soon as the cover was lifted from the keyboard, I could feel my neck, shoulders, and arms begin to squeeze tight. This happened even though I was constantly telling myself that I DID NOT want this to happen!
What the heck was happening to me?!?
The Force of Habit
For some reason, the image of the keys was a stimulus that seemed to force me into contraction. The reason for my unwanted contraction is interesting (and highly correlated with a repetitive strain injury), but the exercise above showed me that the stiffening happening in my head, neck, back, and arms was NOT caused by my “posture” but instead caused by my habitual way of using my arms to create something.
The stiffening that I felt at the piano did not occur when I decided to move my hands toward the keyboard; it happened when I had the IDEA of moving my hands towards the keyboard. These thoughts of mine create such an immediate response in the body, that FM Alexander would think it quite foolish to attempt to separate your mental development from your physical development. In fact, he was quite adamant that you discover these forces of habit for yourself.
Generalizing the Piano Exercise
In the Use of the Self, FM Alexander describes a long series of experiments that he conducts in front of the mirror. He would attempt to stand in front of the mirror and allow himself to release habitual tension so that he could balance upright and feel his habitual pull downs of tension and pressure decrease. Only when he was satisfied with his progress would he continue on with his experiment.
With this new state of balance in his head, neck, and back, FM Alexander would give himself 3 options:
Do Nothing.
Recite something.
Do something unexpected like move an arm.
He chose these 3 options because he was attempting to study his voice. The vocal option (2) was the option he very badly wanted to be good at, but he found it impossible to break himself of his habitual strain if option 2 was the only thing on his mind. In essence, he used variety of choice to help wean himself off of his forceful speaking habit.
The Elevator Game + The Force of Habit
Back in Jan of 2024 I wrote a series of articles on the Elevator Game. The purpose of these games was to give you a sense of stiff weight, dead weight, and all of the other qualities of force that you can direct through yourself. In a lot of ways, these elevator exercises are designed to give you a means of refining your sense of your self. And while this is a VERY good game to play, it will not necessarily be immediately obvious to you that it is also giving you better and better access to sensing the depth of your habits during your daily life.
When I’m done washing the dishes, I have noticed a habit of slightly clunking my upper back into dead weight when I begin to step backwards from the kitchen sink. This noticing did not happen because I watched myself in a mirror or made a video of myself while washing the dishes. It’s just something that I felt one day.2
When these forces of habit make themselves known to you, pay attention! You don’t need to try and fix anything in the moment, but if you can repeat the habitual clunk you can slowly begin to better understand the forces that pull you down. If you are able to stop and create a 3 option scenario like FM Alexander did, you might be able to find a way out of that forceful pull down!
Get In Touch
You may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com. I’m located in Brooklyn, New York.
If you’d like to book any lesson time with me, you can find my booking link here.
I mean yeah I practice Alexander Technique daily and use mirrors and all of that jazz, but I’m not living in my practice room!
YES!! This noticing happens for me a lot... It is powerful to become more and more aware of various holdings, pullings and tensions!