How one man's dogged search created a revolution in "the use of the self."
By JUDY MONTAGUjudy montagu 88(photo credit: )
Overheard - an exchange between Avital, aged seven, and a doll
Doll: Why is your mommy sleeping on the floor?
Avital: She isn't sleeping. She's doing Alexander.
Doll: What's Alexander?
Avital: Your head flies away, and another one after it.
Doll: What's it for?
Avital: I don't know, but it makes your body better and gooder.
Becoming "better and gooder" is something that occupies many of us at this intensely introspective time of year. While the bulk of our concern focuses on spiritual improvement, Jewish tradition also urges us to look after our health.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslav reportedly sent a disciple to "talk to his limbs." Deuteronomy 4:9-10 commands: "Guard yourself and guard your soul very carefully," about which the Torah commentator known as the Kli Yakar explains, "'Guard yourself' means take care of your body."
This imperative, whether he knew his Bible or not, was central to the life of a highly unusual man, an Australian named Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955), who discovered a revolutionary system of physical and mental reeducation.
The Alexander Technique - like Pilates and Feldenkreis - has become popular, even trendy, in the West, including Israel, but its essence and extraordinary value are, I believe, still not widely appreciated.
IT'S EASIER to explain what Alexander isn't than what it is.
It isn't a form of exercise. Exercise involves doing things with one's body, while Alexander begins with the opposite premise: "undoing" or "letting go of" bad and counterproductive habitual patterns.
Nor is Alexander an aspirin-like "cure" to be applied to specific maladies, though it has the potential, as Lulie Westfeld notes in F.M. Alexander - The Man and His Work, "to remake the lives of... people suffering from a great variety of functional disorders."
"I do the same for everyone," said F.M., as he liked to be addressed, "whether he comes to me for flat feet or nervous tension."
Last month, Post health reporter Judy Siegel-Itzkovich wrote about a British study of 600 sufferers from back pain that compared the long-term effectiveness of massage, exercise and Alexander. The results, published in the British Medical Journal, showed that massage helped in the short term only, while Alexander retained its effectiveness at one year, particularly when combined with exercise.
So, "undoing" aside, do the practitioners of Alexander actually do anything? Very much so, though it may be scarcely visible to a casual observer.
The work involves setting in motion a new dynamic between the head, neck and back that Alexander discovered, painstakingly, over nine years of lonely and minute observation of himself in a mirror. He called this head-neck-back dynamic the Primary Control and showed that when working correctly, it brings about the easiest, most efficient and healthiest use of the entire organism.
THE Alexander "formula" - easy to state, initially hard to internalize and virtually impossible to establish without the vocal guidance and skilled hands of a qualified teacher - is: "Neck free, head forward and up, back lengthening and widening."
That's all; but it encompasses a level of improved functioning that elicited from the philosopher John Dewey, one of Alexander's earliest adherents, "admiration in the original sense of wonder." Other enthusiasts, many of whom came to Alexander for lessons after he moved to London in 1904, included physicians, eminent actors and statesmen.
Aldous Huxley wrote about "constant improvement in physical and mental health... we cannot ask more from any system."
The new head-neck-back pattern is kept going not via any physical effort, but by nothing more - and nothing less - than pure thought; by means of which directions are continuously given to the head, neck and back, "one after the other, all together," as Alexander put it somewhat enigmatically. Mental imagery is a help ("Your head flies away...").
This repeating pattern, this flow of thought directing the body's inner energy, begins to undo the excess muscular tension built up by years of faulty use and allows the body to regain its natural posture, expending just the right amount of effort needed to function as it was designed to. After a while, the results become visible - both in the body itself and in one's mental response to every external stimulus.
"Thought?" a newcomer to the technique might venture, doubtfully. "Just thinking can change the body's shape?"
It did mine. And Lulie Westfeld, among the first group of teachers who trained under Alexander, starting in 1931, noted that all the trainees without exception, men and women, exhibited physical changes for the better.
In an early film of F.M. himself practicing his technique, my teacher Dalia Altmann told me, "You can actually see him growing." This, of course, was not real growth, but what renowned Alexander teacher and author Patrick J. Macdonald called an "ironing-out" of the body. Simply, each vertebra had been allowed to claim its rightful space in the spinal column.
WHAT LED Alexander on his excruciating, solitary quest - nine years! - for the Primary Control? It was his burning, lifelong ambition to be a Shakespearean actor.
A successful professional reciter, he began in 1892 to have trouble with his voice - specifically a severe hoarseness that threatened to end his thespian dreams. Medical advice didn't help for long. Gradually, he realized that his trouble was caused by something he did when he used his voice.
The doctors helpless, Alexander now became a pioneer - a natural role, Westfeld notes, for a "lone wolf" raised in the Australian outback, used to relying on his own resourcefulness. He knew little about anatomy, but had the advantage of keen observation.
And observing himself day in, day out, he noticed that as he recited, he tended to pull his head back, causing a chain of harmful reaction. This eventually led to his landmark discovery of the head's leading role in the body's functioning - for good or ill - a conclusion confirmed by the physiologist Rudolf Magnus of Utrecht in 1926 and the experiments of the biologist G.E. Coghill in 1929.
Much trial and error yet lay ahead for the dogged explorer; but Alexander was on the way to discovering his revolutionary "use of the self," the title of one of his books.
'ALWAYS I meet two opposing attitudes about Alexander," Westfeld writes. "The first regards him as an archetypal hero... worship[ping] his personality without judgment or discrimination. The second regards him as partly a charlatan, who in some inexplicable way seems to have done great things for many people."
The harshest critics of her book, she says, "are likely to be those who are familiar with Alexander's work and will charge me with calculated understatement."
If F.M. the man was an idol, he had feet of clay, Westfeld makes clear. Whenever a chance to advance his work presented itself - such as setting up an Alexander children's school - he had "a way of killing every opportunity." He seemed not to care whether his trainees learned or not, fearful perhaps of his work being distorted. He wasted months of their time putting on plays, with himself as the star. He loved horse-racing and "placed a bet every half-hour of every working day."
But he was a good family man; he loved children; he was often excellent company; he could be generous - and he was a genius whose work became recognized despite himself and his eccentricities.
ALONGSIDE the physical, the Alexander Technique has a spiritual side.
"It puts you in touch with your essence," says my teacher Altmann, "enabling you to 'own' your rightful space in the world. Its dynamic is like living waters - mayim hayim - continually renewing itself. It allows a person to find his quiet center and grow from there."
Describing the technique, she uses the word "elegant." As is my wont, I go afterwards to Webster's. It doesn't disappoint, defining "elegance" as "dignified gracefulness or restrained beauty of style."
I have a feeling that F.M., who once described a group of anatomists seeking to study with him as "walking deformities," would applaud.
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