The Alexander Technique community is a broad church and yet there is one thing it can agree on: the importance of ‘Direction’. It is an essential Alexander Technique skill.
The best introduction to FM Alexander’s own use of the term is by Jean Fischer. But this article has a different purpose: to provide a practical guide to Direction for students and practitioners. If you can get your head around what I’m presenting below, you’ll have an amazing (and free) tool at your disposal for improving your quality of life.
This is quite a long post but, if you wish, you can easily jump to sections that most interest you:
Part I
Defining Direction
Do Directions work?
Classic Alexander Directions
Direction pitfalls
Pitfall 1: Confusing Direction with position or movement
Pitfall 2: Making Directions effortful
Pitfall 3: Feeling instead of thinking
Is Direction mysterious?
Part II
Varieties of Direction
Negative Directions
Paradoxical Directions
Freedom Directions
Simplified Skeleton
The Ready List
Spatial Directions
Part I: Defining Direction
Directions are self-instructions for restoring ease, lightness and balance in movement. Here, in no particular order, are three examples of Directions:
1. Let your head float on top of your neck
2. I am not compressing myself
3. Soft and tall
Below is a more formal definition:
Direction is having the wish, the intention, the aspiration, to be going in those directions that are expansive rather than contractive, but the wish must be expressed through muscular release rather than tension and effort.
Nicholls, J. and Carey, S. (1991) p.82.
Directions have their place within the overall structure of the Alexander Technique. This means that, traditionally, a pause to prevent habitual responses (termed ‘Inhibition’) should precede Direction, as in this illustration:
Here is a further explanation of this diagram.
Do Directions work?
Let’s address this question straightaway.
First of all, there is substantial evidence that the Alexander Technique itself has measurable effects. For example, large scale trials demonstrate its effectiveness for back pain, neck pain and Parkinson’s disease. There is also evidence that the Alexander Technique changes the quality of postural muscle tone, making it more adaptable and better distributed.
But what about Directions themselves? Recently, some experimental research looked into this by analysing what happened when a group of older adults used Alexander-based self-instructions compared with other kinds of instructions. The ‘short version’ of the Alexander-based instruction was as follows:
Allow your bones to send you up; let your head float on top of your neck.
And the full version was:
Have the idea that you WANT to go up, but you are not going to do it with muscular effort. Instead, let the ground send you up through your bones, and let your head float up on top of your spine. (Remember where we touched you behind the ears when we were setting up the camera system? The top of your spine is right between those points.) Notice that at the same time as you are going up, you can also expand into width.
The researchers discovered that, of the three types of instruction they compared, only the Alexander-based instruction was beneficial, the result being that:
Thinking of upright posture as effortless reduced muscle activation and improved balance, while thinking of upright posture as effortful made balance worse.
The research paper illustrated the three types of instruction given to participants as follows:
The research concluded:
[the results] support the growing consensus that learning to maintain particular intentions with regard to one’s postural state can have widespread benefits. … The results of this study are important for older adults because they directly address a root cause of falling, that is, poor balance … If, as our results suggest, instructions that encourage an effortless upward intention can decrease excessive muscle coactivation and improve balance in older adults, these instructions should be widely integrated into rehabilitation programs [my underline].
Classic Alexander Directions
Various forms of Alexandrian Direction exist. Patrick Macdonald – a first generation teacher who trained with FM Alexander – presented this typical version:
Let the neck be free,
To let the head go forward and up,
To let the back lengthen and widen.
Other Classic Directions exist for the limbs, but they are of secondary importance. Patrick Macdonald gave his take on the meaning behind the above instructions, and it is worth reading his commentary in full:
Let the neck be free. You will notice that the phrase starts with “let”. This is important. It means that the pupil should avoid stiffening the neck – not that he should do something to free it. I frequently find pupils going through all sorts of contortions in the belief that they are “freeing the neck”. They are usually, in fact, producing an extra stiffening by so doing.
MacDonald, P. (1989) pp.77-9
To let the head go forward and up. Notice the word “to”. It joins the first phrase to the second; it is important that the two ideas should not be considered as separate but as continuous, the second acting in response to the first. The word “let” is employed again, for the reason I have already mentioned, to prevent pupils trying to put their heads forward and up in a muscular manner … It is useful to consider the “forward” as an unlocking of the head at the atlanto-occipital joint by refraining from tightening and pulling it backwards in the accustomed way, and the “up” as a tiny extension of the spine, which is achieved following this unlocking. The movement, if any, is, in an experienced pupil, so small as to be hardly a movement at all. It is a directed flow of force or a kind of pulsation, no more than a heart beat.
To let the back lengthen and widen. Again, the words “to” and “let” are used; the first to join the phrases, the second to denote the impropriety of ordinary muscular action in this connection. Lengthening of the back may be described as “allowing the spine to extend itself to its full length”, widening the back as “refraining from hollowing the back in such a way that it is slumped”. I stress again that directions are not a number of separate ideas, but a whole – in Alexander’s well-known phrase, “all together, one after the other”. I amalgamate the two directions (to lengthen and to widen), as these two impulses are so closely associated that it is improper to consider one without the other.
Direction pitfalls
There is no doubt that ‘Directing’ or ‘sending Directions’ is an unusual skill. In my experience, the fact that there is nothing comparable makes the process hard for students to wrap their thinking around.
Patrick Macdonald’s commentary above already hints at this, with his description of Direction as involving ‘a kind of pulsation, no more than a heart beat’ and his advice against using ‘ordinary muscular action in this connection’.
Therefore, it is really helpful to understand at the outset some of the pitfalls. Here are three of the most common traps people fall into.
Pitfall 1: Confusing Direction with position or movement
When someone begins learning how to Direct, they almost inevitably confuse Direction with either some kind of position, or some kind of movement. But the fact is, Direction occurs within position and movement, and is a separate phenomenon.
To illustrate, consider the following:
Patrick Macdonald again helps us out, giving us an experiment to explore the differences between the three:
Now for a practical exposition, because an ounce of practice is worth a ton of words. I want to explain what I mean by ‘giving directions’. I would emphasize that the following procedure is not important in itself, but only as an aid to understanding. Hold your left forefinger out in front of you. The finger is held, you will probably agree, in a position. Now wiggle the finger about. That, again, you will most probably agree is ordinary movement. Now grasp the left forefinger with the other hand and stretch it gently. This constitutes imparting a lengthening direction to the finger. You will realize that this brings about a different activity in the finger from what happens when it is held in a position, or from when it is put into movement. If you keep on pulling the finger with the other hand you would impart – unless there was some impeding factor – a tendency on the part of the finger to go on stretching itself so that the impulses would continue to flow outwards, as indeed they should, when the finger is left by itself in position. Further, this outward flow should continue even when the finger goes into MM [muscular movement]. To recap: Position, MM and “direction” are three different activities; the third activity – “direction” – should go on inside the other two activities.
Macdonald, P. (ibid.) pp.64-5.
Pitfall 2: Making Directions effortful
Following on from the above, the fact that Direction is not a movement (in the ordinary sense of the word) means that it must not involve muscular effort. And yet, inevitably, on first learning the Alexander Technique, most people try to ‘do’ their Directions.
This doesn’t mean that Direction can’t be specific, focused or – well – directed, but it does mean that Direction is nonetheless only an intention, a wish, an aspiration or a thought.
The Alexander Technique teacher Robert Rickover has come up with a useful exercise to illustrate the amount of effort required in Directing. It goes like this:
Sit down somewhere indoors and look around you to select an everyday object which has no particular significance; for example, it could be an ordinary desk or chair. Now, take a walk around the room and notice the object – sometimes it’ll be in your field of vision, and sometimes not.
adapted from Rickover, R. (2017)
Now, sitting down again, have a little bit more of an awareness of that object, just a little more than if it hadn’t been mentioned. In other words, elevate it a little bit in your awareness so that, if someone were to ask you a question about it, you’d either know the answer or know exactly where to look to find out.
It’s that level of awareness we’re talking about, that level of effort required to think about the object. If you’re doing more efforting than that in using an Alexander Direction, you’re doing too much.
Pitfall 3: Feeling instead of thinking
The Alexander Technique teacher Missy Vineyard explains this final pitfall with great clarity, and it is worth reading in full. If you understand her words below, you will have a good sense of the rather detached clarity of thought you’ll need for Directing. You’ll see how Direction is refreshing, and quite unlike anything else.
Try this experiment: Silently tell yourself to relax your shoulders. Repeat this instruction to yourself for a minute or two. If you are like most people, your attention will drop downward as you focus your mind on your shoulders – trying to feel them, relax them, and determine if they are becoming relaxed. It is as if we try to shift our mind physically closer to our body in order to pay attention to it. What you have just done is put your mind on feeling instead of thinking.
Vineyard, M. (2007) pp. 154-8
To explain, let me return to the brain. Your brain is like a two-way radio. It has two channels, not one, as an ordinary radio does. Your brain/radio can receive signals (inputs) and it can send signals (outputs) … In short, when you are feeling, you are bringing your attention to information that is coming into your brain via sensory nerves. When you are thinking, you are sending out an instruction to make something happen in yourself.
Feeling is a reporting in. Thinking is a command for action … you need to be able to shift your mind’s attention from what is coming in (feeling) to what is going out (thinking). For example, putting your attention on feeling your muscles tightening is not the same thing as thinking that you want your muscles to stop tensing.
‘Thinking from the attic’
Your task is to tell yourself what you want to have happen in your legs without shifting your attention downward to feel. Trust that your mind knows what you mean by these words, and that there is nothing more you have to do. You do not have to put your attention on your legs and try to make the right thing happen. It is like mailing a letter: You go to the mailbox and drop your letter in the slot. Then the postman delivers it – you do not have to deliver the letter. Thinking a mental instruction or thought is similar. You do not have to take your thought of relaxing your legs to its destination – the legs themselves. Remain up in your attic, thinking the instruction. Drop your thought in the mailbox. Trust it will get where it needs to go without further help from you.
Is Direction mysterious?
Before we get on to some colourful kinds of Direction to try, let’s consider this idea: is Direction mysterious?
My first response is that Direction is certainly unfamiliar. The fact is, we’re simply not used to thinking or intending in this way. In fact, most people wouldn’t even realise it’s possible, let alone a skill or something beneficial.
In Directing, we are influencing our muscular system, but through a different ‘channel’ to the one used for muscular movement. Instead of focusing on moving in the ordinary way, we are focusing on creating the best conditions for our moving to happen well.
Looked at in this way, you could say that Direction is no more mysterious than ordinary movement because they are both examples of ‘mind over matter’.
If you don’t consider ordinary movement mind over matter, then you might be struck by this passage by the fiction writer Ian McEwan, as I was several years ago. After reading the following, maybe you’ll consider ordinary movement to be no less mysterious than Alexandrian Direction:
She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or being about to move it, was not the same as actually moving it. And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind. When did it know to move, when did she know to move it? There was no catching herself out. It was either-or. There was no stitching, no seam, and yet she knew that behind the smooth continuous fabric was the real self — was it her soul? — which took the decision to cease pretending, and gave the final command.
McEwan, I. (2001) p.33
So, Direction may be mysterious. However, it is equally important to remind ourselves that Directing is a down-to-earth, practical skill for optimizing how we coordinate ourselves in daily life or in more demanding situations. For many, it is an essential skill for staying out of pain, discomfort or injury.
Part II: Varieties of Direction
What follows is an introduction to some of the more innovative ways that Alexander Technique practitioners have evolved the concept of Direction. For each variety, you’ll find sample Directions in italics at the beginning for you to try out.
Negative Directions
I am not…
I am not compressing myself
I am not tensing my neck
I am not hunching my shoulders
etc
These kinds of Direction were first developed by Missy Vineyard (ibid.). Put simply, they are ways of saying ‘no’ to habits which you’d prefer not to have.
Robert Rickover, who has explored these extensively, believes that Negative Directions have advantages over the Classic Directions I outlined in Part I. As he sees it, the problem with the Classic Directions is that ‘most new students don’t know how to “let” their necks be free’ (Rickover (n.d)). In contrast, Negative Directions don’t make unrealistic assumptions because he’s ‘never met a student who wasn’t able to tense their neck, nor a student who didn’t know what “no” means.’
Finally, although they are negative statements, Robert views these Directions as ‘positive affirmations that you want to stop doing things to yourself that are harming you’.
Paradoxical Directions
[While walking] I am not walking
[While standing] I am not standing
[While sitting] I am not sitting
[While swimming] I am not swimming
[While chopping vegetables] I am not chopping vegetables
[While playing the violin] I am not playing the violin
[While giving a speech] I am not giving a speech
etc
Although similar to Negative Directions, Paradoxical Directions are a strange class of self-instruction indeed. If you’re like me, though, you might find their slightly comic nature fun to play around with and, who knows, this may even add to their effectiveness. They were again developed by Missy Vineyard (ibid.).
The basic idea behind them is that, if you tell yourself that you’re not actually doing an activity, you are less likely to bring your habitual reactions to the party.
For me, Paradoxical Directions also have echoes of the idea that we act more freely when the self-conscious ego or ‘I’ is less present. This idea crops up in all sorts of contexts, from Tai Chi to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’. The idea is also there in the phrase often attributed to FM Alexander that ‘the right thing does itself’, and in this example from Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery:
What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.
Herrigel, E. (1971) p.34
Freedom Directions
I am free
I am free to …
I am free to walk
I am free to feel nervous
etc……… is free
My neck is free
My hips are free
My breathing is free
My walking is free
etc
Jennifer Roig-Francoli is the originator of so-called ‘Freedom Directions’. A simple observation about them is that their present-tense orientation means that they are not a command to ‘do’ something. This attribute can certainly help students avoid the Direction pitfalls I described in Part I.
Jennifer discussed her Freedom Directions in a podcast with Robert Rickover. The discussion explores the philosophy behind them and their usefulness. Robert contends Freedom Directions are ‘the best we have at the moment’:
RR: It’s a statement of intent. Not a statement that “I’m going to make this happen somehow”. It’s more: “this is what I want and, body-mind, figure out how to bring it about”. I mean, I’m the guy in charge, and I’m delivering the message about what I want, but I’m not suggesting that I am personally going to figure out how to do it. I’m sort of outsourcing that to lower-level systems in my body-mind.
Rickover, R. (2013a)
JRF: I would go even a step further to say that if I’m thinking “I am free” it’s not only an intent but it is also, in my view, a reality. … You can remember, “I am free to feel tense and tight, and my neck is free to do all this contracting”. In fact, it’s because of my freedom that my brain can send messages to my muscles to contract – it’s because of that freedom that it’s doing that, so I can allow that … We accept the reality of how something is in the moment … So if you’re allowing the neck to be tight and to feel that first, then just by allowing that, it begins to unravel. And I think when the student is aware of that process coming from the reality of our freedom, then it’s just instantaneous.
Simplified Skeleton
The neck belongs to the spine
The shoulders belong to the back
The pelvis belongs to the spine
My spine is one
Neck belongs to spine
Shoulders belong to the back
Hips belong to spine
(haiku version by Mastaneh Nazaria)
Pedro de Alcantara first described the ‘Simplified Skeleton’ in his book, Indirect Procedures, noting that ‘The simplified skeleton is a practical way for you to sense yourself in action.’ (de Alcantara, 2013 p.21).
Pedro explained the approach in conversation with Robert Rickover:
I like putting it this way. Ideally, your neck belongs with your spine. The neck’s just an extension of the spine. It’s the visible upper bit of your spine, and most people make it so that about half of the neck belongs to the spine and about half of the neck belongs to the head, creating a very strange and awkward unit of head + half-a-neck and another unit of half-a-neck + a spine. And I think that’s the source of a lot of discomfort and illness. And if you find a way of having your neck wholly with the spine and the head kind of slightly independent from the neck, you have a lot more poise.
Rickover, R. (2013b)
So No.1 of the three points of connection within the simplified skeleton is that the neck and the spine belong together and the head is a little bit autonomous relative to the neck;
No.2: the back and the shoulders belong together, and the arms are somewhat autonomous, or the arms are extensions of that unit called ‘back and shoulders’;
And No.3: back and shoulders belong together, and the legs are somewhat autonomous extensions of the back and pelvis. You have articulations at the hip joints so you can do certain movements of your legs without overly-engaging the pelvis. And if the pelvis stays very friendly with the back; it’s much much better than the pelvis becoming over-friendly with the legs.
So, to make a long story short, the simplified skeleton has three points of connection: the neck and the spine belong together, the back and the shoulders belong together, the back and the pelvis belong together. And that’s it: that’s the simplified skeleton.
So, sometimes the simple thought that your neck is not an independent entity and the neck is just a name for a region of a whole thing that’s integrated, that simple thought can have consequences because suddenly you’re modelling yourself, and your body, and your posture and your movements in a different way. You have a new concept where you say, ‘I actually don’t need to think about a neck, or I don’t need to have a neck, I just have a spine and the spine goes all the way into the inside of my skull, and all the way to bottom of my spine to the coccyx, and it’s one thing, it’s one elastic, directed thing’. And for some people, that simple thought – the spine is one, the spine is not many – can have profound consequences.
The Ready List
Stop
See
Breathe
Soft & Tall
Stop – Relax the mind. Think or say “Stop”.
See – Relax the eyes. Am I seeing?
Breathe – Relax the breathing. Am I breathing?
Soft & Tall – Relax into being human. Am I balancing?
‘The Ready List’ is the only set of Directions listed here which includes Alexandrian Inhibition – the ‘Stop’ – as part of its formula. It was developed by Sue Merry and Judith Kleinman, and comprises four simple instructions that you give to yourself. It is designed for all ages, but is especially suitable for children, and has many associated resources which can be used in educational settings.
Although based on the Alexander Technique, it has an explicit focus on regulating the autonomic nervous system. It has a dedicated website – thereadylist.com – according to which,
The Ready List helps us to change any unhelpful habitual behaviour in order to balance our nervous system and to bring a sense of peace into our lives. In this way we can experience a state of being in activity that we more usually associate with sitting in meditation.
Spatial Directions
External:
Become aware of the space above you, the distance between you and the ceiling or the sky, the space behind you, the distance between you and the wall behind, the space on either side, the distance between you and the walls either side, the space in front of you, a panoramic vision of what is in front and the distance between you and the horizon. Become aware of the ground beneath you.
Internal:
Think of the distance between the top of your head and the roof of your mouth; the distance between the front of your eye and the back of your head; the distance between your ears. Now it may be possible to become aware of the whole volume your head takes up in space, its three-dimensionality.
Last but not least, Penny O’Connor’s Spatial Directions were influenced by the ideas of Frank Pierce Jones, David Gorman and Les Fehmi.
With regard to the external Spatial Directions, Penny writes, ‘If it is possible, think of these spatial directions one after the other, all at the same time’. (O’Connor (2016), p.137). And regarding the internal Spatial Directions she writes, ‘You can work through the whole of your body’s dimensions in this manner, adding incrementally to your awareness of self, so that by the end you have become aware of the whole three dimensional space you are taking up from head to toe.’ (ibid., p.138).
One of the best ways to experience the full depth of Spatial Directions is to listen to Penny’s 15 minute audio here.
Penny has clarified the meaning Spatial Directions have for her as follows:
When someone says, ‘Think of your directions’, I think of the space around me. The space around me brings me to the moment, and to a unified field of attention … I have called it my SEA of Consciousness: Self, Environment, Activity, juggling those three attentions until they are one. It is firstly an inhibition of my habitual narrowed thinking and then a direction into widened attention and the Now. I was, I should say, also trained to think of neck free etc, so I cannot say that it is not also associated with it, and comes along beside it, but if I’m spatially aware, if I can take in consciously what I am seeing, hearing, sensing, then the traditional directions seem to happen on their own. It is our birth-right to be tall, wide and gorgeous.
O’Connor, P. (2016) p.136.
Conclusion
So, that’s my whistle-stop tour of the field of Alexandrian Direction. If you have any further varieties of Direction you think should be included, do get in touch.
Bibliography
de Alcantara, P. (2013) Indirect Procedures, Oxford: University Press, 2013.
Herrigel, E (1971) Zen in the Art of Archery. New York: Vintage Books.
Nicholls J., Carey S. (1991) The Alexander Technique: in conversation with John Nicholls and Sean Carey. Brighton: Brighton Alexander Training Centre.
MacDonald, P. (1989) The Alexander Technique: as I see it. Eastbourne: Rahula Books.
McEwan, I. (2001) Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape.
O’Connor, P. (2016) ‘Be Here Now’ in The Congress Papers 2015 pp.135-9. London: STAT Books 2016.
Rickover, R. (2013a) ‘An interesting new development in Alexander Technique directing’ https://bodylearning.buzzsprout.com/382/112493-an-interesting-new-development-in-alexander-technique-directing. Accessed 7 Mar 2024.
Rickover, R. (2013b), ‘The Simplified Skeleton’. https://bodylearning.buzzsprout.com/382/134189-the-simplified-skeleton. Accessed 7 Mar 2024.
Rickover, R. (2017) ‘Lessons in Self Direction – Using the Principles of the Alexander Technique: Lesson 2’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLGX3Lkx38c. Accessed 7 Mar 2024.
Rickover, R. (n.d.) https://www.upwithgravity.net/negative-directions/. Accessed 7 Mar 2024.
Vineyard, M., (2007) How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique to Explore Your Mind-Body Connection and Achieve Self-Mastery. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press.
