The Alexander Technique is invaluable when learning a musical instrument, and the guitar is no exception. As part of the Alexander Technique Music Conference 2021, two professional guitarists created videos showcasing how the Technique can help both classical guitar students and those playing electric guitar or bass.

Firstly, Florence Hill introduces the Alexander Technique for classical guitar:

She asks five questions:

1. Is your head balancing on top of your spine?
2. Are you sitting on your sitting bones?
3. Are you sitting in a way that allows your spine to lengthen and your back to be free?
4. Is the guitar supported in a place that you can reach all positions easily?
5. Can your legs move freely and are your knees in line with your toes?

In less that 10 minutes, Florence helps you to answer ‘yes’ to all of the above. And she also gives a brilliant demonstration of the Guitarlift support which seems a strong contender for the easiest and most comfortable guitar support ever.

Secondly, Jane Gregory introduces the Alexander Technique to electric guitar players and bassists:

Jane teaches at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP) and the Junior Guildhall School of Music. In her video, she covers a number of areas, including the differences between sitting and standing when playing and the use of a wall to help discover alignment.

One simple tip that guitarists should consider is to have two straps of different lengths – one for playing when seated, and one for standing. It is not helpful to play without a strap when sitting. ‘You’ll end up cradling the instrument to stop it falling,’ she says, ‘and you’ll be using all kinds of additional muscle tension that you don’t really need, just to hold the instrument in place’.

To sum up, these are two brilliant videos to help guitarists find ease, balance and freedom from tension in their guitar playing.

Last week, the New York Times Magazine published a short article, ‘How to stand correctly‘, which has been roundly criticised by those in the Alexander Technique profession.

The article – based on comments by director of the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York James Murphy – advises that standing well involves effortful muscular activity to sustain upright posture. It opens with the statement, ‘We have to fight gravity to stand upright’, and then advocates various kinds of pressing, tightening, lifting and straightening of the body.

In her comment on the piece, ‘Michaela from Connecticut’ sums up well the response of the Alexander Technique community:

The language used in this article is almost comical to me; teaching the Alexander Technique, I also want to help people to be upright, be balanced, have space in their torso, have a naturally curved spine AND to breathe, something not mentioned here. We do not have to fight gravity, nope, not at all; we work with a natural response to gravity in our well toned muscular skeletal structure; and there are better ways than to press, to tighten, grip, lift and straighten. … I would like to add that it would have helped if Jaime Lowe had pointed out that this is a description of an exercise, a temporary position and not a way to walk about in the world.

In addition, Dr Rajal Cohen, known for her research on this topic, reminds readers of the comments section that laboratory studies indicate that using a lot of effort to “stand up straight” is harmful to balance. She lists two important studies in this area:

• In healthy adults https://academic.oup.com/innovateage/article/4/2/igz056/5811127
• In adults with Parkinson’s disease https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25665828/

You can also read my own summary of what the Alexander Technique is, and the science behind it.

‘Non-doing’ is an aspect of the way the Alexander Technique nurtures wellbeing: whether that’s mental, physical, emotional or spiritual. In FM Alexander’s own explanation of the term from the 1940s, non-doing involves withholding action in order to prevent the habitual reaction to a stimulus.

Fast forward several decades and Jenny Odell’s How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy (NY: Melville House) is a bestselling publication from 2019. It has a central preoccupation with ‘doing nothing’ in the face of modern technological and capitalist pressures, and as such intersects in an interesting way with the Alexander Technique.

Part manifesto, part memoire, part social science commentary, Odell’s book takes a long, hard look at the damage done to our (collective) selves by our interaction with technology companies. The ‘attention economy’ in her title refers to how these companies will do everything they can to capture, manipulate and monetize our attention, particularly in the online space. While these attention-grabbing attempts may at first seem simply ‘annoying’, many now recognize their potential long-term harm.

Those of us who spend time online, and in particular on social media, are in effect being primed on a daily basis for perpetual distraction, passivity and addiction for the purpose of someone else’s commercial gain. In the face of this onslaught, we should be genuinely concerned about how these stimuli interfere with our faculties of reflection, self-regulation, intentionality, autonomy and sense of self. Odell sums up the predicament of many people:

In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, p.15

‘Doing nothing’ in this context therefore becomes an act of resistance. Odell goes on to describe how she considers doing nothing both ‘as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully’.

For her, this is a form of ‘self-care’: not in a self-indulgent or commercialized sense, but as an act of self-preservation. She reminds us that we can refuse to be productive or efficient, that leisure time does not have to be quantified or about ‘self-development’, and that time well spent can be about maintenance and care rather than ‘progress’. In other words – strange as it may seem to have to emphazise this – it is ok not to have anything to show for the time you’ve spent.

To pause, to stop, to say ‘no’ to a habit, or to do nothing – from the perspective of the Alexander Technique, all of these have intrinsic value. And it is fascinating to see similar themes re-emerging in a different context over a hundred years since Alexander developed his Technique.

In her writing, Odell looks to the restorative effects of re-engaging with nature, art, a sense of place (‘bioregionalism’), the humanity of others and – last but not least – a sense of our own embodiment. Anyone with an interest in Jenny Odell’s writing is sure to find in the Alexander Technique, and its principle of non-doing, a valuable approach for dealing with the increasingly overwhelming demands on our attention in today’s world. As FM Alexander himself wrote,

For in the mind of man lies the secret of his ability to resist, to conquer and finally to govern the circumstances of his life.

FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance (first published 1910).

As part of the Alexander Technique Music Conference 2021 which I’ve helped organised, one of the most popular contributions has been Lindsay Wagstaff’s ‘Alexander Technique basics for singers’.

The video is an excellent short introduction to how the principles of the Alexander Technique can provide the basis for eliminating habits that interfere in the efficient and well-supported use of the voice.

In the video, Lindsay introduces two experiments that vocalists can try on their own. The first involves experimenting with the voice lying down, and the second uses a wall to bring awareness the unhelpful habits of lifting the chest on the in-breath and dropping the chest on the outbreath. She summarizes some of the helpful and unhelpful habits of breathing (in singing as in everyday life) as follows:

Signs of poor breathing habits

• sucking in the air
• tightening the neck
• pulling the head back
• lifting on in-breath
• collapsing on out-breath
• locking the leg joints

Signs of good breathing habits

• head remains in balance
• spine continues to lengthen
• ribs expand and contract freely
• legs are not rigid

Lindsay’s presentation is only around 10 minutes long, but it’s pure gold, and very helpful as a starting point for anyone looking to improve the way they sing.

It is no secret that violinists often suffer from discomfort and pain. The combination of an awkward holding position, the incredible intricacy of the movements involved, and the many hours of practice and performing, can lead to a smorgasbord of unnecessary tensions. Violinists need a way out of these tensions – or preferably a way to prevent them from occuring in the first place.

This is where the Alexander Technique can help. The Technique is a set of principles for discovering ease, balance, support and reduced tension in any activity. It focuses on the best ‘use of the self’, and optimizes the amount of muscle tone underlying all kinds of movement.

As part of the Alexander Technique and Music Conference 2021, I created a short interactive video to help violinists experience some aspects of the Alexander Technique, such as discovering a less reactive approach to playing, working with gravity instead of holding against it, and replacing excessive muscle tension with adaptability, lightness and buoyancy. For the video, I used the metaphor of three trees as follows:

• Tree on a sunny day – discover emptiness
• Tree in a whirlwind – discover emptiness in movement
• Tree in the breeze – discover spring

I introduced these explorations with some wonderful quotes from three string playing pedagogues: Paul Rolland, Herbert Whone and Vivien Mackie. You can view my video here:

If you’re a violinist, I hope the video will give you some ideas to incorporate into your playing. Having said this, one-to-one hands-on work from a qualified teacher is the sina qua non of the Alexander Technique, so if you’re in the Bristol or London area, do contact me if you’d like to give it a try.

The Alexander Technique Music Conference 2021 is now live on Youtube here. It’s an event which I have organised, along with colleagues Judith Kleinman and Catherine Fleming.

Experts from across UK music conservatoires and elsewhere have created a number of free videos to help musicians understand how they can benefit from the Alexander Technique. The categories of videos this year are as follows:

• Voice and wind instruments
• Plucked strings
• Bowed strings
• Piano
• Music and Alexander Technique talks

Videos are for all ages and all levels of ability. Moreover, insights from one instrument can be carried over to another. I particularly liked Lindsay Wagstaff’s ‘Alexander Technique basics for singers‘ since there are explorations there to help integrate breathing into all aspects of our lives, whether you sing on stage or just in the shower!

My own contribution to the conference – ‘Lightness, freedom and spring in violin playing‘ – is also included. I’ll write more about it in a later blog post.

Over a decade ago, Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins published The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body. They popularized the approach known as ‘Open Focus’, and now Les Fehmi and Susan Shor Fehmi have just published a follow-up volume, The Open-Focus Life.

The authors make a bold claim: that changing the way you pay attention will change your life. It’s not an empty claim, being based on over forty years of clinical experience and research in which Dr Fehmi and his team have analysed how attention styles affect brain-wave activity, the nervous system and the way we experience ourselves and the world around us. This latest book signposts how ‘paying attention to attention’ can help a diverse range of areas including stress, physical pain, emotional pain, performance and relationships.

The authors summarize the problem of attention – and its solution – as follows:

Our natural way of being – our natural way of paying attention broadly, intimately, and fluidly to the world around us – has gradually been subverted by the speed and ever-increasing demands of the modern world, which has led us to a chronic and rigid narrowing of focus. By opening our focus through simple habits of attention, we can reverse the negative effects of this artificially created stress and live calmer, more contented lives in which we’re healthier, more optimistic, and more deeply connected to our hearts, minds and bodies.

Les Fehmi and Susan Shor Fehmi, The Open Focus Life. Shambhala Publications 2021.

The Alexander Technique also demonstrates how attending and intending in unique and specific ways leads to a diverse range of outcomes, and so this book provides a useful comparison. One helpful aspect is the authors’ description of four kinds of attention styles, and the assertion that it is of great benefit to be able to move more fluidly between them. This is what they call the ideal of ‘living in Open Focus’. Here’s a short summary of the four attention styles they identify:

• Narrow attention – when we’re focusing intently on a particular task, event or emotion to the exclusion of everything else going on around us, and to the exclusion of the physical space we’re in. This attention style is essential to our functioning, but if it becomes our habitual response to every situation it has a number of negative consequences, including heightened stress levels.
• Objective attention – when we detach or distance ourselves from things, ideas or people. This underpins reasoning skills, impartiality, clarity and wise decision-making; however, when applied to people, it objectifies and reduces them to ‘things’, and so lacks empathy or an ability to see them as whole human beings.
• Immersed attention – when we merge our awareness with a project, person, or experience such that we lose our self-consciousness and feel completely absorbed in what we are doing. This experience is often liberating, and common examples include playing or listening to music, playing sport, viewing art or watching a movie.
• Diffuse attention – when we are receptive to stimuli from all around us at the same time, such as when we enjoy being in all our senses at once on a walk in nature. This is the opposite of narrow attention, and as such can make it difficult to accomplish certain tasks.

One interesting point to note is that the kind of attention required for the Alexander Technique does not seem to fit neatly into any of these four styles. For one thing, an aspect that is missing from the above is the ability to attend holistically to one’s internal map of body parts, known as the ‘body schema’ (see here for further details). Interestingly, I don’t think the very popular concept of flow fits very well into the above taxonomy either. That said, the authors’ emphasis on identifying different attention styles, and cultivating the agility and flexibility to move between them, is something I very much agree with.

One description of attention that has for a long time fitted the bill amongst Alexander practitioners is the ‘Unified Field of Attention’. This was coined by Frank Pierce Jones who described it as follows:

When I concentrated either on myself or on the goal I wanted to reach, something happened outside my field of attention to frustrate my attempt. It was only after I realized attention can be expanded as well as narrowed that I began to note progress. … I had to expand my attention so that it took in something of myself and something of the environment as well. It was just as easy, I found, instead of setting up two fields – one for the self (introspection) and another for the environment (extraspection) – to establish a single integrated field in which both the environment and the self could be viewed simultaneously.

Frank Pierce Jones, Freedom to Change (1997, 3rd ed) p.9.

But whether the ‘Unified Field of Attention’ is really an attention style all of its own, or perhaps a fluidity between established styles, is probably an open question. That’s something for the scientists and not for me to pronounce on.

In the Alexander Technique, we talk often of psychophysical unity, the idea that mind and body are inseparable, or at least very intimately linked. A well-known quote from FM Alexander himself drives the point home:

You translate everything, whether physical, mental or spiritual, into muscular tension.

FM Alexander

However, as an Alexander Technique teacher, I’m also interested in the next level up, as it were: the relationship between our psychophysical selves and our environment. But is there a word for this unity of self/environment?

In general, the English language fails at this point. Although various academic fields offer up a few abstruse words or phrases, I’ve recently grown to like the Chinese Neo-Confucian term Cheng. Cheng can be translated as ‘the integrated cohesion of any natural living system’ and it also means ‘integrity, authenticity or sincerity’. Here’s Jeremy Lent’s useful description:

Modern systems biology explains how natural entities from cells to eco-systems achieve cohesion by a continuous dynamic process in which the separate elements interact to form a whole, while the system as a whole acts on each of the separate elements. This describes the Neo-Confucian concept of ‘cheng’: the inherent integrity of a coherent, self-organized system that both arises from and forms all subsystems within it. In Neo-Confucian thought, living according to cheng was a path to achieving spiritual fulfilment.

Jeremy Lent, The Patterning Instinct p.266

If we accept that Cheng describes a real phenomenon, it begs the question: ‘What does it mean for us as humans to act within the scope, or purview, of Cheng?’.

This is clearly a big topic, and one I’ll address in a future post. For now, though, one helpful clue might be as follows: seek ways to attend to what’s around you with relationship in mind, rather than distance, separation or control.

The physical outcomes of the Alexander Technique (AT) are fairly well-established. There have been comprehensive studies into its benefits for conditions such as back pain, neck pain and Parkinson’s disease, and its positive effects on movement, postural tone and balance have also been documented. I have provided a concise review of these areas on my Alexander Technique Science page.

Some recent research has now looked in greater detail into the psychological and non-physical outcomes of the Alexander Technique. The paper (which is free to access) is entitled, ‘How does the Alexander Technique lead to psychological and non-physical outcomes? A realist review’.

The authors of the article choose the term ‘non-physical outcomes’ to include psychological and wellbeing outcomes, for example mood, sense of self, cognitive processes (such as the way people think), confidence, and emotion. Their paper concludes that the Alexander Technique can lead to a wide range of non-physical outcomes, including:-

• improved general wellbeing;
• increased sense of control;
• increased confidence.

Their research leads them to conclude that the above outcomes can be generated through:-

• improvements in physical wellbeing;
• the experience of mind-body integration;
• the application of AT skills to non-physical areas (these include ways of thinking or noticing physical tensing in emotionally driven situations such as in interpersonal situations).

The authors also make (to my mind) two surprising claims regarding a recent model of the Alexander Technique as follows:

Cacciatore et al.’s neurophysiological model of the AT is largely based in the physical but does include ‘emotional regulation’ resulting from improvements in postural tone and body schema. … Our findings go beyond this to add that emotional and non-physical outcomes are not always secondary, but can come from direct application of the AT to the non-physical.

I would counter the above claims as follows:

• Cacciatore et al’s model is not ‘largely based in the physical’ because it is a neurophysiological model which a) includes the intentional and attentional processes of the AT b) has at its centre the concept of body schema which is representational in nature and c) includes ’emotional regulation’ as one of its four outcomes of AT.

• It is contentious to claim that ’emotional and non-physical outcomes are not always secondary, but can come from direct application of the AT to the non-physical’. This is because the Alexander Technique is a psychophysical process, and as such cannot be applied directly to the non-physical. In other words, we must venture through the portal of the psychophysical and only then discover the panoply of AT effects, including its non-physical outcomes.

Recently I’ve been sharing thoughts on the ‘peaceful body’ with some of my clients:

A peaceful body is an unafraid body. It senses its source, its larger body, as a baby senses its mother or father cradling them in their arms.
A peaceful body is a safe body.
A peaceful body is a trustful body. It lets itself be touched by the world, and immediately and fully a peaceful body touches the world back.
A peaceful body doesn’t retain itself, doesn’t withdraw, doesn’t run away. It doesn’t push against, doesn’t fight. It meets. It joins. It receives, even when giving.
A peaceful body senses how it is always in contact, always enjoined, always in touch – a breeze against its face, the warmth of the sun on its shoulders, the ground under its feet.

Bruce Fertman

To me, this quote helps me consider how the mind and body can be viewed as a two-way street. In other words, if we can encourage certain peaceful conditions in the body, it is less likely that the mind will be troubled by negative emotions such as stress or anxiety. Quite simply, with such a body, there is just less room for these emotions.

This thought ties in neatly with some of the research into how we can deal with stress effectively which I’ve explored in a previous post. Do check out that post – a number of clients have expressed how it prompted for them a real ‘aha!’ moment in understanding and dealing with stress.