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There are so many schools of thought and techniques for how to do things — how to move around, how to exercise, how to stretch, how to breathe, how to dance, how to make love, and so on and so forth. And yet, we go through life and in most cases nobody ever teaches us how to just be. In other words, how to do nothing at all — how to just exist.
But in fact, much of the time we are just standing, or sitting, or getting in and out of a seat, or picking things up and carrying them, or walking. These are seemingly mundane activities and it seems like we don’t pay as much attention to the technique of how we are doing them as compared with doing something, like exercising, playing an instrument or driving a vehicle.
In fact, it is how we carry out these mundane activities which creates the essence of what we are and how we experience existence by default. What a lot of people may not realize is that somebody can actually go through life causing acute stress, tension, a lack of ease, and even repetitive injury to his or her body just by means of how he or she is doing something as simple as standing, sitting, walking or picking something up.
Just focusing in on the two most basic of these (standing and sitting) — most individuals are holding tension of their own volition, on an unconscious or subconscious level, which is causing a lack of ease in the body and creating blockages and problems with the body’s natural flow. Where does this tension come from? There are many opinions about the origins of these stressors, but the fact is that this can be a dualistic, stressful, and tense planet to grow up on. By the time somebody reaches adulthood, they can be carrying stress and tension in their body without even realizing it.
The Alexander Technique was developed in the late 1800s by a gentlemen who was trying to perform a job and found that he was exerting himself to the point where his voice gave out and he couldn’t even effectively communicate without exhausting himself. Trying to find the root cause of this, Frederick Mathias Alexander discovered that in the act of trying and doing, these intentional efforts were causing the body to tense up and hold a great amount of stress and were creating blockages and a lack of alignment.
If you ever look at a baby or small child (or if you look at a wild animal in nature), you can see that they have a lightness and a freeing ease of motion and they seem to just elevate as if floating on a cloud effortlessly. It appears as though there is a string pulling them up by the top of their head and pure, natural alignment and ease just comes naturally. By the time most individuals have finished going through formal schooling, whereby for decades they sat uncomfortably for long stretches of time over and over again, their natural ease seems to have become shot and they no longer resemble this freeing, upward mobility in their posture and overall existence.
The Alexander Technique doesn’t really focus on trying or doing to correct this issue — rather, it focuses on an overall being-ness of the complete individual. The goal of the technique is not to focus on having a straight back or good alignment. Rather, the technique shows you how to increase your awareness of your own body and your own inclinations to hold tension or blockages in certain areas of the body.
Once you grow your awareness, more and more, which is a nuanced skill that can take several months to mature, then you can start to focus on letting go of this tension and ignore the urge to contrive a certain type of posture or movement. This is an act of great discipline, as we are naturally conditioned to hold our bodies in a certain way, whether standing, sitting, walking or something else. And so, somebody employing the technique will grow an awareness of the tension in their bodies, and then once that awareness is rich and mature, that person can practice the act of letting go of this tension, simply allowing the body to relax in a way, and not trying to contrive it into any manner of posture or movement.
Once you let go of these tensions and allow the body to reset, the posture and alignment of the body will naturally balance out and stretch upward and outward in a freeing and elevating manner. Just like how an animal in the wild moves and exists with great poise and elegance, so too can your body begin to take on this beautiful constant interaction with its environment, once you learn to get out of its way. Once this becomes second nature, then the simple existence of you within your body becomes a sort of an art form, with your surrounding environment as the canvas and your body as the paintbrush.
Once people begin to apply a higher level of energy, focus, and importance to the art of simply being, then the quality of life improves and the incidents of health issues or pains can decrease, as the body gets the level of awareness and relaxation needed in order to do what it is divinely designed to do — which is to be free and exist and move freely and easily.
I was fortunate enough to be trained as a young man in the Alexander Technique by a formal instructor, and it is a skill that stays with you for life and is just as important as other skills which are held in high esteem like communication, manners, oral hygiene, sense of humor, good driving, or any other such thing. Although I was taught formally, you don’t have to get personalized instruction in order to gain a grasp of this concept.
I will recommend further reading in this subject for self-education, as well as other resources in terms of finding an instructor, if you do wish to receive personalized teaching here:
RapidRegeneration.com/AlexanderTechnique
Take a moment and listen to your body. Try and gain an awareness of where it may be holding tension and stress. Once you figure that out, let it go and allow the body to exist in a state of sort of nothingness, where it doesn’t need to do anything and instead of contriving itself into a certain position, you just allow it to be and when you feel yourself starting to hold stress or tension, you let it go and you just allow your body to do what it does. As you increase awareness of tension, let that tension go and just relax. You don’t try throughout this process to have good posture or sit up straight or stand up straight, but you will likely notice that your body will actually maintain an upward sort of spiraling upright energy.
The stereotype of the end result of this is somebody who is standing straight and upright, with both feet underneath the shoulders and arms relaxed by the sides, or somebody sitting up straight with their back erect, neck and head upright, and legs hip-width apart and feet flat on the floor. I have experienced this as a result of doing the Alexander Technique and watching my body take over. I think overall this is a worthy goal to have this sort of ease of being-ness in terms of your normal default state of being.
Where I might differ from more purist Alexander Technique advocates is I do think there is an appropriate time to really relax, sit back and yes even slouch back in a recliner chair and put your feet up and really relax the body in that way as opposed to sitting upright and straight all of the time. You don’t necessarily want to exhaust yourself by having perfect posture all the time. It can be rejuvenating to allow yourself time to really lean back and relax sometimes.
The point is to constantly maintain a certain body awareness and try and purge the engrained tensions you hold in your body and relax. As you do that, the body should naturally open up and maintain more of an upright energy that resembles good posture — but as you get better at the technique this should happen naturally, organically, and effortlessly, and not because you’re forcing or contriving it.
We all deserve to move around and just simply be in a state of beautiful elegance. Do increase your level of awareness of your own being-ness and see if you notice changes in how you feel and how you operate throughout the day. This is not an easy area to master with no guidance or instruction though. If you feel intimidated or overwhelmed, do some reading and/or self-learning into the school of the Alexander Technique or find an instructor of the technique to work with more intimately.
Good luck!