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So far Everett has created 22 blog entries.

Long Term Changes – Notes on My Alexander Technique Lessons

By Everett Goldner

As I go from month to month, sometimes having Alexander lessons with Leland regularly, sometimes more infrequently, I often think about how the minute adjustments add up in the long run. Right now it’s been several weeks since my last session, so I’m not feeling the immediate effects of the work, there are, if I take a few moments to notice, benefits that have stayed with me from the accumulated sessions I’ve had over the past fourteen months.

Where do they manifest? The most obvious spot to me is at the base of my spine, where the back meets the buttocks. Even if I hunch over to do something manual, like writing (like I’m doing right now), I don’t feel hunched the way I would have before Alexander. I can feel a suppleness in that area no matter what angle my body’s at, and if I do feel a bit of a hunch, it’s simple to relax the area and let it expand – and it simply feels good to do that.

This feeling of expansion moves up the back until it does encounter some resistance or friction – around the middle of my spine. In this area, I still tend to feel the “old” discomfort and awkwardness that I felt (pervasively) before I began Alexander. But it’s interesting to see how these two areas – one very comfortable, the other not – co-exist next to each other. It’s as if the way I inhabit my body has been partially changed for good and all by long-term Alexander work.

Like all real change, it’s incremental, sometimes invisible to the eye – but it adds up. This subtlety of change is really quite miraculous to watch from the inside, since we tend not to notice at all those things happening right underneath our own skin.

By |2016-03-12T11:17:12-05:00March 12th, 2016|Students' Blog|Comments Off on Long Term Changes – Notes on My Alexander Technique Lessons

After An Interim – Notes on My Alexander Technique Lessons

By Everett Goldner

It’s been a couple months since my last Alexander session – in the interim life has gone on and considerations of how I physically inhabit my body have faded into the background while I’ve been occupied with all of the usual demands life makes.

If I look back to a year ago, when I was just starting my first Alexander sessions, and consider my body-awareness then and now, I would say that the difference in how I habitually hold myself and move is subtle (but obvious when I sit now and think of it). I don’t hunch the way I used to; if I begin to lean forward, while sitting (in front of my laptop, say) and put needless pressure on my lower back, I straighten out after a few seconds and let it go. Because it doesn’t serve anything.

That this kind of pressure in the region of the back doesn’t serve anything is obvious – and would be obvious to anyone who has some basic body-awareness whether they’ve taken any Alexander or not. What is not obvious if you haven’t done any Alexander is how much that self-imposed pressure is not really confined to the lower back even though that’s where it’s concentrated and felt the most. The pressure is actually a full-body phenomenon. It’s felt in the lower back because something about the way I’m sitting is putting excess weight on that spot; I can feel this intuitively even if I can’t pinpoint the progression of it through my body. But I can feel that as my head angles down toward the screen (as is my tendency) rather than out and away from the feet (the Alexander idea being that the head and feet are always directed away from each other), this down-angling is a causal agent of the lower back pressure. If I take a moment to shift my gaze out (it’s not like this means I have to look away from the screen, I just have to widen my focus a bit), the lower-back pressure diminishes.

When I look at my Alexander experiences as a whole up to this point, I think the major points I’ve taken away and retained to some degree, are:

Your body is meant to be expansive. Many people move with their body contracted, curved inward. Aside from closing you off to the world, this also closes off your options about how to move – it restricts you and actually makes you less safe because you can’t react as easily to all the physical obstacles we encounter daily (cars, crowded subways, passing bicyclists on the sidewalk.)

At any given moment, you have more options – vocal, spatial options – than you have become accustomed to thinking you have.

Alexander is a journey, not a destination: as soon as you think you’ve reached a destination, the “goal” becomes something else.

Releasing tension and unwanted pressure in the body is not a matter of doing anything; it’s more a matter of cessation of extra activity.

By |2016-01-08T19:27:19-05:00January 8th, 2016|Students' Blog|Comments Off on After An Interim – Notes on My Alexander Technique Lessons

Brainstorming – Notes on My Alexander Technique Lessons

By Everett Goldner

In Alexander sessions over many months, I’ve noticed that doing Alexander creates a kind of “loosening” – in the body, obviously, but also in the mind. Often in sessions I find myself in a state similar to a brainstorming state that one looks for while sketching out the beginning of a new project – a loose, relaxed frame of mind in which interruptions don’t matter and thoughts flow easily. In my last session, I mentioned that if you could take an MRI of brain activity during an Alexander session, you’d likely see all sorts of areas light up that are usually associated with creativity. There’s a relationship between how expansive and enjoyable your body feels and how at ease and ready to do interesting work you are; anyone can understand that. But how does Alexander actually produce this state, which it does produce reliably?

The actual technique isn’t something I have a real understanding of, but my impressions gleaned through the work I’ve done go something like this: your feet
are at one end of your body; your head is at the other. If you want to expand into life, then you have to let these two poles move away from each other. When we try to focus on something – a task at hand, like writing this blog piece for me, reading it for you or scrutinizing any kind of information – the tendency is to contract into ourselves. I can feel it sitting at my laptop right now; the near-compulsion to *lean into* what I’m doing as if that will somehow make it a better piece, as if I’ll somehow transmit more *stuff* to you, the reader, because I’m just *so focused.*

I won’t, of course. And while reading you have not the slightest idea what the writer’s physical posture was like unless they tell you, and why would you care? Whereas: if I let my feet drift away from me, my spine naturally straightens out – which, among other things, makes it easier to breathe – and my gaze moves back
from a place of friction, bent over one line or one paragraph – into a state of near-frictionlessness, where I can survey the whole page and much more easily percolate over what comes next.

One of the mainstays of Alexander, as you probably know if you’ve done any, is the chair. This notion that “having the chair means you’ll never sit in it”, which at first seems like an impossibly esoteric Zen koan, comes over months of sessions tInhibitiono make a lot of sense. If you’re not in the chair – then you’re mobile, whatever your relationship to it may be. And no matter how closely you approach the chair, if for a moment you stop and notice what your body is doing, you’ll notice that: it’s still mobile. When you extend this sort of awareness to the utmost degree, you’ll find that it comes to mean that you can still be mobile even while on the chair.

My first impulse was to write in the chair, not on – which goes to show you how entrenched is our cultural concept of being swallowed up by furniture, and needing to make an excess of effort to *get away from* furniture. You don’t need to make any effort at all. You just need to understand that you’re an entity that is not dependent on chairs to know who you are in this world. Expanding the body, letting the feet and head move out – this frees you from the chair even while freeing up your mind for more interesting things. The two go hand in hand.

By |2015-10-17T12:23:12-04:00October 17th, 2015|Students' Blog|Comments Off on Brainstorming – Notes on My Alexander Technique Lessons

The Head/Spine/Neck/Voice Relationship – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

By Everett Goldner

I’ve never liked my voice all that much. It tends to feel dry, like I’ve got something caught in the back of my throat, and no matter how I try to give it variety it tends to sound, to me, rather on one note. I don’t usually express through it nearly as much as I would like to.

I’ve been discussing this with Leland in recent Alexander sessions, and the dynamic between the head, neck and spine; how these things play into the voice. For a few months I’ve noticed that while I’m in an Alexander session, my voice flows much more easily than it normally does; but the rest of the week, it sounds the way it usually sounds. So, how to have a flowing voice whenever I speak?

My (very limited) understanding is that the place where the spine ends, somewhere near or just below eye level is connected to the voice or influences the voice in a way similar to the diaphragm. The diaphragm is not a muscle that can be consciously controlled, but it can be influenced by paying attention to it; likewise, by paying attention to the top end of the spine, we can loosen the relationship it has with the voice and make this relationship (and the voice) more fluid. (Again, this is just what I’ve worked out over my last few sessions and may be totally inaccurate with regard to physiology.)

In any case, by doing this – paying attention to this spot – I’ve noticed recently that my voice does tend to free up somewhat. It doesn’t free up as much as it tends to while I’m in an Alexander session – I still feel like I’m speaking from the back of my throat more than I would like – but it does acquire some depth and quality that it generally lacks.

It’s a different quality of attention than most of us are probably used to – this idea of placing attention on one physical spot on the body, and a spot that’s more a notional spot than something you can see (you can imagine your skeleton, imagine the place where the spine ends, but you can’t see it). Of course, you can’t see the diaphragm either, and the way the diaphragm works is also pretty counter-intuitive – but the diaphragm isn’t related to the voice as directly as it is to the breath. The head-spine spot (as far as I can tell) hasn’t got much to do with the breath, but in some way has everything to do with your voice. That you can “change” your voice just by putting your attention here is a bit magical. Try it!

By |2015-09-05T20:31:13-04:00September 5th, 2015|Students' Blog|Comments Off on The Head/Spine/Neck/Voice Relationship – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

Writing and Incremental Change – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

By Everett Goldner

As I continue with Alexander, I find more often these days that, when I think about it, I’m pretty comfortable with moving from the task of writing into other activities and back again. As a writer this is not a small thing. Most of us are aware by now that any job in which you spend hours every day in front of a computer screen can be bad for your body’s alignment. I try to shake things up by standing at times while writing, walking back and forth, etc. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that writing involves a great deal of (more or less) physically motionless activity, aside from your fingers.

If I think back to a few years ago, while working on a long-range, long-term writing project, my solution when feeling stifled would often be to leave the apartment for a while – go for a walk. And while I might still do this today if I’d been writing all day long (plenty of research tells us that a walk is good for your creativity), there’s less of an impulse toward that; it’s easier to stay where I am and keep with the thought that’s in motion mentally or spiritually – without moving. Or to get up and stretch for a moment without really taking my attention away from the screen. Another way of putting it would be that it’s easier to feel that I’m still working on a piece even while nothing is obviously “happening”; a state that every writer is familiar with.

The larger question I’m concerned with here is not simply about being able to sit motionless for long periods of time. Anything we do that becomes habit and eventually becomes part of the way we live has to meet some kind of criteria – what does this do for me; how does it make life feel better (or smoother, or more engaged – insert your own adjective). The changes that Alexander creates are not at all obvious – in session, when Leland asks me what thoughts I’ve had on Alexander this week, it’s often hard to come up with anything off the top of my head. And yet I always feel quite sure that there *are* benefits to my continuing with Alexander week by week, even if I don’t always know what they are. The benefits manifest incrementally – which is how you tend to learn anything really worth knowing; in bits and by degrees at a time. I may not be able to tell you how my experience of my body through Alexander has changed from what it was two weeks ago, but I can definitely tell you how my experience is different from what it was six months ago – I feel more tuned-in. Sitting in front of the computer screen, reflecting, it’s easy for me to sense the long-term difference: I just feel freer.

By |2015-08-08T20:37:20-04:00August 8th, 2015|Students' Blog|Comments Off on Writing and Incremental Change – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

Acting – Notes on My Alexander Technique Lessons

By Everett Goldner

This week I’ve been thrown into a piece of theater for the first time in about six months. It’s not unusual for actors coming back to work after time off to feel lost, as if they have to rediscover the way into a piece, or into their body, or even to feel as if they’ve forgotten what acting ever was and have to reinvent the wheel.

I’ve been feeling some of this for the last few days. But I’ve been taking Alexander lessons more or less consistently for about six months – so how can it help me find the way?

The first thing that has occurred to me is to let go of the need to find the breath, or to break down the space between speech and breath, because I’ve learned in Alexander that there isn’t any place between the inhale and the exhale; it’s actually a continuum.

Knowing this, I let my feelings given a line of speech on the page run through that line. The sense I have of a given line or a given passage of text in rehearsal may or may not be the way I’ll perform it – I don’t really care at that point. What matters is that I keep feeling out that sense and working it the way you’d work a piece of clay you’re molding. Knowing that I can trust my breath to run out as far as it can, through the breadth of my body, is a big help in working the sense of the text, as I – to use a literal connotation – embody it. Changing it from dry words on the page into something infused with a meaning and connected to the other actors and the audience.

For the last couple months, I’ve found myself more in a place of letting what I’m learning in Alexander simply be in my body more than I’ve felt the need to analyze it or parse it out to understand it – I’m not sure that I have a better analytical understanding of Alexander than I had three months ago. But I may have a better intuitive understanding of it. My hope, really, is that as I continue studying Alexander I will gain a better connection with myself that will help me to better connect other people, both onstage and off.

By |2015-07-23T11:33:40-04:00July 23rd, 2015|Students' Blog|Comments Off on Acting – Notes on My Alexander Technique Lessons

Laziness vs. Allowing – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

By Everett Goldner

I’m going to touch on the idea of laziness in this post, which has come up at times in my Alexander lessons with Leland. To let the ribs hang, as you stand, to let the back expand, to let the breath occur – these are all phrases that have come up often in my lessons. A key word here is “let” – not to do these things, but to let them come about.

To allow something to happen is hardly synonymous with laziness, and “allowing” is a key concept in some martial arts I’ve practiced in the past. In Aikido, for instance, we allow the opponent’s energy to come at us, and then use their momentum to send them past us. The practitioner remains centered and undisturbed.

By letting the body be centered and its component parts lie easily and naturally, we can also quell disturbances. In my Alexander lessons, momentum doesn’t really come into it – as far as I know, no one’s running around in Alexander work; we’re just standing, sitting or lying on a table.

The big difference here is between being engaged in activity that has some objective, as in martial arts, where the objective might be to hit the opponent, send them flying or pin them, and activity that has no objective, only process. This “goallessness” of Alexander is a point I’ve written about before.

If we want to let things happen with ease, we do have to allow them to happen. If we begin to talk about “laziness” instead of ease or in place of ease, there are some differences. Allowing means allowing something to occur – the breath to be easy, the ribs to hang, etc. Laziness means simply letting go.

Both of these can be useful in dealing with one’s body and voice, and the key is, I think, to know which is appropriate to use at any given point. If you have a lot of excess tension in your body, it may not be useful to “allow” the tension to flow through your body – it doesn’t have any useful conduit to go to. Better to be lazy and simply let it go.

On the other hand, if you want to move from a state of excess thinking – like a state of stress where thoughts are running around in your head to no end – and change into a state where you can feel and connect more, to your body or to another person, then you may want to think in terms of “allowing” yourself to open up.

By |2015-05-16T15:50:33-04:00May 16th, 2015|Students' Blog|Comments Off on Laziness vs. Allowing – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

Alexander Technique and Spirituality – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

By Everett Goldner

At times, thinking about the Alexander Technique seems to me like trying to hold an inflated ball underwater – it doesn’t want to stay in place. It wants to rise and having risen, it wants to bob around. What is Alexander about?

I’ve done enough of it to know that there isn’t any definitive answer – today in session, Leland said that Alexander is for “people who are searching,” which is true enough. There isn’t a goal to the work or some point at which the process embarked on in Alexander ends, and so, because it is open-ended in this way, it naturally touches on very large questions. But it doesn’t do so in a large context – the context is in terms of how the body is relaxed or adapted to how it is standing or how it sits down.

If I am standing and move to sit down – before taking Alexander lessons, my goal would have been to reach the chair. It’s actually more accurate to say that I had no goal at all; I would just plop down in a chair and then be in the chair. Through my Alexander lessons, I’ve learned to forget about the chair totally. It doesn’t matter that the chair is there; what matters is that I can stay present and engaged in some sense with my body and with gravity while moving towards it.

Removing the ostensible “goal” (sitting in the chair) from the question of “how do I get from A to B” changes everything. If B doesn’t actually matter, then I can feel free to experience everything about moving from A. Letting go of the expectation is very freeing.

If I say that Alexander is for people who are searching, it brings the question of why we’re searching. And of course answers will be different for different people – personally I’ve always thought of myself as a searcher in the spiritual sense – people like the word “seeker” when speaking of spirituality; either serves just as well. A spiritual quest, of course, really has no end – we could speak of spirituality in terms of attaining happiness, which then becomes a discussion of what it means to “attain” happiness and why happiness is or isn’t in the moment that we’re in right now. It’s like the bobbing ball; inquiry makes it move around and shift forms, modalities. Alexander is like this too.

Alexander is about letting the body be open, be expansive and generally feel at ease. This of course helps the mind feel at ease as well. And when we feel at ease, we’re less concerned with questions like – what is it about, what is the thing for. And this is part of a spiritual quest too – letting the question go in order to, as a guru of mine once said, “just take the time to smell the roses.” It’s a truism in spiritual work that answers come when you aren’t expecting them, and by being so squirrely and hard to pin down, Alexander definitely matters in matters of the spirit.

By |2015-05-10T17:24:15-04:00May 9th, 2015|Students' Blog|Comments Off on Alexander Technique and Spirituality – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

Talking to the Body – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

by Everett Goldner

Leland has said to me at least once that “having a conversation with your body is not hard – it’s easier than everything else.”

That having a conversation with your body is easier than having a conversation with someone else may generally be true if you’re not a great conversationalist; your body is what you inhabit; there’s no distance to be crossed if you want to talk to your knee, or your hands, or your neck. And yet our bodies can also, for some of us (or maybe for all of us at times) feel like clothes that don’t fit very well. If you have an itch, you have to take action to scratch it, or just let it subsist, which can feel difficult or torturous. We’re subject to ailments and diseases as well as emotional highs and lows, desires, cravings that some people spend a lifetime learning to co-exist with. People choose to smoke nicotine knowing that it harms the body and the physiology, or take hard drugs knowing what the risks are. Why is this? Why don’t we all just converse with our bodies all the time and solve all our problems?

I‘m going to offer my opinion based on my understanding of Alexander work to this point. We can have a conversation with our bodies at any time to address any problem we might be having: yes, this is true. But people tend to look for a problem in a specific place – to have an expectation of “where” the problem is in other words. If your throat is tight, you may seek to relieve it by massaging it, or by swallowing. But the reasons that your throat are tight are not isolated to your throat, they have to do with your physiology in general.

Alexander deals with things generally – Leland has said to me that Alexander “tells you how to do everything generally and nothing specifically.” But when we *generalize* we tend to think of our “generalizations” as lacking value. Certainly western education teaches us to never generalize, to rather specify. So viewing things “in general” tends to be seen as bad or as frankly meaningless.

Certainly this is a point of struggle for me in Alexander work. If in Alexander I can only generalize about what I experience or how I wish to change what I experience, this can cause some intellectual friction (and I’m sure many people have this experience with Alexander work whether they can articulate it or not): there must be something to DO to “solve” the problem! It’s very easy to fall into this trap of “doing” things. We “shouldn’t” be general, but of course we can no more rid ourselves of generality than we can rid ourselves of our minds, the mind after all being a thing that can’t be located like the brain can be.

We can have a conversation with our body at any time; we just have to remember that it’s okay to have one. So far, Alexander work has definitely helped me “remember” that it’s okay to.

By |2015-04-18T21:04:47-04:00April 18th, 2015|Students' Blog|Comments Off on Talking to the Body – Notes on My Alexander Lessons

Exhaling and Stuttering – Notes on My 15th Alexander Technique Lesson

One exercise that comes up a lot in my Alexander lessons is a way of working with the exhale: to count rapidly by fives, either silently or aloud, while exhaling.

I’m not sure that I understand this: if I’m counting, I’m using up breath and so actually shortening rather than lengthening the exhale, aren’t I? The point of the exercise (I think) is to note how long the exhale was and so make it a bit longer each time, but when we do this, I often wonder if the effect isn’t self-fulfilling: the breath you’re taking tends to mold itself to however long you want it to be: so if I’m counting to ten, the breath will be about that long, and if I’m counting to forty-five, it will be about that long instead. There is of course an upward limit to your natural exhale-length before you have to think about how large a breath you’re going to take, but within a range I don’t really think that it matters.

The reason for putting attention on the exhale in the first place, as I understand it, is because the inhale is always coming anyway, while the exhale is where we have more conscious choice. So counting while exhaling makes sense on principle, but I often find it distracting in practice. If I want a really pleasurable exhale, I’m not going to count out loud while exhaling. What about counting silently? If I try it, I find that, even moreso than with counting out loud, it’s hard to use as a yardstick of the exhale-length; my breath tends to adapt to however long I know I’m going to be counting for.

So what do I really learn from this exercise? I suppose I notice the ways in which my mind plays tricks on me. I’ve found that Alexander lessons in general tend to show me the various little ways in which my mind and body play tricks to hide tension or hide a lack of relaxation, expansion, openness. This often creates a feeling that I’m “stuttering” through the lesson in a physical (and sometimes verbal) sense.

And though I’ve been taking lessons for a few months now, the “stutterings” tend to happen with about the same frequency as they did when I began working with Leland. Does this mean I’m not making progress? Or that I’m making constant, steady progress? I don’t know – apparently I haven’t yet found a way of gauging progress. Small habits that aren’t necessarily great habits to have – like my tendency to crack my fingers and toes – haven’t changed (yet) as a result of my Alexander lessons, though it’s been pointed out to me many times that this doesn’t release tension from the joints, but actually does the opposite: creates tension. More tension within my body is not a desired goal, but I keep doing it for the same reason a smoker smokes: something about it just feels good.

By |2015-04-11T15:28:56-04:00April 11th, 2015|Students' Blog|1 Comment
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