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| Alexander the great |
| Rrishi Raote / New Delhi Sep 07, 2008, 01:04 IST |
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An old technique finds new acceptance among scientists and practitioners.
Talking to me on the phone from England, Carolyn Nicholls is also paying attention to how she does so — making sure that she isn’t holding the receiver too tightly, or pressing it into her ear, or trapping it awkwardly between shoulder and head. I, at the other end, am doing all of the above.
Nicholls is a teacher of the Alexander Technique (AT), which is “a way of learning how you can get rid of harmful tension in your body”. It was pioneered by a man called Frederick Matthias Alexander at the turn of the last century in Australia. Alexander was an outback man, but devoted to Shakespeare. He set up a one-man touring Shakespeare company, and took his amateur act around the country. He had been a premature baby, ill throughout his childhood, and at some point found himself losing his voice. The doctors said they were helpless, so Alexander decided to heal himself.
He set up mirrors in which he observed himself sitting, speaking, reciting. Slowly he realised that the way he held himself, the degree of muscular tension he had, was inhibiting his voice. Knowing what was wrong, he corrected his posture and method, and got his voice back — and with it a new career.
Other actors and performers came to him for help, and with the experience he gained Alexander developed his ideas into the foundation of his technique. In 1904 he emigrated to England, and stayed there. Consequently, the “UK is the home of AT — it has the most teachers, the history, the biggest experience”, Nicholls says. She herself heads the Brighton Alexander Technique College. AT is also used at the Royal College of Music in London, and New York’s Juilliard School of Performing Arts.
But AT is not only for performers. As Nicholls’s sole Indian student, and now the only AT teacher in India, Padmini Menon says, modern lifestyles are stressful, and “the instinctive response to stress is to tighten. You get into a state of tightness and that becomes normal. From tightness to tightness, there’s never any release.”
Menon, who teaches in Bangalore, says that “A lot of wear and tear that we interpret as age is not really that — it’s years of misuse.” The word “use” has a special meaning in AT. It is, says Menon, “the pattern of muscular coordination that you have built up for yourself. Each person’s use is different,” and manifests even in such simple acts as breathing.
So AT teachers show their pupils (not “patients”) how to unlearn ingrained bad habits of working and posture. Because the teacher challenges what your body has come to believe is normal, it takes a number of lessons for the pupil to overcome those habits.
“Toddlers,” says Menon, “have very good use. It’s a natural thing, they’re growing and learning balance. They sit, stand and bend very gracefully, with minimal effort,” and also balance a proportionately large and heavy head with ease.
The head-neck-back axis is critical. “The neck,” says Nicholls, “is the mediator between brain and the rest of the body. When you’ve got a lot of compression there you can reduce the flow of blood to the brain... The central column of the spine actually has a profound effect on how the rib cage is supported.”
She offers an example: “Old people tend to droop their necks forward. The chest is depressed and hollowed. Inside, you’re pressing on the lungs and digestive system. When you have the lessons what becomes apparent to you is that it’s not about particular ways, it’s about what you’re doing doing inside your body.” It’s because of the amount of specialised experience required that it takes so long to learn AT. To be a teacher and give your own lessons you typically train intensively for three years.
Menon describes a starter lesson. First, she says, “I sit them down and talk to them about AT, about what it’s based on and what the theory behind it is. Then I tell them I’ll start working with them, that it’s hands-on, to help them get an experience of their body working in a new way. I tell them not to take it too seriously, not to get too fixated with what I’m saying, to let the words wash over them.”
She has them sit on a chair and stand up, then lie on a table, and then use the chair again, observing all the time what their particular “use” is, and what can be done to correct it, to bring the body back to its natural state. With further lessons, specific problems can be tackled.
Her pupils so far suffer from repetitive strain injury (RSI), spondylitis and back, neck and shoulder pain. “Most have said that they felt lighter, taller and freer. A few have begun to get more aware of how they’re tightening.” One with RSI “has learnt that he can exercise a degree of control over his own condition”. Another “felt he was moving with springs under his feet.”
Menon describes her own experiences. “You suddenly feel something give inside and you feel, oops, wow, that’s what it’s like to have a free neck.” Another time, “I felt this weird uncoiling in my back... this relentless feeling of something uncoiling away.” She sounds blissful.
A long-awaited scientific study recently published in the British Medical Journal says that AT does indeed help reduce back pain — and as a result, “we’re getting far, far more calls”, says Nicholls. But AT still has a long way to go in India.
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