Will I experience change?

After a first lesson, some students report greater ease in movement and relief from discomfort. Some feel more buoyant while others feel more grounded. Let me tell you another way you might experience change: curiously, it is in your relationship with inanimate objects. While everyone’s experience is unique, here is mine.

In the first term of my training to be a teacher of the Alexander Technique, I receive a large shipment of boxes at a local postal store. The boxes are bulky and heavy, so the store kindly loans me a flat wooden cart to wheel them home. It has a waist-high metal handle at one end in the shape of an inverted U. It has these wobbly wheels on it, the kind you find on grocery carts. As I set off toward home, the wheels freeze and turn perpendicularly to the concrete sidewalk. I’m stuck. Now, really more out of curiosity than anything else, I pause, remind myself to free my neck and let the head balance forward and up. I stop using so much effort and – lo and behold – we’re moving. The wheels don’t seize up. No more carts behaving badly. I can hardly believe it. I doubt the validity of my experience. Was it some kind of coincidence?

I very lightly touch the lid with my fingers, I direct, pay attention to my head/neck/torso relationship and let my wrist open and do the work. The lid comes off. Coincidence? Yes, absolutely: the coincidence of the change in my thinking mirrored in improved coordination. “Was that the Alexander Technique?” my friend asks.

I’m using a heavy tool called a Collins Axe to dig a hole in rocky ground. I’m working pretty hard, it’s hot, and the hole doesn’t seem to be getting much deeper. Again, I stop, redirect, allow my joints – my wrists and elbows – to be free, and let the axe do its job. Three things happen. First, I’m not swinging the axe so far behind me, second, I am more in touch with the tool’s momentum, and third, it’s slicing through the ground without much help from me.

Tools, lids, carts, all respond to a change in thinking. What about you and me? Aren’t we both the tool and the mover of our own experience? Every interaction of our day is ripe with potential. Every movement presents the opportunity of achieving embodied mindfulness in our response to a task, whether commonplace or rare. And isn’t this the sort of change you’ve been looking for? You will experience it first hand in an Alexander lesson. What are you waiting for?