Expanding Awareness

The kind of attention you pay to others is detectable

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:28:20 +0100

There is a thing that it’s like to be attended to in different ways. For example, being attended to with grippy attention in a contracted field of awareness feels different from being attended to with un-fixated attention in a wide field of awareness.

I think people generally don't realise this or recognise the subtleties of how their mode of attention affects others.

I have pointed out in the context of 'dating and attraction' that a lot of people—and I suspect especially men—can unknowingly use a kind of attention that may be perceived as predatory or creepy.

Contracted awareness, fixated attention and 'leaky desire’—which are very much perceivable by others, even if these dynamics are not consciously accessible to either party—feel oppressive and threatening.

Open awareness, free attention and what we could perhaps call ‘owned’ or ‘boundaried’ desire feel much more pleasant to be beheld with.

And, of course, all of this is visible to a third party as well.

In the absence of being able to name what’s happening, we default to speaking about vibes.

Zettels: 2.2a1a1b3a, 2.2a1a1b3a1

IFS, presence and innate wisdom

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:30:00 +0100

I do a monthly Q&A for students of my course. Here is a question from September 2026, and an edited version of my answer.

In IFS there's the concept of the Self, which is said to carry certain innate qualities — things like clarity, calm, and curiosity. You mentioned that thinking from a place of spacious awareness feels different, more wise. I can definitely notice my own thinking becoming clearer and more "wise" when I drop into that open state.

What do you think of IFS, and do you think there's some kind of innate wisdom we can tap into by accessing certain states?

For anyone unfamiliar, IFS stands for Internal Family Systems, developed by Richard Schwartz. And I'm going to try to constrain my answer rather than type a few thousand words, which is a risk on this topic.

I should also say that I'm not an expert on IFS specifically. Except for having read No Bad Parts, my experience with parts work comes from my now four-year training with the Aletheia Advanced Coaching Program. This has an enormous focus on parts, and is inspired by IFS, but it diverges from IFS in a number of ways.

Let's start with these two traditions that use parts explicitly. They both claim that parts exist, where parts are semi-autonomous sub-personalities that have a pretty limited view of how the system (you) works. They have a goal, which is often to prevent you from feeling something, or to get you to feel something. We could also call this 'conditioning', as it's learned early in life.

It's often said that "parts always have good intentions", but I've found that some people really, really hate this view. Instead, I prefer to say that parts always have goals that make sense to them.

For example, a part might want you not to feel ashamed, and its strategy for doing this is to get you to reach for your phone and put a YouTube video on to distract or numb you. This action has a bunch of consequences. The rest of you might not see this as 'good', but the part doesn't see any of that. Its goal is for you not to feel ashamed, and it succeeded. Other parts might have things to say about your YouTube use, and so you end up bouncing from part-driven behaviour to part-driven behaviour.

For me, parts explain what I have seen in Alexander Technique, but which Alexander Technique has limited theory for. The language I use in module 3 on the autopilot is influenced by these ideas. A stimulus can trigger a part, the part takes over and does whatever its strategy is to achieve its goal, making an image it has of how you and the world should be feel real. An interesting parallel here is that Alexander Technique's inhibition and IFS’s un-blending are probably very similar moves.

Importantly, parts-based behaviour happens in parts-shaped ways, i.e. with my Four Spectra of Presence moving away from presence and towards autopilot (zoning out, contraction, fixation, and stuckness). Parts are not only psychological, but psychophysical, hence muscle tension and straining. In my view, trying of the kind I describe in the course is evidence of a part in action.

Let's now turn to that spacious, open state you mentioned. IFS calls this Self, Aletheia calls it Presence. For transparency, I don't know if Self and Presence are exactly the same thing. I think that Aletheia's 'Presence' and mine are the same place, or at least very close, but I'm holding it lightly for now.

One view of presence is that it's what's there when parts aren't running the show. Rather than having a sub-personality take over, with its limited and rigid conception of what should be happening and how things should be, the whole of your being can remain involved. From the inside this feels like the other end of the Four Spectra of Presence: fully there, spaciously aware, un-fixated and available to act or not act.

You describe "my own thinking becoming clearer and more 'wise' when I drop into that open state." We could explain this simply: you can see the bigger picture, rather than being caught up in a single story with a single appropriate strategy.

There are two other lenses, depending on whether you prefer a neurological perspective or a spiritual one.

For the neurological lens I'll point you towards Iain McGilchrist and his work on brain lateralisation. He suggests that each hemisphere of the brain has specialised for a different way of attending to the world.

Briefly, his idea is that the left hemisphere seeks to apprehend the world, to control and manipulate objects within it. It analyses things, i.e. breaks them into pieces so that the pieces can be looked at in isolation. Its attention is sticky and it finds it hard to switch focus. It is certain and overconfident about things and itself.

The right hemisphere, by contrast, seeks to comprehend the world, to see it as whole before seeing the detail. It is able to see context, flow and the relationship between things, and it can deal with uncertainty, the unfamiliar and paradox.

His main theory is that these two hemispheres are supposed to work together, with information going first to the right hemisphere (to comprehend the whole), passed to the left (to apprehend the pieces) and then passed back to the right to be reintegrated into the whole. But, he says, modern culture has tipped the scale towards left hemisphere dominance, meaning that "we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it" (The Matter with Things, p7).

So to answer your question from this more neurological view, perhaps presence is that state where there is appropriate functioning of both hemispheres, rather than the left being allowed to dominate.

If I were feeling bold, I might claim that, from this perspective, what I'm teaching is the skill of noticing when the left hemisphere dominates the relationship and gently bringing the hemispheres back into appropriate relationship with each other (epistemic status: maybe? ask me again in 10 years).

At the same time, there are two cautions here. One is that his work is contested. The other is that much of McGilchrist's work is based on studies on patients with brain damage where the differences are clearly amplified. I think there's something really important in McGilchrist's work, but it's worth holding lightly.

Finally, there is the spiritual angle. Steve March, who developed Aletheia, draws a lot from the Diamond Approach, which is an explicitly spiritual tradition, itself influenced by Sufism, Buddhism, modern psychology and other things. One of the core claims of the Diamond Approach is that Presence has a long list of different qualities, which sound like IFS's qualities of Self.

For example, where IFS has Curiosity, Compassion, Calm, Clarity, Courage, Confidence, Creativity, and Connectedness, the Diamond Approach talks of Compassion, Unconditional Love, Joy, Value, Strength, Will, etc. These are different 'flavours' that Presence can show up in depending on what's needed in the moment. This also just seems true to me now, as a matter of experience, but I have no evidence to lean on besides that.

In short, you ask "do you think there's some kind of innate wisdom we can tap into by accessing certain states?" And my answer is simply 'yes'. I've experienced it often, and I've seen others experience it often. It just seems true to me by now.

Here's a reading list if you want to go deeper:

IFS: No Bad Parts, or perhaps one of the other books by Richard Schwartz

McGilchrist:

Easy mode: Ways of Attending or The Divided Brain (film)
Hard mode: The Master and His Emissary
God mode: The Matter with Things (it's 1500+ pages long)

Diamond Approach:

The Unfolding Now - A. H. Almaas

Can you think and be present at the same time?

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:39:49 +0000

I do a monthly Q&A for students of my course. Here is a question from August 2026, and an edited version of my answer.

Is it even possible to think about something and be present in the environment you're in? I notice whenever I think about something, like some task from work, or what I should do in the evening, I get into this kind of fog and forget about everything around me to some extent.

The fog you're describing is a contraction of awareness. In this case, your awareness is mostly contracting around your own thinking to the exclusion of the other domains of awareness (this is a map I introduce in the course).

It is possible to think while being present in the world, but it's counter to a lot of people's habits and can feel unfamiliar. That unfamiliarity guides you back into contraction, particularly in a demanding context like work where thinking just needs to happen regardless of how you feel. (This is actually how these kinds of habits form: there is some urgency or pressure, and you do whatever works, even if it isn't the best way. If it works, it crystallises.)

At the same time, I don't want to imply that all thinking should happen while fully spacious and present to the world. There are modes of cognition that seem to require more resources and come with some contraction.

Contraction is not the same as forgetting yourself, though. You can have contracted awareness, perhaps to use cognitive systems that require it, while still knowing that you're there, able to notice what's happening and make new choices. You can't inhibit your habits if you're not 'there' to inhibit them.

Forgetting yourself might look like going from task to task on autopilot without awareness of the bigger picture. Is this the right task to be working on? Is this the best way to go about this task? Is this even worth doing? It's also what leads from thinking about your evening to scrolling recipes to watching YouTube videos, because you weren't there to catch yourself.

This isn't what you're describing, as you're talking about forgetting everything around you, but I've gone through it to clarify the difference. In this case, I think some amount of it is fine and natural, but there are two things you can experiment with.

First, the skill I teach is not to be spacious all the time, but to bring more conscious awareness and control to these dynamics of your experience. When you notice the world getting foggy, great! Good noticing. You could then choose to expand out again and come into a larger space, or you could choose to continue your work as you are.

I don't want you to notice the fog and judge that as bad. I want you to be able to notice the fog and ask—is this what I want? And then to be able to make a constructive change if it's not what you want. Really, this work is about avoiding getting stuck in any mode, like contracting into work and forgetting the world and, often, yourself.

Second, I would encourage you to consider that it is possible to think without forgetting the world, even if you're not sure yet whether it is. The reason for this is that your habit of contracting to think is likely a lot stronger than is necessary for whatever cognitive function that may require the contraction. Can you forget the world less while still thinking?

In my experience, something paradoxical happens when I think while spaciously aware of the world: the quality of my thinking improves, and thinking often happens by itself. Consider the possibility that you have two ways of thinking: a contracted way, which will probably feel familiar, and a spacious way, which will probably feel unfamiliar and like you're not trying hard enough.

What's it like to get to know the unfamiliar, spacious way of thinking?

For example, one student noticed this while reading:

"Practising this while reading a book. Definite change in cognition, understanding the text in front of me coming much quicker, much less need to re-read challenging concepts. Super powers? maybe." — @_le_big_mac

As you've been reading this, have you contracted? Is the world in a fog? Just let your awareness expand out again, let your attention move around, and remember that you could put the device away and do something else.

What's your experience like now?

The appropriate amount of effort is zero

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 18:06:08 +0000

Most people put too much effort into everything they do. Here’s a good example from Kristijan around tension in his hands when touching and holding things:

"Something clicked about inhibition and non-doing (in Alexander Technique), and the strongest effect has been a relaxation of my hands.

Like I was touching and holding things with 40% more tension than required for that object or activity. @m_ashcroft any thoughts?" — @kristijan_moves

It’s a great example, because gripping too tightly, as we might with the hands, is a great metaphor for what it’s like everywhere else in your system. There’s a pattern of pervasive over-gripping that, once you start to look for it, you will find everywhere.

There is an appropriate amount of energy required for each activity. Holding a cup, turning a steering wheel, or writing a blog post all need exactly the amount of energy that they need. This may sound like a truism, but if it were so obvious, why do many drivers often realise they are driving with a vice-like grip, with tension running up into their shoulders and jaws?

Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone^[1].

Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero.

This idea is where the concept of non-doing can trip people up, because it doesn’t mean no action. It means no effort, even though the amount of energy required could be large. Or, to borrow from Daoist wisdom:

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." — Lao Tzu

Nature is an enormous flow of energy, yet nature makes no effort. Everything nature does is perfectly well-suited to what it does, and it cannot be otherwise. This is why non-doing comes with a felt experience of effortlessness, when it seems like everything is working exactly the way it’s supposed to be.

Consider this quote from Katie Ledecky who, with 14 Olympic medals, is described as “the most decorated female swimmer in history”:

“I felt so relaxed. It just felt very easy, and that's why it surprised me that I had broken my world record.” — Katie Ledecky

Not only that, but trying too hard can reduce performance. Here’s marathoner Ryan Hall:

“… you don't get your best performances by trying harder. When you see the guy who wins the race, he usually jogs out of it waving to the crowd, feeling good. The people who look the worst come in after the top guy.”^[2] – Ryan Hall

So why is it so common to effort when it both feels harder and reduces performance?

For one thing, there are all kinds of societal scripts in the modern age that push us in that direction. All those hustle bros captured by Total Work push their grindset worldview, recapitulating the Protestant work ethic for new audiences. The influence of these cultural waters on our psychophysical wiring can’t be overstated.

These scripts team up with one of the core principles of Alexander Technique: Faulty Sensory Appreciation. When you try so hard all the time, that level of effort feels familiar and you stop noticing it. Put another way, years of overdoing mis-calibrate your senses so effort feels right and ease feels wrong. If you follow your feelings, you are guided back to that same old familiar where you’re trying too hard without even realising it.

By the way, this phenomenon happens all the time in many other domains, and can be the cause of much trouble.

What all this means is that when you pull back the effort below your familiar baseline, it can feel unfamiliar, like you’re not trying hard enough, and those societal scripts I mentioned before can make this experience hard to stay in, even if you’re now closer to the appropriate amount of energy needed.

The way out of this is to experiment with feeling the unfamiliarity of trying less hard and seeing what it’s like. In Kristijan’s case, he played with this for long enough that his sensory perception updated to reflect what was going on more accurately, and he was able to feel that he had been using too much tension before.

So I invite you to go about your day and practice dropping the effort. See how weird it feels, but notice how the activity is still getting done. See what it’s like to drop the energy too low, where you might become lethargic or your performance drops. Notice the sweet spot as a surprising experience of ease and a kind of elegance: the less you grip, the smoother and more precise the movement.

Happy experimenting!

If you get hung up on this definition, just substitute it for something like “over-efforting” or “trying too hard”, as the underlying phenomenon is the same regardless of what you call it. ↩︎
The Philosophy of Ryan Hall ↩︎

ADHD and the Alexander Technique

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 14:10:23 +0000

Some people with ADHD have reported benefits in applying some of the ideas from my materials. What could be going on here?

My interest in Alexander Technique’s potential relevance to ADHD arose because quite a few people with ADHD who have engaged with my materials have reported improvement in how ADHD manifests for them. I’m curious why this is, because my lay understanding is that ADHD has more to do with attention control than with awareness.

But reports like this thread from Thomas got me curious: what if ADHD has a significant awareness component as well, such that learning to notice and control what’s happening with awareness might also be beneficial for those with ADHD?

"Recently found something that helped me make progress on some ADHD problems that I had been hard stuck on: Alexander Technique (though @m_ashcroft's course )

Sort of like an extremely practical form of embodied mindfulness, although that description doesn’t do it justice." — @thommers

I’ll comment on some points that Thomas raises and see what conclusions we might be able to draw.

Understanding attention vs awareness

First of all, for anyone who hasn’t seen me talk about this, it’s important to remember that attention and awareness are distinct, yet mutually interacting ways of relating to the world.

My view, which I’ve seen reflected both in The Mind Illuminated(Culadasa) from a Buddhist-meditation perspective, and in The Master And His Emissary(Iain McGilchrist)from a neuroscientific perspective, is as follows:

Attention is the ‘narrow beam’ that we can move from object to object, although it can jump of its own accord to varying extents depending on the person and practice.
Attention can only rest on one thing at a time. There is no such thing as multi-tasking, only rapid switching.
Awareness is the entire set of things around and within you that you are able to notice. If you cannot notice something, it’s not within your awareness.
Awareness has size and shape, which both change continuously. Highly attention-grabbing things can immediately and strongly contract the field of awareness, a phenomenon commonly known as tunnel vision or target fixation.
Awareness contains, but also constraints attention. You cannot put your attention on anything that is outside your awareness.

Is ADHD a problem of hyper-contracted awareness?

I don’t have ADHD, so I rely on reports like Thomas’ to give me a window into what the experience might be like, although I also recognise that his experience of ADHD might not be like others’ experience of ADHD.

Thomas reports that, in fact, he has “sharp and stable levels of attention all the time”, but…

"Bigger issue is my awareness often collapses to a tiny blob, shutting out everything else. This closing off can be very strong, to the point where I literally won’t hear ppl around me, don’t see objects that are in the way, don’t notice the lights are on/off at odd times etc" — @thommers

From my perspective, a “tiny blob” of awareness could be problematic few reasons.

Hyper-contracted awareness leads to hyper-constrained attention, where attention cannot go anywhere outside the boundary of awareness. If you can’t notice people or objects around you then you can’t make any choices regarding them. In effect, you would be stuck in tunnel vision until something sufficiently powerful knocked you out of it, like exhaustion, an intrinsic loss of interest or a sufficiently powerful outside stimulus.

On its own, this seems to makes sense, but it doesn’t square with some other reports of ADHD that suggest it’s either difficult or even impossible for people with ADHD to sustain attention on a single thing. Instead, attention seems to move from one thing to another with extreme speed, leading to experiences something like “I was trying to read a book, but now I’m playing online Chess—how did that happen?”

I suspect these two views are compatible, though, if we consider that the tiny blob of awareness could itself, for whatever reason, bounce around with attention constrained inside it. The flow of events might go something like:

hyper-contracted awareness on Object A with experience of hyper-focus, then something about Object A triggers the idea of Object B
brief ‘flash’ of awareness expansion only long enough for attention to shift to Object B
awareness immediately hyper-contracts around Object B and a new hyper-focus emerges

This could happen extremely quickly with multiple cycles in quick succession, leading to rapid shifting, repeated hyper-focus and low awareness that this dynamic is happening at all, because awareness—the thing that allows you to notice things like this—is itself too contracted.

Could awareness control help with ADHD?

If this analysis is accurate—or at least sufficiently accurate for some people’s experience of ADHD—then learning to better notice and control the dynamics of awareness, rather than attention, could be helpful to reduce some of the unhelpful manifestations of ADHD.

One way to catch this might be to practice having a more spacious awareness in order to catch the cycle as it’s happening. If the ‘flash’ of awareness that happens with the focus shift could be expanded or extended, even a little, it might provide enough of an entry point to notice and interrupt the cycle.

In general, I wouldn’t attempt to train this in the context of task focus, because the pull of attention is too strong. Instead I suggest practicing in low-stakes contexts, like going for a walk in nature without external input like audiobooks, podcasts or music. Over time the ‘baseline’ level of awareness can improve enough to make noticing the rapid switching easier, or even to reduce the “tiny blob of awareness” effect when in hyper-focus mode.

Mind-body interactions and ADHD

The other point that Thomas raises in that thread is the relationship between awareness and how to body responds to it, which may be particularly emphasised in ADHD.

A shorthand way of explaining this relationship is “where awareness leads, body follows”. Contracted states of awareness tend to shrink the stature of the body, particularly in such a way as the body moves towards where contracted awareness is located.

Put another way, if you are only aware of the space in front and down from you, like if you’re working on a laptop or using a phone, your body will tend to slump forwards and down. Beyond the ‘bad’ posture, this will also come with all kinds of generalised muscle tension and constricted breathing patterns.

"how your body tends to lean towards the part of the space youre aware of. This is two-way: you lean towards your awareness and awareness is drawn to where you lean. This kind of bodily feedback is helpful for recognizing when your awareness drifts, but also actively correcting it" — @thommers

As Thomas correctly points out, if you are able to notice that your body is crumpled, something aches and your breathing is shallow, this can be enough of a cue to intervene. This can be as simple as moving, or it can involve an expansion of awareness back into the broader space around you. In general, that moment of ‘coming back to yourself’ and moving around comes with an expansion of awareness anyway, whether you’re explicitly conscious of it or not.

Isn’t contraction of awareness needed for focus?

There’s one question I get a lot: “don’t I need to cut out distractions to make focus easier?”

My answer to this is… maybe. I don’t know for sure. There are plenty of times I have found easy focus in an obnoxiously distracting environment, and plenty of times I have been horribly distractible in a silent, empty room.

That said, for people who have trouble sustaining attention, removing distractions from awareness can be helpful, because the pull can be too strong. I would just suggest doing this through environment design—like noise cancelling headphones, reduced visual clutter, airplane mode, etc—rather than contracting awareness, because that comes with unhelpful physical and mental side effects, like tension.

In an ideal world, I suspect that training both attention and awareness would be beneficial, such that even if you’re able to notice distractions, you’re still able to keep attention where you want it. In the absence of this, contracting awareness may work, but in my view it’s suboptimal and probably has unwanted second-order effects.

That’ll probably do for now. If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them. I am doing my best to simulate what ADHD is like from the inside, but I could be completely wrong. If I am, please let me know so I can update my model! I suspect there is some useful work to be done along these lines.

Explaining Alexander Technique to software developers

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:04:00 +0000

Just like computer programs, it seems humans have functions. When functions run, the world can get less vivid while reducing your agency.

I'm going to explain a human phenomenon that Alexander Technique plays with, using an idea from computer science: functions. I'm not a developer, so I might not capture it perfectly, but you also don't need to be a developer to follow my thinking.

First, what are functions? Computer programs tend to run linearly, line by line, top to bottom. At the most basic level, you need to write out every single step that you want the code to carry out. This creates a lot of repetition, which gets tedious quickly. Every time you want to print a list, add numbers together, or change the format of some text, you need to write out the code to do those things in full.

This is where functions come in. A function is a chunk of reusable code that is 'called' from the main program, does something, and returns the answer back to the main program, which then continues on its journey from top to bottom.

You have functions

What Alexander Technique reveals is that humans have functions, or something like them. I don't want to imply that humans are as mechanistic as computers, though, so let's assume it's more complicated than that and that this is just a simple analogy.

You have many functions of varying complexity. Here are some examples:

sit down
stand up
start walking
answer a question
breathe in
breathe out
say hello
read words
think about an elephant
tie shoelaces

You get the idea. Each of of these probably calls a bunch of other functions as part of an enormously complex, interconnected web of behaviours that you do a lot.

While most of my examples are physical, that's only because they're easier to point to. In fact, since mind and body are one continuous process—this is a core principle of Alexander Technique, which points at the same thing as 'bodymind' in other traditions—all functions are also 'psychophysical'. Neither entirely mental, nor entirely physical, but both. Thinking is a physical act and movement is a thoughtful act.

These functions accumulate throughout your life into an increasingly large 'library' of things you can do without being conscious of how you do them. The existence of these functions makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary point of view, because they save energy and free up resources for other things. We might also call functions 'habits' or 'grooves of familiar behaviours'. Once a groove has been laid down, it takes less work to follow that same groove next time.

Alexander Technique—and other awareness-based practices, I'm sure—reveal that strange effects come with these functions. The first is a kind of reduction in consciousness.

Functions put you on autopilot

Have you ever had the experience where you've been daydreaming and someone has pulled you out of your reverie and back 'into the world'? It's an odd experience, akin to waking up, where you suddenly realise that you weren't all there. You were somewhere else. Where? That's not clear, but you weren't fully present in the world around you.

People sometimes use the terms 'check out' or 'zone out' for this effect, where it's like the world has gone away a little bit. Sometimes things feel further away, less colourful or somehow dimmer. There might be an experience of tunnel vision, or what might be called 'contracted awareness'. There might also be a sense that you're 'living in your head', or what I tend to think of as being in a simulation of the world rather than in the world itself.

This effect tends to happen at the moment when your functions are called, just as the familiar behaviour starts. Alexander called this the "critical moment".

Take sitting down as an example. As you start to sit down, you enter the 'sit down' function, your consciousness of the world around you diminishes a little, and then comes back when you've finishing sitting down. Functions like this are running all the time, so you probably move through multiple overlapping functions and experience different layers of being more or less vividly 'in the world' throughout the day.

It's tricky to notice that this is even happening, because the reduction in consciousness that comes with being in a function also affects your capacity to notice it. You might call this a reduction in 'meta awareness'—your awareness of awareness itself.

What all this means is that it's difficult to step out of these functions—these highly familiar, habitual behaviours—while you're in them. You're like a ball bearing stuck in a well-worn groove: until the groove shallows out, you can't roll any other way.

Your functions may not be serving you

In theory, functions are a tremendously useful time, energy and cognition saving device. Having to work out how to tie your shoelaces from first principles every time doesn't lend itself to an effortless life.

There's a big 'however' here, though. Alexander's view—based on an early 20th century, lay understanding of evolution, I should make clear—was that humans are in the unique position of having the capacity to involve ourselves in our own behaviour, while also experiencing rapid and dramatic change in our environments relative to how we evolved.

I'll dig into this more in a minute, but first I'll bring in another modern idea from computer science that I believe is similar to Alexander's conception of defects: technical debt, which is "the implied cost of future reworking required when choosing an easy but limited solution instead of a better approach that could take more time." (Wikipedia)

My current working hypothesis is that Alexander Technique is a method for resolving psychophysical technical debt, i.e. all the not-ideal habits that we have picked up because of not-ideal conditions that are accumulated in our body-mind system. I also want to acknowledge that the idea of applying technical debt in this way is not mine, but comes from Mark's meditation book (which changes a lot so this quote may not always look the same):

When a mind is really surprised, or things are happening too fast, or something is just too hard, or a mind enacts ingrained bad habits, in all these cases a mind takes on technical debt in order to keep dealing with the world in real time. The more technical debt a mind has, the harder it is for that mind to solve problems moving forward, so technical debt begets more technical debt.

Let's go back to Alexander's perspectives on why humans might be susceptible to defects like this in the first place, when it doesn't seem they exist in wild animals.

First is our capacity to notice and change our own behaviour. Consider the experience of being thirteen, becoming self-conscious about how you walk, and trying to walk in different ways so that your peers will think you're cool. Or consider that you can consciously breathe in, but you can't consciously beat your heart. Changes like these don't arise 'of themselves', they are layered on by some conscious part of your mind that has some control in some domains.

Put another way: you can think your way into behaving in ways other than the spontaneous action that would come from your natural instincts. This is probably a net good, because it allows you to live in modern society without behaving like a wild animal, but it seems to come with a cost. You can change yourselves, yes, but not without creating subtle, cumulative side effects.

Second is the dramatic and rapid change that our environment has gone through in what Alexander called the 'civilising' process, i.e. all of human development that took us further and further from the 'wild' context that we evolved for—modern features like shoes, agriculture, electronics, chairs and even formal education. For example, while my body is capable of sitting and typing for eight hours a day, this is both a recent behaviour and an enormous deviation from what evolution expected my body to be doing. All this has made possible the introduction of 'defects' in human functioning.

Factors like these, and probably more, mean that your library of functions might not be serving you as well as it would if you were, say, a wild wolf, because a wolf's 'instinctive' functions would be perfectly appropriate for the context, while yours are not. This applies also to the shorter-term perspective of your life: the functions that you learned in your childhood may have worked well enough back then, but they might be out of date now. Going into a low-awareness autopilot whenever something in your environment happens might not be what you want as an adult in an utterly different context.

Given all this, what if you actually want to change? How do you do that?

How do you actually change?

One of Alexander's key insights, from experimentation and self-observation, was that when he tried not to do a particular habit, not only did he fail, he emphasised his existing habit more. Put another way, when he tried not to call the function, he ended up smashing the 'call' button even harder.

The only way out of this bind, he learned, was not to try harder, but to notice that critical moment where he was about to call the function and then simply pause there. This is a special kind of pause, though, because it's emphatically not the same as slamming on the brakes—it's much more gentle than that.

This kind of pause is called 'inhibition' in Alexander Technique (which is not at all the same as Freud's idea of 'the expression of a restriction of an ego-function', on which I can't comment).

Inhibition is the skill of responding to these functions in a 'not yet' way, rather than with a firm 'no', because a firm 'no' tends to activate other functions, like resistance. Inhibition can lead to a state of 'functionlessness', where you could call the function, but you haven't yet given consent to it. You could just as easily call the function as you could do literally anything else, because you're not committed in any way to any one path. I call this couldness if you want to explore that.

Helpfully, the concept of inhibition in Alexander Technique is similar to what inhibitory neurotransmitters do in the brain. Rather than getting neurones to send a particular message, inhibitory neurotransmitters prevent neurones from sending any messages at all.

This points towards one of the core philosophies of Alexander Technique—and many other traditions, not least Daoism—that doing and doing nothing are actually the same category of thing. They're both activations, both 'doings', just in opposite directions, like trying to drive with the parking brake on. Inhibition leads to the absence of this type of doing.

The best of both worlds

When you practice inhibition, a few things happen. First is that the world gets brighter, more vivid, and more three dimensional, because you're not running in that low-consciousness autopilot mode so much of the time. This is a pleasant way to live.

Learning to pause like this also gives you access to a whole new level of agency. You start to notice how much of the time you're just jumping from pre-written function to pre-written function, with little space for choice in between. By pausing, you can expand the space between stimulus and response to notice and then step out of your conditioning and make new, conscious choices.

And to be clear, inhibition is emphatically not self-denial; it's just pausing in a particular way before you act. Let's say you notice that you're about to eat a chocolate cookie and, rather than just doing it, you inhibit that behaviour. That doesn't mean you can't then go ahead and eat the cookie! Instead, you enter a space where both eating the cookie and doing literally anything else are open to you. You get the space to choose.

But you may be wondering: aren't those functions doing useful things? If you're inhibiting the functions, does that mean you have to think about everything?

No! Instead, it's more like you're able to stay fully conscious while the functions are running and, when you do, they actually run better. You're able to watch as your body seemingly moves or thinks by itself. This points at the experience of 'non-doing', when you act, you observe that you're acting, but you don't have the sense that you're putting any effort into it or ‘doing’ it. You get all the benefits of full aliveness, while still retaining choice about how you express it.

That's an essay itself, though, so rather than go into all that here, I'll pause for now and let you digest what I've covered above.

And, if you want, I invite you to notice some of these things in your day to day life:

Notice when you come back from being in that zoned-out function mode. Where were you? How was it different from being back in the world?
Can you catch the moment just as a function is about to activate—as or before the world gets less vivid?
Can you pause there, take a breath, and then still decide to do what you were about to do, but with full awareness? How is it different?

Enjoy!

Unscrunch yourself

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:49:59 +0000

As a little experiment, I'd like you to 'scrunch' yourself.

Consciously tighten a bunch of muscles in your face, neck, shoulders, back, wherever, and hold for a couple of moments. Get a sense of what you're doing to add all this tension to your body and then in a single moment, all at once, simply choose to stop doing it. Unscrunch yourself.

I'm guessing this exercise, where you create tension to allow a deeper ease, is familiar from 'relaxation techniques' you've tried in the past. That's fine and good, but there's more available.

I'd like to invite you to repeat this experiment a few times, paying particular attention to the 'move' you make in the precise moment that you unscrunch.

Notice what it's like to stop doing something you're already doing. Notice how it's markedly differently from doing something else. To use more flowery language, what you're noticing is the cessation of doing, rather than layering on more doing.

See if you can get a handle on "the thing that it's like" to stop doing all that tension.

Now here's the fun part. Keep reading as you normally would, without scrunching, and then make that unscrunch move again. And then gently assert it again, and again, and again.

If this works for you, you might notice a further easing of tension beyond your previous baseline. What's happening is that you're learning how to stop doing tension that you don't even realise you're doing. We often fail to notice what's familiar, so you probably don't notice how much tension you hold most of the time.

This is something I encourage you to play with in day to day life. For example, while walking, working, cooking, or brushing your teeth, gently assert that unscrunching move a few times and see what happens.

I say 'a few times', because our longstanding habits are powerful and reassert themselves quickly without us noticing. So consider that unscrunching is not something you can expect to 'do' once and retain forever. It's more like a choice you keep making again and again, moment by moment, every few seconds. At first this will seem hard and tedious, but it becomes a habit of its own.

I should point out a trap, here. Where this may work at first, it's all too easy to try too hard and confuse the 'cessation of doing' move with 'doing something else'. Walking around trying to relax is emphatically not the same as walking around ceasing doing tension.

The unscrunch move is, by definition, effortless. If it stops working for you, or if it seems to create more tension, you have forgotten the simplicity of what's actually required. We are so used to trying hard that the easy, simple moves can be not only inaccessible, but unnoticeable. If you get stuck, just repeat the scrunch/unscrunch experiment and notice how uncomplicated the 'unscrunch' move really is.

(I want to share that this teaching tool is not my own innovation. I think I got it from a wonderful AT teacher called Kajsa Ingemansson, who I believe developed it from her teacher, Cathy Madden.)

Couldness as a way into aliveness

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 14:39:10 +0000

In a recent YouTube video talking about his experience exploring Alexander Technique, Tasshin came up with the term couldness as a way of capturing a way into a particular way of being that my own Alexander Technique teacher calls 'aliveness'.

I like this term, because it gives a sense of what you need to change in order to bring aliveness about, since the word 'aliveness' on its own doesn't give you any clues about how to get there.

Couldness refers to a kind of moment by moment knowing that you could go anywhere, and do, say, think or feel anything.

Right now, for example, you're engaged in reading this note. Since reading is a thing you probably do a lot, I imagine that you are in a familiar, habitual 'reading mode'. These habitual modes usually close us off to other choices though. While reading, it probably doesn't occur to you that you could go for a walk, so it's not an option that's available to you.

But let's play with that for a moment.

Keep reading, and don't actually go anywhere, but just remember that you could move in any way right now. You could vocalise, you could sing and dance, you could put the device down completely. Really know it deeply, as if you were just about to do any one of these things, but not actually doing any of them.

How does just knowing that change your experience right now? Let's go further within the frame of movement (keep reading).

As you read, I'd like you to expand the field of places it feels conceivable that you could go to right now. Is it just a few steps? What about the end of the street? Could you go to some landmark in your town? What about a different town? Ignore practicalities, what we're doing here is reminding you that more of the world exists and also that you have the agency and capacity to act within that expanded sense of the world.

As you did this, were you able to notice the 'move' you made associated with increasing your couldness?

If you noticed this, were you able to notice the increase sense of dynamism, clarity of being and perhaps vividness of the world? Did your body seem a little more fluid and moveable than before? That is aliveness.

We habitually constrain the set of things that we believe we can do, which has the effect of reducing the vitality with which we show up in the world. One way to undo this is 'merely' to keep remembering, moment by moment, that you could go anywhere, do anything, think anything, say anything, and so on.

That doesn't mean you will do any of those things. It just means that those things would be available to you should you want to access them.

It also doesn't mean scrolling through an infinite list in your mind of things you could do. This is an embodied Knowing. Play with it spatially, with movement, first and then you can watch it unfold into more and more adventurous domains.

Don't crash into the tree!

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 14:27:58 +0000

I recently came across the concept of target fixation on a walk around Wikipedia.

Target fixation is an attentional phenomenon observed in humans in which an individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object. Wikipedia

This phenomenon should be familiar to any parent who's taught their child to ride a bike. The child might be afraid of crashing into the tree, so they fixate on the tree, so, of course, they crash into the tree.

The dad laughing in the background is just wonderful

What stood out to me was what the Wikipedia articule suggests as a solution to target fixation:

To avoid this phenomenon, one can be aware and in control of vision when in a panic mode or in a reward mode. A person should think about what they see and be aware of their environment before making any decisions. Wikipedia

Or, in other words, keeping one's awareness expanded helps to avoid target fixation.

This is just a short note, but it points at something much bigger that I'd like to explore further, which is the idea of global non-fixation.

Fixation happens all the time. We get stuck in familiar patterns of movement, of belief and, as the example above shows, goal orientation. Fixation limits our various capacities and introduces a kind of generalised tension into our system (mind and body).

Alexander Technique teaches us how to notice any form of fixation and un-fixate from it. This allows us to make new choices that were previously unavaiable because of the fixation, and the constantly renewed state of global unfixation is itself a highly pleasant, vivid way of being.

To rush is to try to compress time

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 19:52:00 +0000

I'm fascinated by the felt experience of rushing, because It seems that rushing can be a sneaky two for the price of one type of deal; we may mean one thing by it, but we usually get something extra as well, something that's easy to miss.

We usually use rush to mean simply "to move quickly". I am late for work, so I will rush in order to get there on time. That makes sense, and my interest would stop there if that were the whole story.

But it's not the whole story.

Consider that felt experience of rushing. It's usually also stressful in some way. Rushing creates a generalised tension in our bodies. There's a strong need for the rushed experience to be completed, a kind of embodied "come on already, come on, come on".

To me, this experience is markedly different from merely moving quickly. Olympic sprinters don't rush, even though they move as fast as they possibly can. Olympic sprinters know and fully accept that running 100m takes as long as it takes. Their aim is for it to take as little time as possible, yes, but they don't begrudge how long it takes. Those ten seconds from starting block to finish line don't annoy them.

Contrast this with your rushed drive to work. Behind this there is often a feeling of resistance to the experience taking the amount of time that it takes.

The felt experience of rushing, beyond any simple intention to 'move quickly', is in fact a strange, misplaced effort that seeks to compress time itself. It's almost as if we're trying to get a future moment to arrive before it otherwise would if left to its own devices, which of course is the only way any moment of time can ever really arrive.

This can be made clearer by looking at one of the main side effects of rushing: muscle tension.

Coming back to the sprinter, the level of muscle tension in their bodies is the appropriate amount. Not too little, not too much; just the right amount to get them to move as quickly as possible. This may indeed be a lot of muscle tension, but it's a performance-reducing waste of energy to be more tense than necessary for the task at hand.

Back to your rushed commute, then. In this case it's clear that the speed of your car is constrained by traffic and speed limits. It's also clear that driving a car does not actually require that much effort. Whether you're late for work or not, the energy required to turn a steering wheel or change gear is the same.

Yet consider how different your body feels when you're rushing, compared with when you feel you have all the time in the world. At the end of a rushed drive you may be sore all over, sweating hard with your breathing fast and shallow. What's going on here? None of these things helps you arrive at your destination any faster. The amount of energy needed to drive the car hasn't changed.

All this extra stuff, I suggest, is the effort that some part of your system is applying, ineffectually, in its attempt to compress time, to try to manipulate a future moment into arriving sooner.

This effect, of course, is not constrained to driving. In fact, it happens nearly constantly for a lot of people who seem to be rushing incessantly through each moment, longing for the current thing to be done so the next thing can begin. A life defined by chronic cognitive and muscular tension that result from habitually living as if ever so slightly in the future, existing within a simulation of the next moment rather than a deep experiencing of this moment right now.

The enormous upside to all this is that this extra energy can be liberated if we just allow things to take as long as they take. This doesn't even mean having to move slowly in circumstances that require us to move quickly, but to be able to move quickly in an easy, non-rushed way!

A waterfall doesn't have a little voice in its head saying "come on, faster, we're on the clock here", yet it can move with incredible force and speed.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. Lao Tzu

We humans are the same. Rather than getting caught up in rushing, we can notice that compulsion to add more effort than is required, gently decline to give consent to it, and then welcome the enormous reserves of energy that are made available once we stop wasting it in such futile endeavours.

When we do this, we suddenly realise that not only can we be just as effective as before, but an even greater capacity for action emerges. Only now, rather than having things feel difficult, we can be engaged in all the activities of our lives as if we have all the time in the world.

Non-judgemental awareness is curative

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 14:52:00 +0000

This is one of the lessons from my Fundamentals of Alexander Technique course, which I'm reproducing here because it's something I want to be able to link to on the public web.

There are times in life where we catch ourselves ‘doing’ things that perhaps we don’t want to be doing, like procrastinating, getting angry with a partner, mumbling while speaking or eating sugar. A common response might be to tell ourselves off in some way and resolve to try harder to not do the thing.

This trying immediately gets us stuck. As F. M. Alexander put it:

”Trying is only emphasising the things we already know.” F.M. Alexander

Consider this claim: doing and doing nothing are exactly the same thing. They may seem like opposites, but they are actually both still doing.

What happens if you try to relax? You just end up tensing your muscles in a different way. Relaxation is the absence of tension, the absence of trying. Doing and doing nothing are the same thing.

The absence of doing is known as ‘non-doing’ (a translation of the Daoist principle of wu-wei). Non-doing doesn’t mean inaction; it points to an absence of trying or of pushing oneself around. It’s useful to sit with this idea until you feel it in your bones. I will develop little games to help you explore this, but for now let me draw from someone else’s wisdom.

If I had a recommended reading list to accompany the course (and I will), it would certainly include one of W. Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game books, like The Inner Game of Tennis or The Inner Game of Work. Gallwey likely doesn’t know it, but what he describes is very close to what I’m teaching here, only using different language and ways in.

First, see if you recognise the experience that Gallwey describes here around playing tennis.

“When I was playing at my best, I wasn't trying to control my shots with self-instruction and evaluation. It was a much simpler process than that. I saw the ball clearly, chose where I wanted to hit it, and I let it happen. Surprisingly, the shots were more controlled when I didn't try to control them. I gradually realised that my well-intentioned instructions were being internalised by my students as methods of control that were compromising their natural abilities. This critical inner dialogue certainly produced a state of mind very different from the quiet focus reported by the best athletes.” W. Timothy Gallwey

What he found was that the voice of the teacher, coach or critic created a kind of forced effort that interfered with the player's natural ability. The harder we try to direct ourselves, the worse we perform. This is expressed in the book as Performance = Potential - Interference.

From here Gallwey recognised the presence of two ‘selves’ within each of us:

”I called the voice giving commands and making the judgements 'Self 1'. The one it was talking to, I called "Self 2". What was their relationship? Self 1 was the know-it-all who basically didn't trust Self 2, the one who had to hit the ball. Out of mistrust, Self 1 was trying to control Self 2's behaviour using the tactics it had learned from its teachers in the outside world.__But who is Self 2? Is it that unworthy of trust? In my definition, Self 2 is the human being itself. It embodies all the inherent potential we were born with, including all capacities actualized and not yet actualized. It also embodies our innate ability to learn and to grow any of those inherent capacities. It is the self we all enjoyed as young children.” W. Timothy Gallwey

Self 2 is the part of us that operates in the world with an economy of effort, elegance and lack of force. Ultimately, it feels easy. Great work gets done when Self 2 is free to do its thing. Is this what becomes liberated when we practice the kind of ‘non-doing’ that we access via Alexander Technique? I think so.

Self 1, in this framing, is the part that tries to order Self 2 around or, worse, forgets entirely about the existence of Self 2 and tries to order itself around, all while failing to recognise that it cannot in fact do anything. I suspect that Alexander Technique is a set of skills that allows us to unleash and befriend Self 2. And translating this into my language: Self 1 is the doer, while Self 2 is the non-doer. The doer easily sets up a trap for itself: it sees something it doesn’t like and tries to do the opposite, but only succeeds in reinforcing its own interference. Instead, what we want is to get the doer to shut up and get out of the way entirely. This is how we allow the non-doer to express its natural, effortless, elegant self.

But we have a problem. The doer doesn’t know how to stop doing. It only knows how to do! This is how we find ourselves stuck.

There is a way out though, and that is not to try to get unstuck. Like quicksand, struggling will only pull us in deeper. This is where Gallwey’s advice shines through:

"Non-judgemental awareness is curative. W. Timothy Gallwey

Rather than try to fix things, all you have to do is notice, non-judgementally, that you’re doing them. Even while you’re involved in this non-judgemental noticing, you will notice a barrage of impulses to try different things, to intervene, to try, to fix. That’s fine, just notice them non-judgementally, too.

(I often advise people to consider themselves like an alien anthropologist from the future who is noting what you’re doing in a notebook. That alien is completely dispassionate, as you should be too — it’s all just data).

I’ve spent a lot of words on this idea, because it will come up over and over again in this course and in your practice. Any time you get it in your head that you want to fix, improve or otherwise 'get something right', pause. This is where the practice really starts: it’s noticing all the way down.

Keep doing this and you’ll find things changing by themselves in ways that will surprise and delight you.

—

But Michael, I hear you say, I don’t understand how I can still have agency and act in the world through this ‘non-doing’?

And my answer: intention and doing are not the same thing. You can assert a clear intention (like wanting to pick up a ball), notice all the ways in which you habitually try to pick the ball (doing), not do any of those things (AT skill: ‘inhibit these responses’), and then watch as your body moves in a totally new way and the ball ends up in your hand.

We start getting into this later in the course in the session on the ‘Vishnu Hands’.

Activism is a societal awareness trigger

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 19:13:00 +0000

I’ve wanted to explore the intersection of awareness and society for a long time. I have a hunch that there’s a rich and valuable line of inquiry here, and it seems that the best way to mine it is to simply start digging, so here we go.

First, I need to reiterate one of my main talking points, which is that you can’t make choices with respect to something if it lies outside your awareness.

My quotidian example is that of being in an hours-long flow state, when suddenly you ‘come back to yourself’ and realise you needed to use the bathroom some time ago. The sensations of pressure were there all along, but somehow you weren’t able to notice them or, therefore, to act on them.

That state of being unable to notice is critical and is overlooked as a fundamental and common part of our day to day experience. In general we are released from it by some outside influence, like the flow state ending on its own, being interrupted by a colleague or notification, or the biological necessity increasing to the extent that it becomes salient.

Only then are we able to relate to the thing in our awareness. Until the moment the spell is broken and our awareness expands, it’s impossible to do anything about it.

Consider that every time you make a choice — to move, to speak, to eat, even to think a particular thought — you must first be available to the idea that you could do any of these things. The expansion of awareness to include the notion — the idea that you might make a choice — always precedes the choice itself.

This simple observation is why I wholeheartedly believe that developing conscious control of awareness is a crucial skill that gives us the capacity to make new choices and free ourselves from stuck patterns.

Let’s now scale this up.

A society is made of individuals, and while the whole tends to be greater than the sum of its parts, it seems reasonable that characteristics of the parts will influence the whole. Thus, if individuals experience collapsed awareness, which is a state of reduced availability to the landscape of possible options, then so can the societies that they create.

This collapsed awareness state leads to a kind of ‘stuckness’ in which certain pathways for action become closed. Consider the societal equivalent of being unable to go to the bathroom until it occurs to the society that perhaps it should and indeed could go to the bathroom. Until something frees the society from that rut, expanding its awareness to new options, it can’t do anything but stay stuck in its rut.

Fortunately, societies are made of diverse, heterogeneous individuals, each with an awareness and perspective of their own. Some people may have the capacity to notice that new choices can and should be made, and others may also notice, even if not articulated in these terms, that many people around them seem incapable of seeing what they’re seeing.

In this frame, the role of activism then becomes clear and necessary. The role of the activist is to point out to society at large that it may be literally unable to notice and act upon something vital. The activist seeks to expand society’s awareness to include the thing that concerns the activist.

Of course things are never that straightforward and the situation can get loopy. Awareness has a habit to collapse over and over again in response to what happens within us or in the world. Indeed, this is what true habits are: the collapse of awareness during behaviours that prevent other behaviours from happening, for better or for worse. This saves energy, so makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, but it has the unfortunate side effect of creating a rigidity that leads us astray in rapidly changing environments or when the initial learned behaviour was unhelpful.

This is why activists need to keep being activists over and over again, because where society’s awareness may initially expand in response to the activist, it quickly collapses again. It’s also why activists need to change their messaging all the time, because the tricks that expand awareness at first rarely work for long. New tricks are required to break the spell.

It’s also worth noting that the activists themselves can get stuck in their own collapsed awareness, perhaps unable to see that their tactics aren’t working, that what they aim to point out is actually of low importance, or that things are in fact being done in response to their concerns.

All this suggests that conscious control of awareness — to be able to break free from the limitations in perspective, choice and agency that collapsed awareness creates — is vitally important in those for whom the use of these capacities affects society.

But until this skill is widespread, let’s remember the existence and implications of collapsed awareness and seek to re-expand the awareness of others where we see them stuck in choice unconsciousness. In this way we can all serve as activists for each other and, hopefully, become better able to wisely navigate our path forwards together.

The journey back to conscious naturalness

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 15:18:00 +0000

What does it mean to be truly natural, to have that quality of spontaneity we had as children? Most of us have lost access to that state and would like to have it once again, but there is no turning back now. We can only go forwards and find it in a different way.

This is the story of the journey forwards, towards the rediscovery of that spontaneity, and I suspect it will sound strangely familiar to many people.

Stage 1: Unconscious naturalness

When a baby is born they are in their most natural, ‘authentic’ state. Every expression of their being is spontaneous.

There’s no way they can be otherwise, because they have yet to learn to be any other way than how they are. But this authenticity is not a self-aware one; babies are unconscious of their own naturalness.

Stage 2: Conscious unnaturalness

This unconscious naturalness may last several years through childhood, but for most children there is an inevitable shift in the attainment of a certain level of self-consciousness. This is the moment when innocence is lost.

It’s in this time that differences become clear, along with the associated idea of ‘fitting in’, and both arise in the context of a rising capacity to override natural tendencies.

This is how and why unusually tall children may start to shrink their stature and why unusually short children may hold themselves more upright. Some children may notice that the cool kids walk or talk in certain ways and consciously emulate others' gait or their vocal styles.

Stage 3: Unconscious unnaturalness

While at first all this may have been conscious and purposeful, at some point these choices become forgotten. The new, unnatural patterns take hold as the way things are and always have been.

For many people this stage will forever define their relationship with naturalness, which will remain a confusing, elusive and alien concept. For these people, to be ‘more authentic’ or to ‘be themselves’ can only mean to layer on more kinds of unnaturalness, where to act naturally is indeed to act. These layers fold and reflect back on themselves until, like spending a lifetime in a house of mirrors, the exit becomes not only invisible, but inconceivable.

I make no judgement about this stage. I was here for a long time, and it was only through circumstance that I was shown the way out.

Stage 4: Conscious unnaturalness, revisited

Some people, though, become aware that things may not be as they seem. They begin to notice themselves behaving in strange ways, perhaps shortening their stature, experiencing tension while walking, or straining their voices.

This was how F. M. Alexander made the discovery that would lead him to his life’s work. He noticed that, when speaking on stage, he would depress his larynx, and when he tried not to he found he actually emphasised it. His unnaturalness was so ingrained that, although he was at least becoming conscious of it, he couldn’t do anything about it.

While uncomfortable and disconcerting, this rediscovery of conscious unnaturalness also makes moving beyond it possible. To step out of the house of mirrors requires seeing the world clearly, catching a glimpse of something unreflected and undistorted, which is the path that is not just another mirror.

Stage 5: Conscious naturalness

Arriving at the end of this journey means to have regained what was once lost, only this time to be fully aware of having it. Unlike the baby, who is spontaneous by nature, the truly natural adult can access it by choice, at least some of the time. Old habits die hard.

But this capacity for conscious naturalness is unlike all the skills that came before. Instead of learning how to layer on yet more ‘doings’, this stage requires a conscious capacity to stop doing all the things that previously interfered with the innate, natural state. In this way spontaneity is allowed to express itself, and the skill of the consciously natural adult is to stay out of its way and direct it with intention.

It strikes me that the journey I’ve just described maps on well to the spiritual path of Zen, which seeks to cultivate this kind of natural spontaneity. I believe that Alexander Technique follows the same path, showing us first that we are caught up in a house of mirrors of our own making and then helping us step out of it, over and over again, until one day we realise we are walking around in the real world once more.

Student experience: Kofi Baah

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 13:55:00 +0000

Notes from Michael

While I can say many things about Alexander Technique that I think will be helpful, I think it's often more accessible to hear experiences from students who are earlier on their own journeys.

Kofi Baah kindly shared this great post in the forum associated with the Fundamentals of Alexander Technique course, which I'm sharing here (with permission) and with some commentary from me.

And with that, over to Kofi...

One year of Alexander Technique

I've been practicing the Alexander Technique on and off for a year now. I thought I'd summarise my thoughts into one place for anyone who's just starting, or is just interested.

Key points

Expanded awareness is great for getting out of your own head
Inhibition is one of the most powerful skills you can learn
Non-doing is a little hard to get your head around, but can really improve your performance in motor tasks
The ideas are super abstract and difficult to explain in language, but there's a way in for everyone, so don't stress. It's worth the effort.

Background

I had done mindfulness meditation on Sam Harris' Waking Up App for about a year beforehand. Nothing too serious, 10 minutes a day on and off, but I think it helped me understand what Alexander Technique is about.

I came across Alexander Technique through Michael's twitter and then Substack. I was lucky to have got it straight away after reading this and this and also watching this video.

Interestingly, I think Sam Harris is influenced by the Dzogchen tradition of Buddhism, which I think has some particularly strong overlaps with Alexander Technique. In particular, both seem to emphasise a broad, open awareness and the cultivation of non-fixation of objects within awareness. This is an avenue I hope to explore further. I've had conversations with practitioners of Shi-ne meditation, which is part of Dzogchen, and it feels like we're describing the same phenomena, just with different words. I wonder if experience with the Waking Up course is therefore a helpful on-ramp for my flavour of Alexander Technique.

Some people 'get it' early on, which is helpful to prove that there is a 'there' there and that continued practice is worthwhile. This is not guaranteed though, but its absence doesn't mean you can't get it with practice. Besides, as you will read below, it's common and normal for this initial 'I get it!' experience to fade anyway, only to return later with further practice. This getting it, losing it, and getting it again is a necessary part of the journey. In fact, 'getting unstuck' is at the core of what we're cultivating here.

Also, the Substack newsletter is now deprecated, please subscribe to the new newsletter at the bottom of the page if you want to follow updates.

These prompts were, and still are, my way in:

"if there was a conversation going on behind you, would you be able to hear it?"
"would you able to hear a plane flying overhead?"

I'd been chronically stuck in my own head for 2-3 years and had just accepted I'd be there forever, so it was a pretty big release once I entered expanded awareness for the first time.

Experience

The first couple of days, I spent all the time I could in the expanded awareness state because it was euphoric. I'd go on long walks because they were the easiest way in. (On one walk around my neighbourhood of ~20 years, I decided to look for new areas I hadn't discovered. I found a beautiful woodland path, ended up getting trapped in an allotment, and had to scale a fence to get out. It was great.)

What I liked the most was that problems and thoughts would take up the "correct" amount of awareness, instead of collapsing my awareness to the size of them. It was as if my awareness was a certain shape and size I could control, and thoughts would fill up a proportion of that. Sometimes it was a large proportion, and then I'd just take action on the thought or problem straight away (instead of burying it or avoiding it). Otherwise it was something small that didn't need my attention. This reduced anxiety, because thoughts would no longer hijack my awareness and spiral out of control.

After the initial "beginners luck", I found it hard to get back into expanded awareness. I think this happens to most people. I kind of stopped doing it, because I'd just get nervous about whether I'd succeed or not.

Then the course came out, and I spent some time going through the first few sections, and stopped. I thought I got the hang of it by that point, and spent the next couple of months occasionally practicing, but mostly forgetting about it.

I started the course again like a month ago and finished it. I recommend definitely finishing the course if you haven't — if you stopped halfway through because you weren't getting it, there's probably a part of the course that will solve the problem you're having, or you can just ask in the forum and someone will help you out. It's worth the effort to keep trying. Don't assume you're incapable of getting there, because people have managed it, and there's a way in for everyone.

Part of my own journey here is looking for various 'ways in' that will work for different people. This stuff can be inherently baffling at first, but once there's even a small crack of understanding, more and more light can be allowed in. My role is to develop more ways in and help people get out of various 'traps' that it is perfectly normal to get stuck in. Again, learning how to get out of said traps is one of the key skills here.

I had only really used expanded awareness to get out of my own head, and didn't initially focus on the inhibition and non-doing parts.

Inhibition in particular is life-changing. It stops you being stuck in your conditioned responses to stuff, so you can start deciding where you want your life to go. For example, if there's a bad habit you want to stop, you can observe when the urge arises, and decide whether to engage with it or just let it remain in the background to be replaced by another thought. Inhibition is especially useful if you're prone to interrupting people whilst they speak. I often find myself inhibiting the urge to interrupt someone during conversation, and I'm always grateful that I let them finish.

I haven't implemented the non-doing part into my life much yet, although I did try it once during mini-golf and made a 10x improvement on my previous game. I'd set an intention for the ball to go wherever I decided and then it would just happen, without mistakes and without stress. I want to integrate this a little more. I'm taking it at my own pace though — this is a lifelong skill that i'll improve at over time, so I'm not in a rush.

Stages

This is roughly what my development in Alexander Technique looked like. Your journey might be different, but it might be useful to consider where you are on this scale.

"This is woo woo."
"Wow! I get it. This is beautiful, I want to stay here forever."
"I can't seem to get back there. Will I ever be able to?"
"I can tell when my awareness is collapsed."
"I can tell what triggers a collapse in my awareness."
"I can re-expand my awareness when I notice it has collapsed."
"I can keep my awareness expanded for 30-60 seconds, as long as nothing triggers its collapse."
"I can keep my awareness expanded for as long as I'd like, as long as nothing triggers its collapse".
"I can keep my awareness expanded for as long as I'd like, even against collapse triggers."

This actually mirrors my own journey, even down to the initial "this is woo woo" suspicions. What I was learning didn't map easily to my existing frames — I was an energy consultant with a physics degree, I didn't really do woo — but the experiences I had were so strong and clear that I knew there was something here worth exploring. I adopted (and still suggest) an empirical approach, testing what I was being taught against the evidence of my own inner landscape. This proved to be an extremely helpful tool not only to prove that this thing is real, really, but also to support my own growth on this journey.

Anyway, let me know if you have any questions, I can probably help. You can connect with me on twitter @k3baah. This is a pretty niche course to be interested in, let alone buy, so if you're here then the chances are we probably have similar interests and would get on. Hope this helped!

Thanks so much for sharing your experience Kofi. And for others who are encountering these ideas for the first time and want to learn more, I suggest you Start Here. I do also have an affordable, self-paced course if you want to go deeper, but as you can see Kofi got a lot just from poking around my free materials.

Non-doing or non-forcing?

Sun, 29 Aug 2021 12:00:00 +0000

I want to unpick a challenge that was presented to me: why do I say non-doing, which can confuse people, instead of something more clear like non-forcing?

Non-doing or non-forcing?

Indeed, Alan Watts himself preferred the term forcing in translating the ‘wei’ in ‘wu-wei’:

“Wu-wei is the principle of not forcing in anything that you do.” Alan Watts

I also like the term ‘non-forcing’ and agree that it gets closer to what in Alexander Technique is called inhibition, the skill that gives us access to effortless being and action.

But I still like ‘non-doing’. Why? Because I don’t want to let people off the hook so easily.

I am trying to point towards an experience that is subtle. Chances are that the first thing to occur to you when thinking about non-doing is not really it. There needs to be some reason, some invitation, to dig a little deeper.

If I were to suggest something like “life can be more effortless if you learn how to stop forcing”, that may immediately paint a picture of an exaggerated kind of tension. We all know people who are highly strung and ‘tight’ in everything they do, which makes it so easy to say “ah yes, I am aware of those people, and I’m nothing like them, so what a relief it is to discover that I am already non-forcing. Back to Netflix, then.”

You see how easy it is to slip around true examination of the idea. Particularly in contexts like Twitter, where I have 280 characters per tweet to give someone sufficient pause to give the idea a chance, non-forcing doesn’t really cut it for me.

Let’s explore ‘non-doing’ then. For me, non-forcing and non-doing are synonymous, but non-doing gives people new to the idea a better sense of the paradox that needs to be resolved. It’s a term that raises objections:

“So non-doing just means doing nothing, then.”

No. Non-doing is neither doing nor doing nothing, which are in fact the same thing.

”Okay, but surely if I non-do then I won’t get anything done?”

Incorrect. In fact you’ll unlock capacity, creativity and enjoyment you didn’t think possible. And they’ll just happen by themselves.

”But…. what are you talking about? How?”

BOOM. That’s what I want. The term non-doing is like a Zen kōan, a seemingly nonsensical paradox designed to get your thinking mind to drop away to reveal a direct understanding of the world in a space bigger than and outside of thought.

I invite you to play with non-doing as we go on. Right now, it’s likely that you are ‘doing’ reading.

Check in with yourself as you read. Is your breathing shallow? Is there tension around your eyes and face? Are you leaning towards the screen?

I’m going to keep giving you some words that you can read while you play with this. I invite you to realise that, for example, if you speak English, you don’t need to try to understand these words.

See if you can notice that there is a part of your mind that desperately wants to involve itself in understanding, even though it happens automatically.

It’s the same with sounds. While still reading, I invite you to notice that there are sounds going on around you, and have been this whole time. Notice that same part of your mind that wants to make sense of, label, or even try to listen. No – again – listening can take care of itself.

For those of you who, like me, enjoy deep trance with Alan Watts voiceover, this track illustrates this listening point perfectly, and is just wonderful.

This is the kind of ‘doing’ that is meant in non-doing or non-forcing. To borrow some language from meditative traditions, we could consider the immediate understanding of “forcing” as “gross doing” and the ultimate understanding of forcing as “subtle doing”.

And now I want to really trigger you by suggesting that, where forcing and doing are synonymous, so is ‘caring’.

What about ‘non-caring’?

If I were to ask you not to care about something, what does that bring up for you?

I’m guessing there’s a negative connotation. I can imagine a school teacher writing to my parents to say “Michael simply doesn’t care enough.” In fact, my school had a hilarious evaluation system:

the grades A-E represented performance
the numbers 1-5 represented perceived effort (as I frame it now)

For each subject each term we would receive scores like B2, A1, A3, etc. It didn’t take long to figure out that A3 is obviously a much better grade than A1: “look, I’m getting the same good marks and not really trying!”. You would think it’s a good thing, but that’s not the vibe I used to get from an A3.

Instead, it came with a thin kind of revulsion, judgement or the impression that I was somehow lacking in virtue. The lesson was clear: it’s not enough merely to achieve, you must also appear as though you care about achieving.

The fact that this idea was deeply programmed into me – and, I suspect, also in you – was made abundantly clear to me in my Alexander Technique training. (I also believe it’s a big part of why Total Work is a thing).

My teacher (Peter Nobes) and I would play catch during lessons. Imagine for yourself how you would have responded in the following scenario:

the teacher throws a ball at you

That’s it. That’s the scenario. Can you already feel how your mind and body are reorganising at the prospect?

These are some of the things that I experienced:

it became important that I catch the ball
I worried how silly I would look if I didn’t catch the ball
I got anxious because I was such a bad catcher at school
So I tried to catch the ball
And I sucked at catching the ball like this

That entire process can be called ‘caring’. And every time Peter saw me caring (and believe me, it’s very obvious), he would say “this is the least important thing you’ve ever done in your life”.

Of course that’s true. I was standing in a room with one other person, participating in a training exercise, with no possible negative consequences of not catching the ball. The point of the exercise was not to catch the ball, but to not care about catching the ball. That’s surprisingly hard when you first play with it.

And what I discovered was that, when I cared less – or was able not to care at all about whether I caught, dropped or totally ignored the ball – my ability to catch it improved 100x. I’m not even exaggerating there. My hand would magically send itself to exactly the right place.

Even when I threw the ball back, Peter would just hold out his hand, I would throw it (in an uncaring way), and it would just land in his hand, consistently. He didn’t have to move his hand to catch the ball, the throw was that accurate. There’s no way that I could have done that.

Caring, then, is perhaps a more accessible way into understanding what ‘forcing’ and ‘doing’ are about. The more I ‘cared’ about catching the ball, the more I forced it. When I didn’t care – yet still intended to catch the ball – I didn’t force it, and it happened by itself.

“Well, fine, it’s easy not to care about catching a ball, but what about all the important things in my life, Michael? I can’t not care about those, they need to get done!”

I have two answers for you.

First, right now, I’m not suggesting you completely let go of caring about all things. There’s a lot of conditioning to undo and skill to build. Instead, pick some small things: see if you can care less while reading, while cooking, while listening to music, or even while talking to someone.

This doesn’t mean ‘not intend to be engaged in that activity’, but to let go of the caring about getting it ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. You won’t be a bad person if you care just a little less in the sense I mean.

Second, consider why some things are easier not to care about than others. It comes down to trust. It’s easier not to care about catching a ball after I’ve seen my body just do it a few times. It’s less easy to trust that same system when there’s an important report I need to write for the big client by the tough deadline my boss set.

Ultimately, I believe that all things can benefit from this non-doing / non-forcing / non-caring approach. But I can’t do it all the time (yet), some things still hook me and I can’t always let go of the need to interfere.

That’s okay though, we’re all a work in progress.

Unleashing the right hemisphere

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 21:10:00 +0000

I'm working my way through The Master And His Emissary, written by Iain McGilchrist, which I expect one day will be considered one of the most important books of all time.

You may know that the brain is lateralised into two hemispheres, left and right. This has unfortunately become co-opted by a bunch of corporate training-style nonsense, like "the left brain is for science and the right brain is for art". Unless you've read any of McGilchrist's work, it might be wise to consider everything you think you know about the hemispheres to be wrong.

So why do we have two clearly separated hemispheres? It comes down not to what the hemispheres do, but how they do it.

Consider the paradox faced by most animals in the wild. They need to eat, which means they need to be able to identify and track things they can eat. At the same time it is clearly important that they avoid being eaten themselves by whatever might be hunting them.

These represent two fundamentally different ways of attending to the world that need to exist at the same time. And so it is that the left hemisphere is responsible for the narrow attention required to track prey, while the right hemisphere is responsible for the broad, open awareness required to be able to notice a predator. Each hemisphere is responsible for these distinct ways of attending.

The left hemisphere isolates objects from their context, seeing everything in terms of utility and capacity to be manipulated, in the sense that we can 'use' them to meet some end. The right hand, which is organised by the left hemisphere, is the object-grasping hand for most people.

The right hemisphere attends to everything all that once, including the relationships between things and the flow of time. It sees the big picture and understands that everything exists in context. To the right hemisphere the world just 'is'.

Both of these ways of attending are vital and need to be fully integrated, but there is a sense in which they seem to compete. The corpus callosum, which is a brain structure that mediates connection between the hemispheres, appears to be mainly inhibitory in nature, such that each can stop the other hemisphere from interfering with what they're doing.

But here's where things get interesting. The two hemispheres need to find ways of co-operating, but it seems that the left hemisphere doesn't know or care much for the functions of the right hemisphere and thinks it can do everything itself. On the other hand, the right hemisphere seems to take a somewhat wiser perspective, recognising that both are required in an integrated way.

What this means it that the left hemisphere tries to involve itself in activities for which it is not at all well suited. It has forgotten that, while it does indeed do critically important things, its ways are not the only ways. The left hemisphere, in fact, needs to be subservient to the right hemisphere, but in today's culture that has been forgotten and the right hemisphere has been 'hijacked' by the left, leading to a left hemisphere dominant lens on the world.

In fact, that's where the title "The Master and His Emissary" comes from:

Excerpt from The Master And His Emissary

If you've been following my ideas around Alexander Technique for a while, much of this may sound quite familiar.

I talk about the capacity to train the skill of expanding our awareness, to notice things that could be noticed. I point out that attention moves around within awareness and that strange, interesting and valuable things can happen when we're able to play with this expansion.

So here's my working hypothesis. Alexander Technique is in fact a direct method to access the right hemisphere, or rather to overcome left hemisphere hijack, and to then re-establish appropriate relationship between the two hemispheres.

If this is true then the implications are astonishing, though for reasons that are best discussed another time (it's a 600+ page book, after all).

How to dance without trying to dance

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 12:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular way of being we inhabit when dancing. Dancing is a kind of availability, a capacity to respond to the invitations of each moment in a receptive, fluid and open way.

When dancing without a partner, say in a club or at a concert, the music is your dance partner. Your body seems to move of its own accord as the energies of the rhythms and melodies play easily and elegantly across your frame, where the only wrong way to dance is to not to dance at all.

When dancing with a partner you are always in active communication, in an emergent, wordless dialogue. As the leader you are aware of the music, the space around you, your body, your partner’s body, your partner’s attention and your own intention, which you both assert and allow to emerge.

As the follower you listen for the most subtle of suggestions and give a constantly renewing consent to be led, without anticipating the moment ahead or resisting the moment before.

You each maintain your power, refusing to give up responsibility for yourself to the other.

Of course, all of the above is the ideal. The opposite of that fluid, immersive, dare I say blissful experience is one of being stuck in your head, of trying to ‘get it right’, of worrying about being judged. I suspect this is what most people experience. It’s certainly what I used to experience.

Alexander Technique is a tool by which we can move into the available state, stepping out of the rigidity and awkwardness that stems from trying to dance. Because dancing, like playing, works best when it happens for its own sake, when any goal you may have is subordinated to the process by which the goal may, or may not, ultimately be attained.

But, how? How do you step out of that awkward mode where you’re trying to coordinate yourself, where you’re stuck in your own head?

You step out of it by not trying to step out of it.

ARGH, Michael, what do you MEAN?? You speak in riddles. Just tell me HOW!

Okay, here’s the problem. This is a bind that shows up everywhere in life and my goal is to free you from it. I can’t do that for you, but I can show you the door. The realisation and insight you need to actually step through it is up to you.

With that, here’s what I mean when I say the solution to this problem is not to try to fix it.

Consider that there is a part of your mind — let’s call it the Tryer — that sees problems everywhere. Problems need some kind of solution, which means it is always trying; to analyse, to fix, to solve, to improve, to organise, to categorise, to achieve, to get right. Words like these bear little in common with the words I used to describe dancing above: available, fluid, receptive, open, consent, easy, elegant.

And that’s exactly the problem! The Tryer is not needed here. It seems to think it has to involve itself in dancing, and everything else for that matter, but that isn’t the case, so it only gets in the way. What you need is for The Tryer to be quiet for a while and let something else show up instead, the part that dances when it feels to you that dancing happens by itself.

But be careful, because the bind is coming up. The Tryer is as clever as it is clueless. It understands that trying isn’t required, so it tries to stop trying, but the only tool it has to do that is trying!

Put another way, it doesn’t realise that it itself is the problem and, without seeing what’s going on, it tries to shut itself up by yelling more and more loudly at itself. This is the experience you have inside your head when you ‘overthink’ and what happens when people ‘choke’ in a sports context. It’s a vicious thinking trap that goes like this:

“Okay I need to pay attention to my partner oh and there’s someone on the dance floor where I want to go damn I missed the beat oh god I hope I don’t tread on her foot okay step two three okay relax this thinking isn’t helping stop thinking just flow yeah okay wait why isn’t it working come on you can do this get out of your head… ”

The solution is to stop all that. But again, how?

The trick, the way out of the trap, is merely to notice that The Tryer is trying to involve itself. Just notice it and then don’t do anything about it. Leave the ‘the problem’ unsolved.

Why? Because any attempt to get The Tryer to be quiet comes from the Tryer itself! Really let that sink in. Anything you do is merely digging you deeper into the hole you’re already in.

‘Just’ noticing, though, is an entirely different process, one that creates a kind of separation from The Tryer. And by noticing The Tryer as a separate process you step into a larger space, one that contains the Tryer but isn’t entirely it.

This is my experience of dancing while using my mad Alexander Technique skills:

Start moving
Notice and keep noticing, over and over again, all the ways that The Tryer wants to involve itself in dancing
Notice the associated ‘collapse’ in awareness that comes from being hijacked by The Tryer and consciously re-expand my awareness, hooking back onto the contents of the present moment (AT jargon: ‘inhibition’)
Keep repeating this process moment by moment and watch as I move in a fluid, ‘non-doing’ kind of way. I've never surfed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a similar experience to riding a wave.

Let’s talk about point 3 for a moment. There is a ‘mental move’ associated with not allowing the Tryer to take over which, once you recognise it, is possible to assert consciously.

It’s extremely difficult to put this into words though, and this is what my course is for. Check out this lesson from the course on ‘identifying the finger, not the moon’ to get a sense of the teaching method I use.

By learning to identify ‘the moon’, you can play with your own awareness such that you can consciously ‘unhook’ yourself from The Tryer when it tries to kick in.

I’m applying it right now, while typing. I'm noticing all the ways The Tryer wants to take me out of the present moment and get me stuck. I am inhibiting all that and allowing an effortless something else to show up in its place.

I am always dancing.

This is what I want to give you.

Notice your 'getting ready' habit

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 09:32:00 +0000

I don’t mean preparation, like for a public lecture or test. I mean the moment by moment experience of bracing yourself for the next moment. Yes, I’ll explain.

There’s a very common experience in Alexander Technique lessons, particularly for beginners, where the student ‘gets ready’ to receive some Alexander Technique instruction. This is 100% the opposite of what is actually needed, although it provides an excellent opportunity for the teacher to point it out and thus actually teach Alexander Technique.

And this micro-moment within a lesson maps extremely well to countless moments like it in your day to day life, so it’s worth exploring.

After a couple of lessons the student knows that the teacher is likely to put their hands on their head, neck, hips, whatever. They might know that this will be accompanied by a subjective shift in their experience of themselves and of the world around them.

But the student has certain conditioned beliefs along the lines of

I want to get this right
It’s important that the teacher knows I’m paying attention
I need to know what’s about to happen
I can’t just stand here, I need to do something

These beliefs manifest themselves both in muscle tension and in the narrowing of awareness.

I mean this literally. The student’s body becomes stiffer, less available for movement. This tension ultimately causes physical pain, which is why many people seek out Alexander Technique in the first place. Their awareness of the space around them and of the present moment also diminish such that the student is living within a projection of thoughts about what might happen next, rather than directly experiencing what is actually happening now.

What’s particularly interesting is that the student likely has no idea that any of this is going on, because the ‘meta-awareness’ needed to be able to notice all this has itself gone away.

Any good teacher can notice all this instantly. It’s the teacher’s job not only to bring the student back into full awareness, but also to point out what just happened and help the student learn how to avoid it next time.

So let me do that for you now.

We just need some stimulus, some imagined trigger, that will get you to respond with a ‘getting ready’ response.

How about your boss coming over to you and saying flatly “we need to talk”.
Or your partner sending you a text message that says “call me”.
Or someone about to throw you a ball.
Or your phone bleeping with a new email alert.

Just let each of those scenarios drift through your imagination and see if you can detect that ‘getting ready’ response.

Slight muscle tension. Shallowed breathing. Slight reduction of awareness of everything else. Thought loops.

Behold your analytical, problem solving mind kicking in. I would say this is the left hemisphere taking charge, although since I’ve yet to read The Master and His Emissary, I can’t assert this confidently.

This is the process we are looking to interrupt in a conscious way, because this ‘getting ready’ response is what suppresses not only the innate capacities of your supercomputer, but also your capacity to learn, since:

“You can't do something you don't know, if you keep on doing what you know." F. M. Alexander

To get ready is really to assert an old, known response onto a new situation, one where the most appropriate response may actually be unknown to ‘the thinking you’. And the only way you can discover that more appropriate response is by not trying to impose all the existing responses that you already know.

Let’s take the example of your partner asking you to call.

Your analytical mind will immediately spin up any number of things this could be about. It really could be anything from a request to pick something up from the shops to a death in the family. You can guess, but you can’t know.

The problem is that you can only really ‘get ready’ in a limited number of directions. If you orient yourself towards ‘death in the family’, you’ll be caught off guard when it’s really about your child’s acceptance to that great school.

That’s a positive example, but you would still go into the conversation apprehensively, coordinate yourself as if braced to hear bad news, then you have to unhook yourself from the bad imagined story and switch into a positive emotional state so that you can respond in a suitably excited way.

Imagine if it were the other way around! You’re ‘ready’ for good news about the school and instead you get accusations of infidelity.

These are strong examples, but the point is that this ‘getting ready’ process is likely always happening over and over again in response to pretty much every stimulus that goes on around you. Even down to the level of hearing that new email alert on your phone. Do you have a physical and awareness based response to that sound? How does it serve you?

Life is easier, more spontaneous and just generally better when you’re not pushed around by this reflex. Rather than constantly trying to get ready, you can learn to trust that whatever happens you’ll respond appropriately.

And you can’t know what appropriate looks like until you’re in the moment, so why live in a mental simulation of your own making? Just live in the real world and let yourself respond when you need to!

Yes the word ‘just’ is doing a lot of work there.

For now, I invite you merely to go about your days and notice this ‘getting ready’ process. At first you’ll probably only notice it in retrospect, but when you realise it happened, ask yourself

“where was I just now?”
“what caused me to check out in that way?”
“what was it like the moment I came back to senses?”

And that’s it. Just notice, don’t try to change. You’re gathering data here, that’s all.

Disengaging your parking brake

Tue, 18 May 2021 12:00:00 +0000

A few years ago — during a road trip from Boston, MA, to Burlington, VT — I noticed the engine of my hire car was working quite hard and the steering was heavy.

When I stopped at a farm to investigate, and to sample some maple syrup and cheese, I realised that I hadn’t fully disengaged the parking brake when I started driving.

I’m re-reading the book How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live, written by Alexander Technique teacher Missy Vineyard, which uses this analogy to frame a kind of chronic muscle tension that we all have (emphasis mine):

When we move with too much muscle tension, compressing vertebrae and joints and pulling ourselves out of balance, [the locomotor] system can’t function well. It’s like driving the car with the emergency brake on. Tension and imbalance put stress and strain on your muscles, joints, bones and nerves. It restricts your breathing, interferes with your circulation and more. Over time this can lead to all sorts of problems. Missy Vineyard

It’s a helpful, real-world analogy, because if you find yourself driving with the parking brake on you immediately know that the correct course of action is to disengage the parking brake. And I’m sure you know what would happen if you didn’t realise the parking brake was on and just kept driving anyway. I bet you were even cringing a little as you read my story.

What if I told you that your 'muscle tension parking brake' is on right now — at least a little bit — and you just don’t realise it?

Can you notice it? Can you disengage it?

Actually, these are both trick questions, in a sense.

It’s likely that you can’t notice this chronic tension easily because it’s familiar. It’s already a background part of how you do everything that you do. Imagine if I had driven all the way from Boston to Burlington with the parking brake on. I would have just thought I had been given a crappy hire car and put my foot down more, damaging the car in the process.

The easiest way to notice what this tension is like is to experience what happens when it’s removed, perhaps with the help of an Alexander Technique teacher. During an in-person lesson you might get a sense of “aha, this new way of being feels so light and easy, I now recognise all the tension I was carrying before!”

From there it might seem reasonable to expect that you could remove that tension by yourself, but — I’m sorry — probably not.

When you’re driving the car with the parking brake on, there is a state “parking brake = on”. Another way of saying this is that, moment by moment, the car is continually asserting the state “parking brake = on”. And what you want is to change that state to “parking brake = off”.

But imagine that you don’t know there is a parking brake at all — you just know that something isn’t quite right and something needs to be done. You push every button and try every pedal in different combinations, and everything you do either has no effect on the car or makes the situation worse.

The solution is actually to stop doing something that you don’t know is being done!

This is what it’s like with chronic tension. Even if you know it’s there, chances are that everything you try to do to make it go away either has no effect or makes it worse, because you haven’t yet figured out the ‘move’ you have to make that points to stopping doing something instead of doing something else.

This is the trap that Alexander Technique frees you from.

So how do you do it? How do you escape the trap?

Paradoxically, you do it by not trying to, because to try is to put more effort into things that you already know how to do, and ‘stop doing tension’ is not something you currently know how to do.

Trying is only emphasising the thing we know already." F. M. Alexander

Instead, I invite you to follow this process:

Notice what you notice. While going about your day, keep the intention in your mind that you want to notice how you do things like walking, sitting, standing, talking, and so on. Don’t go looking for them, just allow yourself to notice them as they happen.
Don’t try to change anything. Remember, you don’t know how to change it, and anything you try will either do nothing or make it worse.

And then wait, patiently, without expectation, and keep noticing what you notice.

You may assert a gentle intention of “I want to stop doing this” if you want, but be careful to keep this non-judgemental, because judgement will incline you towards trying not to do the thing, which is what you want to avoid.

What you’re aiming for is to ‘decline to give consent’ to your urge to fix — the Alexander Technique skill of inhibition — while maintaining a clear intention that you want to stop doing the thing.

Then watch as your system changes itself.

A single integrated field of awareness

Wed, 12 May 2021 15:59:00 +0000

I’ve started re-reading one of the best Alexander Technique books out there: Freedom to Change by Frank Pierce Jones. When I have a reading list, this book will be on it.

I want to share a few really interesting excerpts from the opening chapters with some commentary.

“It was only after I realized attention [what I call awareness - MA] can be expanded as well as narrowed that I began to note progress. In order to move on a conscious level in which I could be aware of both doing and not-doing (of the inhibitory as well as excitatory part of the movement), I had to expand my attention [awareness] so that it took in something of myself and something of the environment.” Frank Pierce Jones

This framing of expanding attention (awareness) to include both doing and not-doing is really interesting. One of the core skills of Alexander Technique is that of inhibition, the constructive noticing and choosing not to respond to stimuli. You may notice that you have the urge to yell at your boss, but you don’t.

But this is an active process, one that you are continually renewing.

You are aware of what you are doing in response to your boss (having a conversation) and what you’re not doing in your response to your boss (yelling). Through the skill of inhibition, your awareness includes both of these processes at once. At any moment you could yell — that option is available to you, should you want it, and this is a good thing — but you're choosing not to.

The expanded awareness is what allows this to happen. If your awareness were collapsed down to the yell response, you wouldn’t have any choice but to yell. By expanding out you are able to monitor a wider field of processes and choose the one you want.

He immediately goes on to say:

“It was just as easy, I found, instead of setting up two fields—one for the self (introspection), one 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

For those of you with any contemplative training, particularly in Zen, this should be really exciting. Particularly bearing in mind that, to my knowledge, Pierce Jones had no involvement in these himself.

This ‘single integrated field’ is a wonderful way to experience life, and gives access to the skills of Alexander Technique. You learn to ‘be able to notice all the things that you could notice’, rather than being functionally blind to some proportion of your experience.

Remember, when something is outside of your awareness, it is essentially inaccessible/impossible for you. You cannot get out of the car if you do not know that outside of the car exists.

Later, he talks about really enjoying movement for its own sake for the first time, with links to the expanded state (emphasis mine):

“Using my body even for such tasks as shovelling snow or mowing the lawn became pleasurable. I supposed that other people had these experiences routinely, but for me they carried the fresh appeal of newness—like a new spectrum of colours. There was more to it, however, than mere sensory experience; there was a strong intellectual content. By expanding the field of consciousness it is possible to enjoy an experience at both a sensory and an intellectual level.” Frank Pierce Jones

Expanding consciousness (awareness) allows you to notice all the things that can be noticed, which here includes both the physical sensations of movement as well as your thoughts about them (or about anything else). You no longer have to swap back and forth from one to the other, like checking out of your body when you daydream or being unable to think while engaged in movement. This is useful, as he goes on:

“By ‘overviewing’ it you can detect and inhibit trains of thought or patterns of tension that would otherwise get in the way of your enjoyment.” Frank Pierce Jones

Let’s say you’re playing with your kids and you start thinking about the deadline at work tomorrow. Having this expanded awareness (overviewing) allows you to notice that and then consciously choose not to respond to that thought, such that you can continue enjoying playing with your kids.

But that’s common to lots of mindfulness practices, and AT has more to offer. He then adds:

“Bringing the intellect into physical experience has practical value as a problem-solving technique. A sprained ankle or a stiff neck ceases to be mysterious. After ruling out external causes that can be remedied by help from outside, you set up the hypothesis that something you are doing is interfering with the healing process. It is a hypothesis that can be easily tested an acted upon.” Frank Pierce Jones

There’s a lot here.

One thing to highlight is the scientific method framing here in the creation of and testing of hypotheses. In fact, John Dewey, the American philosopher, said:

“Mr Alexander’s technique is scientific in the strictest sense of the word.” John Dewey

And indeed that was my experience of my own training: propose hypothesis, create test, observe result, refine hypothesis. Repeat.

Also here is the ability to notice and stop things that you’re doing to yourself. The AT principle of psychophysical unity (body and mind are one process, not separate) also leads to such concepts as noticing what I’m doing to my body with my thoughts and then stopping that, like the kind of tension we create while we are ‘concentrating’, like how you might be tensing your face as you read right now.

I want to end this exploration with a final excerpt about what inhibition is like:

“The emotion (or the autonomic manifestation of it), instead of building up to an explosive force, remained a potential for action but did not interfere with rational decision. The same procedure could be used to take the panic out of fear. Redirecting or containing an emotion in this way is not the same as relaxing or ignoring the stimulus, both of which would reduce the capacity for action if action should be needed.”

Alexander Technique gives you the capacity and agency to remain available to respond to any stimulus in any way you choose. You can also see from this why so many benefits are in scope for this work: movement, emotional management, communication, intellectual pursuits: the entire scope of human activity can be improved through these skills. Sounds like snake oil, but if you’re talking about improving the functioning of the human organism, then this isn’t that weird.

I'll close with one last quote from the book's introduction as it's a great definition of Alexander Technique (whether the monkey paw meme is true or not is irrelevant):

“It is said that a simple way to trap a monkey is to present him with a nut in a bottle. The monkey puts his paw through the bottle's narrow mouth, grasps the nut, then cannot withdraw his paw because he will not (and hence cannot) let go of the nut. Most people are caught in monkey traps of unconscious habit. They cannot escape because they do not perceive what they are doing while they are doing it. Having an unconscious response pattern pointed out to you by someone else is not the same thing as perceiving it for yourself while it is happening. The Alexander Technique opens a window onto the little-known area between stimulus and response and gives you the self-knowledge you need in order to change the pattern of your response—or, if you choose, not to make it at all.” Missy Vineyard

How to be natural on camera by expanding awareness

Wed, 12 May 2021 15:58:00 +0000

I’m currently part way through a project to ‘make 100 YouTube videos’, the idea being to get comfortable on camera and to eventually become some sort of YouTube influencer guy. Or something.

Most of these videos have involved me screaming into the void, but this one struck a chord (now viewed almost 4000 times). It’s about how I use Alexander Technique style expanded awareness to come across naturally, or authentically, on camera. I added a 'power up' on social and speaking skills, including camera presence, in the Fundamentals of Alexander Technique course modules.

Before you watch it, though, let me address one fairly common comment, which goes along the lines of “you’re just not narrowing your eyes, moving more and relaxing your face, what’s the big deal?”

All of those things are true, but those are not the things that I'm doing. I am not consciously coordinating my body in any way. What I am doing is playing with expanding my awareness above and behind me. I’m also ‘allowing’ the space between me and the camera to be there, rather than compressing it.

This is a huge distinction. Adding layers of ‘doing’ to my face and body would not have the same effect. It would instead look like I’m trying to ‘do’ being natural. No! The way to be natural is to stop doing all the things that aren’t natural.

With that, here’s the video. Notice, in particular, how your body responds as I play with my awareness…

... and don't forget to like and subscribe!

Could online teaching be superior?

Wed, 12 May 2021 15:57:00 +0000

I’m re-reading one of Alexander’s later books at the moment: The Use of the Self.

He notes in the introduction that many people write to him complaining that they can’t ‘do it themselves’ by reading his books. Let me give you a sense of his not great writing style by providing an excerpt.

The need for a new printing of this book affords me an opportunity to try to clear up certain difficulties mentioned in letters from some of my readers, difficulties which arise in trying to teach themselves to apply my technique. What troubles most of them is ‘How to do it'. Some of these correspondents have rated me quite severely because, as they put it, they are not able to teach themselves from what I have written down in my books. They they must be well aware that, in spite of all the textbooks on the subjects, many people are unable to teach themselves to drive a car, play golf, ski or even to master such comparatively simple subjects as geography, history and arithmetic, without the aid of a teacher. – F. M. Alexander, in 1941. F.M. Alexander

This shows that the desire for self-directed learning of the Alexander Technique has been in the minds of students for almost 100 years. It also shows that Alexander himself didn’t seem too keen on the idea.

Reading closely, that’s not because he thinks it isn’t possible, but because there are reasons why it could fail. He lists four factors that must be borne in mind:

Written or spoken words cannot themselves convey a sensory experience.
The experience will feel unfamiliar at first. This is necessary.
Feelings are an unreliable guide. We need to welcome the unknown.
As a result of 2 and 3, if you ‘try try get it right’, you’ll end up doing what feels right and miss the point.

You can see there are lots of ‘traps’ here for self-directed learning. The student might not have the intended experience, or the student may too easily default to what feels right, but not realise it.

I can see where he was coming from, but it’s worth bearing in mind that

he wrote this in 1941, and
he was not a good writer, as he himself recognised.

We’ve come a long way in terms of teaching methods, technology (audio, video) and access to wider sources of knowledge since 1941. The fact that Alexander couldn’t write abut his technique in 1941 in a way that could convey it doesn’t mean that others can’t do it some other way now.

After thirty Zoom calls, hundreds of interactions on Twitter and many of my course students reporting benefits, I’ve discovered that sensory experiences can be conveyed through words, as long as you understand that it’s still the student who needs to bring about that sensory experience. My role as teacher is not to ‘give’ an experience, but to show you how to bring about an experience. My role as teacher is also to know the traps that you might fall into, show you that they’re there and how to get out of them.

I even suspect that online teaching has the potential to be superior to in person teaching in some dimensions (to audible gasps and boos from the stalls.). Alexander wrote:

To anyone who accepts these points and sees the reason for keeping them in view whilst working to principle in employing the technique, I would say ‘Go ahead, but remember that time is of the essence of the contract’. It looks me years to reach a point that can be reached in a few weeks with the aid of an experienced teacher. F.M. Alexander

Again, I agree — if you’re starting from a standing start and need to rediscover the principles from scratch.

But I wonder: by the time Alexander reached ‘that point’, what was his understanding of it like? He had figured everything out for himself, he knew where he was going and he could get himself back there, because he’d worked through it systematically and patiently from first principles.

I have been exposed to a broad mix of experienced teachers, both as part of my training and some that I sought out myself. The best understood that their job is to teach me skills I can develop for myself. The others (not the ones who joined our training!) seemed to care more about ‘giving me an experience’, but left me confused as to what it meant and what to do with it.

When I experience the latter, it may feel intriguing, but it’s not something I can learn from. Sam Harris compares psychedelics and meditation like this:

If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Sam Harris

The rocket may be fun and useful to show you that there’s a there there, but ultimately you'll probably want to learn to sail for yourself.

Extending the metaphor a little, Alexander taught himself to sail with very little knowledge of boats, water or wind. If you learn to sail by following that kind of journey, you will ultimately know every little detail of sailing required to master your level of proficiency. Yes, someone else may be able to show you how to sail and get you out on the water much faster, but I suspect you won’t understand it quite as deeply — at least not without training that recognises this.

Back to my hopefully inflammatory comment: I suspect that online teaching has the potential to be superior to in person teaching in some ways. That’s because I, as a teacher, cannot give you an experience directly. I have no hands-on experience giving to fall back on.

The only way I can teach you Alexander Technique remotely and asynchronously is if I can communicate something that will cause you to bring about new experiences for yourself. I can’t just give you a sail boat and show you the ropes. I have to demonstrate to you the truth and functioning of boats, water and wind and then teach you how to sail.

This forces me to step up my own game and think through exactly what is going on here. A true first-principles approach.

Public speaking with the Alexander Technique

Wed, 12 May 2021 15:55:00 +0000

Let’s talk about one of the most tangible benefits I’ve seen from applying my Alexander Technique skills: dramatically improved public speaking ability.

I used to be absolutely terrified of public speaking or of ‘performing’ in any way. I would get huge stage fright, feel intensely uncomfortable, visibly shake and would avoid it as best I could.

In late 2019 spoke at a conference in Korea in front of 300 senior energy industry professionals from around the world. I didn't have a script, I was horribly jet-lagged and I had dislocated (and then relocated) my left knee the day before. The talk went well and I enjoyed myself — you can read about this, and my ‘ultimate guide to public speaking’ here.

I now really enjoy public speaking. I still get nervous, but it doesn’t control me. I’m able to access an authenticity and playfulness on stage in a way that I never would have thought that I could have. And I attribute a huge amount of that to Alexander Technique.

Before I learned Alexander Technique, I wasn’t in control of my own awareness. It could be pushed and pulled around, dragging me along with it. When there was anxiety, there was only anxiety. When there was stage fright, there was no space for anything else. I tried to control, interfere or otherwise coordinate myself while being defined by these unpleasant things.

Now I am able to expand my awareness far beyond these things. Not to suppress or ignore them, but to place them in the context of a much bigger space. From there I get to choose how much I engage or don’t engage with the fear, how much I respond or don’t respond to the anxiety.

In Korea, in the moments as I went up on stage, I was aware of my exhaustion. I was aware of the intense throbbing in my left knee. I was aware of the enormous room, and of the simultaneous translators at the back. Each of those 'stimuli' — the thoughts, the pain, the fears — had the potential to hijack me.

But I didn't let them. I stayed 'in the room'. I expanded my awareness. I connected with the audience. I lived in that precious space between stimulus and response. The pain and tiredness were there, but they weren't the entirety of my experience. I had choice.

It’s in that space that something magical happens. Something else shows up that is simultaneously not me, but is also much more me than I could ever hope to ‘do’ myself. That’s where the playfulness really comes from.

I really, genuinely can’t fully express how transformational that moment felt, as I looked back on the timid, younger version of myself and where he had come, and knowing that it was no fluke occasion — that I now have the power to bring that capacity to bear every time I ever go on stage again.

Incidentally, everything I’m doing online — Twitter, the newsletters, making a course, making friends — I also attribute a lot of that to Alexander Technique, but that’s a discussion for another time.

By the way! My Fundamentals of Alexander Technique course now includes a 'power-up' module on speaking skills._

Learning to say no: experiments in inhibition

Wed, 12 May 2021 15:49:00 +0000

Consent lies at the heart of Alexander Technique. I mean two things by this.

One person giving permission to participate in some activity. This kind of consent is vital not just when teaching Alexander Technique, but in all domains of life.

The experience of giving consent to respond to stimuli. This is how someone who practices Alexander Technique would work with themselves.

What does it really mean to give consent? To me it means, "yes, I am making a clear choice to participate, knowing that I have the freedom and the power – at any time – to change my mind".

Because that's what consent comes down to: knowing that you can say no. Can you really give consent to something if you aren't deeply aware – at the most fundamental level – that you have the power to withhold it?

Open and close your hand a few times. You're not thinking "open... close...", you're just doing it. The just opening your hand experience is the level of knowing I mean. If you know that you can just say no, your world changes.

Alexander Technique can be framed as learning how to consciously withhold – and then to give – consent. It gives you the power to say no. But, importantly, it's learning to say no such that you can then say yes.

The jargon we use for this is 'inhibition', which is also a verb, i.e. 'to inhibit':

”You come to learn to inhibit and to direct your activity. You learn, first, to inhibit the habitual reaction to certain classes of stimuli, and second, to direct yourself consciously in such a way as to affect certain muscular pulls, which processes bring a new reaction to these stimuli. Boiled down, it all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus. But no one will see it that way. They will all see it as getting in and out of the chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that a pupil decides what he will or will not consent to do. They may teach you anatomy and physiology till they are black in the face -- you will still have this to face, sticking to a decision against your habit of a life.” F. M. Alexander

F. M. Alexander

If you previously read Learning to say no:experiments in inhibition then I'm sorry (not sorry) that I’m about to pull the same trick on you again.

Incidentally, I did this on every one of my Zoom calls this week and all but one person fell for it, even if they knew it was coming. The only person who didn’t immediately start looking for an object to pick up confessed that he literally doesn’t have an internal narrator like many people do.

Ready? Here we go:

In a minute I'm going to ask you to identify an object you can pick up.

…

So, is a part of you already looking for an object? Come back! I said “in a minute!” I even bolded it!

Did you really consent to that 'looking around' process, or was there a sense of it ‘hijacking’ you?

Here are two more versions of the same trick:

Don't think of an elephant!
If you don't eat that marshmallow then you can have two later!

“But I can't not think of an elephant! And I really want that marshmallow, even though I eat a ketogenic diet (true story)!”

All true. Inhibition is not about suppressing anything. To try not to think of an elephant is still to have your experience defined by the elephant. So in classic non-doing style, we’re going to explore neither thinking of an elephant nor not thinking of an elephant.

Let's repeat the game except, this time, I want you to actively try not to pick an object.

Ready? Let’s go:

In a minute I'm going to ask you to identify an object you can pick up.

...

Michael pauses for dramatic effect

...

What happened? If you're like most people, then one or both of these things:

1. You tried to push away the idea of choosing something by over-focusing on something else.

This is the "la la la not listening" version of attention control. It does work, but you're still defining your experience in that moment by the thing you don't want to think about. It still has power over you.

2. You may also have found yourself tensing your body somewhere, like constricting your breathing or tightening around your jaw and shoulders.

If that's you then you have my permission to let go of all that.

Again, this might work to a point – mind and body are one process, after all – but it's hardly ideal because now you’re tense, and your experience is still defined by the whole object-picking thing.

Instead, I want to show you another way.

First, I invite you to expand your awareness. Right now, as you read:

notice the furthest away sound, and also
notice the feeling of pressure in your body, and also
notice that there is space above your head and behind you.

Keep choosing this expansive state as we repeat the game again.

Notice what it does to that sense of expanded awareness. Notice, even, how me even talking about give you the prompt might be having an effect.

Here we go.

In a minute I'm going to ask you to identify an object you can pick up.

...

Michael pauses again for dramatic effect

...

What happened? The key thing to notice is that your previously expanded awareness likely narrowed or 'collapsed’ in some way. You became less aware of your surroundings, while the idea of picking an object, like the elephant, seemed to take up more space.

This shows us that there is a correlation between automatic habits – that hijacking that happens – and our experience of immediate spatial awareness.

Inhibition is to notice this process happening in a non-judgemental way and to consciously decide to re-expand your awareness. The notion that you could pick an object is there and so is the world around you.

Let’s repeat it for the last time. Expand your awareness (notice all the sounds, space, textures, colours around you), notice that your awareness will collapse a little, and then consciously choose to be aware of the whole world again.

In a minute I'm going to ask you to identify an object you can pick up.

…

Notice the collapse of awareness.

Consciously re-notice the entire world around you.

Let both the thought and the entire world be there at the same time.

Welcome to a special place of undefined. You could now choose to pick an object if you so wished. You could also get up and make yourself a coffee. All options are available to you.

Remember Viktor Frankl’s famous (yet misattributed) words:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." Not Viktor Frankl

To inhibit your habitual responses is to widen and then ultimately live in that space between stimulus and response. From inside that space you have the power to either give or withhold consent to the response.

Thanks for playing with me. That game will have worked for some of you, while others among you may be a little perplexed. That’s okay! Different people need different ways in – this is just one of them.

If it worked then I invite you to notice this phenomenon happening in your day to day lives. Notice what collapses your awareness. Notice that you have the power to consciously re-expand your awareness. Notice what happens if you do.

Unleash your supercomputer

Wed, 12 May 2021 15:39:00 +0000

New metaphor: Alexander Technique is the art of unleashing the power of the supercomputer within you.

In A Pattern Recognition Theory Of Mind (paywall), Tiago discusses the key ideas in Ray Kurzweil’s book, “How To Create A Mind”. There’s a good intro here to what Alexander Technique, and all those other things, are about.

Consider the last time you played tennis (or another sport). As light from the bouncing tennis ball hit your eyes, photoreceptors turned that light into electrical signals that were passed along to many different kinds of neurons in the retina.By the time two or three synaptic connections have been made, information about the location, direction, and speed of the ball has been extracted and is being streamed _in parallel_ to the brain. It’s like sending a fleet of cars down an 8-lane freeway, instead of a bullet train down a single track – some cars can depart as soon as they’re ready, without having to wait for the others. Tiago Forte

You really are an amazing creature. As the tennis ball hurtles through space, you take a huge number of measurements and perform astonishingly complex calculations in mere fractions of a second. And then you keep doing it – over and over again, updating your model of the ball in relation to your body and the environment – as the situation evolves.

Image credit: Jack Butcher

The thing is, though, that you have absolutely no idea how you do any of this. You observe and then move the tennis racket such that the ball bounces back over the net. You “just run”.

How? There’s no role for the thinker here: everything is happening too quickly and you wouldn’t be able to do those calculations with your inner monologue anyway. And yet, there’s a part of you can do it effortlessly. Let’s call that part the supercomputer.

It’s great when it works, but a problem arises when your thinking mind either forgets about, or doesn’t trust, your supercomputer. It gets involved and tries to do things it’s very much not equipped to do. This interferes with the functioning of the supercomputer: “Performance = Potential - Interference” in the language of the Inner Game.

Even worse: we’ve been conditioned to interfere to the extent that we don’t even know we’re doing it and we now have to unlearn those habits.

The solution to this seems obvious, right? Just stop interfering! Get the thinker out of the way and let the supercomputer function!

Well yes, but… how exactly? It’s the same as trying to falling asleep. The more you try, the more you interfere, and the worse the outcome. As Alan Watts might say, you’re in a bind.

How to get out of that bind is precisely what the Alexander Technique teaches. To quiet the thinker, remove self-interference and then watch in amazement as things happen of themselves.

Getting unstuck - physically and philosophically - with Alexander Technique

Wed, 12 May 2021 15:01:00 +0000

I want to open with a quote from Frank Pierce Jones regarding John Dewey, who was an early proponent of Alexander Technique:

(John) Dewey considered that the Alexander Technique provided a demonstration of the unity of body and mind. With progress as a pupil, he reported an improvement in his vision and in his breathing and in ability to hold a philosophical position calmly with ability to change it if new evidence warranted." Frank Pierce Jones

One of those things is not like the others.

What is this thing that can improve someone's breathing — as well as their ability to engage calmly in philosophical discourse? This is an important question, because it gets to the heart of what Alexander Technique really is and why I think it has transformational potential.

Let me start by describing what I mean when I say 'to get stuck'.

Getting stuck means either to forget that you have options or to lack the capacity to act on your options. It means to close yourself off to certain possibilities that exist within your wider 'possibility space'.

That's a little abstract, so let me give you two examples.

At some point it may occur to you to you that you want to go for lunch. Then it occurs to you that you could go to that burger place down the road. At this point, it's highly likely that your awareness collapses around 'burger place', which makes it much more difficult for you to think of other places you could go. You 'get stuck' with 'burger place', making other options less available.

Going back one step, you might also have got stuck with the idea of having lunch in the first place. Once it occurred to you that you could have lunch, how free were you not to have lunch at all — or to do literally anything else?

This exact same thing happens with movement. The ways you habitually move become the only ways you can move, because your awareness no longer includes other possibilities. This is probably the most common experience in Alexander Technique lessons, where a new movement pattern guided by the teacher causes the student to exclaim in surprise "I have no idea how I just stood up."

"But I can choose to move in different ways!" you might say.

Yes, you can, within a limited set of possibilities that happen to be available to you. There are other ways that are not available to you and you don't know about them, so you can't move in those ways. This is still what I would call 'getting stuck', because you are not available to the full scope of possibilities that exist.

Alexander Technique is a way to notice when you're about to get stuck (to 'collapse your possibility space') and then consciously navigate around getting stuck or get unstuck whenever necessary.

Getting unstuck means to become available to everything within the larger possibility space. This is something that happens over and over again — it is never done, and to think that it can be is a trap that itself gets you stuck.

In an intellectual capacity this means repeatedly asserting that you might be incorrect and so being available to change your mind whenever you want. This doesn't mean being pushed around by whatever arguments you come across. You can be very clear in your belief that you are right while at the same time remaining totally okay with the idea that you're not. This is what gives you freedom to make new choices or change your position at any moment.

You get stuck as soon as you 'forget' that you might be wrong. Your options become constrained and you are no longer available to learn something new.

“You can’t do something you don’t know, if you keep on doing what you do know.” F. M. Alexander

It's exactly the same with movement. You can be very clear about your desire to pick up an object while at all moments being perfectly able not to pick up the object or to pick something else up instead.

Here's a little game. Right now, gently check that you could stand up and get a glass of water. Don't actually do it. Just check that you could. Now that you're aware that you could, can you get a sense of what your experience was like just in the moment before you read this paragraph?

Alexander Technique gives you the capacity to be available to do anything, to go anywhere, to think anything, to feel anything. It's when we're not available to do anything, to go anywhere, to think anything or to feel anything that we get ourselves in trouble — especially when we don't realise it.

'Getting unstuck' is not something that happens once and is then held onto. In fact, trying to hold onto being unstuck is itself to be stuck.

Getting unstuck is a dynamic process, something that is continually reasserted moment by moment and aimed towards all things that might cause us to get stuck. I think this is another way of phrasing what I mean when I say 'non-doing' — it's the capacity to make conscious choices, to move and to act within the world while also dynamically, repeatedly and elegantly not getting stuck in the way I describe.

I want to address one criticism that some of you are likely to have here: "But Michael, how can I be aware of all possibilities at once? That sounds overwhelming".

I agree! And that's not what I mean. The two states I'm describing are "not being available for anything" and "being available for anything".

I'm not talking about "being aware of everything", but "being able to be aware of anything". I encourage you to sit with that sentence for a moment.

Since our thinking mind cannot process all possible options at once (you can't put your attention on everything), the actual experiencing of the unstuck state comes with a sense of unfamiliarity, surprise and trust. You end up moving in new ways and thinking new thoughts that seem to come from somewhere else. This is where I could talk about the Dao and wu-wei, but won't on this occasion.

I'm exploring this line of inquiry because I'm curious about the links between Alexander Technique and other areas of philosophy and epistemology, particularly fallibilism, which I just learned is also associated with the aforementioned John Dewey.

Awareness is a User Interface

Wed, 12 May 2021 14:37:00 +0000

In What is the Alexander Technique? I defined awareness as "the space that attention can move around within; the capacity, moment by moment, to be able to notice things that could be noticed."

Let’s play a game.

First, please look at this optical illusion. Is it a duck? Or is it a rabbit? Or is it both at once?

Spend a few moments to really see each version and switch back and forth between the two a few times. This is important: the rest won’t make sense if you don’t spend a few moments getting comfortable with this ‘switching’.

Bunny or duck? Duck or bunny?

Great!

Thanks for doing that.

Now on with the game.

How many of the following statements are true?

“I am leaning forwards slightly in my chair”
“I am holding my breath a little bit”
“There is some extra tension in my face, particularly around my eyes and jaw, and in my shoulders”
“I have sort of forgotten that the rest of the world around me exists”

Sorry (not sorry), but I played a trick on you. The game had nothing to do with the optical illusion, but was meant to show you a few important things:

It’s easy for your sense of what is ‘important’ to be hijacked. Fundamentally, you’re reading an article involving a duck and a rabbit from some guy on the Internet. This is possibly one of the least ‘important’ things you’ll do all day, yet I suspect many of you responded within a frame of needing to get something ‘right’.
Our awareness is easily ‘collapsed’ by sufficiently powerful stimuli. Did the world go away a little bit while you were looking at the picture? When I pointed this out, was there a sense of surprise and ‘getting the world back’? This is perhaps the most confronting part of this for me — how easily I can be made to ‘check out’ of my wider environment.
Your attention and awareness have a powerful influence over your body. If you noticed any of the physical effects I mentioned, just ask yourself… why are you doing any of that? Even if you want to argue that you needed to get closer to the screen to see the illusion… did you really?

Now, let’s get that expanded awareness back.

Right now, in this moment, a_nd without moving your attention away from these word_s:

notice that there is a world above your head and behind you
notice that there are also ambient sounds
if someone were to call your name, just check that you would be able to notice that.
notice that there are objects in your peripheral vision
…now notice if your body has changed at all

Notice also how you didn’t have to do anything to be able to notice more of the world, nor did you have to actually look at or ‘listen at’ it. There’s something going on here.

Like I said, awareness is the capacity, moment by moment, to be able to notice things that could be noticed, and you can’t do noticing.

Awareness Gives You Agency and the Freedom to Choose

Here’s a fun question to ponder.

While you were engaged in figuring out the illusion and making it switch back and forth… could you have stopped and done anything else? Or were you on a kind of autopilot that released you back into the world, either when the task was completed or as it became less salient? This effect would have been be more apparent if your awareness was more collapsed, by the way.

If you noticed this, just think: how much is this happening throughout your day to day life? I use the example of browsing Twitter: when you’re in infinite scroll mode, are you able to stop? Or do you have to wait, somewhat unconsciously, until your attention is no longer hooked, whatever the cause of that may be?

This is something you can explore in your own life.

If something is outside your awareness — i.e., in a given moment when you wouldn’t be able to notice something that you might notice if you were in a different mode — are you able to take action in relation to it?

For example:

if a friend calls your name and you don’t notice it — and not because it was inaudible — can you answer them?
if you don’t notice the thought that you need to buy your mother a birthday card, can you?
if you forget that the space behind you exists, are you able to occupy it? (Are you already leaning forward slightly again, right now? How long have you been doing that?)
If you’re not aware that you could take another route to work, can you go that way?

This is why I say that expanding your awareness increases your agency — it literally makes more options available to you.

But! As you’ve seen, it’s also trivially easy for your awareness to be collapsed by external (and internal) stimuli.

If the space between stimulus and response is very small, you will almost certainly end up following your habitual response, over and over. Your options disappear just at the moment you might want to choose one of them.

So How About That User Interface?

My goal with this article has been to show you that these dynamics around awareness exist. It’s a whole new world of experience, with effects that seem obvious on reflection, but that lacked words and a useable framework.

THIS is why Alexander Technique, I think, could be so valuable. Alexander Technique lets you engage with the world at the level of awareness, rather than at the level of the objects within it.

For example, many people lean forwards and slouch when they work at a laptop, because they ‘forget’ that the space above and behind them exists, and their bodies follow their awareness.

If that’s you, you might use muscle to ‘sit up straight’ and sit back… or you could expand your awareness up and back and watch as your body reorganises itself, without you ‘doing’ anything. This does actually work, and people who have taken the course are reporting this kind of experience.

This particular rabbit hole goes deep, and this is already a long article, so I won’t list more examples now.

But the point is that the stuff you can notice happening in and to awareness is not passive — you can reach in and play with it. And when you do, things change. Your body moves differently, you think differently, you make different choices, and on and on.

What is the Alexander Technique?

Wed, 12 May 2021 14:00:00 +0000

You’re probably familiar with this well-known, yet misattributed, quote from Viktor Frankl:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." Not Viktor Frankl

But… how?

At its heart, Alexander Technique is a method to notice, expand and ultimately play within that space between stimulus and response.

This has an enormous range of applications. While Alexander Technique is most commonly associated with physical performance — and it’s often used by actors, musicians and athletes — in reality the entire scope of human experience can be enhanced by being able to make new conscious choices in response to things that happen in our internal and external worlds.

An example I often use is one of getting angry at someone in conversation. When in ‘fully automatic’ mode — which you could characterise as a kind of autopilot or ‘choice unconsciousness’ — you might just get angry and yell at them. The notion that you had any option to take a different path wasn’t available to you; there was no space between stimulus and response.

That’s what Alexander Technique is about, but the actual experiencing of it has another, much richer dimension to it, which is around the conscious control of awareness. And it’s this that I think has attracted so many people to want to explore the subject more.

A quick primer. You are probably very familiar with attention, that spotlight that you can move from thing to thing (with varying levels of success, depending on your executive function). You have your attention on these words right now.

Awareness, on the other hand, is the space that attention can move around within. Awareness is the capacity, moment by moment, to be able to notice things that could be noticed.

This graphic comes from the book “The Mind Illuminated” by Culadasa (John Yates), which describes the same distinction between attention and awareness. You can have your attention on the face of the person you’re talking to, while the sound of the aircraft or the dog are in your awareness

Right now, your attention is on these words, but you might also be able to notice the temperature of the air, ambient sounds or feelings of pressure in your body. And if you weren’t aware of these before, notice that you are now with me reminding you of them.

For example, let’s say you’re busy working on the computer: writing, coding, analysing, reading, whatever. Such intellectual things have a capacity to really pull you in and collapse your awareness… to the extent that you might not realise that you needed to use the bathroom hours ago. The feeling was there the whole time, but you didn’t (and couldn’t) ‘notice’ it, and as such it was outside your awareness.

Things that are outside of your awareness are not accessible to you; you cannot choose to engage with something until your awareness includes it.

Awareness is a characteristic of human perception that is independent of, but related to and highly affected by, attention. It’s like a ‘user interface’ that we use to exist and navigate as conscious agents in the world. We seem to think awareness is like a TV screen that we just passively watch or get guided by, when in fact we can reach in, interact with it and direct it.

Awareness has a shape, size and ‘boundary’ of variable permeability. It can be compressed, expanded and its contents can be made more or less vivid.

And all of this, bizarre as it may sound, can be brought under your conscious control. The spatial component is why I call this website “Expanding Awareness” — I mean this quite literally.

Now I know what some of you may be thinking here: “this all sounds suspiciously like silly woo”. It certainly crossed my mind when I first encountered it — my physics degree and career in low carbon energy innovation didn’t quite know what to make of it.

You’ll have to take my word for it, but in my three year part-time training as an Alexander Technique teacher, I was the annoying rational one, always trying to come up with falsifiable hypotheses, designing repeatable experiments and trying to catch out my fellow trainees. I was satisfied that there is really something here, something important and additional to the existing ‘mindfulness’ discourse — something I want to share more widely.

Like meditation and other contemplative practices, this is a way of exploring and increasing our capacity to be and act in the world, it’s just that we’re doing it subjectively — ‘from the inside’, so to speak. And, often, we seem to be accessing the parts of the brain that don’t use words, so we sort of have to point, gesture, and use examples and metaphors to gain entry to these new ways of being. Even though I don’t know how these things work, I know after years of testing that they work: I just don’t fully understand the physical mechanisms yet (working on it).

The Alexander Technique — at least the way I see it — is about showing you that awareness is so much more than you think it is, showing you how to gain conscious control over it, and how that conscious control of awareness can be used to develop a greater sense of ease and agency in any aspect of your life, whether it’s how you move, how you think, how you perform, how you speak, how you relate to others or how you relate to yourself.