Ah-teeen-TION!
Welcome to post #39 of my Alexander Technique blog! This means you’ll be getting a Thanksgiving edition before I cram my face for a full day with various brown foods and multiple coffees.
It also means I’ve been giving you loads of stuff to think about during your lie downs and walks without actually telling you THINGS TO DO to get the Arthur Rubenstein level poise at the piano or hit the ever loving shite out of a golf ball. If you can’t tell, I’ve withheld this information on purpose because:
Walking is Awesome. and…
If you just move with your old habit, nuthin’ changes!
One of the dastardly things that can happen when we attempt to learn or do something new is that we go into Concentration Mode. FM Alexander writes about how both concentration and mind-wandering (day dreaming) can block us in our attempts to do something new. So before I go on about how you should go Up on Toes or use Mechanical Advantage to explore the various qualities of weight that you have, I want to describe what tends to happen when we concentrate and do my best to describe the level of attention that helps us function at our best.
When we focus on a task, many of us have a tendency to do a little more than just work on the problem at hand. We tend to gear up and prepare to knock that project out of the park. We tend to say to ourselves, “Ok, lemme get this done real quick.” or just as bad…
“I WILL UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE NOW!
A++ MODE ACTIVAAAAATE!!!!!”
Ok, so I might be revealing more of my own personality than anyone else’s, BUT I have seen many of my students - in a genuine attempt to pay attention and understand their lessons - go into their own version of Thinking or Understanding. And 9 times out of 10, they have a subconscious pattern of dropping the weight of their head into dead weight. The effect of this is to place unnecessary pressure on the neck and begin the process of collapsing the weight of the upper torso.
What a horrible conundrum, no? You come to me for a lesson and simply in the act of attempting to understand the words coming out of my mouth, you stiffen your neck! ACK!!!
Fear not dear reader! There’s hope for us all! You can actually ease your foot off of the concentration pedal and still maintain your ability to think while preventing your neck from stiffening or your head from dropping. It will take some noticing in the beginning. You may even want to practice Doing the Wrong Thing with the aid of a Mirror! This is explicitly what FM Alexander said he did to study his habits in his book, The Use of the Self and it’s what you should try!
For some of my students, the dropping of the head could be forward. For others, it may be a head tilting toward the left or the right. It could be a gaze into the distance with a holding of the breath and a stiffening of the neck. The point is that if you start thinking too hard, you’ve really stopped being in the moment with curiosity. More than likely, you’ve started conspiring to guarantee success. And the one thing that I can guarantee you in this life is that there are no guarantees.**
Attention to Detail is OK!***
I have stressed time and again in this blog that I would like you to practice simple, quiet, and additive thinking. I have also stressed that you’ll have more success with general rather than specific attention. It may begin to seem counter-intuitive for me to then say that you can have this AND pay attention to details. What I am asking you to learn to do is the truest form of multi-tasking you could hope to learn.
During the pandemic, I took some saxophone lessons over Zoom with Marc Mommaas. He noticed that my vibrato was too intense and random and that I was bending far too many of my notes in my playing. When I remarked that this was a big habit and would take me some time to sort out, he countered. He said, that if I made it my only priority to prevent this habit I could sort the problem out in 2-4 weeks.
His prescription was simple. I was to practice and record myself while playing 12 bars. If I noticed vibrato or a bend while playing the 12 bars, I was to stop playing, reset the recording, and try a fresh 12 bars. If I did not notice the vibrato during the playing, I would listen back at the end of the take and verify if I had succeeded.
In the beginning, I must have stopped around bar 3 or 4. By the end of the week, the habit was much reduced.
It took a combination of general and specific thinking to do this. I had to both play the blues AND prevent a habit. Had the types of phases I wanted to play increased in technical difficulty, I would have failed to prevent the vibrato because my mind would have gone into FULL CONCENTRATION MODE and I would have only been able to complete one task; playing technical phrase with habitual vibrato.
FM Alexander, Marc Mommaas, or any great teacher will stress to you that when it comes time to learn something new, you’re going to want to set achievable goals for yourself so that success tends**** to happen more than failure.
What Does Your Attention Feel Like?
If you notice that you also have a concentration mode habit, tell me about it! The first step in preventing a habit is recognising it and naming it so congratulate yourself! I for one will immediately hold my breath and stiffen my neck, chest, and right arm. Ohhhh lawd, lawd, lawd!! (read in my best New Orleans accent). Let me tell you how I don’t like that!
** Correction. Death and Taxes are guaranteed.
*** Another factoid I like to bear in mind. As a kid, I had heard that chess grand masters can think 7 moves ahead. I was discouraged upon hearing this because I hate losing and 7 moves seemed impossible. As it turns out, I recently read that grand masters actually only think 3 moves ahead. But their skill and experience are so great that they have stopped thinking about all of the mediocre moves us mere mortals would do. Great practice leads towards mastery!
**** A tendency towards the good is all we really wish for with our studies of the Alexander Technique. Don’t go looking for perfection and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much easier this work gets!
Well, I KNOW I go into concentration mode quickly and easily doing almost everything!! Especially Alexander Technique! I so want to get it right! I end up staring and stop breathing for sure! No doubt I stiffen and collapse as well. I think I will try to better notice what else happens!