I’m offering a free introductory Alexander lesson to all clergy of all faiths.

I’m also offering free introductory lessons to all doctors, psychologists, therapists, teachers, chiropractors, osteopaths, acupuncturists, dentists, physical therapists, yoga and pilates instructors, masseuses, Feldenkrais practicioners… Anyone who could possibly send me students.

Email me at lukeisback@gmail.com.

The breakthrough moment in my first Alexander lesson was when I lay on a table and my teacher, Julia Caulder, slid her hands down my back and released my shoulders.

Suddenly all the tension was gone and I felt great.

It was an identical move to what my acupuncturist had done.

I had an acupuncture student in training at Emperor’s College who was also a massage therapist. And when he treated me, he’d slide his hands down my back and release the tension in my shoulder blades. I always felt amazing after he did that.

Over the course of my life, I developed the habit of hunching and tightening my shoulder blades.

After my first Alexander lesson — and this is where it was different from what my acupuncturist/masseuse had done — I had tools to live by. I started thinking about the width of my back and the width of my shoulders. During the movie I went to that night, I kept thinking about my width.

I was stepping on to the bridge to total freedom!

Ethan Kind writes:

The fundamental tenet of the Alexander Technique is that the head leads a lengthening spine which leads the body into integrated movement. Therefore, as a student is standing before me facing way, I have them close their eyes for a few moments and feel their head gently leading their body up towards the ceiling. Just this frequently reduces the effort of standing. I then ask the student to find their feet on the floor, which means to sense both feet wholly on the floor with an even weight distribution from the front to the back of the feet.

I point out areas of the body that are held, and I keep returning to the head – asking that it continue to lead the spine into lengthening. I then ask that the knees be easy, just slightly released. Locking the knees tightens the thighs and kicks the whole b body out of alignment, usually creating a sway in the lower back.

I next ask that the ankles be released to show the student that they don’t need to lock their ankles to stand. Then I ask that the muscles in the lower back, right at the top of the buttocks, be easy and not to tighten the buttocks. This allows the student to have movement in the body rather than standing rigidly upright.

Shoulder Girdle

The shoulder girdle is designed to float easily on top of the rib cage with the arms hanging freely to the sides. With my hands resting lightly on the sides of the ribcage of the student, I make him aware of his breathing and ask him not to interfere with it. “Simply let your breathing move the ribs gently on the sides and back as well as the front.” This is the basis of gentle, balanced movement in the torso and allows breathing to act as an inner massage of the muscles of the back and shoulder girdle.

Trevor emails about an event sponsored by BigJewishTent.com: We have an amazing event coming up this Sunday, January 29th. We are celebrating the 15th annual Tu B’Shvat Nature Fest at the Shalom Institute in Malibu. The event will feature star performers, such as the local music legends from Ozomatli, Billy Jonas, and Cindy Paley. We will have a huge variety of food, drink and not to mention outdoor activities. Activities ranging from the ropes course to moon bounces, there are plenty to choose from.

A poised head is balanced on top of the spine. Your head weighs between 12-20 pounds and if it is not balanced on your spine, it pulls on your neck and spine, resulting in strain and injury.

Don’t get sucked in to your computer or smart phone or iPad. Pay attention to how you’re using yourself. If you read something interesting, you’re likely to forget about your use and to hunch around your computer, so keep some awareness of yourself as much as you can (until it becomes second nature).

The Los Angeles Times reports:

A new study published by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, in conjunction with researchers at Microsoft (a long-time Apple rival), is the first of its kind to examine the physical effects on the head, neck and shoulders of spending time staring at a tablet.

The good news is that it is not all bad news. The researchers found that people are more inclined to move around and shift positions when they use a tablet compared with people who are sitting at a desktop computer. That’s definitely good. However, tablet users that hold the device almost at their lap, or rest the tablet in a case on their lap, are putting a lot of strain on the neck muscles — much more than someone using a laptop or desktop computer.

“If you think about your position when you are hunched over looking down, your head is hanging out over space, so you are using your neck muscles to support the weight,” said Jack Dennerlein, director of the Harvard Occupational Biomechanics Laboratory, and lead author of the paper.

Definitely not good.

In the paper, published earlier this month in the peer reviewed “Work: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment, and Rehabilitation,” the researchers identified four ways that people use tablets — the lap-hand (holding the tablet down at your lap), lap-case (resting the tablet in a case on your lap), table-case (resting the tablet in its case on a shallow angle on a table) and table-movie (resting the tablet at a steep angle on a table).

They concluded that the best position is the table-movie position because it is the only position in which the user’s posture approached neutral. All the other positions put a lot of strain on the user’s neck muscles.

This thriving country of 23 million has no Alexander Technique teachers. I should clean up!

Email me if you’d like an Alexander lesson in Taiwan for US$100. Maybe I’ll pay a visit.

On the down side, there are only about 300 Jews in the country.

Greg Leake emails: Luke,
I can’t imagine why you would think about a business in Taiwan (I’ve been there) before you would give it a try in Dallas.

You know, Dallas and Ft. Worth are located in very close proximity to each other. The entire shooting match is referred to as the metroplex. The total population is around 6 million, with hardly any Alexander Technique teachers.

Although the Jewish community in Dallas is not as robust as LA, there were 9 synagogues on our side of town, and some of the synagogues were surrounded by a fairly dense population of Orthodox Jews. Our neighbor was modern Orthodox, and sometimes we helped out on Saturdays and what-have-you. There are not the kosher restaurants that you find in LA, but there are a few eateries (sometimes some Orthodox take a day off from being Jewish… you just have a layer of aluminum foil between the fish and the burner, then use plastic forks to eat with and this way you get to eat with the goys once in a while.) It’s not a bad place for a Jew to think about relocating.

Naturally, because of the nature of the beast, the community there is gradually bumming out all of the goys they’re around because of the well-known unfriendliness. (As I left, one girl who worked in a shop there told me she had never been treated like that in her life. I asked her what she meant, and she referred to the snobbish way that the Jews she waited on looked down on her and treated her in a snobbish manner.) At the same time, I managed to get onto friendly terms with a number of modern Orthodox even if it was not easy. I came to believe that it’s better for Jewish communities to live in a sort of 50-50 arrangement with goys as is true in parts of Dallas. It at least forces some friendships and benevolent feelings to come into fruition, which, of course, is better than nothing. Also I should add that Texas traditionally has felt a certain identification and sympathy with Australians. Used to, the idea was that we saw eye to eye, and that would not be a bad basis on which to ply your trade.

You’ve gotten some good advice from various people about ways to stop shooting yourself in the foot as you attempt to grow your business. I suggest that you stop making such a mildly pejorative characterization of goys. I remember one conversation you and Rabbs had several months ago when you were wondering if you should even have any association with goys at all. I was certainly struck by that, and I am one of your big supporters. Obviously, you don’t want Gentiles to think that they should feel awkward about approaching you for your services simply because they aren’t Jewish. If I understood Rabbs correctly a while back, you have to get special dispensations in many areas for goys to be in your space. These things should not be advertised. It’s a real turn-off. Right now I would avail myself of your lessons first thing if I travel to LA, but there have been a number of occasions when I obviously felt I would be very unwelcome, as I was not Jewish. And this is after all these months of communicating.

So the basic upshot would be to think about trying Dallas if you really wanted to experiment with a relocation besides Australia. Just make sure you have some money set aside to keep you going for a while. The Jewish neighborhoods in Dallas are fairly affluent.

Last night there was a huge rain, and the river below our back yard was flooded, and it’s rapids ahead.

According to Jean Piaget, children are only developmentally capable of writing once they reach the age of six, and yet many of them are in school much earlier than that and forced to write.

They don’t have the motor skills to do this properly. It’s difficult for young children to hold a pencil for sustained periods of time, so they end up tightening their whole arm and back for what should be a simple task.

I always hated penmanship. I never got comfortable with cursive writing and gave it up once it was no longer mandatory (somewhere around sixth grade, I think, when I came to America).

As an Alexander Technique teacher, I’ve learned easier ways of using a pen or a pencil, but the habit of writing is one of the hardest to change. Most of us use way too much tension and effort. We grip the pen too tightly, compressing our shoulders and back.

The best teacher I know for teaching how to write with ease (and how to set up your office for most efficiency) is Babette Markus of USC.

Robert Rickover writes:

In the course of my work as a teacher of the Alexander Technique (1), I’m often asked just how it is that so many of us have developed harmful patterns of posture and movement. I tell them about the horrible furniture children are forced to use in most schools (2), problems with carrying heavy backpacks and the unconscious immitation of parents who themselves may have poor posture.

But underlying all these is the fact that most parents and teachers really have no idea just how easy it is for children to pick up bad habits of posture and movement, and how quickly these habits can become lasting distortions.

Take for example the process of teaching children how to write. “Penmanship”, it was called when I was in school and it was a most unpleasant experience. My handwriting was judged not acceptable and for awhile, I was forced to stay after school for additional practice. But no matter how hard I tried to copy the perfect examples posted on the wall of my third-grade classroom, my writing just didn’t measure up.

In hindsight, it is clear that my attempts to “get it right” probably made my writing worse and certainly contributed to a pattern of holding a lot of excess tension in my hands, arms and shoulders. It was only after I began taking Alexander Technique lessons some thirty years later that I learned how to release this harmful habit.

Think about what’s involved in teaching a class of thirty 8-year olds how to write: Some of the children will learn this skill quite easily. But others – like me – will not, often because they simply have not yet developed the fine motor control necessary to move a pen or pencil in a precise way across a page. All too often, the pressure to “get it right” causes them to produce a lot of extra tension as they write, including scrunching themselves down over their desks.

From the classroom teacher’s point of view, these scrunching children are “making an effort” and they may even be rewarded for their obvious desire to do well. After all, they’re not disrupting the classroom as some of the other children may be doing, perhaps in frustration with being forced to learn something they’re not ready for. Inadvertently, these tension patterns may be reinforced by their teacher’s approval of their effort.

The problem is that these habits of tension often persist into adulthood. Take a look at what people around you do to themselves when they write – you’ll often see shoulders hunched up, stiff hands and fingers and other forms of tension totally inappropriate to the task. If you have children, take a look at what they do when they take up pen and paper (or, for matter, when they use a computer keyboard). Take a look at yourself doing this in a mirror. You may be shocked at what you see!

Relationship expert Alison Armstrong says we all have two natures — human spirit (the elevated part) and human animal (the more primitive part, the instinctive part that lashes out, often in primal fear of scarcity or competition).

When men and women perceive a threat to their survival, they respond by instinct (a primal biological urge compelling a response that relieves tension).

If you’re experiencing tension, you’re likely reacting instinctively from your caveman or cavewoman.

I’m thinking about the Alexander Technique. It helps us live in response, not in reaction. Many of our unthoughtful reactions to stimuli do not serve us. Many of our habits are destructive. When we live in the past or in the future, we stop being aware of what’s around us right now and we instinctively tighten our muscles.

When we perceive a threat to our well-being, we typically go into fight or flight reflex. That means the head juts forward and rotates back, compressing the neck, the shoulders ride high, and the back tenses and shortens. This is a fine position to fight out of or to launch a hasty retreat, but as a daily response to ordinary stimuli, it is not helpful. We need to let go of these habitual reactions, these instincts, if we’re to free our necks and to lengthen and widen our torsos while choosing to act with poise.

I remember going on a long drive with my girlfriend of the time. I turned on the Dallas Cowboys game. She felt bad that she no longer had my full attention. So she lashed out by saying she was thinking of hooking up with someone else.

When she said this, I was upset, but I was driving. I could not lose my cool. So I tried to free my neck and to think up through my torso and I did not lash back. “Yeah, you do?” I said.

And a couple of minutes later, she apologized. She said she missed having my full attention.

It was half-time of the game so for the next 12 minutes, I gave her my full attention.