In his closing speech, Adolf Hitler starts out with good use. His head floats up and his face is clear of tension. His shoulders are broad.
As he gets into his speech, Hitler’s face and body display more tension, but he doesn’t pull down and compress his torso. His neck remains uncompressed and he breathes easily and projects his words.
By contrast, Hitler is collapsed and broken down in the last months of the war as dramatized in the 2004 film Downfall:
Notice that a minute in when Hitler loses his temper, he pulls his head into his torso, compressing his neck. Without this fight reflex, he’d be unable to fully summon the emotion of anger.
If Hitler kept ranting with his head retracted on to his spine, he’d lose his voice within a few minutes.
This is the first in a series of posts analyzing the use of the most important people in history.
If you find yourself ranting like Hitler in his bunker and you don’t know why, you might want to book an Alexander Technique lesson with me and we’ll get to the bottom of your genocidal impulses.
Do you think he could produce such perversity without perversely tensing up and compressing himself? A poised loose-limbed bloke wouldn’t make a video like the above. Instead, he’d make sunny uplifting videos like my Youtube channel.
Ninja’s wife Yo-Landi has beautifully loose limbs. No wonder she keeps singing, “I am your butterfly.”
Could you imagine some tense pulled-down compressed chick singing about being your butterfly? No, I can’t either.
Why do beautifully loose-limbed women so often end up with tense compressed jerks?
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Yoga classes frequently presuppose a level of flexibility that most people simply do not have. There’s no way the average bloke will be able to keep up with the following:
This next video is from Yoga Journal:
Elena Brower says: “Sit in a simple cross-legged position.”
This position is going to be far from simple for many people. Most of us will need to sit on cushions to be comfortable.
There’s a lot of tension and compression in the shoulders of this woman. That’s not something you will want to imitate.
Notice how her right arm is held in close to the body while her left arm goes out. Her whole right side is more contracted than her left side.
1:28. While the narrarator says “lift to a flat back,” the model tenses and compresses her neck. Her back is far from flat.
Like most yoga instructions, this video is all about accomplishing postures and it pays no attention to the quality of the movement. From an Alexander Technique perspective, what’s going on with a person at each moment (is there tightening or compression going on or is there expansion and ease) is far more important than accomplishing any position or posture.
If most people in the Western world try to do these exercises, they are simply going to lack the necessary flexibility and strength. They are going to fail much of the time and in the process put themselves at high risk for injury.
Sandra Wind-Carson says: “With every practice, we’re looking for our edges, for our boundaries, that is where we can find the openings.”
It’s also an invitation to injury if you keep seeking your boundaries.
All the instructions here are about what poses to do and there’s nothing about the quality and ease of the movement. Pushing for achieving these postures invites injury and detracts from attention to your own interfering tension patterns.
This video begins with instructions to lie on your back without head support. Thus the neck and torso are compressed and breathing and ease are impaired.
If you’ve made it through my blog post this far, you deserve a reward.
Follow this video and you’re likely to injure yourself!
Yogi Tara Styles says: “This is a routine great for beginners… So go ahead and sit up on your heels.”
It was this very sitting on my heels during my first weeks of yoga in 2009 that stretched ligaments in my feet that caused them to swell a shoe size and to require about $1600 worth of physical therapy.
In many yoga classes, the teacher does not pay enough attention to how performing a particular exercise might injure somebody. Too often in yoga classes I’ve attended and yoga videos I’ve watched, the stress has been on completing exercises rather than on examining how you do them.
From an Alexander Technique teaching perspective, how you do something is often more important than what you do.
To tell somebody to do something that stresses their strength and flexibility is to risk injuring them unless you pay careful attention to how they’re doing the assignment.
This video has a particular end in mind — weight loss. No wonder it has almost 500,000 views.
The Alexander Technique, by contrast, concentrates on means rather than ends. Alexander teachers rarely promise particular results such as weight loss because they can’t know how a student will implement the Technique. Some people are not capable or not interested in doing the cognitive work necessary for progress in the Alexander Technique. You can’t promise somebody increased energy or flexibility if they’re not willing or able to practice the principles of the Technique.
The principles (such as observation, inhibition and direction) of the Technique work but not every student is going to find this work congenial to their temperament.
Because of this, most Alexander teachers market the particulars of the Technique rather than the benefits.
Over Shabbat lunch, I was asked what the Technique was about. “It is a way of noticing how you respond to stimuli,” I said. I was told that I should come up with Alexander Technique definitions that stressed the benefits of the Technique rather than its unsexy mechanics.
That’s what Alexander teachers call end-gaining. You go for a goal and this outweighs the importance of the means of attaining the goal.
The girl in this video move elegantly but the instructions convey few if any principles of easy movement such as freeing the neck and allowing the head to release away from the torso. The average Joe who watches and practices this video is unlikely to come away with any additional knowledge of how he works.
It’s easy to follow these exercises and to just be totally mindless, paying no attention to how you’re doing things and what effect your interfering tension patterns are having on your movement. By contrast, an Alexander Technique teacher such as myself could point out to you damaging habits such as needless compression in the neck and torso whenever you encounter a substantial stimuli (such as challenging yoga positions or chopping vegetables or driving a car).
The following video is billed as “yoga for relaxation.” It has almost 13 million views.
There are no principles you can take away from this video to promote relaxation as you move through life. Instead, judging by the comments, it appears that many guys got quite stirred up by this chubby white girl in a red bikini. Giving in to wanton lust is the opposite of relaxation in my book.
If the average person tried to imitate the exercises in the video, they’re putting themselves at risk for injury. Our yogi provides no instructions on how to do things safely. Rather than spreading enlightenment, every wiggle of this lady’s derriere bangs away at the foundation of the nuclear family.
“My name is Simona. I am a Czech Fitness Girl. Fitness is my passion. I am sharing my passion with you in my videos. I am training in the white, clear transparent beaches of Halkidiki, Greece.”
This sexy bikini workout is fun to watch but it lacks practical information for noticing and letting go of your patterns of excessive tension.
I thought yoga was supposed to be spiritual? I feel so unclean.
According to fitness coach Belle Badell, “the idea of the chest pop is to squeeze the back muscles and then squeezing the upper abs. …Press the back muscles in and downwards. Press and release. If you ever wonder how Shakira does it, this is the trick.”
I notice Belle tightening and compressing her shoulders and neck as she does this exercise. If people imitate that, they’re likely to feel lousy and have less free movement.
If you’ve got distorting tension patterns that cause bad posture, I doubt you’re going to improve by doing this or any exercise. You’re just going to ingrain the habit of adding more compression to your back, shoulders and neck. That’s going to diminish your breathing and your emotional and physical freedom.
The idea of exercises to improve your posture holds that you can just add layers of corrective procedures to undo the damage of interfering tension patterns. The Alexander Technique instead focuses on letting go of those interfering tension patterns so that you can move more easily. You learn to undo rather than to do.
Shakira has beautiful use of herself and I doubt it is because of the chest pops outlined above.
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* The Torah often reads to me like it was written by an accountant. In my experience, accountants are among the most ethical people I know. They are exact. It’s hard to be a good person if you’re sloppy. Torah is all about attention to detail. And accountants are discrete. They know a lot about people’s lives.
* Rabbi Berel Wein writes: “Accountability is the name of the game in Jewish life. The Torah teaches us that “adam muad lolam” – a person is always liable and responsible for one’s actions and behavior.”
* Rabbi Wein writes: “At the conclusion of the reading of this parsha, the congregation this Shabbat rises and proclaims “chazak, chazak v’nischazek.” – “Let us be strong, let us be strong and let us strengthen others as well.” Part of being strong is the realization of the necessity for being responsible for one’s deeds, behavior and words.”
After I got tossed from this synagogue, I did a lot of sniveling on my blog about how much it hurt me. And this bloke, I don’t even know his name, kept saying to me, “Be strong. Jews don’t respect those who are voluntarily weak.”
So what does it mean to be strong? Not many Torah Jews are emo boys. According to Wikipedia: “Emo has been associated with a stereotype that includes being particularly emotional, sensitive, shy, introverted, or angst-ridden.”
* There’s a lot of repetition in these final chapters of Exodus. Rabbi Wein writes: “One must train one’s self to be honest, to resist temptation and shoddiness. Goodness and truthfulness are conditioned by habitual behavior more so than by inspired sermons and learned treatises.”
* From Chabad: The Rebbe explains that the Torah wants to emphasize that there will always be two versions of G‑d’s home on earth: the ideal version, as G‑d envisions it and describes it to Moses, and the real version, as it is actually built in and out of our physical lives.
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My Alexander Technique students usually want out of their pain as fast as possible. If they have a sore neck or tight shoulders of a gimpy knee, they want a fix pronto.
But these pains are only symptoms for what is really going on — a refusal to accept reality.
When we accept what is, we don’t rush. We don’t get impatient. We don’t get frustrated. And we don’t lie. And when we don’t do these bad things, we don’t feel guilt and shame.
I want my students to accept that the pain they feel when they type at a computer or when they walk down the block or when they sit in a chair is primarily a symptom of a lack of coordinated use of the self. When you’re moving elegantly, most of these pains don’t occur. But you can only move elegantly when you accept reality and stop rushing and trying to immediately fix things.
David Gorman writes: “What did happen when I actually inhibited my monstrously powerful habitual urge to react to the feelings of the symptom was very, very different than I expected. After a moment of intense awareness of narrowness and restriction (during which I had to choose again not to react), an expansion filled me up and the strain and tension disappeared.”
I’m reading an e-book by David Gorman on the virtues.
He makes the point that patience is the absence of impatience. And what is impatience? It is a refusal to accept reality. It is a refusal to accept that things are moving more slowly than we would like. Life is not living up to our expectations.
When this happens, we all tend to tense and to push. We compress and we try to hurry. You can’t try to hurry and not tighten up. If you were to resolutely stay poised, you could not be frantic.
As long as we believe that our beliefs about what should happen are more real than what is happening, we are going to be impatient. We’re going to tighten and compress. And we’re going to hurry.
The true meaning of impatience is that our beliefs are out of alignment with reality and we are not experiencing life in the present moment but trying to force life to align with our beliefs.
We should take the feeling of impatience as a wake-up call that our thinking is out of alignment with reality. Impatience is just part of the learning process.
If we learn to accept reality, we will lose our impatience, and we will stop unnecessarily tensing ourselves and those around us.
It makes no more sense to practice patience than it does to practice good posture. Instead, by letting go of the way we unnecessarily interfere with ourselves by trying to impose our unrealistic beliefs on reality, we will naturally let go compression and take up our full space in the world.
When we try things and they don’t work out as we wish, we get frustrated. The feeling of frustration is a wake-up call that our ideas about what steps will bring about a particular end are not accurate. Our beliefs are not matching up with reality.
When you understand the meaning of your feeling of frustration, that unpleasant feeling goes away. Once you get the message, the messenger leaves.
When we are deliberately being dishonest, we usually feel lousy. We’re afraid and nervous and tense and calculating.
So why then are we dishonest? Because we expect to lose something important to us if we are honest.
How hard it is for you to be honest is a measurement of how much you want what you want and don’t want what you don’t want.
If it would be unacceptable to lose something and intolerable to endure something, we will be dishonest to avoid those unpleasant states. So we make up a form of reality and try to get others to accept it.
We reject life as it is. By contrast, if we were to accept life as it is, we’d feel little desire to be dishonest. Honesty simply means accepting reality just as the absence of frustration and impatience also means the accepting of life as it is.
So what keeps us from accepting the truth? Our unreal ideas about what should be.
No matter how strong our beliefs and how eloquently we can state them, we are all still forced to live in reality.
By refusing to lie and to rush, we can see ourselves as we are and accept other people as they are.
“If we look at how things work with curiosity rather than trying to distort them to suit ourselves, how could we feel guilt or shame? We’ve done nothing wrong.”
PS. I don’t think of devious people as moving elegantly through life. If you’re constantly lying, you’re inevitably going to develop weird compression and tension patterns. Just think of Richard Nixon.
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The best thing you can do for your posture is to be happy. Happy people tend to be buoyant aka “capable of floating”. Buoyant means full of air and full of life. Upward in orientation. Depressed people tend to collapse. They’re pulled down.
When you float through life, you’re much more likely to be happy than when you are focusing, tensing, compressing and pulling down.
Another way to have great posture is to be in the present moment. When you think about the past or the future, you’ll stop noticing what you’re doing in the present, and you will most likely tense and pull down on yourself.
One way to be in the present is to notice everything you can around you. See what’s to your left and to your right and everything in between.
Another way to be present is to listen for every distinctive sound. These choices tend to awaken your kinaesthesia and you’ll find yourself moving up and letting go of needless compression.
Here’s a posture video by golf swing coach David Leadbetter:
For him, posture is a position rather than an orientation. It involves fixing which will always lead to tightening and compression. Notice how tight his shoulders, back and neck are in this video. His face is filled with tension. His jaw is clenched.
This video below claims to improve posture in ten seconds.
The Indian therapist says to the patient: “Imagine there’s a thread in the middle of the head and somebody is pulling you up. Get the chin a bit tucked in. And the shoulders a little back.”
When you try to do these things, or anything like them, you will stiffen and tighten. This unnecessary body tension is the primary reason for bad posture. So even though this advice above sounds good and creates immediate results, in the long run it will do more harm than good.
With the Alexander Technique, our clients are “students”, not “patients.” We don’t fix them or treat them. We educate them about their tension patterns and show how to let go of the patterns that aren’t serving them. We don’t guide them into the correct positions. We show them how they’re holding themselves down and when they let go of these habits, they become buoyant and their posture takes care of itself.
The following dance posture video is excellent, even if you have no interest in dancing:
Below, Elliot says our physical body is a manifestation of our thoughts, emotions and spirit.
Elliot: “You can look at me and my postures and physical manifestation and guess what I’m thinking.”
“The origin of most of our postural distortions are psychological and spiritual.”
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
