Luke Ford

“Pedro de Alcantara, an Alexander Technique teacher in Paris, France, talks with Robert Rickover about his concept, the “Simplified Skeleton”, the basis of what have come to be called “Neutral Directions”.”

Pedro: “When most people talk, they move their heads and their necks besides from gesticulating and moving their arms, legs and body. They nod. They say something and the head goes up and down. There are at least three possibilities. You can train yourself to talk without actually moving the skull, where the jaw, tongue, lips, vocal chords, and diaphragm move but the skull stays where it is. Many good singers, actors, politicians, preachers know how to do that. It is very convincing when a speaker can talk without moving the skull. It lends a certain authority to the speaker. It also changes the tone of voice and the timber of the voice.

“Then you can choose to move your skull on the joint between the spine and the skull. You can nod the head a bit but the neck is not affected. You nod with the head, not the neck. Then you can catch yourself moving your neck in space, moving it forward and down. Once you feel the distinction between the three things, they are very different ways of speaking. If you often talk moving your neck and you train yourself to talk without moving your neck, you’ll become a different preacher, speaker, singer, actor. A different set of emotions.”

“Practice talking without moving your neck or watch how people talk on TV. Watch the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? And you’ll see these two great actors, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, they talk without moving their skulls. They show strong emotions without nodding with the neck and the emotion and action is more condensed on account of it. If you keep your neck in place with the spine, everything changes — the voice, the emotion, the communication, the force, the personality.”

“Direction works best when it is multi-media, when you use words, thoughts, images, sensations, trigger, symbols, anecdotes, haikus. In that song and dance of directions, you find the one that suits you and gives you that stable neck. You say to yourself, my emotions flow through me to my listeners, but my neck stays.”

Robert: “In my experience, the people to watch are successful politicians. They generally don’t give their necks away. You don’t get elected if you are constantly giving your neck away.”

In this interview, Pedro says: “The Alexander Technique is a way of solving a problem by putting the problem aside and working on yourself instead, focusing on yourself, calming yourself, and opening up your mind. If you do that, most problems disappear.”

Robert Rickover writes:

There have also been dramatic developments in what might be called “Alexander Technique teaching technology”. This started with Alexander Technique spin-offs such as Body Mapping, Posture Release Imagery and Up With Gravity – all of which are easily accessible to members of the general public and which are to a large extent web-based in terms of how people discover and use them.

More recently, several new methods of Alexander Technique directing have emerged, starting with Negative (sometimes called Inhibitory) Directions, which have gained a significant following among Alexander Teachers. In the past few months, Freedom Directions have emerged as a likely successor to Negative Directions – one that is simpler to use, often a bit more effective, and above all, one that students can easily share with others. They can used by pretty much anybody with an interest in learning them. (You can learn about all these and other new developments in Alexander Technique directing at the Alexander Technique Podcast page: New Directions in Alexander Technique Directing.)

As if all that weren’t enough, the web has also provided a new medium for teaching the Technique at a distance: Skype. Of course there is at present no hands-on teaching with Skype, although this seems certain to change as existing new technologies become cheaper and more widely available. Many teachers have successfully used Skype to teach students who would otherwise have no access to a teacher. The new teaching developments mentioned above are fairly easy to convey via Skype.

What this all means is that the “cage” provided by professional Alexander Technique organizations – one that may well have been necessary half a century ago – has now opened wide, allowing new ideas to be quickly and easily tested and propagated throughout the Alexander world without any official involvement or control. Alexander organizations still have important roles, but controlling innovation in Alexander Technique teaching is, in my opinion, no longer one of them.

The Daily Mail reports:

Do YOU have text claw or iPosture? Expert reveals the 21st century ailments caused by smartphones and tablets
Smartphone users check their phones 150 times a day on average
Phone addicts are often easily distracted, suffer disrupted sleep, are tempted to lie about their phone use and can become depressed
Overuse of a smartphone can lead to a phobia of being without it, texting while asleep, phantom vibration syndrome and cybersickness
It can also lead to hand, eye and posture problems, say experts

It is easy to get sucked into whatever is absorbing your attention and collapse your whole torso around your interest, but this is rarely to your advantage. A great way of learning about your patterns and letting go of the ones that don’t serve you is through lessons in the Alexander Technique.

Throughout the Bible, God berates the Israelites as “stiff-necked” people.

Here are some examples:

Exodus 32, verses 9, 10: The Lord said to Moses, “I see this is a stiff necked people. Now let Me be, that my anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them…”

Deuteronomy 9: verses 13 and 14: “I see that this is a stiff necked people. Let me alone and I will destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven…”

Jeremiah 7, verse 26: “They stiffened their necks, they acted worse than their fathers.”

In Micah 2, verse 3: The Lord says, “I am planning such a misfortune against this clan that you will not be able to free your necks from it. You will not be able to walk erect.”

There are more joints in the neck than anywhere else in the Bible, so Alexander Technique begins with freeing the neck from tension, then directing the head to release forward and up and the back to lengthen and widen.

If the neck is tight, stiff and compressed, the body cannot be free because all those joints in the neck mean that bones are connecting to bones and the compression of a stiff neck is going to ripple throughout the body in layers of constriction.

In this podcast, “Robert Rickover, an Alexander Technique teacher in Lincoln, Nebraska and Toronto, Canada, talks with Amy Ward Brimmer about the phrase “stiff necked people” that appears many times in the Bible and how it relates to Alexander Technique teaching today – which emphasizes the importance of not stiffening your neck.”

Robert: “If you want to change the way you use your body, you’re going to want to pick an intervention point, and the neck is perhaps the key intervention point because it affects everything else in your body.”

“How you manage the weight of your head on top of your body affects everything else in the body.”