A typical yoga teacher has taken a course of about 200 hours, often done in 12-hour stretches on weekends.
An Alexander Technique teacher trains for three hours a day, five days a week, 36 weeks a year, for three years (a total of more than 1600 hours of training).
Feldenkrais practitioners train for about 800 hours. Again, much of this training is done in long stretches of eight hours or more. By limiting daily training to three hours, Alexander Technique teacher training is of a different quality than these other modalities. On average, the Alexander teacher spends much more time and money on his education.
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After 25 years of lecturing on happiness, writing a book on the subject (“Happiness Is a Serious Problem”) and devoting an hour of my radio show every week for the last 13 years to happiness, here are some conclusions about who is happy.
People who control themselves.
Happiness is dependent on self-discipline. We are the biggest obstacles to our own happiness. It is much easier to do battle with society and with others than to fight our own nature.
People who are given little and earn what they have.
That is why lottery winners are rarely happier than those who have far less money — they didn’t earn their newfound wealth. And they are often less happy after their win than they were before it.
So, too, those who get used to receiving unearned material benefits (such as government entitlements) are likely to be unhappier than they were before receiving those benefits — and much less happy than those who have earned whatever they have. That is why the entrepreneur who has worked day and night for years is usually happier than the person who inherited vast wealth.
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Pol Pot‘s Khmer Rouge murdered about one in three of Cambodia’s citizens during the 1970s. A graduate of the Sorbonne, he’s often listed as one of the ten most evil people of the 20th Century.
When you watch him interviewed here, you can see all tension in his neck and back. He pulls down and in on himself.
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Mao Zedong was the biggest murderer in history. He killed about 75 million of his own people.
Mao did not move with elegance and ease and his Little Red Book contains no exhortations to free the neck so the head can release forward and up.
Mao was stiff. He tended to tip his head back, to lock his neck, and to pull down and in on himself. I wonder if his genocidal impulses came from all the unnecessary tension he put on his cervical spine?
Mao was fat and like many people with big bellies, he tended to tip back from the waist and to compress his lower back.
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.
"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)
