Kirstie Miller on Alexander technique

This is the first post in a planned series about ideas that have changed people’s lives. The posts are based on interviews where I ask people to describe the idea — and its influence on them — in their own words.

In this post, I talk to Kirstie Miller about the Alexander technique. Kirstie is a cellist and Alexander technique teacher based in Cardiff.

What’s the Alexander technique, in a nutshell?

Alexander technique isn’t easy to define, and it’s easier to understand if you’ve had a lesson and experienced the “hands on” [i.e., a teacher physically touching the student to demonstrate the technique]. But it’s about changing your thinking about who you are, how you move, and what you need to do in order to carry out day-to-day activities, so that you can move through the world with more freedom, flexibility, ease and efficiency. The inventor of the technique, F. Matthias Alexander, called the work ‘psychophysical’ — it’s about the relationship between the mind and the body.

When did you first hear about Alexander technique, and why did you start studying it?

I’d heard of it as a teenager, because my granny had had some lessons to help with her Parkinson's disease. I first started lessons myself when I went to music college to study cello. I was full of enthusiasm and trying hard to impress people and do well, so I was practicing a lot. This manifested in me getting very tense and developing some knots and pains and tension. I used to move around a lot when I played: I think I was trying to be Jacqueline du Pré, who was a great cellist in the 70s and 80s. She moved a huge amount when she played, and she was my hero. But actually, moving in that way wasn’t the most efficient way to play an instrument. So my teacher suggested I have some Alexander technique lessons.

I didn't know what to expect. I probably expected to be given exercises to practice. I don’t particularly remember the first lesson — I wasn’t one of those people who had the lights suddenly switch on when they discovered the technique. I think it felt pleasant. But it took me a while to get my head around it, because my tendency towards perfectionism and wanting to be a good student held me back. Alexander technique is very different to traditional education, because it’s not about trying to please the teacher or find the right answer, but rather to expand your mind and consider whether the ideas you hold are helping you.

What did you learn in the lessons?

People often expect that Alexander technique is about learning exercises, but it’s not about that. It's more fundamental. It's about examining your thinking and ideas, and how they might be influencing who you are, and how you move through the world.

It’s also not about learning to do something, but learning what not to do. We all tend to interfere with the natural freedom of our bodies by tensing our muscles more than we need to. This can be for many reasons. It might be that we're trying really hard to get it right, or we imagine that things take more effort than they actually do.

Or maybe it’s to do with how we see ourselves. For example, tall women often stoop. When I work with students, I usually ask myself ‘what might they be thinking that’s bringing about that movement that I can see?’ And often it turns out that taller women think, ‘I’m the tallest person in the room, I’m sticking out too much,’ and so they stoop to stick out less. But this is really tiring: contracting muscles uses energy, so if that’s your baseline, you’re going to get tired much more quickly. But then on the flip side, when you start to let go, you free up a lot more energy.

As another example, another student I had always held his head up and back. He was getting horrendous migraines, and was on heavy medication for them. In the first lesson, I was trying to move his head with my hands, and I wasn’t getting a lot of movement. So I took a gamble and said ‘this head is really fixed: what’s going on there?’ He said ‘Oh, I hold it like that because I think I’ve got a double chin’. I said ‘How’s that going?’ He broke and smiled and said ‘maybe not very well!’ And then suddenly, I could move his head in all these directions. That was almost the only lesson he needed — he never went back to that fixedness after the first lesson, and I was thrilled to hear that a couple of lessons later, he was off his migraine medication, and by the end of the six weeks he came for lessons, he was hardly getting any migraines at all.

A big aspect is learning to respond differently to stimuli. Say you’re sitting in a chair and your phone rings; you might jump out of the chair and grab the phone without thinking much about how you’re doing it. But Alexander technique teaches you to receive a stimulus and not immediately respond, but instead think about how you might respond. So when the phone rings, I might think about what movements I need to make to get out of the chair, rather than leaping up and probably tensing 100 muscles that I didn’t need to tense. It doesn’t necessarily mean slowing down, but it means being conscious about what you’re doing. People often say, “Oh, gosh, does that mean that you're thinking about everything all the time? That sounds like a lot of thinking.” But I find that it helps me be in the moment. I’m more focused on what I’m doing.

Another element is the relationship of our head to our body. Alexander discovered that, when we humans start activity, we tend to pull our heads back in relation to our bodies. The scientific way of putting this is “vertebrates are reflexively organized in a cephalo-cordal manner”. This basically means that every time we move, the head should lead and the body follow. But most humans, by default, interfere in this process. This causes a locking-up through the neck. He first spotted this in himself, but when he observed others he realized this is a universal thing. So when I work with people, I very often start by working in the region of the head and neck.

In lessons, we often work with activities. Usually in someone’s first lesson, we just look at sitting, so they get a basic experience of the technique and learn about the most important principles. But after that, the student can bring along whatever activities interest them. I sometimes get musicians and actors and the like, who come with their instrument or with a monologue they’re working on. But I also get a lot of people who just experience aches and pains in day-to-day activities, and they might want to look at something simpler, like walking or bending down. I did a lesson yesterday with someone about putting her socks on.

How does Alexander technique influence your day-to-day life?

Because you're working with your whole self in such a fundamental way, the results can be really far-reaching, influencing areas you wouldn’t expect. It’s hard to summarize how it influences me. Sometimes it’s about noticing that I’m using muscles unnecessarily or inefficiently. I remember early on, I’d be doing the washing up or something, and I’d notice my shoulders were up around my ears. And I’d realize “Oh, I don’t need to do that”. The more experience you have, the better you get at spotting that kind of thing. I bring my attention to the relationship between my head and body, because if I’m fixing my head in some way, that’s going to have unideal results.

I also think about the steps I need to do to achieve something. This idea can be applied on various levels: on a micro level it might be about ‘what are the steps I need to take to pick up that book off the floor?’ But on a macro level, it could be ‘what steps might bring me towards my life goals?’ This is one reason the technique often makes people feel calmer: they start being more reflective about all their actions and goals, great and small.

Similarly, if I’m thinking about a certain task, I’m breaking the task down into parts and thinking about why I’m doing each one, and if anything is unnecessary. And I can also apply that more holistically, by breaking down ideas that might be limiting me: perfectionism, ideas about myself. Changing those ideas can bring about really fundamental changes to how you move.

What are some of the benefits of Alexander technique, for you and others?

The list of all the ways that Alexander technique has changed my life would be extremely long and varied. Fairly early on, my head felt calmer. I started studying Alexander technique at a time when I got stressed easily and was very much a slave to my emotions. But through the lessons, I started to experience an inner peace that I hadn’t felt for a while. I’d always been rushing around like a headless chicken, and suddenly I felt more grounded. This wasn’t what I’d gone to the lessons for, but it was extremely welcome.

When I work with my own students now, they often say that they feel calmer or more present, and their head is less busy. I can’t explain exactly what happens physiologically, but I have a sense that when someone helps you to switch off some muscles, it means you don’t have to think so much, because you’re not sending different messages to all those muscles, telling them to be active. Sometimes people cry in the lessons, because it can feel profound to release effort you’ve been making for a long time, or even a bit vulnerable. You might have experienced something like this if you’ve ever let go of a lot of tension in your neck and shoulders, or had a good massage.

The lessons also changed my cello-playing immensely, beyond what I would have expected. When you’re playing an instrument, you and the instrument sort of form one big instrument together. So if you’re playing with lots of tension, the instrument responds to that. If you’re pressing strings with tense fingers, or you’re drawing the bow with a tense arm, you’re going to make a more scratchy sound, less resonant and sonorous. I was bowled over when I first experienced my cello making a completely different sound in a lesson because I’d freed up my movements and stopped some of the unnecessary things I was doing with my body. I’m still seeing benefits there, as I continue to study and practice.

If I look back and think about the kind of person that I was before the Alexander Technique, I can barely relate to that person anymore. I feel that I’ve made fundamental changes I couldn’t have made in other ways. I used to be more shy and awkward. I'm so much more confident, and more able to deal with stressful situations. I feel more poised, more carefree, more able to be light-hearted and spontaneous.

Alexander technique can sometimes help with pain or other medical issues. Sometimes our aches and pains are caused by something we are doing, and through Alexander technique we can learn to become aware of those patterns and stop them. In the case of the student I mentioned earlier, it seemed evident that the way he was holding his head was a large factor in causing his migraines by the fact that he experienced such significant alleviation of his symptoms after his first lesson, and saw more improvement throughout the six weeks he came to me for lessons.

That said, we couldn’t have known this in advance, and Alexander technique can help anyone, whether or not they have a specific symptom that bothers them. I use the same approach with every student, whether or not they come to me because of pain.

Resources

To learn more about the Alexander technique, check out the ITM Alexander technique website or Kirstie’s personal website.

I’m interested in feedback on this post: what works and what doesn’t? What sort of ideas would you like to hear about? You can give feedback by commenting, emailing me at ambace@gmail.com, or leaving an anonymous comment.