Alexander Technique/Feldenkrais Method Compared. ------------------------------------------------ September 1995 This is a description of my experience with Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method. By the time you are done reading this, it should be pretty obvious that I greatly prefer Feldenkrais. However, because I have less than a year's experience with these systems of sensory awareness, you should not read this as an absolute statement of which form is better. Probably the most helpful way to use this essay is to compare some of my experiences with yours. If something I say about myself or these methods resonates with your experience, then you have a better indication that my story is useful for you. I have included a section on my "traits" because they have much to do with how I experienced these systems of sensory awareness. The general conclusion is this: I liked my Feldenkrais experience because I felt like it was using my own nervous system and my own feelings to find out what was best for me, and I disliked my Alexander Technique experience because it felt like dogma. IMPORTANT NOTE: this does not mean that every Alexander teacher is dogmatic and every Feldenkrais teacher is not so. It does mean that if you are taking or planning to take lessons in one of these techniques, you may wish to pay attention to this dimension of your teacher and the technique they teach. I DON'T WANT YOU TO RULE OUT ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE AS A HELPFUL SYSTEM! My personality leads to a particularly strong and definite reaction to AT, but other people have different reactions. I also don't claim to have finalized my opinion of AT for all time. Why I sought help --------------------- Chronic right wrist pain. Chronic tension, particularly in my chest and neck. Uncomfortable on my feet. Tendency for my feet to roll inward, pain in my ankles and knees. History -------- In the spring of 1993 I injured my wrist while woodworking. I didn't notice exactly how; all I knew was that at the end of the day, my right wrist was quite sore. I happened to start practicing piano regularly about that time, and the pain got much worse. After a few months, I stopped playing piano and stopped typing at work with my right hand, but the pain in my right wrist remained. Splints, drugs, and attempting to limit the use of my right hand had little effect. In the fall of 1994 I began weekly lessons in the Alexander Technique and continued them until June 1995. At that time I stopped the Alexander lessons and began having Functional Integration lessons (that's one form of Feldenkrais work) and practicing with Awareness Through Movement tapes (another form of Feldenkrais). When I began Alexander lessons, I was amazed by how much they helped the chronic tension in my chest and neck, reduced the roll inward of my feet, and made me more comfortable on my feet. Alexander Technique also reduced the level of pain in my wrist and let me use it more for light tasks, but unfortunately any significant amount of piano playing or typing rapidly increased the pain back to the point where I couldn't use my wrist. However, since I began the Feldenkrais work (and some similar awareness exercises that I devised on my own before I officially went to a Feldenkrais teacher) in early June of 1995, my wrist has improved much more. In fact, there has really been a dramatic shift in my experience of my wrist: Before the Feldenkrais and similar work, I had anxiety associated with pain from my wrist. Every time I felt this pain, I felt along with it the fear that I would be permanently disabled, as well as some anger at myself for failing to limit my use of my right hand enough for it to heal. The rest of the time I tried to ignore feelings from my right hand---almost as if I was trying to detach my right hand from my body somehow. When feelings of pain in my wrist broke through, it stirred up the anxiety and anger against myself. I think that this "ignoring" of my hand caused me to hold it in awkward ways most of the time, particularly when I was resting it on something or in my pocket. Now, my body has "accepted" my right hand. I have much less fear associated with pain from my wrist. I am now (September 1995) using my right hand maybe six hours per day to type and play piano. I still have some pain, but I can soothe my wrist with awareness work. my traits ---------- 1. Uncomfortable with my body---its size, shape, limitations, and pains---although much more comfortable than I was prior to summer 1994. 2. Sensitive to the feelings in my body, particularly where it hurts. 3. Moderately skeptical: I try to explain things in so-called "rational" or "scientific" terms (although I think conventional medicine is quite ignorant of the mind/body interaction). 4. I am prone to feeling that a situation is hopeless. My wrist is very likely damaged beyond repair, I often thought. 5. Desire to understand what is happening to me, to understand why I feel the changes. 6. Strong willingness and desire to practice on my own. Basically I believe that _I_ am the one who makes the change. 7. I believe in the usefulness of a professional's guidance and wisdom, when I trust that the professional is intelligent and honestly truth-seeking. 8. I believe that my body is particularly in need of healing from past experience. I believe that I have much pain stored in my body. My perception of mind/body connection ------------------------------------- I often speak of a part of the body in isolation: "I have a pain in my neck," "My neck learned to better assist the movement," ... I've had an Alexander teacher preach to me that I appeared to think that the mind and body were "separate entities that happen to have some connection" with each other and admonished me think of them as one system. Well, when I speak of the neck in the statement, "My neck learned to assist the movement," I mean both the collection of tissues in the approximate area called "the neck" and the parts of the nervous system that directly interact with those tissues. Furthermore, I agree that the neck is really part of a larger system and that it is more useful to view some patterns at the perspective of the entire system, rather than just the neck. However, I still think that it is useful to address just one area of this system. It's also practical. For example, if someone's right wrist hurts, it is useful to begin by examining their patterns of use in their right hand and forearm---perhaps major change can be made there without requiring major change throughout the system. I certainly don't think we should forget that everything is part of a larger system, but that doesn't mean we must always be working with the entire system, nor always start with the same part of the system (as Alexander Technique essentially does with the neck). In my opinion, the mind has many dimensions of its workings that are not effectively addressed by either the Feldenkrais Method or Alexander Technique. How Alexander teachers would answer this essay ---------------------------------------------- They would say I never really learned AT. But I think I experienced "the real AT" because there was a certain congruence of all the available information. I was able to see my initial experience and my later experience of Alexander Technique as different perspectives of the same underlying process. The descriptions of AT in the book by Leibowitz and Cunnington and the book by Barlow very closely matched my experience. I developed some of my own forms of practice, and they were very effective, further indicating that I had a deep understanding of the process. However, I'm am not claiming to have made up my mind about AT forever. There is much more to know about it. One day I may change my mind. Abbreviations ------------- AT Alexander Technique FM Feldenkrais Method ATM Awareness Through Movement (form of Feldenkrais) FI Functional Integration (form of Feldenkrais) Differences: ----------- Note: some of these differences could be attributable to differences in the specific styles of my teachers, some to my personal attributes and responses to the methods. Therefore these should not be read as statements of absolute difference between the methods. 1. I experienced AT as saying "use your body like _this_," whereas I experienced Feldenkrais as encouraging my own nervous system to grow and discover new possibilities for movement. I felt like Alexander Technique was trying to make me into a new person and leave the old, "bad" me behind. Feldenkrais feels like it cares more about who I am, why I have trouble using my body, and what I can do to heal and grow. In fact, after my first experience with the Feldenkrais method, coming after eight months of Alexander Technique, I had the strong thought "My _own_ body is back, and it feels _good_!" 2. AT: inhibiting habits. Feldenkrais: evolving habits. The two methods have a critical difference in the way they approach the ingrained habits that may be harming one's ability to move gracefully or causing pain. Alexander lessons attempt to "inhibit" the habit. For example, people often tighten up their neck as they exert effort so that their neck actually ends up working against them. An Alexander lesson says to the neck, "Stop that tightening, and lengthen instead." And the Alexander training techniques are remarkably effective; the neck usually listens. I have not encountered in Feldenkrais any direction to stop doing something, but rather the suggestion that a pattern "evolve" to a more helpful pattern. Feldenkrais asks "Can the neck's pattern of tightening be transformed into a pattern that is helpful?" I believe that when my neck tightened up and worked against me, it was actually _trying_ to help; it just didn't know how. But Feldenkrais has helped my neck learn to help. I have found that when a body part learns how better to help a movement, magically the tightness starts to leave! 3. Differences in the lessons: During an Alexander lesson, I'm supposed to "leave my body alone." The teacher lays hands on my body and shows it how to move. Much of the lesson involves practice standing up and sitting down. I spend some time lying on a table. During a Functional Integration lesson, I spend almost all the time lying down while the teacher gently manipulates my body to give my nervous system information that it can use to improve my organization. I don't like several things about Alexander lessons, especially comparing them to Feldenkrais lessons. (At the time I was taking Alexander lessons, I didn't find these things particularly objectionable, partly because I got used to them, partly because I thought they were necessary for meaningful change.) For example, I sometimes felt that the activities were tiring or causing pain. I also didn't like that I had to leave my body alone, and I didn't like that an Alexander lesson felt like a "lecture" for my body. I sometimes experience pain in FI lessons, but thus far the pain has always felt like a result of releasing tension and discovering pain that was there all along. I actually experience the onset of this type of pain as kind of relief. 4. AT wore off quickly, frequent lessons required. F: lots to practice on one's own. Basically, I usually felt great after an Alexander lesson, but the effect started to wear off the moment I walked out of the lesson. In the beginning the good feelings wore off within two or three days of the lessons; later, more than a week had to pass between lessons before I noticed any wearing-off effect. I tried to apply the Alexander directions myself, to find the "Alexander instinct" in myself. For a while I thought I had succeeded. Later I began to feel that my techniques for directing myself were actually a way of jogging my memory of what the lesson felt like. The more time that passed between lessons, the more this memory faded, and therefore the less capability I had to follow the Alexander directions. The situation with Feldenkrais is more complex. With my early Functional Integration lessons, some of the immediate changes I noticed after a lesson persisted for about two weeks, some of them for only a few hours. However, with Feldenkrais work there is lots of practice I can do on my own that feels like it truly involves self-discovery and growth that continues the theme of the Functional Integration lesson. I think that self-discovery and growth is probably more important than the immediate effects of the lesson. So an Alexander lesson feels like an experience that one tries to remember and emulate but without complete success, whereas a Functional Integration lesson feels like the _start_ of a process of self-discovery. 5. AT: pain as the lessons wear off. I often experienced a great deal of pain and tension in my body, mostly my neck, between A. lessons, particularly when I was just starting and particularly when more than a week passed between lessons. I don't really understand why---perhaps the lesson freed up chronically tense muscles, making me unnumb to their pain, and then those muscles started to become quite tense again. It seems that I was pretty darn good at "directing" myself upward during a lesson, perhaps better than most people, but perhaps that led to changes in my body that it couldn't really handle for long without pain. That doesn't really explain the whole situation to me. I believe that pain sometimes occurs in the course of making long-term change in any part of the body/mind system. So, I stuck with Alexander Technique in spite of this pain. With Functional Integration lessons, however, the "lesson wearing off" effect is mostly a smooth, gentle return to some of the feelings and patterns in my body before the lesson. I have encountered some pain between the lessons, but the vast majority of it felt like a release of tension that was blocking pre-existing pain. After the first couple of lessons, I developed some pain in my knees while walking, but that entirely disappeared a couple weeks later when I discovered a simple change I could make in my manner of walking. In hindsight, the pain I experienced with Alexander Technique did not feel like it was part of a healthy process. It felt more like electrodes buried in my muscles were causing them to tighten and cramp. Several times recently I have tried to direct myself according to the Alexander directions, and each time I felt some changes in my body followed quickly by the onset of this tightening and pain. 6. What to do with one's conscious attention? AT: directing and inhibiting. Feldenkrais: taking in information. So you're having lessons in one of these techniques, you're feeling changes in your body. Walking is smoother, let's say. Even without trying to walk differently, you just do. However, you would like to feel like you're _doing_ something with your conscious attention. AT suggests that you "inhibit" your body's habits and direct your body according to the Alexander directions. That is, as you are walking, you are thinking, "I will not compress my neck as I usually do. Let my neck lengthen as it does during an A lesson, let my back widen and lengthen, let my legs release from my pelvis, let my shoulders release from my torso." Feldenkrais suggests that you take in information, that you notice how your legs feel as you pick them up and set them down, how your torso moves or doesn't move in synch with your walking, etc. 7. Alexander: initial kinesthetic sense is misleading; emphasis on using outside information to make change. F: the initial kinesthetic sense can lead to positive change. An approximate definition of the "kinesthetic sense" is the sense of the body's position, movement, effort being exerted, and so on. For example, without looking at my leg I can sense the approximate angle of my knee joint. I can estimate the distance between my feet. If I (or someone else) move my leg, I can sense the approximate direction and speed of movement. If I pick up an object, I have an idea of its weight. F. M. Alexander, the founder of AT, discovered that his kinesthetic sense was unreliable. For example, he thought he could feel his neck lengthening, but when he looked in a mirror he discovered it was contracting. He set out to study his movement in a mirror and re-educate his body, and his kinesthetic sense, based out what he saw. My Alexander lessons contained the idea that my initial kinesthetic sense was faulty, and that it led to misuse of my body and a lack of ability to sense or change habits. I needed my Alexander teacher to develop an accurate kinesthetic sense. The Feldenkrais method uses the kinesthetic sense to lead to positive change. It says that as I begin to pay attention to my kinesthetic sense, whether the information I get is "objectively accurate" or not, my nervous system will begin to make positive change to my organization, and my kinesthetic sense will improve also. Rather than the kinesthetic sense being faulty and requiring outside intervention, the idea here is more like the kinethetic sense is underdeveloped and ignored, and requires practice. 8. Awareness Both methods have body awareness as a goal. Feldenkrais helps you direct your attention to important places and helps you ask useful questions about what's happening in your body. The body can learn and grow from this sort of awareness. My Alexander lessons led to awareness, but primarily awareness of how well my body was following the Alexander directions. I was aware that I felt good when my body was following the Alexander directions well, and I was aware that I felt bad when it wasn't. Unlike the Feldenkrais sort of awareness, I just didn't feel significant change from this awareness---the change from the lesson led to the awareness rather than the awareness leading to change. Perhaps that was because so much of my attention was focused on a small area, specifically on how I could maintain the A directions. 9. AT: focuses on head/neck/back and waits for change to spread. F: can start anywhere, can focus anywhere. My Alexander lessons focused on the head/neck/back relationship. My teacher indicated that when I got their organization right, the rest of the body woutld follow. I certainly did notice lots of changes all over my body. I discovered that I could soothe my wrists by giving attention to my neck. Feldenkrais also contains the general idea that change in one part of the system can spread elsewhere, but the head/neck/back relationship is not singled out as the prime control. A Feldenkrais lesson can focus anywhere. I think that it was more useful to pay direct attention to my wrist and my feet (two areas where I felt pain) rather than focusing on the neck and waiting for the change to spread. Within two months of paying specific attention to my wrists and feet, I have come to understand and change major habits that were causing pain. That's much more progress than I got in eight months of Alexander lessons. In fact, I felt like my habits were "battling it out" with the Alexander directions and the A directions really only scored a victory in the head/neck/back relationship. Everywhere else, my habits stuck around, perhaps muted a little, but essentially still there and still causing problems. (By the way, this account portrays the habits as "the enemy" and I want to assert that I believe it is more useful to understand them as trying to help.) 10. Feldenkrais: small simple movements. AT: sitting down and standing up. There is a difference in the types of movement practiced by the methods. AT deals largely with standing, sitting, standing up from a sitting position, and sitting down from a standing position. These are all movements/postures that many people carry out with a great deal more effort than is required. They are also common movements. It makes sense to me to pay attention to them, because any change in those movements will have a large impact on a person's life. Feldenkrais deals more with small, simple movements that are often done lying down so as to minimize the work a person must do against gravity. Because the movements can be done with very little effort, a person has a lot of attention available to notice the feeling of the movement, and a lot of freedom to explore different ways of organizing that movement. I think that working with both types of movement brings immediate change to most of a person's life. However, I think that the Feldenkrais types of movement facilitate self-exploration, growth, and healing more than AT types of movements. It's really amazing to me that if I explore, say, tiny motions of my fingers pressing against the floor, that suddenly my typing, which involves much larger movements in many different directions, gets easier and smoother. Musicians and athletes may be familiar with the idea of isolating and practicing some very small aspect of their technique and noticing how much general effect can follow. Feldenkrais is an exploration of movement that can bring about change at a very deep and general level because it works with small, simple movements, the components of many types of movement. 11. AT: CPU upgrade. Feldenkrais: CPU and entire operating system upgrade. I call AT a "CPU upgrade" because it seems to make my body work better but doesn't change how I give motion instructions to my body. This is analogous to changing the CPU from a 386 to a 486 so that all software will run faster, but then running all the same software. To be more specific, let's say I want to walk. I think "walk" in the same way I've always thought "walk," and the act of giving that instruction to my body feels the same. But my body responds differently: smoother, easier, with more grace. This is nice, but I get somewhat frustrated when I (my consciousness, ego, whatever you want to call it) don't feel that I have much ability to explore different ways of initiating and carrying out the walking movements, when I feel that the smooth form of walking came from some mysterious place outside myself. To be sure, I don't believe that all levels of the neural system are under direct control of my consciousness; I don't expect to be able to directly control every aspect of my body, but it's nice to have an image, an understanding, a model of what these lower levels of the neural system do, and it's nice to feel that my system did the learning and changing itself. I also think that AT can change more than the CPU; with more Alexander lessons, AT's effects trickle further up the hierarchy of the nervous system and eventually reach consciousness. I just don't feel satisfied with that method of creating change. Feldenkrais, however, feels like it helps me learn at all levels in my nervous system. As I do an ATM lesson, my ego is exploring different ways of initiating a movement at the same time lower levels of my nervous system are learning about different ways of organizing that movement. My mental image of walking is changing; it feels like I'm changing what I'm "trying to do" when I walk; also, it feels like my body carries out my ego's instructions differently, and the whole experience is more unified than the AT experience of walking. When you upgrade a computer's CPU _and_ operting system, you change not only how quickly the computer responds to commands, but you change the form of the commands themselves. I make an analogy between this and the Feldenkrais Method. 12. AT: I prefer surfaces and postures like the Alexander lesson. F: like greater variety of surfaces. While I was taking AT lessons, I prefered to sit on chairs that were simple, flat, and hard, like the one used in my Alexander lesson. I prefered to sit very upright, like I did in my Alexander lesson. If I had to stand for a while, I prefered to stand with my weight equally distributed between my feet, knees slightly bent, torso and head well balanced, as I did in my Alexander lesson. This explains my Sorehand post a while back in which I raved about hard flat chairs. Since doing Feldenkrais work, I don't feel so strongly that I need a hard flat chair to sit comfortably. I'm now a little more comfortable in car seats and movie seats. 13. Feldenkrais: support from the ground. The Feldenkrais Method puts emphasis on the feeling of support you gets from the ground. Suppose you are lying down; Feldenkrais asks you to notice the shape of the region of contact you make with the floor, whether one side feels heavier than the other, your sense of the floor beneath you (is stable, or unsteady? hard, or soft? flat, or contoured?), and so on. During the course of an FI lesson or ATM lesson, you check your support from the floor and notice if it has changed. The way the body organizes itself to support itself is an important dimension of the body's general organization. My Alexander lessons did not contain this idea generally---during a type of practice called "Alexander lying" I sometimes noticed my contact with the ground but the emphasis was not that the noticing itself would bring change in the manner of lying, rather that the manner of lying was an indication of how well my body was following the Alexander directions. 14. Alexander could provide a useful suggestion to a body that was at an advanced state of awareness. I was unsatisfied with AT because I experienced it as a non-instinctive external ideal. However, I wonder if AT could provide useful ideas to a body that was already at an advanced state of awareness. An advanced chef, for example, might find ideas in the strange cooking of an alien society. He wouldn't necessary want to use their recipes verbatim, but he might be able to find things he liked about them and integrate that knowledge into his own style of cooking. Perhaps AT is better in some respects than any organization the body could discover by itself. A runner may find that he runs faster after an AT lesson than at any other time. A cross-country skier may have more endurance. A public speaker may project his voice further. Just a thought; I have no way to confirm or deny this theory at this time. 15. AT: endgaining F: effort Imagine a runner trying hard to reach the finish line. Every part of the runner's body leans forward, toward the finish. As a result, this runner is not in an efficient posture, and doesn't run as fast as they could. This illustrates the concept of "endgaining"; trying hard to reach a goal without considering what path is best. This is an important concept of Alexander Technique, and one that I think illustrates an important concept of body use (and mind use, too). However, I like better the concept in Feldenkrais, "using less effort." If I perform a movement with less effort, then more information is available to my nervous system, and my nervous system can naturally discover where I might be hampering myself. To say that I'm "endgaining" sounds like I need to inhibit another one of those nasty habits; on the other hand, the direction to "use less effort" implies that my body has many natural good instincts, that it was really trying to help all along, and that the solution is readily accessible. I took Alexander first, then Feldenkrais --- does this sequence affect my experience? ---------------------------------------------------------------- Oh yes. As I mentioned in my "traits," I am somewhat skeptical. But AT really convinced me that change was possible because my body felt so different so quickly. Right in the first few minutes of the lesson I could tell that something profound was happening. I felt lighter, taller, slimmer, and my hurting right wrist felt very soothed. I think that the effects of my first few Feldenkrais lessons were subtle, especially compared to early effects of AT. Had I started with Feldenkrais, I may have wondered for a while if it was going to help my wrist as much as I wanted. The increase in my self-awareness that resulted from AT probably helped me progress in Feldenkrais. However, it didn't feel like it _directly_ helped; I still feel like I'm starting from the beginning with Feldenkrais work. For example, I had a very disorganized reach in spite of the fact that I had been taking AT lessons. In working with my reach I felt that I was starting from the beginning. I felt that my habits of "holding a part still, not getting a part involved in an activity" were very pronounced at the beginning of FM work. I think my experience of AT is confusing my ability to sense where I've been and where I want to go. I have taken a journey, at first with Alexander Technique, and later with the Feldenkrais Method. I changed directions when I started the Feldenkrais Method; I'm not sure where I am now relative to where I started. Time should make this clear. (Please contact me at mossey@dgr.jpl.nasa.gov with any questions or comments.) -------------------------------- Copyright (C) Mike Mossey 1995 All Rights Reserved