Stephen Jenkins's List: Alexander Technique

• ‘Supporting and Being’ muscles.
• ‘Moving and Doing’ muscles
• the answer to the question in the title is, perhaps, not either Being or Doing, but rather that we want to be at ease, and do only what is necessary and appropriate for any given task. 
• When our minds are buzzing around with the ‘what ifs and what shoulds’ -  ‘pasturising and futurising’ as somebody once called it, our body reacts as if each of the memories, worst-case scenarios or dramas which we are thinking about are actually happening right now
• The Now is all we have.  We cannot inhibit last week, direct ourselves tomorrow, or even control our reactions five minutes hence. All this has to be done Now. The fact that we find it so difficult to BE in the present, is, I might suggest, also mirrored in the way we stand. How can we be all present and correct, if our heads are driving back into the past, our bodies rushing forward into the future, and even our feet are barely present in the Here and Now.“  
  
• We are encouraged in our lessons to pay particular attention to the ‘space between movements’ – the only place where we can stop our automatic pilot from taking over, and change our habitual reactions to a stimulus into a more conscious and constructive response.

  • This aspect of AT really reminds me of Friedman's comments about reactivity.... the space between stimulus and our response
• As Alexander practitioners, we are also aware of the vital importance of the ‘space between’ breaths.  If we are not interfering with our breathing by contracting around it, then we can learn just to wait, without holding or fixing, at the end of an out-breath, and we discover that the in-breath comes of its own accord, with no effort on our part.  If we have got into the habit of not trusting in this process, for all sorts of reasons, then we will rush to ‘take a breath’ right away, probably before the out-breath has even finished.  This makes breathing not only more effortful, but also much less efficient.   To learn to ‘rest in the space between breaths’ and trust that the new breath will be given to us is a great energy-enhancing benefit.   

  • This observation reminds me of vocal breathing exercises.... 
• “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
  

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