* This is the last show from my hovel! I’m moving out Oct. 2.
* Rabbi Berel Wein writes: “There is a cynical but unfortunately accurate statement rife in the ranks of diplomats that treaties are made to be broken.” This is true in personal life as well. Anyone who tells you, “I will never lie to you” or “I will never betray you” or “I will always be there for you” is unlikely to live up to such lofty obligations. We have to stand on our own two feet in life and not try to rely on binding people to us in such obligations.
* This is the last show from my hovel! I’m moving out Oct. 2.
* Rabbi Berel Wein writes: “There is a cynical but unfortunately accurate statement rife in the ranks of diplomats that treaties are made to be broken.” This is true in personal life as well. Anyone who tells you, “I will never lie to you” or “I will never betray you” or “I will always be there for you” is unlikely to live up to such lofty obligations. We have to stand on our own two feet in life and not try to rely on binding people to us in such obligations.
* This is the last show from my hovel! I’m moving out Oct. 2.
* Rabbi Berel Wein writes: “There is a cynical but unfortunately accurate statement rife in the ranks of diplomats that treaties are made to be broken.” This is true in personal life as well. Anyone who tells you, “I will never lie to you” or “I will never betray you” or “I will always be there for you” is unlikely to live up to such lofty obligations. We have to stand on our own two feet in life and not try to rely on binding people to us in such obligations.
* This is the last show from my hovel! I’m moving out Oct. 2.
* Rabbi Berel Wein writes: “There is a cynical but unfortunately accurate statement rife in the ranks of diplomats that treaties are made to be broken.” This is true in personal life as well. Anyone who tells you, “I will never lie to you” or “I will never betray you” or “I will always be there for you” is unlikely to live up to such lofty obligations. We have to stand on our own two feet in life and not try to rely on binding people to us in such obligations.
Luke Ford writes: Robert Rickover talks with Belinda Mello, an Alexander Technique teacher in New York City. Belinda discusses ways in which the Technique can help an actor prepare and perform, as well as why the Alexander Technique is a taught at the world’s leading acting schools.
Belinda: “When training, an actor is training his whole self. They’re not just training their body and their voice separately.”
“Relaxation for an actor does not mean lying on the sofa and watching TV. It means being present, alive in all of themselves, but not rushing. That presence means learning to let go of all that unnecessary tension. While letting go of that tension, they become more aware and more open. Alexander Technique gives an actor of process of learning how to be.”
“Alexander Technique is about stimulus and response. The actor wants to embody a whole set of feelings in a situation of conflict. We don’t have theater and film about somebody having a good day. We tend to be under a lot of pressure.
“The actor has to face what most people would rather avoid in their day. So the actor has to learn not to react in that ‘I want to hide’ way. They have to show in their embodiment of the moment a willingness to go for it. Alexander Technique helps an actor not to bring habit on to the set and the stage.
“There’s a performance of a Shakespeare play on the stage in New York. It’s a beautiful production but one of the actors who’s playing the romantic lead, is able to embody the dark troubled aspect of the character in the first half of the play. And we see it in his physicality. His shoulders round forward. His chest sink down.
“The problem is that this is also his way of being so that he is not breathing fully. Later in the play, when his character experiences love and joy, he’s not able to open his heart. So he not only got a bad review but the play got a bad review for not elevating to another place. Alexander Technique would help him embody this extended range.”
Robert: “There’s this old [1939] movie called The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton who played the hunchback. That was a role that required him to contort himself during the performance. He even had to wear a special outfit to do that. He injured himself badly doing that role.”
“Being an actor may require you to take on some unpleasant postural sets. To be able to do it in a way that doesn’t hurt you and doesn’t become habitual for you.”
“A good actor is able to get energy from the audience.”
Belinda: “The audience reinforces that I am in the present, rather than what should I be doing next? When the audience is with you, it’s like having a wonderful partner.”
Luke Ford writes: Robert Rickover talks with Roy Palmer, an Alexander Technique teacher in Bedford, England about ways the Alexander Technique can help with sports performance.
Roy has specialized in working with athletes and writing books about athletics.
Roy: “Alexander Technique is a whole new angle to training. Athletes will take things like nutrition and training seriously but neglect how they move, how they apply themselves to the techniques of their sport.
“I tend to see athletes when they’ve injured themselves. It would be better if we could get them to the Alexander Technique earlier before they have these injuries.
“Alexander lessons are an eye-opener for them. They’ve never considered whether they run efficiently or use themselves efficiently. They’ve usually picked up the sport at an early age and assumed that what they do is the best way they can do it.”
“I always work with them away from their sport to start with. Basic body movements. Your hips articulate from this point. This is where you can move and turn your head. Give them an experience with a different way of moving without the effort they associate with their everyday activities like getting in and out of a chair, standing, bending, walking. You then see them take it into their sports activities and start to notice things they’ve been doing that have not helped such as stiffening the neck and tightening their backs.”
“Often, the golf coach, for instance, won’t see the things we see such as whether the athlete is tightening his jaw, whether he’s lifting his shoulder. They’ll say, ‘My coach told me to relax’, but often people will look at someone collapsing as relaxing.”
Robert: “A golf coach is likely to say something like, ‘Relax your shoulders’, but that instruction is not likely to be useful. If the golfer were able to relax his shoulders at will, he’d be doing it. Telling someone to relax his shoulders is not a useful strategy. They’re likely to interpret that as collapse or to pull the other way. A big advantage of the Alexander Technique is this prevention strategy of seeing a particular pattern and teaching that it is not helping the movement and working out a way the student can say no to this pattern.”
Roy: “However active your sport, you can still think as you perform. Martial artists found they developed extra speed by taking out the unnecessary actions they were bringing. I was doing karate when I discovered the Alexander Technique and I discovered so much more speed. I realized I had been tying myself up in knots before I delivered a punch. It’s the getting set thing. If you can stay free and poised, you don’t have to release that unnecessary tension before you move. My kicks gained power and height as I took the brake off [of unnecessary tension].”
Robert: “Roger Federer, the tennis player, exhibits grace and efficiency. Mohammed Ali, the boxer, in his early days was famous for being agile on his feet. He was often fighting people with more bulk. He could not have been so quick if he had the interfering habits we’ve been talking about.”
Roy: “Federer rarely looks like he’s panicking.”
“I wonder if some of the training methods people use cause them to lose their natural [agility]. Compared to most other male tennis players, Federer is lighter. He doesn’t have the bulk in the arms muscles. Some of that weight training may knock out our natural freedom of movement.
“When you look at these people being interviewed, the top people in every sport seem poised in every way. Such as Michael Johnson, the sprinter. They have this air about them.”
Robert: “How would you work with someone to get them to identify what they’re doing that is getting in their way and how to release that?”
Roy: “I start them in chair work, getting in and out of a chair.”
“Most of us found in our first Alexander session that when we were asked to get out of a chair, we found we did all manner of things. We put our hands on our legs. We pulled our heads back. We pushed forward with our chests. We tightened the lower back. We did all of these things that were completely unnecessary to get out of the chair.
“Working with a sports person who maybe very skilled in a particular sport and bringing them back to something as basic as getting out of a chair to let them see where they are making things harder than they need to be. You can see most of them racing ahead in their minds — what do I do when I’m serving? What do I do when I’m running?”
“If you can get them to stop doing unnecessary things and to give them the experience of almost floating out of a chair, then they start to see the benefits.”
Robert: “One of the telltale signs [of performance limiting habits] is a tendency to tighten the neck as they go into the performance. I know from watching ice skating competitions, from watching the skater’s head-neck-back relationships, and see how that compares to the ratings the skater gets. I find almost universally that the skaters who get marked off, you see excess tension leaking into their neck. There’s a little bit of pulling their head back on their neck. There’s a relationship between that and the quality of the performance. An Alexander Technique teacher can give you a strategy for not doing that.”
Roy: “Or tightening the jaw. You’re interfering with your head-righting mechanism.”
“Alexander Technique is a good way of getting into the here and now, the first stage to getting into the zone where everything is so much easier.”
“All athletes know that state of mind is key to peak performance. Watch people who are best at their sport and see what they are not doing. See how free and easy they appear to be in their movement. Ask yourself, do I look like that? Or am I trying to hard? Bruce Lee said that if you’re trying, you’re wasting effort.”
“What do you do when you say you’re going to try harder? Most people will grit their teeth, tighten their necks and furrow their brows.”
“I like to ask most sports people, what was your best performance? Was that difficult or easy? And they all say it was easy. If your best performances feel easy, that’s because you’re not doing half as much as you think you need to.”
Luke Ford writes: Until I read the following by Robert Rickover, I thought craniosacral was just some feel-good massagey thingy while as an Alexander Technique teacher, I was showing people how to take responsibility for their use.
The truth is that many investigators other than Alexander have gained valuable insights into human functioning and have developed effective methods and procedures of their own. We would do well to investigate these with an open mind. We may even want to incorporate some of them into our own teaching – just as Alexander did.
Personally, I have made significant improvements in my use and functioning as a result of my experiences with the Feldenkrais Method, the Tomatis Method, acupuncture and acupressure. Cranial Sacral therapy has taught me more about freeing my neck than years of Alexander training. Others I know have benefited enormously from such widely diverse methods as chiropractic, massage, physical therapy, yoga, Tai Chi, Rolfing and Trager work.
According to Wikipedia: Craniosacral therapy (also called CST, also spelled Cranial Sacral bodywork or therapy) is an alternative medicine therapy used by osteopaths, massage therapists, naturopaths, and chiropractors. A craniosacral therapy session involves the therapist placing their hands on the patient, which they claim allows them to “tune into the craniosacral rhythm”.[1] The practitioner gently works with the spine and the skull and its cranial sutures, diaphragms, and fascia. In this way, the restrictions of nerve passages are said to be eased, the movement of cerebrospinal fluid through the spinal cord is said to be optimized, and misaligned bones are said to be restored to their proper position. Craniosacral therapists use the therapy to treat mental stress, neck and back pain, migraines, TMJ Syndrome, and for chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia.[2][3][4] Several studies have reported that there is little scientific support for the underlying theoretical model for which no properly randomized, blinded, and placebo-controlled outcome studies have ever been published.”
Ingrid Bacci is an Alexander Technique teacher in Cortland Manor, New York. She talks here about the Alexander Technique and Craniosacral Therapy.
Ingrid: “The body can hold emotions that are repressed. In Alexander Technique training, I got a tremendous release in my body from physical pain. At the same time, I felt a lot of emotions flooding up. I found craniosacral therapy useful for processing that.”
“My jaw started locking up. While Alexander helped me release tension throughout my body, I couldn’t figure out how to release the vice-like sensation that came into my jaw. I went to a craniosacral therapist and she did some specific things that helped that.”
“Unlike with Alexander Technique, you can go into a semi-hypnotic state in craniosacral therapy. It’s passive. I started flashing back to something I could not recognize. I started crying. When I was finished crying, the pain in my jaw was done.”
Robert: “I encountered craniosacral work at the time I was graduating from a [three-year] Alexander Technique training course. Walter Carrington, the father of my course, was intrigued by craniosacral work and encouraged some of his students to experience it.
“I ended up taking a five-day training in it. I was impressed by the training. I found I could do it but I also found that it bored me and that I was much more interested in receiving it.”
“Over the years, I’ve found it an incredible complement to Alexander work. Not as much on the emotional level, but at getting at deep-rooted patterns.
“What craniosacral can get to that Alexander lessons can’t are these complex fascial patterns. Alexander directions tend to be linear and many of these patterns [are deep and difficult and not easily accessible to Alexander directions].”
Ingrid: “Unwinding, where the complex fascial tissue and muscles [unwind]. It’s learning to talk to the tissues. Why don’t you show me how you want to unwind.”
Robert: “There are certain tension patterns where Alexander Technique works well in releasing them but with other complex [tension] patterns, it’s hard to imagine how you could usefully direct yourself out of them. I’ve become aware through 20 years of craniosacral work of specific tensions that I never noticed before with many years of Alexander teaching. No one ever called them to my attention. They were under the radar of what an Alexander teacher could even notice.”
Ingrid: “I learned through craniosacral therapy that we may not release certain tensions because we’re emotionally committed to them. They are part of the way we hold ourselves in life and they’re bound up with fear or anger or feeling burdened. When you can bring a sense of the emotional quality of that tension to the client, then they can work with it more consciously through Alexander Technique style of direction.”
Robert: “The Alexander Technique shows you how you can take up the space in the world you are entitled to and not scrunch yourself up.”
Hyman George Rickover (January 27, 1900 – July 8, 1986) was a four-star admiral in the United States Navy who directed the original development of naval nuclear propulsion and controlled its operations for three decades as director of Naval Reactors. In addition, he oversaw the development of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the world’s first commercial pressurized water reactor used for generating electricity. Rickover is known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy”, which as of July 2007 had produced 200 nuclear-powered submarines, and 23 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and cruisers, though many of these U.S. vessels are now decommissioned and others under construction. With his unique personality, political connections, responsibilities, and depth of knowledge regarding naval nuclear propulsion, Rickover became the longest-serving naval officer in U.S. history with 63 years active duty.[1][2][3] Rickover’s substantial legacy of technical achievements includes the United States Navy’s continuing record of zero reactor accidents, as defined by the uncontrolled release of fission products subsequent to reactor core damage.
