Alexander Technique Video Interview with Judith Vigurs

What is the Alexander Technique? Who is it useful for? How can it help you? These are some of the questions which Human Improvement asked Judith Vigurs, an experienced Alexander Technique teacher living in North East England. This video interview is in two parts.

What Is The Alexander Technique? Part1

What Is The Alexander Technique? Part2

What is the Alexander Technique, video transcription

Hi this is Richard Owen for humanimprovement.com. I’m very proud to produce our first video and I have got a very special guest today, Judith Vigurs and Judith is an Alexander Technique teacher who is going to explain to us a bit about what she does. So, Judith, you are an Alexander Technique teacher. What is your background and how did you get into doing what you do?

JV: I got interested in the Alexander Technique because I had a friend many years ago who was a cellist with a big orchestra and he had terrible problems and he did the Alexander Technique and it really transformed him. He didn’t just get better, he had a bad neck and everything before but he just seemed to kind of open out as a person too and I was really fascinated by that.

RO: What is the Alexander Technique for? What kind of things does it help with?

JV: Well, when you learn the technique, basically, you learn something that kind of gives you a resource you can use with almost anything you do because it’s a way of managing yourself, looking after yourself better so that you are not putting too much stress and strain on yourself, and just staying free, inactivity, you know so you are free to react to whatever happens. Mostly when we are doing things we tend to shut the body down, for instance, if we’re thinking or concentrating on something. With Alexander you learn to keep a bit of awareness in the body at the same time as thinking or planning something.

RO: So body awareness and that helps you with the use of your body in everyday life, whatever you’re doing.

JV: Yes, because actually most of what we do we are governed by habit and we have the same habits in everything that we do so whether you’re gardening or driving, whatever you do, you are doing the same things with your body and, as you say, the more aware you are of it, the easier it is to do it better.

RO: So it’s about doing everything better or easier or with less effort perhaps.

JV: Yes, more freedom in movement really.

RO: Where does it come from? What are the origins of Alexander Technique?

JV: Well Mr Alexander was an Australian, he was born in Tasmania. He was a farmer’s boy, he was born in 1869 but perhaps a bit unusually for a farmer, he had a real love for the theatre and wanted to be an actor and just as soon as he started getting a little bit successful as an actor he had big trouble with his voice, he started losing his voice.

RO: But he overcame his problems?

JV: Well he did, the thing is he used the power of thought you could say, and it’s the power of thought that makes me go a bit hoarse when I think about voice trouble which you can use it for yourself you know to improve things and Alexander did that.

RO: So it was a case of him having to develop his method and process by which he could solve his own problem with his voice as an actor. You were saying he was from Australia and did that technique, how did it get come to England or other parts of the world?

JV: Well he set off, he decided he had something valuable and he thought in Australia it would be more difficult for him to really spread the news so he set off for England and I think he arrived in England in 1902 and he set up premises in Harley Street and started teaching, working, and he contacted doctors, he got to know doctors and quite a few well known people and for a while it was a bit of a fad doing the Alexander Technique and he tried very hard to get the medical establishment interested and he only partly succeeded, but he did make it better though by going to London.

RO: Did he work with other actors and similar types of people as well?

JV: Yes, actors and playwrights. He worked with George Bernard Shaw for instance, actually quite a lot of writers and those kinds of people. He actually worked with all kinds of people, anyone who heard about him and thought that he had something to teach them. First it was all voice work and breath work and then gradually he started working more just with the person as they came along and whatever their patterns of tension were. He started off working for himself with the voice but then he found after being working for a while his general health improved as well. He got people who pulled themselves out of shape for a long time and tried to kind of sort them out.

RO: So where did you train and how did you learn to become an Alexander Technique teacher?

JV: Well I trained actually when I lived in Holland. I trained at a school which my teacher started. My teacher had been trained by somebody who had been trained by Alexander. So Alexander set up a school in the 1930’s and from there all other teachers come.

RO: What benefits have you seen in your own life from Alexander Technique?

JV: That’s a good question. I think actually the thing that is most important for me is that it has given me far more confidence in myself really. I just feel I have the confidence to embark on anything, to try anything and I’ll know that I won’t hurt myself or you know or I’ll do the best I can. Where as in the past I was quite timid about speaking in public or something like that. Nowadays I really enjoy it. It’s just kind of opened up a world of possibilities for me I think. I was a very, I worked a lot with my head you could say, but my body just got left out of it and after I had done my training I started dancing and you know, it just felt more possible somehow.

RO: That leads me onto the question, is Alexander Technique for everybody, what kind of people is it most suitable for?

JV: Well I think you can use it for anything but I would say that people who come to me most commonly fall into three groups if you like. One is people who have some kind of pain, back pain, neck pain, headache that kind of thing, or some sort of health problem. One is performers, and that kind of includes sportsmen as well because perform too at a very high level and then the other group is people who are sort of interested in it, I don’t know, interested in making things a bit better for themselves. Maybe they’ve noticed over the years they have started to slump and they don’t seem to be as tall as they used to be or they want to improve their golf swing and they don’t quite know how, or they have got some interest. They are actually the easiest people to work with because it is quite difficult to work with the people who suffer pain. Pain is a very complex and difficult thing.

RO: So you work with these people to help them to learn what habits they may have and how to overcome those as well?

JV: Yes, I mean habits are useful things, they are part of the way we learn. It wouldn’t have been helpful for us not to have any habits and if I go to the door and I want to open the door, I don’t really want to have to think ‘now first of all I have to do this.. I have to put my hand out’…..you know it’s nice that it goes automatically but the problem with habit clearly that they, quite automatically things start to happen sometimes which aren’t so good for it so, yes, I work with people to identify habits. I do this by getting them to move in various ways and guiding them, I guide them with my hands; I guide someone who is sitting down and help them to stand up and look at what they’re doing with their head and neck particularly, as that is a very important area. And I also work with people lying down so I put them on a table, this is the bit people normally like most in the lesson, it’s very relaxing and I put my hands on their neck for instance, and that encourages them to relieve the neck and then I ask them to bring their attention to themselves really in a way that helps them expand a bit and normally when people get up off the table they feel a bit better.

RO: So you’re saying it helps people open out and stop restricting themselves perhaps with too much muscular tension that kind of thing?

JV: Yes, that’s a good way to say it because, if you have a lot of tension, but most people have got quite a bit of stress in their lives and that continues basically. Life just gets more stressful in some ways. Tension tends to make you kind of short and then narrow. People kind of take on a sort defensive posture and there’s a lot of pressure on them, I mean I’m kind of helping people to stay quite expanded, to stay free to move really, not to clench themselves so much and that has a powerful effect.

RO: How does this sort of excessive tension in the body come about, do people just develop it over years without realising it?

JV: Yes I suppose so, I think it is one of the ways that we respond to anything that is difficult. We breathe, we have this instinctive inclination to fight or flight and if neither of those is possible we freeze are we kind of immobilise ourselves. It starts really young I think. There are a lot of theories about why people get very tense, but I think it often is quite a sort of defensive posture, you know, things are coming at you. They might not actually be concrete material things but criticism or lots of work or something like that comes at you and you actually do the same thing as you would do if someone was throwing something at you. In that way we’re quite instinctual beings.

RO: So did Alexander have quite a holistic view on the body and the mind and how it all works together as a system, is that kind of part of his outlook on the whole thing, how it works?

JV: Definitely, he always said that the thing that made his work possible was the fact that the body and the mind cannot be separated for any practical purpose and he thought that was something that many people said but they didn’t really have a sense of what it meant. He meant you really can’t separate them. Everything you do you do with the whole of yourself whether your are conscious of it or not. So yes, it means that you can use your attention and thinking to make things happen in the body and that is one of the things we do in Alexander Technique.

RO: So taking you back to your friend who inspired you in the first place, are you saying you saw him change as a person emotionally perhaps and in many other ways so the physical changes which affected him in his life helped in every other way yes?

JV: Oh yes. He was a very skilful cellist and he was in the Concerto Orchestra, I mean major orchestra in Holland and he was one of the top cellists. He is quite a tall man and had sort of narrowed over the years and he was a very quiet modest man in a way that was perhaps not terribly good for him. He kind of, he didn’t speak out when things were difficult. He seemed for one thing to widen which I’m sure he did because he stopped narrowing himself, but also he began to be more assertive and actually in a really lovely way as I saw more of him as a person and I think that was a very good thing for him actually. He had to go through quite a process to reach that, but he came out of it a bigger person in every way.

RO: So we have touched a little bit in what you were saying a session of Alexander Technique entails, generally you do it one on one, is that right, so that you have one person and you as the teacher help them with their specific problems, but can you do it as groups as well or are there ways to do it?

JV: Yes, you do need some 1:1 work because it’s just so subtle. If I am teaching somebody to notice what they are doing with themselves, I mean we all have this information coming in, but we have so much information coming in that we might not really notice about more subtle things, so you do need some of that but I also work with groups.

RO: So you are saying in the 1:1 Alexander sessions people might spend some time kind of just focusing on awareness, just laying on a table of some kind also guide his movements as well. What sort of things do those entail, what kind of movements to help people?

JV: Any movement really. Sometimes people come with a particular thing they want to look at, a particular activity and we look at those movements, but even just standing up, sitting down, that’s a movement that uses the whole system really and it’s something that we do dozens of times a day without really much awareness. Walking, I do things like crawling which most people don’t do very much but it’s nice to do because it takes us back to an earlier stage of development, the stage before walking. Some of the problems we have in walking come really from that time and you can work on them. Rolling over, sorts of jumping, running I do sometimes with people, I have even done cycling – that’s quite hard to set up. I had someone who brought his snowboard to the lesson. They’re astonishingly big. The way you sit when you’re driving. Most people spend hours, the way you sit at the computer. The things you do a lot have a big influence on how you feel and what happens to your body so if you can get those right actually, the more difficult things, then you.

RO: So, you were saying about the neck and how people guide it to try and release the neck during Alexander Technique sessions, I’m just curious about how that kind of in Alexander Technique, how you see that relating to the body and how that actually helps people?

JV: Well, the neck is a very important area in the Alexander Technique. I mean it is important for our whole coordination, this area, how the head and neck relate together and how the head and the whole spine relate together and that’s central to our whole coordination and we are vertebrate creatures really. Everything is organised from what you might call the nerve centre really, the brain in the head right on top of the spine. What Alexander discovered about this was that actually whatever you do with your neck has a big influence on the quality of movement in the rest of your body. If your neck is tight, you know you won’t be able to move any part of your body completely freely. You might feel free but it’s going to be a bit impaired. If you learn to release your neck and keep it released while you’re in action, most people don’t, it’s amazing how much it frees up the rest of the body. It’s a useful thing because you don’t have to think about your whole body in Alexander work the whole time. If you focus your attention on your head and neck on what they’re doing, that’s actually enough to get you kind of opening out and being more lengthened and widened rather than shortened and narrowed, so I focus a lot on that anyway.

RO: So how might you guide people to think about the sort of way they want their neck to be, is it possible to deliberately release the neck in the same way that you would release clenching your hands or something – how does that process go about?

JV: Well I suppose the answer is it is possible but not in the way that we can release our hands, I work much more getting people to give themselves sort of guiding directions and one of those is to think the neck free. This actually has more of an effect than people think at the beginning, you have to get quite good at it. It’s kind of remembering to think of your neck being free in action like kind of now. I need to have just a little bit of the tension for what my neck is doing and that gradually builds up, it helps you to free everything up in practice. But I think you often can’t tell if you’re neck is free or not do you? You notice if it’s really tight but you can’t really feel whether it is free, it doesn’t feel quite the same.

RO: So you have a kind of indirect process of thinking thoughts that might give you the feeling that you want in the terms of relaxedness?

JV: Yes, it is quite indirect actually, the Alexander Technique is quite indirect. People come to me with a bad knee and they kind of wonder ‘ well, what’s she going on about my neck for?’. I am glad that they say that because it enables me to explain that if you get the neck going well that’s going to help everything and help you to integrate the whole body.

RO: Things that your body doing then is subconscious and you are not aware of, is what you are doing kind of bringing those things to consciousness and making people aware of them and then doing some kind of thing to change consciously what it is and then allowing it just to become subconscious again, is that how you see it working?

JV: Yes I think so. Most people when they start off really don’t have a clue about how they do things. If I ask someone in the first lesson which I often do, stand up and sit down and I say “Well, do you have a sense of what bit of your body was leading you?” and actually they don’t. People have just never thought about it – as long as things work alright, why would you? So it’s making things conscious, that’s quite a big bit in the beginning of the process and then, as you say, building up more useful habits actually. The habit of just remembering to notice what you’re doing rather than going through life without thinking about it at all, that can be very, very helpful. And gradually the idea is that these become habits that you don’t have to think too much about. It only takes something like that [snaps fingers] that quick to think about it and it helps you. So I mean, for instance, dancing, I don’t think all the time about what I’m doing with my head and neck, I think it would be awful, it would be awful to have to do that but just having a kind of awareness of it occasionally really, really helps and it is possible to do that.

RO: That’s great, so, say someone was hearing what you are explaining about a session of Alexander Technique. I mean in some ways they might think ‘how can these things help me?’ you know, standing up and sitting down, perhaps even rolling on the floor or crawling, you know, people would think ‘that sounds a bit silly, how can that help me?’ Is there some way that’s easy to show people how it actually does help them?

JV: I think that there’s something in that idea that it seems a bit silly. One of my clients that has been coming a long, long time used to say to me that every week I taught him something else that was silly and it used to amuse his colleagues by saying what it was. But actually the best way to demonstrate how it works is simply to work on someone. If somebody is really, I’ve often given presentations when somebody has been very unconvinced and thought it seemed stupid. If I can persuade that person to let me do a bit of work on them then they get the experience and it’s so hard to describe an experience without sounding extremely airy and fairy but once people feel that something is different then that’s a different kind of information. So yes, I would try and work on somebody and try and demonstrate.

RO: So how long is the process of overcoming habits and using the Alexander Technique, I’m guessing it’s not just an overnight thing?

JV: No, it takes a while. It varies hugely but if you had your habit about 20 years say, then it might take a couple of years for them to really, really go. People vary a lot in how long they convalesce. Some people come for sort of 10 lessons and then that’s enough, off they go. And others keep going for ages but the process of change goes on for a long time. If you really stick at it you keep on changing, but this is change for the better, mostly we think of change for the worst, age, we get tighter and more inflexible. Alexander used to say medical science knows nothing of the long slow change for the better and I think that’s really true. It’s very much, as I say, it’s very individual. Some people find that they have some lessons and then they can carry on by themselves and perhaps come back every now and then for an MOT sort of thing. And others like that regular reminder so that they don’t fall back into their old habits.

RO: So it does require some sustained work and attention to get the results from it?

JV: Although the results can start pretty quickly actually, that’s the thing. I think that’s what keeps people going. They do feel such better quite quickly if they don’t they wouldn’t keep coming.

RO: If you’re unsure of what it is the only real way is to try it actually.

JV: Absolutely. I mean it’s not for everybody. There are a lot of things out there. It doesn’t have to be the Alexander Technique but it’s worth trying because that really is the way to know. There are some similarities with things like Pilates and Pilates has done very much more as a system of movement, but actually they work quite harmoniously together and they were developed about the same time and I think the ideas are similar. It fits in well with all kinds of things, I mean, if you do yoga, to have some Alexander is really helpful, it stretches them really. It’s a technique you can apply to those sort of things. It’s very different from sort of body systems that exercise the body. You don’t really do exercise, it’s much undoing things than learning to do things.

RO: So it’s as much training your mind to have a different process that say or a different way of awareness of approaching things.

JV: Absolutely, absolutely.

RO: Great, well thanks very much for your time.

JV: You’re welcome.

RO: It’s been a very interesting interview and I hope you’ve all enjoyed the video of the Alexander Technique and look out for some future videos coming up on humanimprovement.com in the near future, thank you.

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Published on Thursday, 03 May 2012 10:29

Written by Richard