How to Correct Posture

Alexander Technique Q and A Session

This is an interview with Leland Vall, a certified Alexander Technique instructor who practices in New York City.  The questioner is William Egert, a blogger and student of the Technique.

Questions are in bold, Leland’s answers are in regular type.

-Leland, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions today.  Let’s start with a loaded one: how do I improve my posture?

 Posture seemingly can’t be escaped, but there really isn’t such a thing. There is only Use.  There is not “position” in the body as it is always externally and internally moving. Any attempt to “fix” its position will result in stiffness and possibly pain.

If that is the case and there is no correct posture, how do I move my body as to avoid strain?

You know it’s funny because there really isn’t movement either.  Alexander constantly contradicts itself. Or I should say, I am interested in the stillness in movement and the movement in stillness.  In movement one thinks that they are going somewhere, but you are actually still there with all the same problems that you had before you started moving.  At the same time, in stillness, there is always movement. So I am looking at a continuum that never changes within a system that is always changing.  

To move more easily, to avoid strain, partly you have to begin to see the stillness in the movement.  But that’s a result of the work, it isn’t something I would tell someone. The lesson is like this:  

You are standing before the chair with the intention of sitting in the chair.  This time between the standing and the sitting is not really very interesting to most people, they just want to be in the chair, but interesting things happen here.  The whole time before you are actually in the chair, and if you recognize that you will make a discovery about less stressful movement. This is going back to my statement that there is no movement.  Basically, if you stay on your feet the whole time you are moving toward the chair you will have an entirely different experience than if you were to just fall in the chair. Taking that further you might recognize that as you go to the chair you are not going “down”, but actually standing up, just as you were before, the whole time you were moving toward the chair.  So to recognize that to move toward sitting down, if you go up as you move down you will have an easier time of it. This idea that you go up to move down is very confusing to most people.

From understanding the chair there is a big leap to a wider understanding of what movement is and what things are and the choices you have in relating to them.

Would I be correct in saying that you are a proponent of “conscious movement?”  Or, movement with more awareness? It seems a bit like Zen.

Consciousness is a very hazy concept.  There is a lot going on in the mind and the whole body and around you, pretty much we are barely conscious as it is.  What I’m talking about is clarifying your intention: where are you really going? Are you going up or are you going down?  It’s very specific. Yes there is need for a greater consciousness, but only to some specific things. And really, the difference between up and down, aren’t we aware of these things already?  

From what I am gathering, it seems that Alexander is a philosophy or a state-of-mind.  Would I be correct in that assumption?

The Technique is the method for solving problems about the Use of the body.  It is a tool for developing improved use and also for solving new problems that may be more specific to that moment.  It is a philosophy, a way of doing things. But also, it doesn’t have to be. In that sense it could also be a bunch of tricks.  That’s kind of what the tips are about. 

Do you believe that the mind and body are intimately connected? 

That’s Alexander’s idea.  The mind and the body are are psychophysical whole.  This mind is a part of the body.

But to answer more fully, you can’t just train the body to have good posture.  This is why exercise doesn’t really work to change posture. You have to be clearer in your intentions about what you are doing when you are doing something.  From here, your body will also strengthen in a more appropriate way. The body strengthens to support the way that it is used. If it is used poorly, it will strengthen in a way that supports that poor use.  It will do that even if you do exercises that seek to strengthen it in a different way.

Based on your responses, I’m inclined to think that many have problems with posture in our society because we are doing too many things unconsciously.  You seem to be advocating a new awareness of the movements/intentions of the body and the habit of staying in that state of heightened awareness. Perhaps we are focused on the wrong things.  What are your thoughts?

You don’t really have to be aware of movement, It’s more about being aware of your intention.  The body follows what you want. 

I don’t think you need heightened awareness, just really a different awareness.  You are already aware of the concepts of up and down, I just want to reverse them.

It is hard to express how surprising it is to some people when they recognize that a lowering of the body is really an upward intention.  You don’t really need to be aware of what that movement entails, You just have to know that you are going up instead of down.

Just in writing this, you have to try it.  Sit in a chair without falling.into the chair.  Sit in the chair as if it is not there. Recognize that the chair is an incidental object.

Some people will really like this idea.  Others couldn’t care less about it.

Writing about the Technique gets me into a lot of trouble.  It’s very squirrely. It is itself and its opposite. It’s really something to be experienced, not so much described.

This is all very interesting.  I tried the chair technique. You describe sitting in a chair as, in actuality, an “upward intention.”  From a very basic point of view: When I sit in the chair, the whole world around me certainly moves up.  It seems that you are advocating a synergy between our inner and outer worlds. This is totally Zen and I love it.  Do you think Alexander is holistic in its expression?

Yes, but zen doesn’t improve your posture and there are lots of people into zen who improve their back pain through the Alexander Technique.  Also Alexander is not religious and you don’t meditate to achieve Alexander, you achieve zen by meditating while also using the Alexander Technique.  Meanwhile, no one can see you using the Alexander Technique but everyone can see the zen going on.

{Is Alexander holistic?} Yes, unless it isn’t.  Plenty of people think of Alexander as a trick that they employ as they need it.

Alexander has no fashion, no music, no movement, no exercise, no secret handshake.  It’s invisible. Most important to me, it has no time. In a musical sense, Alexander only exists between the beats, as if the next beat was an infinite amount of time away.

To clarify this point about time, the enemy of intention is compulsion.  If something must be completed, especially something that you know how to do, exploration of the means becomes very difficult.  The chair is an extremely compelling device that makes a lot of promises and demands that you skip right away to the moment when you are in it.  But to choose not to sit in the chair is to choose to not be compelled and to take your time and to clarify your intention. As soon as you feel you have to sit in the chair, you will just sit in it they way you always have.

It seems like Alexander is more of a “non-doing” than a doing, which certainly carries an Eastern flavor.  

Non-doing is a kind of doing and it has nothing to do with doing things or working hard or using the body in a strenuous way.  The idea of non-doing is that you must choose carefully what you are doing and what you are not doing. The classic example is the chair.  To end up in the chair, don’t choose to sit in it. Choose not to sit in it..

I hope my next question is valid.  Taking the devil’s advocate approach:  If I never choose to sit, how will I ever be able to sit?  Does the chair choose me?

I do get this question a lot.  If you stand before a chair and choose to remain standing as you bend your knees (there’s some other things that are important but we are not getting to that yet) you will end up in the chair without intending to sit in the chair.  You can do this same thing without the chair and you won’t end up in the chair but you won’t fall down because you have already chosen to remain standing. If you do fall (whether with the chair or without) it means that you lost your intention to stand.  It’s very common to lose the standing intention where there is a chair behind you, less so when there isn’t.

See, you really do have to get to this part right away because all the explaining doesn’t make any sense.  One may have some ideas about Alexander, but once they take the lesson it becomes much more difficult to explain it.  “It’s about standing up to sit down, but somehow while that was happening it seemed to be about a lot more than that but I’m not sure what.” 

It seems, as you stated, that Alexander is something to ultimately be experienced.  This will be my final question: Why would one want to keep the standing intention while intending to sit?  Is this because the body is more properly aligned while standing? Are we trying to somehow transfer this to the sitting action?  I understand these things are difficult to put into words, but would you try before we conclude for the day? Thank you for your time.

This is an important question.  The body follows your intention.  Poor posture is the result of a downward intention. Like posture, there is no such thing as body “alignment.”  Aligned with what? To stand tall, you have to go up, not down, and not forward. To go somewhere, you need the intention.  It’s not a position, it’s a destination. To get into a chair, people pull themselves down. This is completely unnecessary because gravity is already doing that.  Your job is to go up, and that requires your intention. To walk forward is not really to go forward, it is more beneficial to aim up and back as one leg at a time goes forward.  To crawl under your sink most people would not think of alignment, but there is always an opportunity to go up. There are some other important intentions but we are not yet getting into all of that.

Leland, thank you for your time!  This concludes today’s Q and A.

Thank you Bill.