The LearningMethods Library

Confessions of a Do-er
by Dr Nick Drengenberg
Copyright © 2006 Nick Drengenberg,
all rights reserved world-wide
Other articles by Nick
— Floating in a Sea of Tissue
| The Bearable Lightness
of Being |
I Wouldn't Start From
Here | Posture: The Great Big Rump
This is an account of a transformation in my life over the past
couple of years. An enormous transformation, in what has been
a relatively short time. A transformation that had many contributing
elements, and that allowed me to finally be rid of several issues
that I’m sure others have also faced, in their own lives.
The main players in this account are my encounter
with the Alexander Technique, and subsequently the LearningMethods
work pioneered by David Gorman. What has been learned in this
short time led to a vast expansion of my understanding of the
workings of the body, but also of the nature of problems in
any area and how they may be resolved.
In The Beginning
Like many people, for most of the adult years
of my life I had taken several things for granted, as being
just they way things are. These included: that it takes effort
to do things, whether that be to stand, sit, walk, run, lift,
push, pull, think etc.; that experiences in life could be grouped
along a continuum running from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, and that part
of our life mission is to maximise the good and eliminate or
alleviate the bad; and that in general my life was something
that I needed to be constantly steering in this or that direction,
that things happened around me but the overall course of my
life and all of the activities in it were mostly of my own making.
Me and the world, with me either driving a path through it as
best I could, or reacting to it when events overtook me.
So, again like many people, I was pretty
happy with my lot, although there were certainly problems or
experiences that I didn’t enjoy much, many of which were recurring
but which seemed to be just the human lot — “everybody has problems”.
And like the same many people, there was almost a sense of pride
in acknowledging this; it seemed part of being an adult to accept
that problems would occur, and that bearing them stoically or
doing my best to fix them was the best anybody could expect.
Amongst the issues that fell into this category
of things to grin and bear were: that I would have pains and
tensions in my body when doing things, whether that be working
at a desk or at a more vigorous activity, because obviously
gravity and activity will take their toll; that I would feel
stressed by some situations, and that I would therefore need
to balance this with some deliberate relaxation; and that some
of my more chronic issues like an ongoing battle with asthma
and with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) were manageable,
but these were ‘conditions’ and I shouldn’t expect them to follow
the logic of anything else going on in my life.
For each of the issues in my life, I would
carry out the standard responses of trying to eliminate them
or at least lessen their impact on my other activities. Some
examples relating to OCD and breathing might be useful here.
OCD and Breathing
For those unfamiliar with OCD, it’s essentially
an anxiety disorder, which causes people to obsess about issues
which to a non-sufferer appear as complete non-issues (like
“did I turn off that light?”), and then to compulsively undertake
a wide variety of rituals to try and drive the anxiety away.
There are variants on this basic model, but that’s pretty much
how the disorder operates. OCD sufferers can spend many hours
every day ruminating over these non-issues, without ever resolving
them, because in truth they are issues that cannot be resolved
in the way that OCD causes them to be framed.
My own encounter with OCD, as an adult, was
quite subtle. It didn’t manifest itself with the more famous
OCD rituals like hand-washing (although there had been some
of this when I was younger), but rather with a continual attempt
to set a standard for any activity which was one of perfection.
Every experience potentially got caught up in an endless rumination
and associated increase of anxiety as to whether it was ‘right’.
This could be hours of thinking about conversations I’d had
with other people, trying to figure out if I’d said something
offensive or silly, or enormous effort in trying to pin down
THE correct approach to apply to this or that thing, be it a
medical problem or some aspect of my work, and so on.
Steven Phillipson is a renowned psychologist
with great success in treating OCD. I stumbled upon his work
one day, and his approach seemed startling. Without being too
detailed here (the work is easily found online), essentially
he was saying that OCD was a battle between the rational self
and emotions or feelings. And that the rational self was powerless
against the condition, and in fact usually made it worse. His
solution? To fully accept all of the emotions and feelings,
in this case the feelings of anxiety associated with an activity,
even if these feelings were crying out for some kind of response
or reaction. This is extremely effective against OCD, and its
relevance to what comes later in this paper should be obvious,
later.
One part of my life that OCD got its hooks
into was my breathing. Because breathing had been a bit of a
focus already, through the odd bout of asthma over the years,
once OCD got involved I could spend many hours every day trying
to get my breathing ‘right’. It’s probably not surprising to
anybody that I never got there, but it wasn’t through lack of
trying! Diaphragmatic breathing, different types of breathing
exercises advocated by anybody from yoga practitioners to pregnant
mothers’ groups, etc.
And then one day, while scouring the Internet
for yet more advice on breathing, I stumbled upon a short piece
written by somebody calling themselves a “teacher of the Alexander
Technique” (I’d never heard of it) who said there was only one
way to breathe well, and that was to “just breathe”.
To throw away all of the exercises, techniques and advice, and
just breathe. I’m sure my first reaction of “duh — that’s what
I’ve been trying to do” would have been shared by many, but
something then clicked and it seemed immediately obvious that
if breathing is an automatic function of the body, no technique
could ever get it right. That in fact what I needed to do was
just stop fiddling with my breathing, no matter how well-intentioned
the fiddling was.
This is where the journey started to get
really interesting.
Encounters with Alexander
This isn’t a paper designed to give people
a comprehensive view of all aspects of the Alexander Technique.
Information is not difficult to find, as I soon discovered.
(Alexander was an Australian, so let me be chauvinistic for
a moment and say wake up Australia and given him some posthumous
recognition.)
I immersed myself in the key Alexander literature,
and in different peoples’ accounts of their experiences with
the work, for maybe 6 months. And I started to experiment on
myself, using what I had learned. First this thing, then that
thing, with many successes, some failures, and some successes
which then seemed to lapse back into failures. But over time
it became obvious that a profound change was occurring in me.
I might now give a brief synopsis of what Alexander’s work is
about, just to help the story a little at this point and to
give some context to some of my experiments, which I’ll then
describe. Again this is in no way a comprehensive history or
even description of the Alexander Technique — there’s plenty
of information out there, if you’re interested.
Alexander believed that each of us is what
he called a “psycho-physical unity”, meaning that there is no
real distinction between our minds and bodies. This is something
plenty of other people had said previously as well, including
Buddhists and some psychologists. That statement alone would
therefore have meant little, but Alexander then discovered that
quite extraordinary changes occurred in his body/mind if certain
things were done with the way his head, neck and back interacted
(particularly the head and neck). He found that this interaction
was the ‘primary control’ of the functioning of our entire body/mind.
He’d therefore stumbled upon a very practical, and in principle
simple, way to restore ‘good use’ to our entire selves, rather
than have our minds and bodies opposed and fighting each other
(like me trying to get my breathing right).
Those who have experienced the Alexander
Technique will know that the effects are both profound and very
real. [How it can sometimes get lumped in with the more kooky
‘alternative therapies’ is a bit of a mystery, given that anybody
can walk into an AT lesson and experience these effects, usually
in a very short time.] There is an incredible sense of lightness,
almost as if your body had been pumped full of helium, and all
feeling of effort in your activity disappears completely.
At the same time your mind becomes calm and you become immediately
aware of a lot more things happening around you, so that space
suddenly seems a huge, expansive thing. And your breathing becomes
almost geologically deep and completely smooth and automatic,
it feels as if gravity itself was now in charge of it, and what
you’d called breathing up until that moment was nothing but
insignificant fiddling.
There are various methodologies Alexander
teachers use to bring about this good use. In fact the methodology
is sometimes contested, within the Alexander tradition, but
all tend to agree about good use when it’s achieved — it’s a
bit hard not to know it’s happening, even if only to some extent.
Most use a type of ‘hands-on’ work, where the pupil is guided
in some way using the touch of the teacher’s hands. In any case,
a few of my own Alexander experiments are described below. My
description of them can’t convey the variations I tried for
each, nor can I describe the full variety of experiments I used,
but you can at least get a sense of what I was up to.
Muscle Tension
Like many people, I had experienced muscle
tension in many of my activities. With my breathing, playing
with it every day produced a tight, knotted feeling in the guts
that many would know, and a day in the office made me ache in
the back and shoulders, no matter how many ergonomic gizmos
or stretching exercises were involved. And like most people,
my response to all of this had been to try and “relax” these
muscles, or to treat them in some way using massage, hot baths,
stretches etc.
None of this had a lasting effect in the
sense of these problems not recurring, because they were back
to annoy me, every day. And why would it? Obviously bodies aren’t
built to be doing these things, as I then thought. There was
also often no connection between relaxing muscles in one part
of me and in how the rest of me felt — I might get my stomach
to stop feeling knotted, but the pain in the shoulders, neck
or back was a separate pain, to be relaxed independently.
When I discovered Alexander’s experiments
with the head, neck and back relationship, this gave me a new
possibility for relieving my own muscle tension. What if I just
concentrated on relaxing the head, neck and back muscles? This
can take some time to learn how to do, because the muscles in
the head and neck in particular are not always easy to perceive.
But I got there eventually, and lo and behold once I could keep
these muscles from tensing while doing things, my entire body
was free from effort and tension. There was no need to focus
separately on breathing, shoulders, stomach — they all “fell
into line” dutifully the moment the tension was removed from
my head and neck region. And my head felt more free, less held
to the rest of me, and it seemed to just float upwards on its
own, with my body following — I didn’t need to be ‘held’ up.
Not to lose track of Alexander’s psycho-physical
unity, there are varying degrees of mental tension as well,
which you can just as easily monitor and release by control
of the head, neck and back region. For example, repetitive or
obsessive thoughts are ‘tense’ thoughts, because they’re attempting
to solve some issue or focus on some thing with a redundancy
that is equivalent to the physical straining which produces
muscle tension. I noticed that such thoughts produced noticeable
muscle tension, often in the forehead, and by releasing this
tension the thoughts lost their power and went away. Such repetitive
or obsessive thoughts, I noticed at this stage already, directly
produced an overall coordination of my body that was tight and
not smooth.
I was very excited at this time, as you might
imagine. But…
Taking it to the Streets
There was a but. Namely that the lovely absence
of tension was at last achievable, all over, all at once. But
only in a fairly circumscribed way, namely when I had awareness
of the tension in the key head and neck area, while involved
in some activity. When I lost awareness of that area, typically
the tension would return. I’d lost the awareness of whether
I was straining or tensing there, and thus inevitably these
things occurred and the muscle tensions throughout the body
came back. Also, even when I could keep the tension there in
my moment of awareness, while doing other things, it was in
itself a restriction on my activity, because instead of being
able to be fully engaged in what I was doing, there was always
a need to be ‘checking’ or feeling out that the tension wasn’t
there.
So I had a problem. I could get rid of tension
in certain fairly restricted conditions, but I was spending
a lot of my day monitoring all of this, to the detriment of
my real engagement in the other things I was doing. This monitoring
also, and inevitably, fired up the OCD again, and became another
of my rituals: am I tense there now? What about now? Yes, oh
wait, no…yes, there it is, good now…”.
Awareness
The word awareness came up a few times in
the previous section. One of Alexander’s own pupils, Frank Pierce-Jones,
wrote brilliantly about the nature of awareness, and this was
my next Alexandrian port of call. Awareness, in Pierce-Jones’
description of it, is the ability to have more than one aspect
of any moment in your experience, in that moment. For example,
you can be reading a book, closely focused on the words on the
page, but you can also be reading while simultaneously noticing
the temperature of the room, or a smell, or the feel of the
pages under your hands. Note that this is not the same as having
your attention alternating between these things — they
need to be in the same moment of experience.
Most important for Pierce-Jones was the idea
that you should have an element of your body (including the
vital region around the head) in any moment of experience together
with the activity you’re involved with, outside your body. So
if you were writing you could be observing both the words and
feeling of the pen in your hand, at the same moment. Or if you
were seeing, you could be aware of what it was you were seeing
but also of your actual eyes, at the same moment.
This was a quite new experiment. No playing
about with tensions at all, simply broadening my awareness while
doing things. My first and favourite was to simply allow myself
to feel the Earth under my feet, while I was doing other things,
even sitting, or breathing — whatever. This produced a great
release in the Alexander way, and was simple and physical, so
didn’t degenerate into endless thoughts like “is there tension?
Is it there now? How about when I do this?” I just needed to
keep that persistent contact there, in my awareness. Great also
for computer or office work, where the pressure feeling of your
bum on the chair serves equally as well.
Was there a but here? There was a butt here,
on the chair, but had I now hit upon the magic technique to
surpass all other techniques? Alas. It’s probably clear to most
people reading this that here again is a fairly restricted and
artificial state of affairs. Were we put on this Earth to mingle
all of our great joys and sorrows with some sort of awareness
of what our bum and feet are doing, at each moment? It seems
unlikely. This approach was still tied up with the whole domain
of technique. Should we need techniques to live the fullest
possible life? How can we ever be fully engaged with what we’re
doing if technique needs to be part of that experience as well?
I shouldn’t give the idea that a failed experiment
returned me to the drawing board, to ‘start again’ each time.
Each experiment was a progression of sorts, and what I learned
stayed with me through the next experiment as well. And I had
already lost or at least drastically alleviated most of the
problems I’d been dealing with for years at this stage, such
as persistent OCD, clunky breathing and muscle tension. All
of the wonderful things students of Alexander work experience,
such as effortless movement and sitting, calm mind, expansive
awareness — these were all mine to turn on and off at will.
To this day I can still play with all of these techniques, and
experience the same things again. And there are even times,
for example when I’m very tired, when these are lovely little
‘tricks’ I’ll drag out to make some pain or tension go away.
But something was still missing. I wanted
to truly live that lovely ease, rather than always need
to produce it by doing something. It also seemed that there
was something going on here that went beyond the body, that
there was something about the nature of the world itself which
was trying to be told. And then along came David Gorman.
The Rounder We Go…
You might remember me describing the approach
of Dr Steven Phillipson in the treatment of OCD, where sufferers
are told to accept fully their feelings of anxiety, despite
the fact that every fibre of their being will be screaming at
them to do something to alleviate the pain. This is the part
of the story where my pre-Alexander world was going to collide
with where I’d now arrived.
I stumbled upon a long and sometimes heated
discussion in the Alexander Technique discussion group between
David Gorman and others, about a paper he’d submitted for feedback.
David was a very experienced and respected teacher of the Alexander
Technique, and yet was challenging some of its core tenets.
[The details of this debate aren’t for this paper, but can easily
be found on David’s website at
www.learningmethods.com/debate/]
I was intrigued by the details of the discussion,
and felt a little threatened by it as well, having now found
(I thought) a pathway to a better life via Alexander’s work,
which I didn’t like being threatened by any sort of suggestion
that something was amiss. As it turns out, it wasn’t a throwing
the baby out with the bathwater affair, although some might
feel it to be this, to this day. To my mind that would be everyone’s
loss. But again the details of the discussion are best explored
in the actual paper, on David’s site.
My curiosity then led me to read the other
papers on David’s site, detailing where Alexander work had led
him, into a new area he calls LearningMethods (one word), or
LM for short. One paper in particular started ringing my OCD
bells, a classic text called “The
Rounder We Go, The Stucker We Get”. In this paper David
makes the following statements, the effects of which have never
left me:
“The moment I truly accept what is going
on for itself and its own sake is the moment I truly give
up to it. I am no longer struggling and straining to get
to a 'better' moment. There is no longer a split in me with
one part of me that feels another part of me as wrong and
therefore not OK to be in the moment. There is no longer
that one part of me trying to change that other part to
what I think it should be (as if that were possible)… To
make the choice to be in the actual moment I am in is also
the moment that I give up imposing my deluded version of
what should be happening and leave myself open for something
new.”
This was so similar to what Steven Phillipson
was saying about OCD, an approach that simply accepted your
experience for what it was. But this seemed broader, it wasn’t
just about anxiety, it was about using this approach in all
aspects of a life. And the paper explained why this approach
worked so well, going well beyond the brain theory which is
used to explain why anxiety acceptance is effective against
OCD. Most importantly, it showed that this acceptance not only
made symptoms we don’t like go away, but that this acceptance
then automatically opened us out into that lovely state of ease
and awareness which Alexander had been working towards. The
symptoms weren’t problems, they were the solutions, sitting
there all along waiting to do their work, but which we tended
to push away, or to try and fix.
Here was something that felt very new. Up
until this point I like everybody else had problems, be they
‘mental’ or ‘physical’, and I’d tried to find a way to alleviate
or get rid of them, or just bear them. Even when I was working
with awareness, the underlying motivation was to do something
which would give me a better experience. But here was an approach
that said why try to exclude any aspect of your experience?
Why are some feelings right and some feelings wrong? Why do
you need to try and fix anything, and more importantly why think
that you have this power over something as all-encompassing
as experience?
The vanity of what I’d been trying to do
really struck me at this point. Me against the world, me judging
and controlling experience. What a notion. And how did I know
that these experiences didn’t have a meaning I was completely
ignoring?
In case the way I’ve described this new insight
seems a little New Age, as a sort of hymn to “love and accept
all”, it’s important to point out that this is an intensely
practical approach. Repeating any sort of mantra such as “accept
everything” or “don’t react to what happens” will probably get
you noticed or even locked up as some hippie throwback, but
it won’t in itself have much effect on the quality of your experience.
There will be plenty of people also who feel that this is what
they do already, surely? More on that response at the end of
this paper.
So it was time for new experiments. Whenever
I was doing something, anything, and something appeared in my
experience that I didn’t like, be it a muscle tension, blocked
nose, or even a nagging thought that something was amiss, I
decided to not let it interrupt my activity, to not try and
fix this thing that had appeared that I didn’t like, and to
not push it away but to let it be a full flavouring of that
activity, as it were. This took a bit of practice, because as
anybody who has tried this knows, there are two traps for the
unwary:
1) you find yourself pushing the thing you don’t like away to
get on with what you were doing;
and/or
2) you remove your attention from what you’re doing, even if
only subtly, to focus on the feeling.
In other words, it can be difficult at first
to have the activity and the feeling as an undivided
single experience. To make the feeling the feeling OF that activity,
not to make it activity plus feeling, as two separate
things. But after my practice with awareness of having more
than one thing in a simultaneous moment of my life, this soon
became do-able, and the result was everything David described
— that full, expansive awareness that the Alexander methods
also tapped into.
This was closer to that ideal end of just
having this natural and expansive ease and awareness in my experience,
all the time, without having to “think about it” in any way
or to “do” anything. All that was needed was just to accept
my experience as it came to me, warts and all. Not easy by any
means, at least at first, because our deepest instincts are
to react to what feels bad or not right. And to feel that we
need to be controlling things, whether that be our posture or
movement or thought or whatever else. This seemed to finally
be the answer, to just accept everything that was happening.
Hard not to react to those ‘bad’ feelings, but with a bit of
practice…
Still Do-ing
Stepping back for a moment, there’s a common
theme to everything that had happened up to this point. And
the theme was still there, working away as it always had. It
could be summarised as:
Feel bad or
wrong SO find something to do to make it better.
Whether that do-ing was feeling the pressure
of my feet on the floor or my bum on the seat, or working on
my awareness or even just accepting everything that happens.
I was always looking for some thing, some technique, which when
used would ‘fix’ things, for good. I was a chronic do-er!
On the face of it the last place I’d arrived
at, as described above, where it was all just going to be a
matter of accepting that happened to me, was different because
it carried the suggestion that there was nothing that needed
doing. But the sting in the tail was this — yes it works to
accept the bad aspects of your experience, in terms of getting
you to a more open and expansive ‘nice’ feeling, but why
were these bad feelings occurring? I’d found a way to deal
with the symptoms of what was happening, but I hadn’t fully
understood or learned why the symptoms were there in the first
place. What was going on when these symptoms occurred? (This
is in fact the sort of question LearningMethods will ask you,
and David’s work quoted above was in fact from a time when he
was making the transition from Alexander to LM work.)
I understood by this time that they occurred
when I had become disengaged from whatever I was then doing.
Disengagement took many forms, for example:
• thinking about one thing while trying to do another;
• doing physical activity with my attention only on the end of
that activity,
rather than on its details; and
• trying to ‘figure out’ how to do something in my head, while
I was in the act of doing it.
To return for a moment to Alexander’s psycho-physical
unity, what was happening in my body at any time was inextricably
linked to what my “I’ was doing. When my I was simply letting
the details of any activity be what they were, without any trying,
reaching, grasping or figuring out, then I had that lovely ease,
or better I didn’t have any feelings at all in the usual sense
of that term — the activity was all that was in my experience
at that moment, there was no “me doing an activity” — just the
activity. It was only when my I was one of setting myself apart
from the details of what was actually happening (and this could
be in extremely subtle ways) that the symptoms would occur.
This is so obvious when you think about it; if we are psycho-physical
unities, it means that there is never a need to fiddle or do
anything to coordinate our bodies, because that happens all
by itself. How a person’s body behaves is how their mind
is working at that moment in time, because there is no mind
separate from their body.
This seemed like coming full circle in a
way — it couldn’t be as simple as just doing the activity! I’d
been on a search for how to do these things properly,
had experienced great highs and excitement as bad feelings turned
into amazingly good feelings, and after all of that the answer
was that simple?
“That’s What I’m Already Doing!”
To return to my earlier mention of a fairly
common response people will give you when you try to explain
that it’s all as simple as simply being fully engaged in what
you’re doing. Many will be absolutely convinced that this is
what they already do. And yet scratch the surface and there’s
a do-ing there, even if this is the extremely subtle do-ing
of maintaining some sort of distance or detachment from the
moment (usually what’s termed “thinking”). You will have experienced
this yourself — how often when talking to a person or eating
something, or whatever else, has your ‘mind drifted’, even only
in a minor way, to something else? Whether it be to focus on
an itch, to think about where you car keys are, to think about
what the other person is saying, or to dwell in a particular
memory etc.? How often have you washed the dishes while thinking
about the day that’s just gone or the day to come, or while
talking to somebody, ignoring most of the actual details of
the dishes in your hands? Or rushed up out of a chair thinking
only about where you’re going, ignoring every detail between
sitting and walking away?
(There’s a very strong feeling people can
have that life must be something more than what happens in it.
That there must be something ‘behind’ the details that explains
it. Like the man who said to me that he couldn’t just sit in
a chair and take in what was happening around him, because it
was “too boring.” We can be so used to cultivating this artificial
detachment from actual detail, that we come to feel this detachment
as our simplest state. However complete immersion in detail
is the most delicious thing that can happen in a life.)
Ironically people learning something like
the Alexander Technique can suffer the most in this regard.
So convinced (and often assured) that there’s a something they
need to get right to achieve ‘good use’, such as to let their
head do this or that thing, they can often end up not far short
of full OCD in their obsessive attempts. It’s vital to remember
that the body coordinates itself. Our ‘bad habits’ are
merely the expression of a disengagement from our experience.
Any sort of fiddling, or even ingenious attempt not to fiddle,
with the body/mind, is doomed to fail in giving you a fully
engaged experience. The action is in your activity —
being fully engaged there takes care of your body/mind, and
this is how it should be; surely the most obvious end-point
to be reached here is active and full engagement in a life?
This is a profound shift in the way you can
come to view things. The focus of your entire life shifts from
inside your head and body and out into the world. You learn
how to make more and more of what you do a response (rather
than reaction) to what’s happening around you; the locus of
your activity is where it should be, in your activity! The great
existential feeling of a solitary soul staring out at an alien
world is replaced by a sublime immersion in the world’s details,
no matter how insignificant they may have once seemed. Everything
comes alive, the world seems to be a vibrant and constantly
changing and fascinating thing, and just being in it
is all you want and need, wherever you are and whatever you’re
doing.
From here you can move into much wider areas
of a life than the traditional physical problems like muscle
tension — in fact you have an approach which allows just about
any human problem to be understood in a very new way. And beyond
that you have an inkling about the way the wider world and universe
works, the wonders that might appear if you’re prepared to allow
them by relaxing your attempts at control. This is in fact where
David Gorman’s LearningMethods work has gone, and the testimony
of those who encounter it is more than enough evidence of the
seemingly miraculous changes that are wrought in their lives,
by nothing more than their own learning.
~~~~~~~
Other articles by Nick
— Floating in a Sea of Tissue
| The Bearable Lightness
of Being
I Wouldn't Start From
Here | Posture: The Great Big Rump
There is
a small biography of personal details
about the author below.

 |
Copies of many of
these articles are available as
downloadable e-books
from
LEARNINGMETHODS PUBLICATIONS
Read more
articles on the work by
Eillen Sellam, David Gorman and others
Return to the LearningMethods
home page
|

About the Author
Dr.
Nick Drengenberg trained and worked as an engineer, before working as a teacher of high school students for almost 10 years. During this time he also trained in philosophy, and now works as an administrator at a University, with active research interests in a variety of areas, including the LearningMethods approach.
He recently co-authored a
book on learning analytics, which explored how technology and education have not really ever understood each other very well, and what to do about it.
|