“If we stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing does itself”: Inhibiting the Flow of Writing through the Alexander Technique in the Twenty-First Century¹

Katja Dreyer & Anneleen Masschelein

Writing, as most of us do it, is harmful. Writing is mostly done while sitting down. An easy position it seems, where not much can go wrong. Nothing is further from the truth. No matter how eager and inspired, or stuck and desperate, a writer easily succumbs to gravity in a harmful and unconscious way, resulting in a shortened, stiffened, crouched posture lacking poise. While the symptoms become more manifest with age, the problem is not age in itself. As ‘writing’ as such is not taught as a psychophysical activity, already primary school kids hang above their book with extremely tense hands and fingers; when they become teenagers, it becomes worse. For the professional writer, this lack of poise can lead to exhaustion before the writing day is over. Whereas performers, be it actors or dancers, are trained to work with the body as their main instrument, writers are still taught from within a dualistic framework that puts the body in a different category than the mind. But are these two practices, performing and writing, really that different? Don’t we write with the same faculties that we dance or perform with? Can the writing process be enriched by intersecting mental activity with a conscious visceral reality? If the practice of writing is something you do with your mind... where is your mind? Where do the words come from, how do they get onto the paper or the screen?

In this contribution, we want to stage a conversation between two people and their many personae: Katja, a theatre maker, a performer, a playwright, a researcher in the arts, a teacher of the Alexander Technique (an educational method to unlearn the harmful habits in posture and movement); Anneleen, a professor of cultural studies, a researcher of contemporary creative practices, a story editor for the film industry. A dialogue in which different perspectives meet, but that stems from a common experience of and curiosity about the contradictory experiences of stillness of the body and the flow of creativity in the mind. An experience in which stiffness, inhibition, frustration and determination coincide with freedom and agility of thought, and with the exploration of new and old ideas. From different backgrounds, we both study the processes of creative writing. Katja teaches writing for performance as well as the Alexander Technique and has performed in numerous pieces, which gives her a unique perspective on how the ‘bodymind’ operates. Anneleen has studied the popular advice in handbooks for creative writing and has written articles and books, wondering why so little attention is being paid to the challenge of remaining seated at a desk for a long time. Each of us will revisit our own practices to take a closer look at the stillness at the stormy heart of writing.

Rethinking Thought on and for the Stage

“I saw you thinking, Katja”, the acting teacher said after an improvisation in the first week of attending drama school. Despite being new to this world, I got a hunch that this comment meant failure. He saw me thinking, and thinking does not belong on stage? What we look for on stage, he said, is BEING, is Life, like life during the plague. Thinking, in his eyes, was not being? And being is the absence of thought? Experience taught me that it was not THINKING that he wanted to ban from the stage, but an (impossible) attempt to cover up being lost and overwhelmed by impulses, which generates a fuzzy presence instead of the kind of clear presence an actor or performer needs to bring to their story. But still, damning the act of thinking as a sign of bad performance and as something to be avoided left an impression in the young student’s bodymind. Witnessing somebody think, on or off stage, is captivating, contagious and moving. It reveals a human being in a moment where they are most human, a moment (or is it a gap?) where strength and vulnerability meet, between not yet knowing and almost knowing, a moment rich in creative energy. Where the passing of time is transparent. Where time is stretched, a flow is interrupted, and hesitation or inhibition creates the potential for action. Manoeuvring the dichotomy of THINKING versus BEING kept me busy throughout the four years of drama school. I believe it led to many more failed improvisations, where I kept thinking “don’t think”, whenever I noticed this teacher was watching.

In the early 2000s, ‘conceptual or reflexive’² dance was entering mainstream dance festivals through the work of artists such as Xavier Le Roy, Jerome Bell, Sasha Waltz, and Thomas Lehmen. Dance had reinvented itself. There was little dance as we had known it. The dancers were speaking; there must have been writing. This is how I wanted theatre and writing to be. I met the choreographer Ivana Müller. In 2006, we created While We Were Holding It Together (WWWHIT), a performance for five performers. Müller describes this work as a “choreography of thoughts”. The concept is simple: the performers each hold one position. The composition of the five positions forms a tableau vivant or a still image. During the performance, the performers create an ever-changing variety of potential readings of this still image, by starting every sentence of the performance with “I imagine...”.  The audience is urged to envision different scenes – from a forest to a military operation or sculptures in an auction – and to think along. Through the relationship of still bodies and changing words, this performance highlights the creative potential of words. It highlights the process of imagination, of thought as creation, as imagination, as being.

The creation process of WWWHIT started as a collaborative writing process, directed by Müller. Three writers looking at a model of the stage image. Five cardboard cutouts of the future performers placed on a cardboard stage, each holding a certain position, a tableau vivant, or a still reenactment of a random movie scene. Hot summer days in an old theatre in the former East Berlin – sweating, writing, laughing, thinking together, and looking at the miniature photos of the performers stuck on pieces of cardboard. After the script was written, the rehearsal process started, and the writers metamorphosed into performers and a choreographer. Performers enjoy challenges. This was a special one: holding one position for one hour without losing presence, limiting strain on the joints, while keeping your voice free. Müller invited a teacher of the Alexander Technique (AT) to help us with this task and give us some concrete tools. These tools, introduced to the performers by the teacher, along with a delicate touch of the teacher’s hands, were uttered thoughts and wishes.

Now. Think – Where in your body can you do less? Now. Let gravity work for you, where are you holding? Now, think up while you allow your weight to go into the floor. Don’t do up, think up. Now. You can always release more weight while thinking up. Releasing weight generates an upwards movement. Wish your neck to be free, think about your back, your head is balancing on top of the spine, you do not need to hold it, you are always in movement also in stillness. 

Traces of the Body in Creative Writing Traditions

Katja’s experience with the difficulty of holding the tableaux vivants while conjuring up different universes through language brought me back to my longstanding research on writing pedagogies and popular handbooks for creative writing (Masschelein & De Geest 2021). In the creative writing handbooks that I have read, I encountered very little mention of the physical stillness of writing. Still, anyone who has been writing for a longer time is familiar with the discomfort, even excruciation, of sitting on a chair behind a laptop for prolonged periods of time, waiting for the imagination or thinking to come. The wriggling and repositioning, the endless trips to the kitchen to get some tea, trying out different places: a room, the kitchen, the public library or a fancy coffeeshop. Despite ergonomic chairs, standing desks or fancy laptops accessories, there is no miraculous salvation from pain. There is only moving your neck from side to side, straightening and stretching your back, staring at your laptop, wishing, willing yourself to write. As writing coach Jane Anne Staw points out, what many blocked writers experience is that “they had a problem sitting down” (Staw 2003, 51).

Already in one of the earliest and still influential advice books, Becoming a Writer (1932), Dorothea Brande defines “the writer’s magic” (or “X”) in terms of the mind-body connection:

X:Mind:: Mind:Body. In order to think intensively, you hold your body still: at the most you engage in some light, mechanical task which you can carry on like an automaton.  (Brande 1932, chapter XIII)

As a way to prepare yourself for writing, Brande suggests a sort of mindfulness avant la lettre: exercises aimed at learning “to hold your mind as still as your body”. Concretely, this entails that you start freewriting immediately after a “near comatose state of bodily stillness” such as sleep, to free the creativity from the unconscious and to make sure that it can flow uninterrupted.

The conception of creativity as flow fits, according to intellectual historian Hillel Schwartz (1993), within the broader context of a “new kinaesthetic” developed in the first half of the twentieth century. By this he means a preference for continuous flowing movement that underlies new forms in a wide variety of artistic and pedagogical practices: improvisation, rhythmic gymnastics and modernist dance, handwriting in primary school teaching and graphology, and new designs based on smooth movement like the zipper or the rolling staircase. According to Schwartz, in the pedagogies developed by Frederick Matthias Alexander or the process philosophy of John Dewey, the kinaesthetic of flowing movement also led to new starting points: an emphasis on practice rather than on end goal, and the fundamental interconnection of body and mind (Schwartz 1992, 82-83). In writing advice of the period, the creative flow is sometimes linked to bodily movements like walking, dancing, handwriting or fighting.³

The quotes above from Brande and Staw reveal that the connection between mind and body is not always straightforward. The creative flow of imagination may be stimulated by walking or freewriting, but the real labour of writing also involves the effort of stillness as a counterpoint to it. In Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer’s Block (2003), Staw includes an interesting case study from her practice in which a blocked writer who is also an amateur musician is encouraged to play the violin before writing, or to listen to her own music while writing.

By taping herself playing the violin and by playing this tape while she wrote, my client brought the musician part of herself with her into the writing room, right to the computer screen. While she wrote, measures of Bach floated toward her, filling the air with a harmony and a fluency the writer herself had produced. Gradually, the keyboard of her computer became the strings of her violin, and the fluidity she experienced while playing Bach began to characterize her writing. She noticed that she held her hands differently as she wrote. That her posture had changed, her back and neck now straighter, as if she were standing with her violin, not sitting on her chair. She even found herself swaying to her words, as if the words became notes. (Staw 2003, 166)

This quote beautifully shows how the body and the mind are intrinsically interwoven and connected: by adapting her body’s posture, this writer is able to make a connection between the fluidity of playing the violin and writing. Playing and writing require the bodymind’s concentration, the ear’s openness to receive, the hands’ ability for coordinated movement, the will or wish to connect.

In the remainder of this article, we want to turn our attention to the Alexander Technique. Developed by actor F. M. Alexander in the first half of the twentieth century, this somatic/psychophysical method to align posture and thinking has been incorporated in many creative pedagogies, primarily music and drama. It takes the ‘bodymind’ (rather than the Cartesian ego) as its starting point, introducing concepts such as inhibition as a counterpoint to the (still) omnipresent metaphor of the flow. How can the AT help us with the strenuous posture of sitting down, and additionally, will the AT influence not only how we write but also what we write? In this we follow Aldous Huxley, an early pupil of F.M. Alexander, who foregrounds ‘inhibition’ as the most important element of the technique: “If we can learn the act of conscious inhibition on the physical level, it will help us acquire and practice the same art on the emotional and intellectual level” (Huxley in Leavy, 76). Could practicing inhibition, the conscious interruption of a habitual pattern through thinking, lead to or tune into a different type of writing? One that is more than just free association or freewriting, a kind of writing enriched through the fully present bodymind?

The Alexander Technique: Freedom Through Inhibition

The AT was developed in the first half of the twentieth century by Alexander in Tasmania and Australia before he brought it to the USA and finally settled in London. Alexander started off as a successful amateur orator and actor until he developed serious vocal problems. As no doctor could help him, he ventured out to help himself. He suspected that his problems were a consequence of his own unconscious behaviour, a suspicion that was confirmed and led him to develop his specific technique. Rather than “muscular re-education” Alexander used the phrase “psycho-physical re-education” (Alexander 1923, 20). Neither a therapy nor a cure, the technique is taught in a one-to-one situation. This learning process requires “the active participation that is [...] not muscular activity but it is the active participation of thought and awareness” (Carrington 2021, 30) The AT presents itself as an “owner’s manual” (Langford 2008) that can help us use our bodies in a way that is more easy, less strenuous, not based on habit, but on conscious thinking.

Observing himself with three mirrors, Alexander acknowledged that what felt “right” to him was in fact not so much right as “habitual” (Bloch 2004, blurb). Seeing that he wasn’t in fact doing what he was convinced he was doing led him to conclude that his sensory appreciation was not trustworthy: it was his own use, or better misuse, of himself that caused his problem. If he were able to change his ‘use of himself’, the vocal problem could be solved. In other words, if he were able to stop doing what he was doing, a significant improvement in his functioning would be achieved: “If we stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing does itself” (Alexander 1941).

The ‘habitual misuse’ that Alexander became aware of – a shortening of the neck by pulling your head back, the pushing forward of the chest, leading to the hollowing of the back, gasping for air and trying to grip the floor with the feet – were in fact interconnected physical habits. When trying to get rid of them, the force of habit proved to be strong. Thus, Alexander came to recognize the need for conscious inhibition: only the inhibition of our habitual responses towards stimuli allows one to retrain one’s body and mind. Alexander described the process as follows:

In response to a given stimulus, we refuse to give consent to a certain activity and thus prevent ourselves from sending those messages which would ordinarily bring the habitual response. (Alexander 1941, 101)

It was at this point that Alexander understood that body and mind are a single unit and should be treated as such. With what we know today, what we do by applying the AT is creating new neurological connections or pathways between brain and muscle: “Students of the technique build up a new body grammar by correlating muscular use to a corresponding mental image imprinted through repeated sequences of words.” (Schwartz 1992, 82) This entails that managing to inhibit the unconscious habitual reaction to an instruction from the brain is key to changing it. The momentary inhibition is followed by a redirection of the body through following thoughts or directions that are repeated by the teacher. Caught on the spot by herself, succumbing to gravity and tensing of the neck and jaw, while occupied in the performance of writing, Katja instantly reminds herself:

Allow your neck to be free- so your head can balance on top of the spine –going forward and up- your back can be broad and wide- your hip joints can be free, so your knees point away from each other. 

An important pitfall for Alexander is what he called ‘being end-gaining’ – i.e., going for your goal without thinking about how to get there. This can lead to relapse into old habits. To counter this tendency, he developed the concept of ‘means-whereby’ as a complement to the idea of inhibition. Keeping at any moment the possibility to change your mind (or more accurately, your bodymind) and figuring out how to get where you might want to get are crucial in order not to fall into the trap of habit.

The head-neck-torso relationship, later referred to as “primary control” or “primary freedom” (Rahtz 2022, 15), is considered essential for the functioning of the whole organism, which is conceived as a system of interconnected mechanisms, organs and bodily systems.⁴ The AT challenges students to understand how habits influence their actions, physically and mentally. The student becomes aware of the many unconscious movements, postural and thinking patterns and learns to question them, as I am doing right now:

Do I really need to lift my shoulders when I am stressed?  Or shorten my neck if I want to be understood.   Maybe allowing the shoulders to release, releases some of the mental stress,   we can try, that we can do.  Do I hold my breath while I am trying to type these words, yes,   and does that help me write? No, I could just release my sitting bones onto the chair, help my back to be more full, free my hip joints, get more support from the floor, through my feet and sitting bones, along up my spine, wish my head to balance on top of the spine, going forward and up, wishing my neck to be free and continue writing like that. 

The teacher uses words to encourage the pupil to not do or to do less, and to direct themselves by the means of thought in the desired direction. The effect of gentle touch with non-doing hands and repeated instruction enhances the underlying effect of becoming more present.⁵ The non-doing hands at the same time assess the psycho-physical situation of the student and transmit the correct use of the teacher’s bodymind to the student’s. Students develop a finetuned awareness of themselves, their actions and surroundings. In this constellation, they can practice ‘doing less’, inhibiting habitual muscular reactions and responding instead to directional thinking, resulting in less effort and more poise.

The final aim of the technique is to integrate it into daily life, moment by moment, whether one is doing the dishes, playing tennis, performing on stage, having an argument with a partner, or writing an article: “It is wonderful the student keeps his neck long when he is in the lesson, but it is far more important he keeps his neck long when he is escaping a fire in his house.” (Carrington 2021, 84) It is not a coincidence that Walter Carrington, one of the early-generation teachers of the technique, links it to a dangerous situation. The sensation of fear is an important warning signal that we are in a dangerous situation. While performing on stage or writing for stage are not dangerous situations per se, they are often accompanied by fear. Learning, whether to cycle, swim, write or act, is an unsettling process from not knowing to maybe knowing and the success is also based on finding ways to deal with fear. Hence, in learning the technique itself, overcoming fear, notably the fear of change, plays a big role.

An important moment in Alexander’s career was his meeting with the American philosopher and educator John Dewey in 1916, who became his student.

[Dewey] always had been physically awkward [...] and performed all actions too quickly and impulsively and without thought. ‘Thought’ in his case was reserved for ‘mental’ activity, which had always been easy for him... It was a revelation to discover that ‘thought’ could be applied with equal advantage to everyday movements. The greatest benefit he got from lessons […] was the ability to stop and think before acting. (Bloch 2004, 108)

Alexander’s technique convinced Dewey of the interrelation of body and mind, and he credited the technique of inhibition with improving his physical and mental agility, most notably the ability to step back from ideas to consider them calmly and, if necessary, change them. In the foreword to Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (1923), for instance, Dewey states that Alexander discovered a principle which “bears the same relation to education that education bears to all other human activities” (Dewey in Alexander 1985, 12). He thus elevated the AT to a preliminary technique for all other consciously executed activities.

The AT has long been integrated in various types of performance education, from music to drama. It is not hard to see why: performing requires the human being to be active and present in all their faculties, cognitive, physical and emotional. What is at stake here is the activation of the “unity of human potentialities, which, up till now have been differentiated and represented as ‘body,’ ‘body and mind,’ or ‘body, mind and soul’” (Alexander (1923) 2004, 46). If taught thoroughly, the AT is a deep and transformative process, for both teachers and student: “During an AT session, when we touch someone, we touch their lives and their stories about themselves. Our bodies and minds echo with the history of our ancestors, plus the imprints of our cultures.” (Rahtz 2022, 64-65)⁶

Agency through Inhibition

The emphasis on stories in this quote brings us back to our starting point. Indeed, might the AT also be useful for writing, not just to facilitate the strenuous stillness of the writing position, but also to accomplish something else: to provide insight in and access to the source of our writing, of our stories, in the bodymind? Although Alexander himself has written books, with varying success,⁷ we could not find direct references to writing as a creative practice in his work or in that of his followers. And yet, we feel that the technique can be a good starting point to explore embodied writing, as a specific approach to writing, which is closer to autotheory than to notions such as ‘flow’ or ‘freewriting’. In writing pedagogy and in theories of creativity, flow is often described as a state of bliss when the words or movements seem to be spilling out of us in abundance, effortlessly. In 1926, Virginia Woolf wrote to her friend Vita Sackville West: “It is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words” (Woolf in Le Guin 2004, Preface). Exercises that focus on liberating the flow of creativity – for instance Elbow’s famous ‘freewriting’ (1973) – are offered as tools to overcome inhibitions to creation, and to incorporate the practice of writing as a routine in daily life. But if we continue to read Woolf’s letter to Vita, we get a glimpse of the work that is involved: “But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm” (Woolf in Le Guin 2004, Preface). Literary techniques like stream of consciousness – so characteristic for Woolf and other modernist authors – perhaps mimic the chaotic flow of thinking, but they are far from uninhibited free writing. They are highly technical devices which require suspicion and suspension of flow. As Walter Benjamin explains it in his description of material historiography:

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. (Benjamin 1969, 262)

For F. M. Alexander, ‘flow’ equals habitual, automatic, conditioned behaviour. It leads us down the road that we know, unconsciously following our habits instead of consciously being in thought, open to what we did not know we knew. The AT is neither about choice or free will nor about reaching a state of flow. It is about not doing – on a muscular level, so that the right thing, on a muscular and mental level, can do itself. When Dewey spoke about using thought for movement (Bloch 2004, 108), today we can turn this around and acknowledge that a thoughtfully executed action or movement also generates a new thought. It works both ways. It is about creating clarity in the bodymind and for that we need the pause. And this pausing, which is increasingly urgent and difficult today in an age of ‘immediacy’, needs to be actively taught, if we want to keep our writing alive, vibrant, evocative.⁸

Intermezzo: A Classroom Experience

“I cannot concentrate in this room. I have nothing to write about. I do not like this exercise.” Faced with the underwhelmed state of my own students I advise them to write about the last experience they had that touched them physically, that they could still feel resonating in their body. For some this suggestion works, while for others it remains just another writing exercise, and they despise my not so hidden desire to get them hooked to writing. They are in class of their own free will. I tell them to forget about writing, to concentrate on their feet, their spine, their head that is on top of the spine, I tell them to think about the places where their body touches a surface, encourage them to undo the activity of muscles where it is not needed, so that gravity can work for them. We look at pictures of our body’s anatomy, at how the skull is balancing on top of the spine, but not exactly centred, we note that it has more weight in the front than in the back, how that affects our postural muscles in the back, how it is all connected to why we might feel stuck with our writing. Some look at me blankly. Others arrive in their bodies differently, start writing or stand up to look out of the window or sit down on the floor as they do not like to sit on chairs. Something has changed in the room, is getting unstuck, not directed yet, not energetic, but unstuck and therefore carrying its potential for movement, for story more readily available. 

Holding your body still, practicing inhibition, to let the bodymind’s stories come: this is what we also examined in the performance of While We Were Holding It Together. From the vantage point of a performer in the piece, these seemingly still bodies are very active, practicing inhibition, while performing a still image and thought onstage. Jonas Rutgeerts describes this as opening up an “interval between impulse and reaction” (Rutgeerts 2022, 86). During the performance of WWWHIT the performers were practicing the AT, and by doing that they were “performing not only a pose but a pause. It takes on the form of suspension rather than sedimentation. It creates a gap in which we can act” (Rutgeerts 2022, 84).

Stillness is not stagnation, but agency through inhibition. Stillness is an illusion: even a corpse is still teeming with the activity of all kinds of bacteria and carries residue electrical current. Active stillness in the performance was achieved through conscious inhibition, which allowed the inner bodily communication systems to function effectively and effortlessly, and enabled the actor to focus on the creative faculty from a supported and harmonious state. In this state, physical support is generated by using continuous thought. In this way, the anatomical inherent self-support system of our skeleton – the innermost layer of muscles around the spine – is activated to stabilize the body against the downward pulling force of gravity, to generate perfect poise or muscle tone. This state carries a certain calmness and bodily expansion helpful from a neurological, physiological, anatomical point of view, which gave us the courage to find what we did not know we knew, and to evoke stories from an empowered bodymind. As a result, the performance itself became an organism that infected the audience, inviting it to mirror this active stillness, and to enter into the realm of active conscious imagination. Is this not what we want our writing to do: to activate from our writing bodymind the bodymind of the readers.

Introducing the contagious powers of the activated bodymind into writing education can be part of a pedagogical project, activating and teaching us to use our full potential as human beings, to become as wide, as broad, as alive as we wish and will. This becomes more and more pressing in times when artificial intelligence is so easily and massively colonizing our writing and minds, realizing the longstanding desire of cybernetics to make the body obsolete and to become posthuman (Hayles 1999). In this context, to see someone pause to reveal thinking is no longer a reprimand as in Katja’s drama school days. What many contemporary spectators and readers enjoy, is precisely to see someone think on a stage or on the page, to experience writing as performance or performance as thinking.

Like While We Were Holding It Together, this type of work – embodied writing, autotheory – can be strenuous and difficult, but it is visceral and accessible at the same time. It starts from bodymind experiences to consciously create forms and styles that maximize the awareness of entanglement. In so doing, the thinking subject stages itself while/as thinking. The work of critique is performed through inhibition, creating stillness and heightened awareness, immersing us in the open-endedness and subjectivity of a process. To teach this – the performance of thinking and of writing – to our students, is a huge challenge for twenty-first-century pedagogues. While the AT does not offer an array of ready-made maps, its tried and tested tools can be incorporated into writing classrooms which may yield exciting, unexpected results.

From Bodymind to Bodymind…

This article has been speaking, stopping, dancing, stumbling, falling and jumping up again between different voices, feeding from different experiences and different practices. Thinking, performing, dancing and writing are intermingled, in a giant reservoir of bodymind where all creative output starts. If we consider the bodymind as an archive and as “a site where new knowledge is produced” (Eichhorn 2023, 3), we need tools to work with and in this library, for, as dancer, choreographer and dance writer Jonathan Burrows pointed out: “At some point we began to speak of the body as an archive when it finally got recognized that dancers carry their library with them, but what a mess the library turned out to be.” (Burrows 2022, 8) This statement also applies to the writers’ bodymind as an archive of fragments of stories, writing down words and the practice of using them in and for our writing. Despite a clear decision not to broaden the range of this article even more to the point of bursting, it needs to be said that the conscious movement towards the bodymind is part of a movement of reclaiming from a long history of abandonment. For the sake of this article every bodymind is a dancer, and every writer is dancing with words. Every bodymind carries an archive or a library, which can be used for creation. Not every bodymind needs access to this library, but for those who do, a map is helpful.

References

Notes