What We Learned in Class this Week 3: Perception and Attention

When I first started teaching, I was always surprised when students came back and were doing exactly what we spent the whole first/second/third session working NOT to do. Even when we specifically mentioned the exact thing and talked about how you’ll be enticed to do this, but do something else instead, inevitably students returned to their habit.

Over time, it became clear to me, that before we can change our movement, we have to change our thinking. This is a concept in Alexander Technique teaching that is often buried in all the talk about the neck and AO joint, or it is a concept that comes along later in the study. What was clear to me, is if we start with the thinking, we circumvent the cycle of repeating the same information repeatedly.

I refer to this as “preparing the field.”

So, this week in the introductory class, we talked about and unpacked:

·         Awareness vs. Attention: they are different and when one does not know this, they recruit muscles to try and change, adapt, and even grow their awareness. It’s attention that we can develop. Our awareness is the data that is coming in from our senses, which are always on and sending information to our brain. Aside from corrective lenses or hearing assistance devices, we can’t really change our senses. What we change is how we organize and interpret the data, which we do with our attention.

·         Sensation vs. Perception: Sensation is data. Perception is the interpretation and understanding of that data, filtered through the lens of our lived and learned experiences and knowledge. Perception isn’t faulty or debauched, despite what F.M. Alexander wrote. Our perception is hard-wired to normalize, to accept what we do as normal, and to habituate it. Thankfully, perception is plastic or changeable; we can develop it.

·         Attention Strategies: It turns out that you can pay attention to HOW you are paying attention. And not only that, but you can choose different ways to pay attention. You can flashlight or floodlight your attention, and you can pay attention to something that is still (like a book) or you can pay attention to something that is moving (like a crowd of people or traffic). This is vital to understand before you embark on discovering what you are doing with your body. We often employ the “hold it still” strategy using the flashlight quality of our attentional system. When we use this strategy to answer, “What am I doing,” the answer is always “I’m holding myself still.” We need a different strategy if we want to understand how our body is coordinating.

 ·         Integrating Attention: When we choose the appropriate strategy for the specific task, our mindbody/bodymind will coordinate around this intention, and our whole attentional system will integrate. This also integrates the body in movement.

Later that day, in the continuing class, one student reported a particularly interesting discovery about AT when they were working on training their mother’s new horse which was particularly headstrong. They reported that when they stopped pushing the horse to do what they wanted and thought specifically about their connection to the ground and about their quality of presence with the horse, the horse immediately changed, and followed her.

This spawned a very interesting exploration of how so often we misalign intuition and intention, using our intuition to push our intention out into the world. This results in us being in the future, often catastrophizing and strategizing, rather than existing in the present moment, in our bodies, doing the task that is before us.

I remember a very poignant moment several years ago. I was having dinner with Sarah Barker, and catching up as we often were able to do when she came to Greensboro to teach. I was running through my usual list of complaints about life and career when she very eloquently said, “It sucks living in the future!”

In that moment, I realized this was just a habit of mine and it was keeping me from seeing all that was good around me and all that was good about where I was in my life at that moment. It really helped me slow down and appreciate all that I was doing, which at that time was teaching 2 graduate AT classes, teaching clarinet, and playing with several local symphonies in NC….so a lot! Life was good, and I was too busy looking into the future for all that I thought I wanted. I couldn’t see that it was already happening around me.