(Personal post) What’s the point of AT awareness?

Note: This is a post on my learning process during the Alexander Technique teacher training course, and it might not reflect my current understanding of the technique.

Recently I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with a “ heart-centered awake awareness” style of mindfulness in my daily life. It’s a nondual approach to awareness popularized by Loch Kelly, and it’s very much in contrast to the ‘deliberate’ styles of mindfulness that are so popular now – in fact, he’d claim deliberate styles, such as “one-point focus” are all just training wheels, not the main point. I’ve been rather amazed by the implications for how I approach my somatic, emotional, and cognitive experiences. It’s offering me glimpses of aliveness and freedom and ‘basic goodness’ that I just had no idea were possible.

Anyway, I strongly suspect that when we get into a true “AT style” headspace, we’re in touch with what Loch calls “awake awareness”. But how exactly do AT and awareness relate? I think I’ll be teasing out that question for decades to come. I guess I suspect that awake awareness – the seat of our consciousness, or the awareness that’s aware of itself – is always with us, but the more spaciously embodied we are, the more our awake awareness can accurately sense what’s going on with our ephemeral states. The more sensitive we are to such states, the more aware, the more we can let them come and go with love. Sounds woo-woo, but it’s very experiential and practical. And the Alexander Technique is an in-road to awake awareness, a pointer toward it, as well as a facet of intentionality within awake awareness.

Perhaps I should just state it simply: I used to (and sometimes still do) walk around using the A.T. to berate myself (gently, but still). “Oops, you’re going down”. “Why don’t you think your directions right now, it’s something you should do!”

But at this point in my journey…that doesn’t feel good. I’d much rather go into a sort of nonconceptual awake awareness, get centered in my heart, let thoughts (words and images) mute down a little, and then get very indirectly intentional with my A.T. thoughts in order to help maintain that state of awareness. For example, thinking “I’m not sitting” as I sit and imagining directions generally, as Missy Vineyard recommends in her excellent book “How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique to Explore Your Mind-Body Connection and Achieve Self-Mastery”. Then the point of directing and inhibiting is not some sort of externally motivated self-improvement, but rather just the desire to stay awake, using whatever tools – such as the A.T. – that I have at my disposal. It reminds me of something Walter Carrington (a famous A.T. teacher) said. I’ll paraphrase, but it was something like, “if it sounds boring to think your directions and inhibit all the time while you move, then you’re missing the point”. Yeah. The point is, as Loch Kelly would say, “shifting to a different operating system”.