Alexander Technique: End-Gaining
Friday April 23, 2010 • Filed in: Alexander Technique
In answer to a question, I wrote the paragraph below. It focuses on some of the consequences of what F. M. Alexander called “end-gaining,” which means to investing so much of ourselves in getting something that our struggles to have it at all costs get in the way. The result, sadly ironic, is that we end up not getting what we want. What I wrote refers to performance, although life is indeed a stage, and we are all players on it:
If we are focusing exclusively on where we believe we need to go, we will not only miss how we are getting there, but how we are going about getting there. And that means all our performances, great and small, will become mere reenactments of how we have always done things. For some, this means their performance becomes stale. For others, it means their performance lacks the required quality and is thus little valued. If there was ever any joy in the performance, all of it will have drained away. Amazingly, our tendency is to keep on reenacting our well known moves even if they never get us to the place we wish to be.
Of course, “how we are going about getting there,” refers to the “means-whereby,” the concept in the Alexander Technique that holds how we are, and thus, how we act as primary. This doesn’t require that we give up our aims and goals. It means that how we are when we go about doing what we do is of primary important because this will ultimately have a great influence on not only achieving our aims and goals, but the quality of those realizations as well as their consequences, direct and peripheral, good or bad.
iphone photo: frank m sheldon. mossy shoes, april. 2010
If we are focusing exclusively on where we believe we need to go, we will not only miss how we are getting there, but how we are going about getting there. And that means all our performances, great and small, will become mere reenactments of how we have always done things. For some, this means their performance becomes stale. For others, it means their performance lacks the required quality and is thus little valued. If there was ever any joy in the performance, all of it will have drained away. Amazingly, our tendency is to keep on reenacting our well known moves even if they never get us to the place we wish to be.
Of course, “how we are going about getting there,” refers to the “means-whereby,” the concept in the Alexander Technique that holds how we are, and thus, how we act as primary. This doesn’t require that we give up our aims and goals. It means that how we are when we go about doing what we do is of primary important because this will ultimately have a great influence on not only achieving our aims and goals, but the quality of those realizations as well as their consequences, direct and peripheral, good or bad.
iphone photo: frank m sheldon. mossy shoes, april. 2010