From the time we are little children, we are often told, by parents and teachers, to "CONCENTRATE" or "PAY ATTENTION." It is obviously important to concentrate, or pay attention, but what do these words mean in practice? What do you actually "do" when you decide to concentrate? In my years of teaching, by observing both myself and my clients, I have found that most people have peculiar and contradictory responses to the idea of "concentrating." Many people do things such as furrow their brows, hold their breath, stiffen their bodies, stare fixedly, or close their eyes. Often people feel that they must temporarily stop life from moving on so they can pay closer attention, that they must fix themselves rigidly in order to notice what is happening. Or they feel that they must somehow remove their mind further away so it can survey what is happening from a distance, so they can "be more objective." Either way, they make all kinds of efforts. Do all these actions have any beneficial effect? No. In fact people become less attentive as a result. But what are we supposed to do if we need to focus, if our mind is wandering - don't we need to make some kind of effort to focus? And why is it that so many people have this reaction to the idea of concentrating?
Look at the pictures at the top: the first to the left is the famous statue by Rodin called "The Thinker." Notice the contorted body, the strain and effort. This is a good depiction of the idea of "concentration." Now look at the cheetah and the martial artist: they are alert, yet open and relaxed. An open, alert quality of attentiveness is what we are born with. It is our biological inheritance. The strained, forced idea of concentration is an unfortunate misconception about attentiveness that almost all of us pick up from our culture as a part of our upbringing. An animal would not survive long in the wild if it engaged in what we call "concentration." It would have so little awareness of its surroundings, and would be so fixed and immobile, that it would end up as a tasty bit of prey, or a starved predator.
Lessons in the Alexander Technique help re-awaken this more vital, connected, biological type of attention in which we are aware of both our bodies and our environment in a seamless field of awareness. The problem is that once we have this incorrect, strained response to the idea of concentrating, we will react this way with any attempt to pay attention. So the real problem is, not what to "do", but how to stop doing the wrong thing. When we study the Alexander Technique, we learn, not how to "concentrate," not how to "do" something different, but how to stop doing what causes us to narrow and fix our attention. We learn to notice how we are interfering with a wider field of awareness and stop the interference. This “noticing” is the awakening of true attentiveness, and it leads to the gradual freeing from the false and restrictive habits of concentration that we mistakenly identify as "paying attention" or "concentrating."
