November 2026
This is lesson 1.2 of my course, Applied Presence: Foundations, published here in full as a preview, and because I want to be able to reference this idea.
One of the most important skills I want to teach you is the capacity to notice how much of your life you spend trying.
Trying will show up throughout the course, as it does everywhere else. My goal in this lesson is to point it out so you can become aware of it and begin to work with it more skilfully.
This is important for two reasons. In the context of your learning journey here, trying will make it more difficult for you to notice the dynamics that I aim to point out. It also interferes with transformation in your life, because it involves reinforcing your existing habits and ideas about how things are.
Trying is such a common pattern in modern life that it has become almost imperceptible, like the water that fish swim in. Let's start by disambiguating two distinct meanings that have both been captured by the word 'try':
These tryings are two very different processes. The first is about what you do while the second is about how you do it. When I use 'try' in this course I mean the latter, and it's this one that I invite you to notice as you go about your life.
The important thing to note about how you try harder is that it tends to involve doubling down on what you're already doing, only with more effort. Or, as Alexander put it:
Trying is only emphasizing the thing we know already. — F. M. Alexander.
Let's make this more concrete with some examples.
You have probably had some kind of formal education and work experience, which tend to come with a certain amount of cultural baggage, like "it's good and important to be a good student and a good worker".
So, what's the difference between wanting to enjoy learning versus trying to be a good student? What is the experience of trying to be a good student like, in your body?
You are a student right now! Can you notice any effort attached to that idea? What do you do to be a good student? What does trying to be a good student look like from the outside? How does trying to be a good student feel from the inside? How much does any of that have to do with learning effectively and enjoying learning?
You'll see that I pull moves like this throughout the course. I want you to investigate your direct experience. Not conceptually or theoretically, but as a real and vivid experience happening right now. Where in your body is the trying?
Since this idea may be confusing at first, let me move on to the next example: trying to understand.
If you speak English to a good enough level—and if you're here, you do—then you are understanding these words automatically. You don't need to try to understand this sentence. Sometimes, though, when things get more complex, you'll notice an impulse to try to understand.
Just for fun, here is a sentence from one of F. M. Alexander's books. He wrote in a verbose style that was common at the time, but that we rarely use these days:
This is a unique situation, and one that man, as far as I am aware, has not been previously called upon to face under any method of education, training, or scheme of living, and this situation will persist as the greatest stumbling-block in the way of making fundamental change until we employ means which provide opportunity for gaining the experiences necessary for passing from the familiar (wrong) to the unfamiliar (right) guidance and control of the psycho-physical organism, the only means which we are justified in concluding make provision for change in the fundamental sense. — F. M. Alexander, The Universal Constant in Living
It's 95 words; I counted. This is from the fourth of Alexander's books and uses a lot of idiosyncratic language and jargon. I picked it at random, and it's actually interesting, but also difficult.
So, what is it like to try to understand this? Don't grapple with it for too long, but notice how you respond as the paragraph continues and the train of thought gets harder to track. In particular, what happens in your body?
I would guess some or all of the following:
That is, unless you gave up halfway through and skipped ahead. But, even then, what was it that made you skip ahead? Perhaps a feeling of discomfort somewhere in your body, a tightness or tension that you didn't want to feel?
All of this reveals one of the core lessons of Alexander Technique: all 'trying' is excess tension in the body. We might also call it 'efforting' or straining.
You translate everything, whether physical, mental or spiritual, into muscular tension. — F. M. Alexander
I would also expand this to say that you attempt to stop the flow of experience by tensing your body when, for example, you try to suppress feelings you don't like.
This dynamic also shows up at a much more fundamental and unconscious level: you use muscle tension in an attempt to control the world, as my favourite tweet of all time captures:
"If you manage to control yourself there will be ice cream" said the parent.
"I sure hope this doesn't have unforeseen lifelong consequences" thought the child, doing their best to physically tense the body in the higher ice cream probability shape. — @RomeoStevens76
This may be confusing at first, but it's something I'd invite you to sit with and explore for yourself. It's a wonderful, if unsettling moment the first time you catch yourself tensing your body to change an outcome that's well out of your control.
For example, have you ever found yourself tensing your body when watching a film that involves vicarious embarrassment? Maybe if you tense your body hard enough they won't say the cringe thing this time!
A common experience in traditional, in-person Alexander Technique lessons is for the student to 'get ready' in various ways based on what they think the teacher expects or what they imagine will happen.
For example, if the teacher suggests that the student might stand, the student might immediately start tensing up and moving forward to stand. Or, when playing catch, the student starts bracing and cupping their hands where they imagine the ball will go, all before the teacher has even begun to throw it.
Getting ready is a special case of the trying pattern from before. The whole point of going to see an Alexander Technique teacher in person is to learn to do things in a new way. But how can you prepare to have a new experience? You can't, and doing something the way that feels familiar will block any new experience you're looking for.
You can't do something you don't know, if you keep on doing what you do know. — F. M. Alexander
Or, put another way:
If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. — Not Henry Ford, probably, actually
So it is with this course. You're here to have new experiences, but getting ready for them will just push you more deeply into your existing ways of being.
I invite you to let go of both trying and getting ready. See what it's like to surrender to not knowing. Not just cognitively, but also in your body. The ball might hit you! You might drop it! You might catch it with perfect elegance and with no idea how you did it. Let's experiment and find out.
I'm going to restate something I covered in the video, because it's that important.
One of the core principles of Alexander Technique is that the mind and body are not separate, but are one continuous process. Even saying that the mind affects the body, and the body affects the mind misses the point, because that framing still considers them to be separate. Other traditions use the term bodymind for this idea.
Psycho-physical unity is why you might tense your muscles when trying to understand, because the thing that is trying isn't your mind, but your whole psycho-physical system. Your bodymind thinks, and your bodymind moves. Thinking is a physical activity just as moving is a mental one. This will become more apparent as you work through these materials.
The term psycho-physical is used both here and throughout my works to indicate the impossibility of separating “physical” and “mental” operations in our conception of the working of the human organism. As I wrote in Man’s Supreme Inheritance, “In my opinion the two must be considered entirely interdependent, and even more closely knit than is implied by such a phrase.” F. M. Alexander
Right now you are taking an online course. What is your 'posture' towards it? Or, consider a higher-stakes learning environment where you really wanted to do well. Can you describe or even recreate the 'shape' that you adopted in that context? (For the avoidance of doubt, we're exploring this so that you can notice it and ultimately drop it, not so that you can do it more).
Over the next few days, notice the physical shape your body takes when you are trying to understand something, reading an important email, or listening to someone speak. What muscles do you tense in order to try in these contexts?
Watch what happens right before you perform a routine action, like brushing your teeth, standing up, or picking up a pen. Can you catch the micro-second of physical bracing or settling where you get ready for the activity?
In another context, do you get ready for someone to say something before they've said it? What is that like? What happens if they say something you weren't expecting?