Hands, Wrists, Fingers; Mind, Heart, Soul
The ASO Newsletter - 57th edition
Working together to enable greater understanding of the Alexander Technique through disciplined inquiry.
Introduction
This month we are posting a written piece by Pedro de Alcantara, author and Alexander Technique teacher. Pedro explores his experiences using his hands throughout his life, and he shares his thoughts about how miraculous the human hand is. This personal essay is based on Pedro's creative process while developing his new book on the subject. He invites us to travel along with him on his journey of research and play.
Hands, Wrists, Fingers; Mind, Heart, Soul
By Pedro de Alcantara
The exploration of our hands probably starts before birth, where those strange appendages grow slowly together with the rest of our bodies and we don’t know exactly what’s going on and we feel generally comfortable—with both the growth and the lack of intellectual understanding.
But we leave the womb at some point, and a different exploration then starts. The hands of newborn and of little babies are amazing. It’s tempting to call them miraculous, though in truth they’re the logical outcome of an organic process that has been going on for millions of years. For us, those baby hands are objects of fascination and veneration. But what about for the babies themselves? Truth be told, we can’t comprehend how they sense their own selves, but we suspect that they enjoy the mystery of their hands, the sensations up and down the arms, the visual dimensions. With their little fingers, they grab our gigantic fingers with a touch so firm and so enveloping that we could cry in joy, couldn’t we? And if we pull on their little fingers, they pull back in an incredible play of opposing forces. They don’t grab our fingers with their little fingers; they use their entire selves, in perfect integrated coordination. Look at their faces: they’re smiling, faintly or broadly, as their fingers connect with ours, as their selves connect with our selves. Okay, let’s call it miraculous. Hands, wrists, and fingers are miraculous.
The exploration of hands never stops. We might be alert to our exploration or indifferent to it, but the sheer number of things that we can do with our hands, and the sheer number of times we do things with our hands every day, is such that we can’t fail but notice the hands. Simplifying it, I’ll say that we undertake hand research every day, all day long.
Many things have led me over the decades to charge my hand research with attention and care. I started learning music at age 8. Together with two of my siblings, I attended a class over several months in which we learned to play the recorder and the toy marimba, and we also learned the basics of music reading, in the French tradition of solfège. This happened almost 60 years ago, but I still remember the physical setting, the excitement, the confusion, the pleasures and the fears, including the fear of “not getting it” and the fear of “other people are watching me.” (And maybe other people were in fact watching me, or not. Fear and facts don’t talk to one another.) But there I was, handling a plastic recorder and receiving a sort of musical baptism or initiation rite. I was (and have always been) metaphysically inclined, and prone to sense the symbolic dimension behind seemingly banal experiences.
It happened that I liked learning music, so I was put on a path. I’m using this expression on purpose. I don’t remember if I requested to study music or if my mother encouraged me—or if the universe took hold of me and “made me do stuff.” On the path I went. Over the years I played multiple recorders of different sizes: sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor, bass. I got involved in the music of the Renaissance and in the Baroque repertory of Vivaldi, Telemann, Handel, and Bach; and, to a lesser degree, in modern music, including Paul Hindemith, who composed an interesting recorder trio. The manipulation of the varied recorders, and the study of varied musical languages, started me on the conscious study of hands and music, hands and language, hands and breath, hands and objects, hands and self. Decades later, these explorations helped me pick up a bass-sized Native American flute and play it from the first moment as if I had always played it.
Wonderful as it was, the recorder had its musical limits, and at age 12 I “was put on the path” of broadening my musical horizons by taking cello lessons. The cello became my next teacher of hands and mystery, music and mystery, life and mystery. No, I don’t remember if I chose the cello or if the cello chose me. No, it wasn’t all straightforward and easy. Yes, it’s been wonderful! The cello became the center of my explorations for several years: the usual repertory of classical music, the usual path of conservatory training, the usual path of trying to figure out a career in music.
Enter the Alexander Technique. No, it wasn’t all straightforward and easy! But let’s say that for someone who’s drawn to the mystery and marvel of hands, the whole territory of the Alexander Technique is a sort of dōjō—a hallowed training ground for self-discipline and discovery. (In Japanese, the word “dōjō” means “the place of the Way.”) By coincidence or by mysterious design, when I started taking Alexander lessons “I was put on the path” of exploring Zen and aikido as well. Not that I ever mastered these exacting arts, far from it; but the research kept getting broader and broader, ever more involved, ever more intoxicating. Aikido, which I stopped practicing a long time ago, gave me multiple tools regarding the arms, hands, wrists, and fingers, above all a sense of spiral organization or direction. And I’ve often resorted to saying that the Alexander Technique is a Western manifestation of the Zen principle.
Vaguely and ambiguously, an insight emerged in a way that I couldn’t comprehend at first. The Alexander Technique, aikido, and Zen together told me that end-gaining lords over our lives. What you do with your hands is an inevitable consequence of your goals, short- or long-term, banal or urgent. You can’t change the use of your hands if you don’t address your goals, of which you might not even be aware. Attention and intention determine every outcome.
It's a thorny path.
I never entered the classical music profession, certainly not as a jobbing musician. Instead, I slowly created my own career. It’s difficult to describe, but I became a professional learner, forever studying music, writing, languages, singing, art, metaphysics . . . I make my living by learning together with people who generously pay me to learn with them. At some point I took a long sabbatical from playing or practicing the cello. This allowed me to give birth to a different cello: not the standard instrument of classical music, but a shapeshifting instrument that invites improvisation, composition, special extended techniques, and a certain theatricality that has quasi-shamanic potentials. As I said, it’s difficult to describe.
The paradox of hands, which is central to their mystery, is that you go to sleep with your ordinary hands and you wake up with your ordinary hands and you live your daily life with your ordinary hands. And yet, your hands are always changing, growing, discovering new capabilities, exploring, embracing, giving up, embracing anew. Your evening hands aren’t your morning hands! The shapeshifting cello gave me adaptable hands, which I couldn’t have imagined when I took my first cello lesson in 1970.
In recent years I also took up the piano and the guitar, using both instruments primarily as tools to work on myself. If end-gaining is the problem, working on yourself is the solution. This essay would have a nervous breakdown if I really attempted to define end-gaining and the means-whereby. Instead of a definition, I offer you two quotes from F.M. Alexander, although I haven’t been able to find reliable bibliographical references for them. Maybe I’m making them up.
“Behind every misuse there lies a wrong belief.”
“People in the grip of end-gaining are temporarily out of touch with reason.”
If your hands hurt, it’s possible that a wrong belief is behind the way you use your hands. (This is the polite version of the statement. Here’s the blunt version: “Your beliefs are hurting you.”) Tendonitis, which I’m using as an illustrative example, is a sort of misunderstanding: not a physical problem requiring a physical solution, but a conceptual problem requiring a conceptual solution. If you don’t change the way you think, feel, react, and act, the tendonitis will prevail.
A long-standing tradition states that lessons in the Alexander Technique are educational, not therapeutic. I’ve come to think that every learning is a healing. Learning how to read, for instance, heals you from the inability to read and write, with all its practical and existential consequences. Learning how to assess your goals and the way you pursue them heals you from the ravages of end-gaining. Broadly speaking, all of life can hurt you, all of life can heal you—but you need to learn how, and to accept that you need to learn how. Acceptance of learning is acceptance of healing. I consider that lessons in the Alexander Technique are and have always been therapeutic.
Sometimes it’s said that we speak with our hands, although it might be more pertinent to say that our hands speak. A handshake is highly communicative. Waving hello and waving goodbye, our hands hint at joining and separating. The traffic cop, the umpire, and the Indian dancer employ elaborate manual vocabularies to impart meaningful, sometimes urgent information. Giving the finger could start a violent fight. A single gesture can have so much symbolic power that it’s illegal to perform it in public: the Nazi salute, for instance is banned in Germany and Austria. Pointing can be so rude as to be taboo; in some cultures, you aren’t allowed to point at a person in a position of authority. We can multiply these examples ad infinitum. Stretching the observation to an all-encompassing principle, I’ll state that hands (and wrists and fingers) always express thoughts and feelings, suggestions, doubts, certainties. An Alexander teacher touching the shoulder of a student is inevitably communicating something to the student.
Becoming aware of your hands’ linguistic capabilities is a sure way to improve the way you use your hands, thereby improving their health. Blockages in communication are blockages in energy, movement, and flow. I don’t mean that you should use your hands more and more as you communicate; I mean that you should be alert to how you communicate with your hands. Excessive gesticulation sometimes reveals a lack of intellectual or emotional coherence; the excess can be costly to your health.
Making music is to speak the language of music, whether you do so with your voice or your hands. Apparently physical struggles at the cello or the piano—or any instrument—often come from a lack of linguistic clarity. If you don’t understand the musical text, or if you don’t know how to say it, or if you’re thinking in terms of elbows and shoulders rather than phrases, questions and answers, statements, interjections, prosody, meter, musical grammar, and musical spelling, then you’re courting trouble.
When it comes to end-gaining, misuse, and suffering, the diagnosis and the solution are inevitably surprising to the sufferer. “But, but, but—my wrist really hurts!” Professionally trained musicians taking lessons with me have had panic attacks if I ask them what’s the time signature of the piece that they’re playing for me by heart. They don’t know the time signature; they suddenly feel terribly embarrassed or even ashamed for not knowing it; they twist themselves into a knot over not knowing, over judgments, over shame, over their entire musical training. The hurting wrist is one of many symptoms of a deep malaise. And overcoming the malaise involves, among many other things, new ways of speaking and embodying the language of music.
Working with hands (mine and others’) has been an interesting and fruitful journey. Over the years, ideas and inklings developed into exercises and workshops. Thematic workshops offered the opportunity for me to organize my exercises according to a plan, formal and yet flexible. I took notes, and the notes became paragraphs, and the paragraphs became chapter drafts.
Writing has been one of my main occupations—if not my main occupation—for about 35 years. Many of our colleagues are familiar with my two books about the AT, both of which exist in two editions: Indirect Procedures: A Musician’s Guide to the Alexander Technique (Oxford University Press, 1997, 2013) and The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life (Crowood Press, 1999, 2021). Over the decades I published several other books about music pedagogy, and two of my children’s novels also found a publisher: Befiddled and Backtracked (Random House).
In the spring of 2024, I received a perfectly timed email out of the blue. One of the editors at Anthem Press wanted to know if I’d be interested in submitting a book project for their growing music list. Anthem Press is a midsize publishing house with a wide-ranging catalog including many academic and scholarly titles. I proposed to write a book about the creative health of the hands, wrists, and fingers, and our conversation led to a contract.
My materials for this project were ready to face the rigors of the writing process. Anthem Press suggested an accelerated timeline for producing and publishing the book. I accepted it. The creative juices started flowing, and the book became the intense focus of my intellectual efforts. Someone might think—in amazement or skepticism—that I wrote a big ambitious book in a just few months. But I started writing the book before my birth, back when my hands, wrists, and fingers were being conceived in the dark. Creative time isn’t linear. A book doesn’t take 12 months to write; properly speaking a book takes a lifetime to write, plus 12 months (or 24 or 48 or 60 or 72 months as the case may be).
I organized the book in four parts. Part I, “Culture,” is an exploration of narrative and its impact on perception and behavior. Our hands are inseparable from the thoughts and feelings that we have about our hands, including thoughts and feelings of which we aren’t aware. If we’re having problems with our hands, it’s possible that the stories we tell ourselves about our own hands are part of the problem. And they can become part of the solution as well if we revise our stories and tell them in fresh ways.
Part II, “The Language of Hands,” gathers materials and exercises related to the linguistic capabilities of our hands. Healthy hands are good speakers, inventive and fluent.
Part III, “Sensitivity and Creativity,” explores what one might be tempted to call psychomotor skills, although I prefer using more poetic names and descriptions—for instance, Object Wisdom is the art of handling all sorts of objects and absorbing the information that the objects are trying to impart to us, if only we pay attention. Juggling balls, newspapers, sponges, towels, jars, pencils, erasers, and many other objects come to the fore here.
Part IV, “Knowledge and Mystery,” goes into the liminal territory of the symbolic and the ritualistic. And yet, most of what is presented is practical and immediate. I think metaphysics resides in your fingertips, in your actions, in your doings and non-doings. Play with sand in wonderment and gratitude, and you become a practitioner of metaphysics.
The Internet is awash with excellent photographs that you can use free of charge. I illustrated my book with roughly two hundred photographs. I used four or five of my own photographs, a few images from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, and a few more from Wikipedia. The other images come from Pixabay.com, one of those sites where photographers share their work for free. The photos on this essay are all from Pixabay.
I recorded 36 video clips with ideas from the book. Not pedagogical clips that explain the exercises, but creative clips in which I play with my ideas about my ideas, so to speak. Let’s say that I perform a one-man show in 36 episodes, without verbal explanation and with soundtracks mostly of my own compositions and improvisations. You’ll find the clips on this Anthem Press page: https://anthempress.com/books/hands-wrists-fingers-epub
Hands, Wrists, Fingers: Creative Health for Musicians is available as a hardcover, a paperback, or an e-book.
About
Pedro de Alcantara is a musician, writer, artist, and teacher. His many books include five volumes of music pedagogy published by Oxford University Press and two children’s novels published by Random House. Pedro certified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique in 1986. He lives in Paris and travels the world. www.pedrodealcantara.com . Contact: pedroinparis@gmail.com
Thank You
Thank you to Pedro de Alcantara for his work and contribution to this post. To our community, thank you for being here—your participation matters. To support our work you can subscribe to our newsletter, share this post, comment below, or email us. We’d love to hear from you.