Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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You have an instinct for good posture
A client came in to see me yesterday who I'd last met around six years ago. He'd had a good series of sessions in the Alexander Technique at that time and then ceased comining to continue using the technique for himself. But with so many changes going on in his life, other things took priority and he probably didn't think much about his posture thereafter. But he told me that recently he'd felt that his posture had deteriorated and he wanted to make amends.
Understandably, he thought that with such a long gap since his previous sessions that we would be back to the beginning and have to do a full course. As with most things, we get a bit rusty. Well, you can imagine his surprise when actually we find that he has not forgotten it all. He may not have been conscious of his poise in the way that we may hope, but the conscious mind is only part of this equation, particularly in the case of 'natural poise'.
What he may have forgotten is that we all, including him (and you and me) have an inbuilt instinct for healthy poise. It is ingrained in our subconscious and has been passed down to us in our genes by our ancestors from right back to primitive times. It's part of being human. Just like in the new born foal who comes out of the mare and lands on the grass all sticky and wet and then stands up. The umbilical chord is still attached and he may fall over a few times, but stand up he does.....and he can't even see! So how does an animal who cannot see, manage to use around five hundred muscles in a relatively well co-ordinated way, to bring himself up onto four feet and balance? He does it through instinct. For an animal such as a horse, deer or sheep or cow, there may be predatory animals around.....at least there were at one time. As the mother cannot pick up its young, the foal has to follow her out of danger by sniffing and following its mother's rear end. Lovely.
As humans we can carry our young, so we let our young children crawl on the floor for much longer and this has probably contributed to our intelligence and hand and eye co-ordination, that has enabled us to craft with our hands.
But even though my client need not have followed his mother's rear end, he nevertheless has a built in instinct for poise....and he has it still. We have it until we die. I have worked with clients over a hundred years old who have improved their poise, so it's never too late. It is this instinct for natural poise that we tap into during Alexander Technique sessions.
You cannot 'do' good posture. Any attempts to 'do' it end up with us making far more effort than is necessary and interfering with this natural process just as much as if we were slouching or stooping. You cannot 'do' it. But you can 'let' it happen. Good poise will happen if we cease to do the wrong and harmful things that interfere with it. These harmful tendencies have probably become habitual over the years, so much of the focus during a lesson in the Alexander Technique is about eliminating habits. This is where the teacher comes in, and by gentle hands-on guidance, the client can get the experience of what it feels like to move or stand free of habitual tensions and to let good, healthy poise 'happen'. It feels effortless when it's working well.
So although my client who I had not seen for six years felt that he "had forgotten it all", he had not completely. He may have thought about it much, but his subconscious and instincts for poise have it all engrained and built in. These are what we revive. This is 're-learning'. Alexander called it 're-education'. We get back what we were able to do as a young child before we developed bad habits.
So, there was a happy smiling face, full of contentment and pleasure when he left feeling freer, taller and more relaxed than when he had walked in. Revived in his poise, revived in part in his conscious awareness and with another few sessions will be able to maintain it much better for himself. Regular top-ups after a course of sessions can be extremely helpful as a means of ensuring that the habits don't creep back in. So it's thanks to our cavemen ancestors who passed down the instinct for poise through their genes. This makes re-learning good poise relatively simple, if we put our minds to it.
