Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
« All good things... | Main | Expert in ourselves »
Stepping outside of oneself
Having been away for a week in different surroundings, enjoying outdoor activities and fresh air in the most beautiful of early autumn weather, I return home and to my practice today. There is something about 'going away' that makes 'coming back' feel rather strange. Things we take for granted, things we see or use on a daily basis which normally pass us by as we focus on our daily activities are suddenly made more noticeable; they draw our attention or we see differently.
Where absence may make the heart grow fonder, it also makes things less familiar and we see them with fresh eyes. We may notice the shoddiness of the decor that needs updating, or the rather untidy clutter, or the appearance of the street seems different, shop fronts more noticeable, the noise of traffic is greater or less than we remembered etc.
It's strange how 'going away' makes things more obvious on our return. If we consider our posture for a short moment; our muscle tensions and postural habits are with us 100% of the time, so it's not surprising that they pass us by unnoticed. It's only if we get pain, stiffness or discomfort might we notice that something is wrong or not as good as it could be. If we were able to 'go away' for a while and then return to our postural state, we'd probably get quite a shock.
Have you ever put somebody-else's shoes on either by mistake or by intention to check a style? Did you notice how strange they felt? If two people buy the same shoe in the same size and if they were a reasonable fit, after a few months the internal shape would have moulded to each person's way of walking and standing. If after a few months they swapped for an experiment and they put each others' shoes on, they would feel them quite different despite them being the same at the time of purchase.
If we were to 'slip into' someone-else's posture we'd feel very odd indeed. Discounting whether one person's posture is better or worse than another, the fact that we're all different would mean that to 'try on' someone-else's posture would feel very unusual and probably 'wrong'. When people have lessons in the Alexander Technique, their posture and 'use of themselves' can change dramatically even in one session, and guess what? The new and better posture feels wrong; that is until it becomes familiar, then if we were to temporarily slip back into the old 'poor posture' it would feel wrong and that's the way it should be; where good feels right and 'not so good' feels wrong.
FM Alexander used mirrors to see his posture when he was working on his technique to overcome his vocal problems; he found that he could not trust his senses, but the mirror didn't lie. By trusting his eyes and the reflection in the mirror he found that he could tell far better when he was stiffening his neck or shortening in stature. He began to rely on 'giving his directions' (thoughts and intentions rather than making physical effort) which is the mental process that governs our 'use' during movement; he did this rather than relying on how it felt. His eyes told him when he went wrong or 'went well', even though it may have felt different from reality. Teachers of the Alexander Technique give this sort of feedback and guidance during lessons.
Not being able to step outside of ourselves means that we can have all sorts of tensional problems and because we live with them the whole time, we are oblivious to our situation. It tends to be only when things go wrong that we notice. If only we could step back more often before things went wrong, or even better, look after ourselves with awareness, so we avoid problems in the future.
