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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Thinking, not doing
When people come for lessons in the Alexander Technique, it's a frequently held idea that they are coming for treatment and the practitioner will 'do it' for them. I wrote about the fact that sessions in the Alexander Technique are 'lessons' and not treatment in a previous post.
When it's understood that the client or 'pupil' as is the case here, needs to participate and we need to learn how to apply the technique for ourselves, we have another 'problem' to deal with and that is how we're doing things. In Alexander Technique sessions we do a variety of different movements and activities such as standing, walking, sitting, bending, writing at a desk or using a keyboard and it's understandable that we want to know the correct way. People often ask me, "Should I sit like this?" or " "Should I hold myself like this?" etc. Such comments bring up a key point. There is no 'correct position' to hold yourself in whether you're standing, sitting or anything. One position is far too limiting; what happens when you want to move? Nor are there ten positions to switch from one to another; we're not robots. The people with the best posture in the whole world are young children who have not yet learnt any bad postural habits and they move around the whole time. Even the idea of 'holding' a position is problematic as the very 'holding' causes fixation and we're actually meant to be free and loose, not stuck.
It needs to be understood that Alexander Technique does not involve learning how to hold ourselves. But it is about learning to bring about the correct muscular tone and co-ordination within us that will allow us to move, bend or sit in any position we like, but we will be free and expansive all the time....and it feels effortless. We re-learn the poise we had as young children. We tap into the instinct we've got for healthy poise that we were born with and will be with us until we die.
We learn to bring about a quality of freedom in all the joints as well as a condition of expansiveness that brings us up tall and broad without any sense of effort. There is no holding required. Our body knows what to do if we 'let it'. It's more about preventing or 'inhibiting' the wrong tendencies such as stiffening, stooping or getting off balance. And we learn to bring about (direct) ourselves to lengthen and widen in stature; but we do it all by thinking. No effort is required. Indeed if we make effort to 'pull ourselves up straight' then we are interfering again with a co-ordination that is far more subtle, and we'll get into further problems. Do not 'pull yourself up straight' and don't 'pull your shoulders back'; all these things cause tension and different problems. It needs to come from our 'intention'; we do it by thinking and nothing else. 100% thought. It's not difficult, just a little unfamiliar at first.
FM Alexander had a way of explaining this. Let me quote FM. "You come to learn to inhibit and to direct your activity. You learn, first, to inhibit the habitual reaction to certain classes of stimuli, and second, to direct yourself consciously in such a way as to affect certain muscular pulls, which processes bring about a new reaction to these stimuli. Boiled down, it all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus. But no one will see it that way. They will all see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that a pupil decides what he will or will not consent to do. They may teach you anatomy and physiology till they are black in the face - you will still have this to face, sticking to a decision against your habit of life." i.e. If you choose to not stiffen your neck as you move, you can have direct control over your life-time's habits.
Well Alexander's words sound rather heavy and it's really not like that at all. The point to take, is that it's not about physically doing anything, but giving a little thought that can change the 'way' you do things. That's what it's all about. It's easy when you're shown how. It's the thinking that changes how your body works. It's thinking that makes you feel like you've got a new body 10 years younger. If you haven't experienced it, get a teacher of the Alexander Technique to show you. In short,....it feels great. But it does require your participation....
:-)
