Welcome to Week 2 of your Alexander Technique course. Last week we focused quite a lot on how external stimuli (such as a smart phone) and internal stimuli (such as an anxious thought) are apt to ‘put us wrong’ quite a lot of the time. We also saw how Alexander discovered that the first step in making any progress was to learn to Inhibit his reaction to a stimulus – or in other words, to get really good at stopping and so prevent the wrong thing from happening.
One way to look at it is that, if you stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing can do itself. But what is this ‘right thing’?
First I would like to say don’t fall into the trap of thinking that there is a correct place to be, a correct position or even ‘good posture’! Why? Because we are animals, organisms, creatures, and our fundamental nature is to constantly move, re-balance and re-adjust to our surroundings. There is no fixed place, and the holding, the fixing or the positioning is simply another habit you’ll need to find a way to release.
The answer to this conundrum is actually that the ‘right thing’ is something else entirely – you can think of it as a set of healthy relationships between parts of the body. To be more specific, Alexander’s discovery was that the optimal functioning of the whole organism depends on a healthy relationship between the head, neck and back. He termed this head-neck-back relationship the Primary Control.
Another way to think of the Primary Control is as a set of centrifugal or expansive relationships between body parts, particularly the head, neck and back. This is because people with poor co-ordination tend towards centripetal or contractive relationships between body parts. They tend to interfere greatly with the Primary Control – in particular by locking the head and pulling it back and down on the top of the spine. This creates a lot of tension in the back.
Part of the solution for rediscovering your Primary Control and getting it working well is what’s known as body mapping. In short:
The Body Map is one’s self-representation in one’s own brain. If the body map is accurate, movement is good. If the body map is inaccurate or inadequate, movement is inefficient and injury producing.
Barbara Conable
In particular, knowing that your spine extends up to a point between your ears and down to the base of the pelvis is a very useful start. Secondly, becoming familiar with the structure of the shoulder girdle – and its wonderful capacity for freedom of movement – is also incredibly helpful. This is because, for most people, tension around the shoulders is a constant source of interference in the length of the spine.
Once you become familiar with what a healthy Primary Control looks and feels like, you will start noticing a lack of it in most people you meet. Having said this, young children often demonstrate this relationship beautifully because they haven’t interfered in it yet. Watch, for example, a toddler going into a squat to play with something and you will see how free and open the relationship is between the head, neck and back.
In addition, some sports stars, athletes, actors or dancers move with the kind of grace which a working Primary Control affords. Either through luck or instinct they haven’t lost what they enjoyed in childhood, or they have rediscovered it consciously thanks to the Alexander Technique or some similar method.
This week, as well as practising Inhibition:
➣ notice your Primary Control – head-neck-back relationship – in everyday activities. These could include walking, running, driving a car, riding a bicycle and sitting at a desk or at dinner.
➣ take a look at some pictures of the human skeleton to hone your Body Map. Look carefully at how high up the head balances on the spine, and how low down your legs articulate with the pelvis at the hip joints.
➣ pay special attention to sitting down. Do you need to interfere with your head-neck-back relationship in this simple act of bending at the hip, knee and ankle joints?