I’m sure you’ll have come across visual illusions before – where lines look crooked when actually they’re parallel, and so on. However, less well-known is that our kinaesthetic sense – our ‘body sense’ – is also imperfect and makes ‘mistakes’. For example, have you ever had the experience of seeing a photo or video of yourself and thinking, ‘Wow, do I really look or act like that?’. All sorts of postures and mannerisms we never knew we had can be suddenly revealed to us, in quite a disconcerting way.
When working well, our kinaesthetic sense tells us three important things about ourselves: the position of our joints, the movements we make and how much effort we’re putting in. However, it turns out that this sense can become inaccurate over time. For example:
- Over many years I develop a habit of standing with my head tilted to one side. This now feels normal and right to me, and my sense of position no longer registers the tilt.
- I always tend to raise my shoulders in response to stress. This is one of my most unconscious habits and my sense of movement does not tell me I’m doing it.
- I use a lot of effort to stand up from a chair. I don’t realise I’m putting in excessive effort, and my sense of effort tells me that this is just normal.
The above are examples of a curious phenomenon at play with our kinaesthetic sense. It is this: As long as we achieve our goals, most of us care very little about how we coordinate ourselves while we are achieving them. So long as we get the job done, we just don’t notice that we might be unbalanced, making unnecessary movements or putting in a whole lot of extra tension. When a particular action we’ve made a thousand times works for us, we never stop to consider that we’ve sacrificed our best coordination to make it. For example, I might always hunch over to eat a sandwich even though I’m building up tension over time, and am horrified when I see a photo of myself at a lunch party.
Indeed, scientific research confirms that our awareness tends to discard sensations when they’re no longer needed. For example, once we’ve learnt to stand on our own two feet, we’ll begin to ignore the sensations associated with finding our balance. We can then go on and focus on other goals in our young lives – such as kicking a ball – without having to be conscious of our balance all the time. As adults, things move along in pretty much the same vein. For example, once we’ve mastered how to use a computer keyboard, our attention moves away from the sensations of typing towards our goals of responding to emails, filling in spreadsheets, writing novels… or whatever our technologies enable us to do.
In addition, as long as ‘just getting things done’ remains our primary focus – if we are, in Alexander’s phrase ‘confirmed end-gainers’ – all our habitual positions, movements and efforts just tend to feel right, even if we initially never learnt the optimal way to do something, or if this way has since become off-kilter, inefficient or injury-producing. It’s how we’ve done it for a long time, and so it’s bound to feel normal, even if inaccuracies and tensions have crept in without us noticing.
It’s only when things start to go wrong, that we might begin to suspect that our kinaesthetic sense is deceiving us. For example, a public figure who values their tall stature might catch sight of their hunched-over reflection in a shop window. Or a guitarist might only discover they’re moving in a way which interferes with their playing when watching themselves on video. Or an office worker might develop tendonitis and only realise that their arms are full of tension when an Alexander Technique specialist points it out to them. And so on.
So if the wrong thing feels right, where on earth do we go from here? This was the impasse that FM Alexander himself reached as described by him in ‘Evolution of a Technique’, the first chapter of his book The Use of the Self. You might recall that Alexander’s acting career was hampered by the voice loss he developed while performing on stage. Determined to see whether there was a behavioural cause, he observed himself in a mirror while reciting. After a long period of close observation he started to see in the mirror a pattern of tension throughout his body which always accompanied the act of speaking. Yet this tension pattern always felt right to him, and so he was unable to prevent it in practice – with the result that the vocal trouble returned.
What Alexander had stumbled upon was a seemingly intractable problem. Whenever he decided to speak (or in his words, ‘when the stimulus came to me to use my voice’), it always triggered his wrong habitual use, and yet his kinaesthetic sense did not inform him of this misuse. It was a Gordian knot of stimulus, habitual wrong reaction and untrustworthy feeling.
Alexander’s genius was to realise that the only option left to him was to use his rational mind rather than his habitual feelings of right or wrong to establish a new and improved use of himself. To him, this ‘implied the possibility of the opening up of an entirely new field of enquiry…’; he realised that:
I must be prepared to carry on with any procedure I had reasoned out as best for my purpose, even though that procedure might feel wrong. In other words, my trust in my reasoning processes to bring me safely to my end must be a genuine trust, not a half-trust needing the assurance of feeling right as well.
What this amounted to was adhering to a rigorous plan to break the link between the stimulus and his habitual misuse. Supposing he gave himself the end of speaking a certain sentence, he would attempt to Inhibit his habitual reaction to this stimulus and instead project Directions to ensure a new and improved use of himself (we’ve covered these concepts in earlier chapters). Often he would not go on to gain his end of speaking the sentence but simply do nothing, or perhaps do something completely different such as lift his hand. Only when he was absolutely convinced that he was Inhibiting his instinctive response and projecting his improved Directions right through to the gaining of his end, would he speak the sentence.
Through this process, Alexander could begin to pursue his goals within the context of the best possible use of himself. And his kinaesthetic sense then came along for the ride. It got retrained to recognize positions, movements and efforts that were appropriate to the task in hand.
Pay attention only to goals and and your kinaesthetic system will get the idea that fulfilling goals is the only thing that’s important to you. This means that, as long as you meet your goals, no matter how haphazardly, your brain will ignore most of the sensory feedback available to it along the way. So, out of the window go your sense of body position, your sense of movement and your sense of how much effort you’re putting in. By end-gaining, you are, in effect, living in an imagined world, a simulacrum of your own making.
The irony, though, is that you will ultimately not achieve your goals effectively if you don’t let your kinaesthetic sense recalibrate to the real world. Efficient, accurate and pain-free movement requires that you allow your kinaesthetic sense to ‘check in’ with its surroundings. Your kinaesthetic sense would dearly like to ask questions such as ‘where are the relative positions of my joints?’, ‘how is my entire musculoskeletal system supporting my movements?’, and ‘how much effort am I putting in?’.
As described in the last chapter, our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t need to go through this process called the Alexander Technique. That’s because staying attuned to their environment was for them a matter of life or death, and their flexible style of attention was a constant source of nourishment for their kinaesthetic sense. But we can rediscover our ancient birthright: it’s part of what the Alexander Technique is all about.
Below are some ideas to think about for this week.
➣ Notice more often what your kinaesthetic sense is telling you. Unless you spend some time ‘listening in’ to your surroundings, you’re going to be putting tension into everything you do. Otherwise the extra tension you put in is a bit like shouting all the time because you’re wearing headphones!
➣ In some ways, we’re like mechanical instruments that need to be recalibrated to match the ‘real world’ after a period of time. You can think of yourself like, for example, a compass that needs to find true North again, a clock that needs to be reset to Universal Time, or the set of strings on a violin that need to be retuned to the correct frequencies.
➣ FM Alexander said that ‘You want to feel out whether you are right or not. I am giving you a conception to eradicate that. I don’t want you to care a damn if you’re right or not. Directly you don’t care if you’re right or not, the impeding obstacle is gone.’ In other words, focus on Inhibiting and Directing and not on trying to ‘feel out’ the effects of these. You’ll just be caught up in your unreliable kinaesthetic sense if you do.
You’ve now reached the end of your six-week introduction to the Alexander Technique, and are in a very different ‘place’ to when you began. Do revisit all the previous chapters: they’ll make more sense on re-reading because you’ve now had a good deal of new sensory input during lessons.
Although further lessons are recommended, the lessons you’ve received and these six chapters are a great start in taking the Alexander Technique forward successfully into your life.
Good luck, and ‘think up’!
Some further reading
FM Alexander, The Use of the Self
Michael Gelb, Body Learning
Pedro de Alcantara, The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life
Angela Bradshaw, Be in Balance
Carolyn Nicholls, Body, Breath and Being: a New Guide to the Alexander Technique
