Alexander DoubleSpeak

DoubleSpeak
Doing = activity driven by your Voluntary Movement System (VMS)
Non-doing = activity driven by your automatic Postural Support System (PSS)

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Many Alexander teachers – not me – love talking about ‘doing’ and ‘non-doing’. 

These concepts are alien if you have not experienced the mysterious ‘Alexander touch’ that teachers spend decades developing. When teachers refer to ‘non-doing’, they refer to activities that were not consciously made to happen.

One remarkable feature of Alexander-touch is the experience of your body significantly changing without knowing how it is happening. This is a ‘non-doing’ change – it just seemed to happen all by itself. Like your body breathing itself.

I saw the most dramatic effect of this one day in 1983 when my business partner Roz and I were both giving individual chair lessons in our studio looking out over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. As I worked with my student, Roz was using her hands on her student as he was standing in front of the chair…

Suddenly, he collapsed and fell to the floor.

Roz turned to me, shock on her face:

“I think he is dead.”

***

He wasn’t dead – he had suddenly fainted. 

Dr David Garlick of the University of NSW – one of the early academic researchers of Alexander’s discoveries and a trained Alexander teacher - explained what he believed had happened. Garlick observed that the touch of an Alexander teacher may sometimes cause sudden systemic changes in postural tone. When this happens, the circumference of the blood vessels instantly widens – it’s like squeezing the end of a hose so that the water will spray out, then suddenly releasing the pressure on the hose and the water then dribbles down in front of you. David explained that this sudden drop in blood pressure triggers an emergency response in the brain to make us lie flat so blood can more easily flow back into the brain. 

We call that fainting.

‘Non-doing’ describes changes that are authorised by your Postural Support System. Postural tone within this system can not altered directly - any more than you can change your blood pressure just because you want to. 

Your Postural Support System (PSS) is an unconscious, automatic and integrated system responsible for maintaining balance while you do what you do – it generates constant muscular activity that opposes gravity, adjusts quickly and resists fatigue so you can continue being optimally configured to do whatever you want to do.

Influencing PSS is the ‘non-doing’ element of an Alexander lesson.

The ‘doing’ element of a session is easier to understand - you can recruit any voluntary muscle in your body at any moment to do anything you want. We call this the Voluntary Movement System - read more about it here:

https://atsuccess.com/blog/2024/02/miracles-movement.html

I’m sure to get a pesky email from a teacher correcting me – I look forward to it.

Because of this strong ‘non-doing’ element in sessions, Alexander’s work is sometimes referred to as an “indirect method”. As my story above illustrates, Alexander did find a way to influence your postural tone indirectly, often with major consequences.

Today, people believe they can improve postural tone directly using the Voluntary Movement System. They are quite right – you can. However, there is a problem with that.

A rather big problem. It’s called recruitment.