Alexander’s 2nd Discovery – The Mechanics of Co-Ordination

Once at breakfast, I remember being interrupted by a girlfriend pleading with me in an exasperated voice:

“What’s wrong with you this morning?”

I was genuinely surprised (and a little irritated).

“Nothing.” I lifted my eyebrows.

“Fine”, she re-joined “have it your way.”

I was fed up with this.

“What are you talking about!?”

In the end, she pointed out how I failed to make eye contact when I came into the kitchen, started banging the cupboards as I made my tea, then turned away from her as I sat in the chair to read the newspaper I had brought with me.

Some of us love to pull things apart: to tinker, divide and analyse in order to deep dive into how a thing works, even a relationship. Turns out my girlfriend was right, and we split up about a month later. She finally told me:

“I’ve learnt more in our 2 months together than I have in the past 5 years, and I never want to see you again.”

Oh dear.

Deep-diving works.
With Alexander's discovery, deep diving comes in the form of exploring how we are designed. Bill & Barbara Conable kicked this off as a movement, eventually leading to the Andover Educators. This inspired me to create BodyThinking – a one year online learning program for my trainees with over 50 videos that deep dive into the functional relationships between bones, joints, muscles and movement intentions. It’s a deep-divers paradise, a mecca for the car mechanics of co-ordination.

Deep-diving has its drawbacks.
Never was it clearer to me than yesterday, as I struggled to help one of my trainees play his beloved trumpet. He was worried about the pressure and effort he felt in his “upper back muscles” as he struggled to produce enough air pressure to hit a loud, high-pitched crescendo in the musical piece he was practicing.

“Tell me how you think about it.” I asked.

As he explained, it was obvious his plan was something along these lines:

1. ask for his co-ordination (head/whole Self thingy) so that…
2. he can play the piece (with his years of practice being newly influenced by 1.) so that…
3. he can feel if it was better in those muscles this time or not (while he hit the notes).

Step 3. Was the problem.

Sensory feedback is not an step in the process, and he was making it step 3. The car mechanics of co-ordination usually do. In simple form they are saying…

“I ask my head and whole self to move so that I can do what I want to do so that I can feel how that went in those parts I am curious about at the moment.”

Won’t work.

What he failed to realize – and this also took me years to grasp – is that sensory feedback is not a step in your process. It’s a given.

I mean – with your eyes open can you stop seeing? Of course not.

There’s no switch that turns off sensory information, therefore the idea of “checking” to see if you felt something or not is totally absurd. You either do or you don’t. Seeking to know if you felt a feeling is motor act that will generate a feeling for you. It is circuitous and delusional.

It’s turning sensing into a motor act, and violates the design of your neuro-muscular system.

The design and use of conscious motor control is a 2nd, much subtler discovery that FM made.

Amazingly, many teachers fall into the trap of turning sensing into a motor act – the whole glassy eyed thing – and I include my Self in that for the first 10 to 15 years of teaching. Those creepy AT teachers who look so spooky as they move – they have not grasped this point.

This is no simple discovery.

FM showed that when you make sensing a motor activity, your nervous system will still happily oblige by generating tension to produce the feeling you are actively seeking out. But your system is basically incapable of producing anything original or new via this means.

People in involved in teaching and practicing meditation, Yoga, martial arts, music-making – and many more besides – all fall into this error. It is a rampant and wide spread misunderstanding.

People unknowingly misuse the design of conscious neuro-muscular motor control.

And this subtle error of misuse causes them to dysfunction, as it did with my trumpet player. All he got was what he was looking to find – tension in his “upper back muscles” (a feeling) and a lack of achievement in the sound (which he blamed on this misuse of these muscles!)

Most of the car mechanics of co-ordination fall into this conundrum, because they have been seduced by sensory delights and disappointments within the minutiae of their behaviour. This fascination leads them to make their final step in the process: how did I feel this time around?

Back to my trumpet player, ending his playing by checking how it felt in his upper back muscles.

I asked him: “What else could you think about?”

This was a puzzle for him. He stood there silently, mouth opening and closing, as the members in the class watched him grapple with a fundamental question of conscious motor control.

Finally, he returned to his roots as a performer.

He recognised that his real purpose was to wake up his audience with an impassioned message from his trumpeted music. He decided that this was the conscious request he wanted to co-ordinate – to invite the audience to listen to what his music expressed.

His new plan was:

1. ask for his co-ordination (head/whole Self thingy) so that…
2. he can play the piece (with his years of practice being newly influenced by 1.) so that…
3. he can invite the audience to wake up to the passion of living a full life (something like that).

Having made this new plan, I stood by him offering my touch to inspire confidence in a new way of thinking. Finally he started to play and the sound he produced was extraordinary!

The class clapped. In his own words:

“I haven’t produced a sound like that for years.”

We were all slightly stunned by nature’s demonstration of its magnificence. As an afterthought, after all the ensuring discussion had finished, I did finally ask:

“BTW – how were those “upper back muscles”?

He didn’t know. He hadn’t felt them (because he hadn’t searched). They had effectively vanished: no longer part of his conscious concept of playing.

Finally, the mechanic was liberated from his obsession.

Why did it work?

This always puzzles the car mechanics, as it still puzzles me.

It comes down to trust: trusting you, trusting your neuro-muscular system to deliver what you reasonably ask. The fact is – you are not a car. You are the most complex organism that we know to exist. It’s unlikely you can ever understand the infinite complexity that produces these unexpected results.

FM found that he had to fully trust this process:

“…not a half-trust needing the assurance of feeling right as well.”*

FM's 2nd discovery is hard to articulate, even harder to implement: a deep insight into how the operating system of conscious guidance and control actually works.

This issue is not unique to FM or our Alexander profession.

The question fascinates neuro-scientists like Tristen Roberts, author of the remarkably dense Understanding Balance. Or Lucy Brown, who presented an enlightening paper on “sensory-motor contagion” at the first Lugano Congress.

As I proposed in my previous blog, it is arrogant to assume that the process of consciously guided behavioural change is exclusively our own.

However, through FM's discovery of…

1. Firstly, the primary influence that the head/spine relationship has in systemically optimizing our behaviour; and

2. Secondly, showing the operational requirements to implement this consciously;

…a hitherto unknown tool is now available for any process of behavioural change.

See what I mean about subtle?

*From Use of the Self, "Evolution of A Technique"