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Down-Dog Asana with Shoko

Mar 05, 2024

Shoko was a trainee at BodyChance.

In the video below, she asks how to manage her back pain while doing a down-dog, followed by a salutation to the sun…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSYyLryues0

As an Alexander teacher, I often look like a movement coach – I watch how you do something, then analyse it from the perspective of how you use your Voluntary Movement System in tandem with your Postural Support System. Whether standing up from a chair, walking to the subway, or doing a down-dog, most people recruit unnecessary voluntary movements that suppress postural support. 

Children don’t, especially the younger ones.

In Shoko’s case, she drops her head and neck down from C7* as she bends at her hip joint to go into her down-dog position. As I am not a Yoga Educator, I ask her why she drops her neck/head?:

“Oh. Am I?” Shoko replies.

Re-calibrating your sensory perception of a movement is a big part of your Alexander session. Very often, you are not doing what you think you are doing. As FM Alexander put it:

“All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing.”

To help her move in a new way, my hands encourage Shoko to move at the hip joints without dropping her neck and head. My hands are simultaneously inviting her Postural Support System into more robust recruitment of the extensor system of the spine.

As we attempted this, I saw something else…

A need for more efficient timing.

The order in which things happen significantly impacts the quality of the movement produced - Pilates educators, for example, are taught to meticulously specify where and when a voluntary movement needs to start. 

In Shoko’s case, she initiated her bend up to look at the sun by first moving her ribcage/spinal area, then her head. As you can see in the video, I ask her to explore reversing that order by starting the movement from her head and then letting the ribcage & spine follow. This follows the logic of Alexander's first discovery that head movements govern vertebral coordination.

She bends back more and has no pain!

This kind of result is commonplace in Alexander sessions. I’d love to take the credit, but the credit lies with 500 million years of movement evolution. We have a brilliant system, but we don’t clearly understand how it is designed to work.

Alexander’s three discoveries are the beginnings of a new science of movement which consistently produces extraordinary results in every field of human activity. 

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