Everything is Forward Moving

Take a look at your hand.

Now try to bend the fingers back. They don’t go very far do they?

Now bend them forward – wow! There’s a lot of forward motion.

While standing with your arms at the side, see how far you can bend your elbows back - they don’t go very far either do they?

Now bend them forward – wow! There’s a lot of forward motion.

Do the same with the shoulder joint = same thing. Getting the picture?

Rinse and repeat with your legs, your spine, your head. Forward movement is always greater than backward movement, sometimes by an exponential factor!

Arms go forwards, legs go forward, head goes forward. In fact we know that the head is always falling forward, it is designed that way. Watch a person fall asleep on the train – the head falls forward.

We are designed for forward motion.

This is a fundamental principle of human movement. And yet so many people react negatively to this: Sit up! Shoulders back! Stand up straight! Back back!

We consider rounding shoulders, slumping, and forward-looking shapes to be bad things. They are nothing of the sort. They are part of your flexibility. Watch any young child move – they have no bias against forward motion.

And all of this forward motion is anchored by an unconscious, automatic system that is not under your control. For want of a better name, I call it our Postural Support System – it involves a fundamental extensor action along our spine which anchors all of this forward motion.*

Our problem is not that our parts move forward, it is that our postural support system is being suppressed by all our efforts NOT to fall forward!

Ironic isn’t it? 

The effort we make to “stand up straight” and have “good posture” is the very reason we don’t have them. The way FM Alexander put it:

“You've been trying to use your organism by primarily dis-coordinating it.”

The reason we fail to appreciate this counter-intuitive insight is FM Alexander’s most fundamental discovery. FM discovered that postural support is automatic - “the right thing does itself” - he was fond of saying. You can not directly change posture, although that is what everyone is trying to do.

Which I imagine puts many of my readers in a quandary.

If I can’t do it, what do I do?

Aha! 

Time to meet the almost zen-like frustration people experience when trying to understand this fundamental discovery of Alexander’s. This is the ‘non-doing’ I referred to previously, although I don’t use that term in teaching as I think it just confuses people. 

Anyway.

How can you control a thing that is not under your control?

This is the fundamental enigma you experience when taking Alexander lessons.

However, all is not lost – FM claimed we can have ‘indirect control’ over our postural support system. And he went on to develop a technique for people to master this indirect control.

The easiest way to think about this is to imagine you are learning how to control your body temperature. No one grows up being able to do that – whatever for? - but there are meditators who can melt snow by raising their body temperature through conscious intention. This is an example of an ‘indirect method’ and it takes a long time to master.

Of course, that’s not something I ever want to do, and I guess you’re the same.

However, I do want to learn how to ‘indirectly’ control the automatic function of my postural support system. And how you do that is something I will be exploring over the next month.

Stay tuned.