How To (not) Win $50 with Jeremy

In all the years I ran my Alexander-busking competition, only one person came close to winning. She was a young student of bodywork and took my whole lecture very thoughtfully. In some ways, I regret never paying her.

To win was simple.

You’d win $50 if you could rise from a chair without pulling back your head. Most people pull their heads back - as they stand up - so that they can see in front of them. This is a natural part of the movement to stand.

However – in my competition – I would ask my audience:

“Hands up those who think they can rise from the chair without pulling their head back to look in front of them?”

Inevitably, a lot of the crowd would raise their hands.

“I’ll give you $50 if you can!”

And they would all smile and salivate and wonder what my trick was.

And my trick was simple too – I knew they couldn’t do it.

Why they couldn’t do was the subject of my Alexander lectures, making my audience eagerly wait for the competition to start. Postural movements are managed in areas of your brain that are not easily accessed consciously.

For example, how easily can you speed up or slow down your heart?

Yoginis can do it, but it takes time and training. Breathing is similar, although more accessible. Opera singers – for example – spend years mastering the art of breathing to produce the sounds of different songs. Breathing is one of those borderline processes that live between your conscious and unconscious behaviour.

You can change your breathing directly – but without in-depth knowledge and insight, you can harm your health and well-being over years of uninformed interference.

Posture is the same.

Anyone can impose an idea on their movement system - such as “shoulders back” or “pull in the tummy”, or “tuck the pelvis forward” - but to keep these going takes continuous will power to achieve. Once your will power diminishes – as it always does – your unconsciously driven behaviours take over.

Unconscious behaviour will mostly override your conscious intention.

I depended upon that to keep my money.

Most people tried this “imposing their will” approach to win my $50. To stop their heads from going back as they stood up, contestants tried to keep their heads still by increasing their neck tension. This is the example of “posture imposed from without”, and it is both harmful and ineffective over the longer term.

And anyway - you instantly lost if you did it this way.

“I am not asking you to do something new,” I would explain to the three final contestants, “I am asking you to stop doing something you are already doing. If you succeed, then…

“…all you end up with is the absence of what you had.”

I’d sprinkle these ZEN-like koans all through my act. 

I’d quote FM saying things like:“You can’t do something you don’t know, if you keep on doing what you do know.”

And I might riff on that for another few minutes, keeping my audience in suspense.

I met my only winner at a rock concert outside of Sydney. Kathreen - a good friend at the time - had decided to rent a tent for Naturecare in the Health Fair area near the concert camping grounds. She wanted to gain new students for her courses, and I was good at gathering a crowd.

At one of my shows, this young bodywork woman appeared.

Her way of rising from the chair shocked and stumped me – I did not know what to say. But I wanted to marry her immediately. In all the 100’s of examples I had seen, no-one had ever thought to use her simple trick.

And of course, if you want to know what trick she used – lookout for my next Daily.