Running On Rocks: The Catch 22 of Movement Control

When I was 11, I played a dangerous game of running on rocks at Avoca Beach in Australia.

I didn’t think it was dangerous, instead I was exhilarated.

It was dangerous because the rocks were sharp and bulky – crashing into them could have split my little head open. They were boulders with diameters as wide as my nimble legs. The rocks extended onwards from the beach, reaching into the overhanging cliffs and disappearing around a headland.

The game was simple: running on rocks as fast as I can.

My whole Self was challenged by this game – I never knew where to put my foot until a split second before I needed to. There was no giving up in this game, momentum assured me of that. There was no calculation either, it wasn’t possible to anticipate things. I was going forward: find a place for your foot Jerry, keep moving.

It was flow. It was one. Unity, with trust.

I trusted me. I trusted that incredible instrument of me: my brain, nervous network, senses and consciousness to deliver me where I wanted to go. It’s a lesson teachers of Alexander’s work need to understand, and for 40 years I barely knew it my Self.

I’ve just returned from Osaka teaching, and I saw evidence in my own trainees of the challenge of understanding Alexander’s 2nd discovery. Yes, I know I always write “Alexander's discovery” as though there was only one, and in the real world that’s true.

But in the cognitive world – where analysis and separation reign supreme – then yes, actually there are THREE discoveries. Today I am writing about the second.

What do my Osaka trainees and running on rocks have in common?

It’s to do with understanding how we are wired to move. As I have written previously, there is a sea squirt that eats its own brain (once it’s found a permanent home in the sea floor). Neuro-scientists point to this as evidence that the purpose of our entire nervous system is simple: to move.

When I was running on rocks, I was in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”. The Buddhist have another way of describing the same phenomenon: singing without the singer, running without the runner. It’s true – when I think back – that my identity vanished during those joyful moments of running on rocks. Perhaps that’s why I loved it so much? There was no “me” anymore, there was just movement.

How can you be depressed when there’s no identity to be depressed about?

And what I saw in Osaka last week was a lack of movement, a strong sense of identity and self-hate. Marj saw it in me the first time she watched me teach in 1986. I walked over to a student, stopped, inhibited my Self and started giving my directions before raising my hands…

“Oh that’s spooky!” Marj exclaimed. “Walk away.”

I was embarrassed and confused as the class laughed. I walked away like a good boy scout.

But I loved Marj, I trusted her and I knew she had something to tell me that I didn’t know. This was after 10 years of being a trainee and teacher – I was still so ignorant. I can forgive my Osaka trainees for not knowing something that I didn’t then know either, even after years of being a teacher!

Then Marj said: “If you are not ready when you get there, you never will be.”

This has resonated within me over the decades since 1986, every time it’s truth plunging me deeper into a universal insight of existence itself. Back to the neuro-scientists: the purpose of our brain is movement. That’s why it’s there. To move you.

When you don’t move – when you go into: “I am not good enough” and “I can’t do anything” and “I am not ready yet” you are fighting with Nature herself, and you will lose every time.

Walter Carrington expanded on this concept in his extraordinarily insightful: “Balance as a Function of Intelligence” And balance has no meaning without movement.

My follow up to Walter’s paper could be titled “Change as a Function of Movement”. Unless you move, you don’t change – this is what Marj was giving me that day. The Buddhists teach the same concept in impermanence: for a thing to function, it must change. Space doesn’t function, because it doesn’t change. Everything is movement, everything that functions that is.

When I did the whole stop, inhibit, direct then do procedure, I was interrupting flow.

It’s unnatural. I was fully embracing my identity: being right, feeling for a correct feeling/position, setting my Self – all those things I already knew result in a less wonderful co-ordination. How did I miss that?

I forgot what I set out to do. I forgot to move towards that.

I forgot to be interested in the activity, I was a nerd obsessed with the operating system, trying to set it right before I did what I wanted to do.

Actually, Nike hit upon a truth when they shout “Just Do It!”

Alexander’s insight was that you cannot know what will happen until it happens, and yet Identity demands a reassurance before it will act.

It’s the Catch 22 of movement flow:

I’ll do it when it feels right to do it; it will never feel right to do it until you do it.

Seeking reassurance only guarantees more of your past.

And the misunderstanding of this point is rampant in our Society. Physical therapists tell people to directly control things – as though that was the design – when the design is to do what you want to do with respect to your wholeness, and let the system determine how to do it.

People listen to relaxation tapes and sink into a thick, ponderous head space absent of agility or any direct relevance to the actual realities that are pounding their life.

Yoga practitioners stand in Tadasan, “feeling their way through the body” as though that will help their asana – when all it does is deaden their mind and make them stiff. Of course they won’t admit to this – that is too shocking.

That is why Marj sought to shock me that day.

Actors and singers and fighters and dancers and office workers and people doing their household chores all do the same thing – try to feel the right way to do what they want. And it doesn’t work.

Pain is rampant, stress is rampant – a design of perfect genius is needlessly crushed.

And my trainees were doing what I was doing when Marj called me “Spooky”

They were trying to get their co-ordination plan right before they went into the activity (of singing, walking, playing an instrument, gurgling – whatever). It is a form of self-hate – I am not good enough, ready enough, able enough, strong enough to do what I want to do.

How do you know? Identity tells you.

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The coordination plan that Alexander discovered – head movements govern vertebral co-ordination – is an operating system. Like Windows or Mac OS, it’s function is to allow you to do things you want to do. You do those things with the software – to draw, to write, to make music, to speak to other people (on Skype).

Being obsessed with the coordination plan of itself is akin to being a Windows nerd. All you want to do is sit in a dark room all night obsessesing about deep code. No-one understands what you are talking about (except other nerds) and most people just don’t care.

Isn’t that kind of how our Alexander profession is today?

However, people do care when Windows crashes – then they want the nerd to come and fix it. Except we’re not talking about Windows, we’re talking about the most complex operating system for movement that exists, as far as we know.

The “non-nerds” just want to be happy, they want to do things. And when they truly do the thing they want to do – which rarely happens – this particular operating system works perfectly (unlike Windows).

That’s the magic.

Here’s a story from Osaka that illustrates what I mean.

A talented singer was working on an operatic duo…

“I can’t be this character” my trainee told me “I am not strong.”

“Do you want to be?” I asked her.

“Yes” she replied.

“Then commit your whole Self to that. Sing that.”

She did, and her voice transformed.

No mention of head and spine, no mention of lengthening and widening. Instead, getting her to commit her whole Self moving with the song had a transformative effect on her coordination. I’ve seen this again and again in BodyChance. Sometimes I hear Tommy Thompson says weird and wonderful things like: “There is no primary control” and in that moment with my singer I finally understood what he meant. Yeah, I get it Tommy…

When my whole Self is committed to doing what I want, and I trust my whole Self in that activity, then I really don’t need to second guess my operating system. It will perform at optimal efficiency – because I am so clear about where I want to go.

How do I know this is true?

Because when it happens I am ecstatic. I am in joy, in flow.

Running over rocks with no runner inside.

I loved that game, and now I know why

It’s become a metaphor for my life.

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Come and explore these ideas with me personally in London. I am running two workshops. "The Art of Teaching Groups" on Feb 4th and "The Art of Marketing Groups" on Feb 11th.

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Finally - this guy is not running on rocks, but pretty close to what I imagined in this essay...