Comparing the Tube Principle and classical Alexander directions

The two most basic components of the Alexander Technique are inhibition and direction. Frederic Mathias Alexander’s concept of inhibition has stood the test of time. Without Alexander’s inhibition, any attempt to change habits of movement and posture is doomed to mediocrity at best. Inhibition is what really marks the Alexander Technique apart from anything else.

It’s only after you’ve decided you’re not going to do something in the old, habitual way that you become free to choose a new one to put in its place. Anything else is, at best, a patching up process that leaves the problem still in place.

Once you’ve started to inhibit the old way, direction is the next step. Direction is the process of working out the new way to allow your body to move and of forming the intention for it to move in that new way. F.M. Alexander set out a formula for the most basic, always applicable, directions. His followers have mostly kept faithfully to this formula. (Needlessly changing something that works is not a good idea).

What are these classical directions?

The classical Alexander directions

“Allow your neck to be free in order to allow your head to go forward and up in order to allow your back to lengthen and widen”.

So there it is. My pupils will know that I’ve not used this formula for a very long time now. The reason I haven’t is because, in practice, it doesn’t work as well as it could do to do. Up until recently I thought the reason it didn’t work as well as it should was just because any formula for directions, routinely applied, provides a big temptation to do the directions rather than “project” them. (By “project” we mean: “form a clear intention in our mind of what we want to happen when we move”).

The reason we avoid “doing” is that doing is always determined by those very habits we need to get rid of. Essentially, trying to “do” anything correctly is an attempt to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps: it’s always doomed to failure.

Discovering the Tube Principle has shown me that the problem is bigger than just the temptation to do rather than simply intend. I now realise that parts of the old classical directions are just plain wrong.

How are the classical directions wrong?

If you’ve been reading my posts on the Tube Principle, you’ll know that, in some parts of the body you need to actually allow the surface of your back to narrow, not widen as the classical formula says.

Now, to be fair, a good Alexander teacher has always instinctively encouraged the widening of the convex part of the tube and narrowing of the concave part of the tube. In practice, the Tube Principle has often been instinctively followed even while consciously intending a widening of the whole back and encouraging the pupil to do the same. The problem is, in large part, semantic rather than real.

The problem

I said “in part” because the words of the classical directions, seeming as they do to contradict the Tube Principle, easily draw both teacher and pupil into not allowing the beneficial effects of the work they are doing because those effects are different from what the classical formula appears to require.

My problem as an Alexander teacher was our lack of a good model with which to predict what the correct directions should be. When I first started, very tentatively, applying the Tube Principle, I was quite sure that it would prove a sometimes useful but basically limited tool. As I applied it in this tentative way, I was very surprised to not to find any circumstance to which it did not apply.

The Tube Principle solution

Now that I’ve been using the Tube Principle in all my teaching for a while, I can confirm that it always applies. I have not found any circumstance in which the Tube Principle didn’t accurately predict what needed to happen in order to to direct out of the habitual distortion into better movement.

Not only is the Tube Principle an excellent tool for predicting the most helpful directions, it’s also a great tool for sticking to those better directions. Whenever habit comes along and confuses us, going back to the Tube Principle always puts us back on course.

I now bless the serendipity that led me to consider the image of the body as a tube and to consider what happens when that tube is distorted.

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Next: How do you work out what the new directions are? Previous: Free your neck 4: Apply the tube principle to your neck.
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