I’m betting you’d lean back.

When I give an Alexander lesson, my pupil often ends up feeling like they’re leaning forwards at an angle of 30 degrees or more. So what do they do?

They try to lean back — but I don’t let them. Instead I put them in front of a mirror and show them they are standing upright. They see it. They remark on it. They’re generally bowled over by the difference between how they feel they’re standing and what they see in the mirror.

So what do they do next? Surely they don’t try and lean back again?

Yes they do.

Why is your kinaesthetic sense so weird?

Actually, your kinaesthetic sense (your feel for what your body is doing) isn’t weird at all, it’s your interpretation that’s wrong.

Your kinaesthetic sense is not really telling you what you’re doing: it’s telling you what you’re doing differently from usual. So if you usually lean backwards, it will only comment when you stop leaning backwards. When you stop leaning backwards, it will tell you you’re leaning forwards of where you usually are.

You will only think you’re leaning forwards because you thought you were straight when you were leaning backwards as usual. And you’ll feel like the difference is far larger than it really is, hence the 30 degrees.

Have I taught you something or just confused you?

Let me know.

P.S. Here’s more about kinaesthetic weirdness.

In my last post, I showed you that the classical formula for the basic Alexander directions is flawed. Not badly flawed but flawed nonetheless. The Tube Principle points you to new, better directions. How are you to work out what those better directions are are?

Here’s how, it’s a three-step process:—

1. Find the bends in the body tube
2. For each bend, make a note whether it bends forwards or backwards
3. Apply the Tube Principle rule

1. Find the bends in the body tube

The bends in the body tube do vary from person to person and so you do need to examine what is actually happening for you personally. The best way to do that is to move your hand up your spine noticing where it hollows and where it sticks out. Done with care, feeling the bumps and hollows is pretty objective, whereas trying to see them in the mirror — or worse still, sense them — will give you very subjective and unreliable results.

2. For each bend, make a note whether it bends forwards or backwards

That’s easily done:-
A bump shows you that, at that point, your body bends forwards.
A hollow shows you the places where your body bends backwards.

Write down what you found out.

Why? Because if you begin to doubt yourself. (Trust me, you will begin to doubt yourself).
…when you begin to doubt yourself, you can just go back to what you wrote down. Only if you’re convinced you made a mistake, will you need to use your hand to check again.

If you don’t write it down, you’ll probably end up mis-remembering what you found out with your hand. So write it down.

Now you have the facts to hand, you can…

3. Apply the Tube Principle rule

The Tube Principle tells you that every bend has a bend-away-from (a convex, bump) side and a bend-towards (a concave, hollowed) side. Where there’s a bump in the back, there’s a hollow in front. Where there’s a hollow in the back, there’s a bump in front. However, because your body is not, in fact anything like a perfect cylindrical tube, it’s often not easy to tell by the shape of your front. That’s why I told you to use the mid-line of your back to work out what’s what.

The Tube Principle also tells you that, front or back, the bend-away side is pulled together, like the bit of your sweater that’s in your hand when you grab hold of it and gather the sides together. And that the bend-towards side is stretched out sideways.

So where, applying the Tube Principle, you intend or direct a bunched-up, bend-away point in your back to widen out, you also allow the sides of your body-tube to ease forwards. To complete the direction, you allow the front of your body to un-over-stretch (to coin a word). You have enough slack to allow your front to narrow or concentrate. Taken together, all this pushes your body into a straighter place without your doing anything to make it happen.

(Yes I know you’re focussing your intention, you’re directing, but you’re not doing it. You’re only freeing it up: allowing something to happen that, previously you were not allowing).

Where the bend is the other way, exactly the same principle applies in reverse.

Where the bunched-up, bend-away point is in your front, you direct your front to widen out and the sides of your body-tube to ease backwards. Completing the direction, you allow the back of your body to un-over-stretch, to narrow or concentrate. Once again, all this pushes your body into a straighter place without your doing anything to make it happen.

Summary and what’s next

I’ve just shown you how to direct each bend in your body tube. How do you put it all together into a sequence? That will be the subject of Friday’s post.

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.