Finding the material to shore up your scoliosis

If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ve already seen many examples of the Tube Principle showing you to work constructively to free up a tight, misshapen body.

Each time you want to coax your body back into shape, you need to find the place where it bends away (the convex side of the bend). In stoops, hunchbacks and swaybacks, the convex side is either in your front or your back. In scoliosis, it is on your left or your right side. That’s the only important practical difference between a scoliosis and those other problems. Let’s take a lean to the right as our example.

Correcting a lean to the right

If you lean to the right, there’s a part of your left side that sticks out more than the right side. In fact, your right side is hollow at that point. That’s the convex side of the bend. As always, you need to allow that convex area to soften and, as it softens, to spread around your body to the front and back.

You can’t do that while you’re struggling to haul yourself up straight, so first stop struggling to be straight.

As your left side spreads, your front and back can begin to ease slightly over to the right (because you have created a little bit of slack by allowing your left side to soften and spread). You’ll be reluctant to do that because your habitual tendency is to try and tighten that area and pull yourself up by main force. But you don’t need me to tell you that that really doesn’t get you very far. Now’s the time to do what does work: begin to soften and ease your bump around to the left.

What do you do with the bump as it begins to inch around rightwards?

The final step in putting the Tube Principle to work for you, is to draw together the slack that you’ve gathered from easing the front and back of your body-bend over to the right. As you do that, it will tend to push the top of your hollowed right side up. It will finally begin to shore you up as it should have been doing all along.

Do you see now what was happening before? The bit of you that should have been holding your right side up was dragged over to the left leaving you clinging on to the overhang, desperately trying to prevent yourself from toppling over.

The more you cling on to the overhang, the more you draw your support out from underneath yourself. The more you draw the support out from underneath yourself, the bigger and heavier the overhang you have to cling on to.

Is it any wonder that your efforts so far have never brought you any success?

Now that you know what you were doing wrong

Now that you know why your efforts couldn’t be successful, just get to busy practising what does work. Whatever you do, don’t let your past failures get you down. I’m not telling you you’ll get amazing results quickly. You might but it’s unlikely. You really need to work at this — and you’ll progress much better if you have a guide.

Don’t wait until you find a guide

Start now. As long as you don’t go back to trying haul yourself up, as long as you begin to put the support back under your sagging right side, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t start your journey back towards greater health and ease right away.

When you need a guide, call an Alexander Technique teacher. They’ll know how to help you. And don’t forget that, whether they realise it or not, your guide will be showing you that it’s not a wall you’re learning to shore up: it’s a tube.

Then here’s how to use the Tube Principle to get rid of the pain. It’s actually very straight-forward. Just imagine someone taking hold of the very top of your arm with both hands so that their thumbs are on your shoulder joint and their finger tips are in your armpit. Imagine them gently spreading and softening the shoulder muscles under their thumbs and bringing the freed-up muscle around toward the arm-pit.

That’s it.

If you were holding your shoulder joint tight, that should free it up and ease it. If you had pain from the tight muscle it should go (at least until you tighten it up again).

The intention is enough

There’s actually no need to have anybody take your shoulder for you. All you need is to remember to allow the outside of your shoulder to soften and spread into the arm-pit.

Having said that, if you’re used to holding your shoulders tight, it helps a lot if somebody does it for you the first time. That way, you get to know what a free shoulder feels like.

If you learn how to apply the Tube Principle like that wherever you’re holding your muscles stiff and tight, you can be as happy and care-free as this young man.

By the way, carrying your shoulder bag with the strap across your body like that also helps.

Most often, knee pain comes from putting too much effort into bending and straightening your knees. Here’s how to remove the strain and therefore the pain as well.

Think of your leg as a tube. The knee is, of course, a bend in that tube. When you put too much effort into moving it, you over-tighten it all around and strain pretty much all your knee muscles.

Normally you would concentrate on trying to ease your bending or straightening knee muscles. Don’t do that. Instead, pay attention to the pull from the back of your knee towards the front. Here’s how to do it.

Do this and you’ll find it helps your knee very quickly

Find your knee-cap and then put your two hands over the knee so that the tips of fore-fingers are on the bottom of your knee-cap and the other finger-tips are on the front of your lower-leg bone. Allow your palms to settle gently on the sides of your knee.

Now just imagine someone gently massaging your knee, gently drawing their two lots of finger tips apart in front — and the bases of their two hands together at the back. Go with it: allow your knee to ease in that direction.

Notice how that simple thought eases the pain straight away.

The next step

When you next feel knee pain, stop what you’re doing for a moment and imagine those two hands doing that gentle drawing backwards. If you need to, sit down and use your hands to get the feel you got when you last did it again. Once you have some ‘feel’ for it, just use that new-found feel to help your knee work more comfortably, as you go back to what you were doing.

See what a difference it makes? Then remember to keep using it: the more you use it, the better your knees will get.

… and the next article

The next article, How to use your feet better to get rid of knee pain, was published in my newsletter, Back in Action on Wednesday 25^th March. You can read the article here.

You already know that the Tube Principle offers the best way to understand and fix your back. (If you don’t then you haven’t been reading this blog).

But does this Tube Principle seem so complicated that you don’t know where to start? Here’s the help you need.

Start here

First a question: have you followed my instructions in How do you work out what the new directions are? If you did, you will have already written down where the bends in your body-tube are and whether each is a forwards or a backwards bend.

If you haven’t followed those instructions yet, then here they are again.
Why not do it now?

Next

This post tells you what you need to do next. Here’s how you use the new directions you’ve just worked out. (Use them for each bend in your body-tube).

Which bend do you start with? Start with your neck and then follow this sequence:—

1. neck bend
2. head bend
3. neck bend again
4. the next bend below your neck
5. keep going to the next bend down until you get to the end

A typical sequence would run:—

1. neck bend
2. head bend
3. neck bend again
4. chest bend
5. the bend in the small of your back
6. the bend in your hips

At each bend apply the Tube Principle rule and then move on.

How long do you spend on each bend?

Spend just long enough to become clear on what you want to happen at that bend. Once you’re clear on that, move on to the next bend. It may take as little as a second or as long as five minutes. Don’t look for results, just look for that clarity.

When you get to the end of the sequence, if it’s all clear to you, just go back to whatever you happen to be doing at the moment. If it’s not as clear as you would like it to be, go through the sequence again.

Keep your directions at each bend simple enough so that you can visualise them. As you become more practised at it, you can add more detail. If you get confused just simplify again.

That’s it really. Do you have any questions? Of course you do, so just ask the question. You can use the comments box or the “ask me a question” form in the sidebar to send me an email.

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.

(What a face! You really wouldn’t want to know me if I were normally like this

At least it’s impossible if you don’t know how to do it — and most people don’t know how to do it.

This first clip demonstrates the kind of thing that happens if someone with a bad stoop such as I was demonstrating makes a determined effort to straighten up.

Play the clip. Do you see how I end up very stiff and how my eyes go out of focus? I wouldn’t be any good for anything if that were how I straightened up.

In contrast, in this second clip, I’m doing it right.

So what was I doing in the second clip? I was freeing my neck. How was I doing it? Find out here. This article also teaches you how to do it yourself.

Ignorance is no excuse under the law.

Your body acts according to very precise laws. If you break ’em, you pay the consequences (and there’s nothing I can do to change that). What I can do is to teach you those laws. Once you understand them, you can begin to work in harmony with them. How will this help you let your neck be free?

Most people can’t let their neck be free because they’re trying to place it at a ‘correct’ angle. Trying to place your head at any particular angle is asking for trouble. It’s asking for trouble because the position of your head depends on what you’re doing with the muscles that hold it. When you ignore what you’re already doing and try to super-impose that ‘correct’ head position, you’re doing two different things at once. The result is more tension than you already had — not nice.

So stop trying to put your head in that ‘correct’ position. Let your head go wherever it wants — even if you don’t want it to be there. In my next post I’m going to tell you how you can go on to encourage your head to want to be in the same position that you want for it.

Understand the laws of your body and make them work for you instead of against you.

Good. Before we start to prepare the dish, we will need to assemble the ingredients. That’s what I’m doing in this post. In my next post, on Monday, we’ll start cooking up that free neck.

So what are the ingredients you need? I’m going to divide them into two groups:–

• The parts of your neck
• The other bits

First List of Ingredients: the parts of your neck

You need to distinguish three separate areas in your neck:–

1. Your head/neck joint. This is the joint between your head and the top of your neck. That’s easier to say than “Atlanto-occipital joint”, don’t you think?
2. Your neck itself
3. The very base of your neck, where it joins your back

1. Your head/neck joint

Your head/neck joint needs to be absolutely free, able to move at the touch of a feather.

2. Your neck

Your neck needs to be firm enough to support the weight of your head. It should not, however be cemented in place as most people’s necks are. Although your neck does naturally have a slight backward curve, most people pull it hard back into an over-accentuated curve. Other people have over-straight necks. Unfortunately, these over-straight necks are often even tighter than the strongly-pulled-back ones.

3. The base of your neck

A healthy neck usually includes a small forwards bend at it’s base, where neck flows into back. However, the base of most people’s necks includes a very pronounced forwards bend. This pronounced bend is, like the bend in the main part of your neck, also a symptom of extreme tightness and effort. This bend, which usually continues into the top of your back, is what gives you your stoop. Most people have a stoop — although it’s usually at least partly disguised by their sway back. Stoop and sway back together form that familiar S-bend that you can see in so many backs.

Second list of ingredients: the other bits

In addition to that first list of ingredients, you need to be aware of:–

4. Your throat.
5. Your tongue.
6. Your jaw.
7. Your palate.

4. Your throat

Your throat spans all three of the above areas. The central part of your throat is your voice-box or Adam’s apple. Your voice box is suspended in the middle of a web-like array of fine, strappy muscles. Some of these muscles attach downwards to your the top of your chest (the top of your breast bone and and your collar bones). Others attach upwards to your jaw and to the base of your skull.

5. Your tongue

Your tongue is partly suspended in the upper part of the web of muscle that converges on your voice box. It also connects with your jaw-bone and your palate.

6. Your jaw-bone

Your jaw-bone has strong chewing muscles that can pull it upwards toward your skull so that your lower teeth can meet your upper teeth in in many different upwards, forwards, backwards and sideways movements. A tense throat inevitably pulls down on your jaw bone as well as your head — a major contribution to that stiff neck.

7. Your palate

Most of your palate is just the bony roof of your mouth. The interesting part is the soft palate at the back. This is where the hard bone gives way to soft tissue. It ends in the familiar uvula that you can see hanging down at the back of the mouth if you look down someone’s throat.

We’ve already seen the same pattern in action in my last two posts:–

1. What happens if you treat your body as a tube? looked at the small of your back and your belly. We found out how the contortions you habitually perform there give you a sway back.
2. Getting rid of your hunchback looked at your chest. We found out why what you habitually do there gives you a stoop.

Now let me show you how to un-distort your hips and stop slumping.

What is happening to your hips?

There at the bottom of your torso, at your hips, you can feel that you’ve bone all the way around your back and sides — the only soft part of your hips is between your hip bones in front. So how do you distort your hips?

You distort your hips by tightening the muscles behind them. This tightening causes those big hip bones to splay out. In front, between your two hip bones, your muscles slacken and your hips widen. When that happens, your guts tend to spill out in front.

As the tube model predicts, this slackening and widening in front causes your body to crumple forward so that your hips roll back and the upper part of your body drops forwards into a slump. Quite apart from being unsightly, this distortion of your body-tube easily becomes a cause of much pain.

How does this distortion cause pain?

This distortion of your body-tube means that you end up having to strongly over-tighten muscles in the bottom of your back. If you strongly engage the muscles at the base of your spine to try to stabilise your back in this way, the great effort involved puts the muscles into spasm, giving you a bad bout of acute back pain. As so often happens with habitual reactions, this one only makes your back weaker, tighter and less stable. Go figure.

How do you stabilise and strengthen this part of your back?

Since the habitual reaction really doesn’t work, we need a better way. The tube model tells us what that better way is. You need to allow the muscles at the back of your hips to ease, allowing the back of your hips to widen. As that happens, your hip bones stop splaying out: they rotate so that, at the front, the space between your hip bones becomes a little narrower. Your muscles there at the front then join in and help to pull you together in front. That also stops your guts from spilling out in front. Your body-tube straightens and you now have a strong, firm platform for the upper part of your body to sit on.

When this is working just so, your hips become an extremely stable power-house. That’s the power-house you need not only to stand and sit straight and easily but also to run and jump with ease.

Once again, you can see how important it is to learn to apply the tube principal. I’ll be back with my next post on Friday, continuing this exploration of the tube principal.

A hunchback is a forward bend in the top of your back and a caved-in chest. The hunched back is narrowed and the caved-in front of your chest is splayed out sideways. How do you correct problem? Before you can correct the problem, you need to know what to allow to change.

Here’s what you allow. (Remember the word ‘allow’: if you ‘do’ it you will do it wrong. If you allow, you’re allowing your body to do what it always wanted to do. You’re allowing your body to ignore the insistence of your habit. You’re allowing your body to stop splaying out your chest and hunching your back.)

Allow your hunched back to widen and open out so that the sides of your chest ease forwards and the front of your chest narrows. As you do, you’ll gradually realise that your hunchback is beginning to straighten and your neck is no longer poking forwards so much.

But habits don’t give up easily.

Your habit will always fight a rear-guard action.

Once your habit’s insistence that what you are doing is wrong gets over-ruled, it will fall back to a different way to try and persuade you. Your habit will tell you that what you’re allowing is not what you think it is, that you’re confused and headed off in the wrong direction. Don’t believe those thoughts and feelings that your habit brings up, just carry on allowing your body-tube to un-bend.

Don’t believe me? Then try the opposite

If you don’t believe that allowing the front of your chest to narrow will straighten you out, then try the opposite. Deliberately splay your chest out sidewise some more and watch your head drop and your neck poke forwards.

See what I mean?

Your next step

Actually the above is advanced fine tuning. Starting to get rid of your hunch-back is actually simpler than that. What you need to do to is:-

1. Start by reading this article about stooping.
2. Then follow the steps I give you at the bottom of that article.

So what am I talking about? Imagine your body from the tops of your legs to the top of your head as a tube. You’d like it to straight and long, wouldn’t you? In fact it bends and sticks out in places making you shorter than you’d like. Your belly sticks out and so does your neck — and your upper back has a stoop.

What would you have to do to a straight tube to make it bend like that? On the in-side of the bend, the tube would either buckle or splay out sideways. That’s because you have less space vertically so the material of the tube has to either squash up or spread out horizontally.

What about the outside of the tube. That would be either stretched very thin or narrow down at the bend. That’s because you have to make the material of that part of the tube cover a greater length. To do that, it must become either thinner or narrower.

What I’ve just described is exactly what happens to your body.

Let’s take, for example your lordosis (sway back). Don’t have a sway back? Try putting your hand on the small of your back. Notice how it’s hollowed out? It’s not called the small of your back for nothing. And what’s on the other side, in front, why that’s your protruding belly, my friend.

Let’s do an experiment

Let’s see what we can do about your sway back and your protruding belly. If my tube analysis is correct, then your sway back is too wide and your protruding belly is too narrow. Let’s see what happens if you use your power of thought to encourage that to change.

For this is to work it’s vital that you don’t deliberately try to do the things I’m going to ask you to think. Just think them, imagine them, intend them but don’t do them.

Let’s start with the belly. I want you to think of it opening out and spreading sideways. Yes, I know, that’s exactly what you don’t want to let it do but bear with me and try the experiment.

Sit on an upright dining chair for the experiment. Don’t lean back in the chair. Now, as your belly spreads sideways, so your sides are able to move backwards a little. And the small of your back is able to narrow and firm up. So think of all that happening: your belly spreading sideways, back and around to your lower back which narrows and firms up.

Do you notice something? Do you notice how you’re beginning to sit taller? Feel your back. Notice how it’s flattened itself. Feel your belly. That too has flattened itself a little. Hallelujah!

A final word of warning

If you’d like to repeat this experience, make sure you don’t try and do it. It won’t work. It won’t work because you’ll do all wrong things. Instead, repeat the experiment exactly as I’ve set it out.

Let me know how you get on.