Reasoned Considerations

Are everyday movements interesting?

A Wellbeing Improver brought the following to her session. She is experiencing pain when she opens a carton of milk with her right hand. She described her elbow as being overactive and said that it was doing too much. She linked the doing too much to pain in her shoulder and in her wrist. Following this explanation and the demonstration of the activity of opening a carton of milk, several interesting points came up. I will only expand on three of them.

When does the thinking process begin?

One of the first questions I asked Wellbeing Improver was where does your thinking process begin when you want to perform an activity?

When I want to unscrew the top of the milk carton

What about before that?

When I bend down to get the carton out of the fridge

What about before that?

I don’t know!

What about the relationship of your head/neck and your body in movement? As D. Weed says the poise of the head in relation with the body in movement is the key to freedom and ease of motion.

In a lesson, I start by observing that relationship and the ideas that drive that relationship.

How do you open a milk carton before you open it?

During our interaction I observed Wellbeing Improver and had a sense that she was opening the milk carton before she had ever done so.

Indeed, as soon as she wants to, as soon as she has the desire to unscrew the top, up goes the elbow and everything goes wrong!. It’s like she has her head in the clouds and she embarks on some ring road, some shortcut, which bypasses her thinking process and leads to some movement automatism she does not even consider.

The question is, is such a shortcut helping her or is it getting in her way? She will have to answer that question for herself.

Can opening a milk carton be an interesting everyday activity?

Wellbeing improver explained why she is going off in her mind somewhere: opening a milk carton is not very interesting and I do it the way I always do.

It sounds like the activity opening a milk carton is boring and does not register any longer. This is, because according to F.M. Alexander, we have become indifferent:

Unfortunately, we have been taught that all the ordinary, most necessary, and therefore most oft-repeated acts of life should be automatic and unconscious; for this reason they have become indifferent. (Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, p. 198)

Now let’s say we perform any activity, such as opening a milk carton, every time AS IF IT WAS THE FIRST TIME? This would require staying in the present and reasoning things out. It would also mean that automatism does not really have its place when we move and that each movement would be an experiment. We would not know the results beforehand and would allow ourselves to consider several choices. This would make carrying out an activity interesting – even fascinating - and certainly not the way I always do and the performance of an activity would depend on the present circumstances.

What happened when she performed her activity again?

Wellbeing Improver carried out her activity one more time and her movement was different, and she looked different: there was more space between the neck and the shoulders, her upper body was more open, her shoulders not so up, her face was more relaxed.

She felt more in control of her movement and that she had given herself space. She also noticed that she moved her arm differently. Her movement was easy and fluid. As a bonus, she noticed that she did not experience any pain: it had gone away.

She acknowledged:

This moves me forward. My sessions have made such a difference in the way I move.

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∞ Everyday life: screwing or unscrewing the top of a milk bottle or a carton of juice

I am the superhero of my body

I am the superhero of my body announced a Wellbeing Improver when she came in after a previous session with a grin on her face. She had more to say:

I have superpowers!
Since last time, when I notice the pain in my right lower back, I think about the relationship of my head/neck with my body, and about the poise of my head. When I think about that, there is more flexibility in my neck and there is something that flows all down along my back. I still have niggly pains; however, I move better.
I am delighted and I feel like I have superpowers! I like this a lot and I like the fact this thinking helps me with movements I do every day. There is nothing out of the ordinary.

The Alexander Technique does not teach you anything new

Wellbeing Improver’s conclusion ties in with what Frank Pierce Jones says about the Alexander Technique

(…) the Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new to do. It teaches you how to bring more practical intelligence in what you are already doing; how to eliminate stereotyped responses; how to deal with habit and change.

To start with, a lot of difficulties

This Wellbeing Improver in her late 40s has had a few movement lessons (Alexander Technique) over a couple of years. As a surgeon, she works crazy hours and does not always find and take the time to look after herself, except when it all comes to a head.

When stressed, she experiences severe pain in the top of her back and in her lower back. She feels then that she has no other choice but to seek help when it is difficult to lie down, difficult to sit, difficult to turn over in bed, difficult to get in the car and very difficult to get out of the car. Jobwise, it is very uncomfortable to wear a lead apron.

As she said: All these difficulties get in the way of my wellbeing.

After her first lesson

After her first session, she experienced more flexibility and more fluidity in the relationship between her head/neck and body. The increased movement in this relationship helped with the discomfort at the top of her back and in the lower back.

She went away with more movement in her whole trunk and reported that she had noticed an immediate transformation : she could sit, lie in bed, turn over in bed, get in and out of her car more easily. There was improvement in her everyday life even though getting out of her car is still an issue.

According to F.M. Alexander in Man's Supreme Inheritence, this is how any movement is:

If the mechanical principle employed is a correct one, every movement will be made with a minimum effort.

Some more work (discussion and manipulation) at her shoulder (gleno-humeral joint) led her to realize a few things:

∞ Her movements at the gleno-humeral joints were less easy than the movement in her neck

∞ She had a tendency to fix her neck while moving her “shoulders”

∞ Little by little, throughout her session, her movements got easier

∞ She mentioned she could perceive different movements

Step by step by step by step

It is important to notice that Wellbeing Improver improved gradually. Although we move as a whole, she is also starting to disassociate the different parts of her body.

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∞ Superhero of my body!