When we see our reflection and notice that we are stooping over, when we feel a loss of balance or we feel stiff joints or start to suffer from back pain we often think its simply because we are aging or it’s because we are stressed or uncomfortable any many other reasons besides.
A man named F.M Alexander started a path of investigation which led him to question the inevitability of this, he came to the conclusion that the way we use our bodies, in fact the way we use our entire selves, mind and body is the root cause of many of the problems that we associate with stress, office furniture, aging and well….modern living.
If Alexander’s expression “the way we use ourselves” seems a little strange then we can reflect that a trainer or instructor might teach you to “use your legs” in a certain way say, perhaps asking you to place awareness on where your weight falls into your feet, Alexander talked of the “use of the self” instead of the “use of the legs (or hands)” because he came to realise that you have to address the whole person, this is not sentiment but reflects our interconnected nature.
Alexander discovered that we are better designed than we think, the patterns of what he called ‘good use’ are not something new that he invented but are something that most people had as infants, unfortunately these patterns have been obscured by newer unhelpful patterns, patterns that are unconsciously strengthened every time they are used.
People are often very surprised to find that the sensation they simply call their weight is in fact a sensation that in part arises from tension around joints and a tendency to pull themselves down, when they are freed from this pulling down habit they say that they feel lighter yet this is simply the wonderful experience of what Alexander called ‘good use‘, its not artificial or something new, its actually something already inside us that become lost. Of course the hardest thing to get rid of is the thing you don’t know is there, if we get used to a certain sensation of weight we simply accept it as normal.
Alexander dedicated his life to the exploration of what happens after infancy when we lose our poise and balance and ease of movement, he observed that in nature animals rarely follow patterns of use that result in bad backs, even a household cat rarely does anything that results in discomfort or compromises its slinky fluidity.
Look at the effortless poise of the infant above
Alexander’s explorations led him to conclude that humans have evolved an ability to override instinctive patterns of movement, this flexibility means we can do amazing things that a cat cannot like learn to dance, ride a bicycle or play the drums, activities that nature did not anticipate and that no cat can copy. However our great gift, our ability to reshape patterns of movement combined with our reactions to the stresses and strains of modern life can also work against us; our patterns of standing, sitting or movement can change in a way that compromises us and eventually results in crumpled posture, stiff necks, compromised walking patterns and worse.
An example is of course is “text neck” an unfortunate outcome of habits we have only recently learned as we have reshaped our bodies around our technology, but it’s nothing new, for decades office workers have suffer back pain from sitting at a desk all day.
One of the worst examples is the way young school children are scolded at school and told to keep still. It is absolutely natural that a child forced to sit in a chair for long periods starts squirming around, their bodies are quite literally rebelling at the unnatural imposition of being expected to sit still in a chair that was designed to be convenient to stack rather than having any ergonomic merit.
Ideally what we want is to be able to take advantage of our flexibility to play a violin or to pick strawberries and yet not corrupt healthy patterns of use. To see what I mean take a look at the man and his infant son below, they are both picking strawberries but they are using themselves completely differently.
Take a moment to see if you can spot some differences in the way that they are using themselves…
Here is one suggestion, the line of the mans back is more curved than infants and his head is pulled back so there is a noticeable ‘kink’ in his spine, an area of tension which also compromises the strength of his back.
There are many sources of information about safe bending for people suffering from back pain and following advice from a good source may help you change your patterns and may find that this satisfies your needs. However Alexander took it a lot further than this, I am sure we are all aware that simply copying the ‘shape’ of a person who is very poised may give you the same ‘shape’ but it does not give you the full benefits. The Alexander Technique is not the same as following health and safety guidance for protecting your back, it affects your patterns, mental and physical at a much deeper level.
In the western context Alexander really did discover something new, he was one of the first explorers in the area we now call somatics, however eastern practices have been around at lot longer and we so we find things in common, this is reassuring. The way I like to express it is that in the east and more recently in the west there have been different explorers of what we might call human potentiality; these explorers have different perspectives and character but they are all fishing around the same pond and finding that when we learn to stop unintentionally sabotaging the way our bodies are meant to move they actually work much better than we realised.