"Everyone wants to be right but no one stops to consider if their idea of right is right."

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Past Articles:

Thinking with More of You

Starting at the Top

The Spine as a Compression Spring

We Don't Know Squat

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Get Out of Your Own Way:
When Your Idea of "Right" is Wrong

People come to me for lessons all the time with something very specific in mind. They want more freedom, better posture, fuller breathing, or more coordination. But to achieve these goals, or to "fix" the things they label as wrong, they think they need to learn more things to do on top of what they are already doing. Few people realize that they have the ability to take responsibility for themselves and attain all of these things by recognizing and inhibiting the small, unconscious habits that stand in the way of their goals. The only way they can achieve better posture, more freedom, and fuller breathing is by learning to view themselves differently—and non-judgmentally. In all these unique cases the lesson is often the same: students learn that they already have all the freedom and coordination they need, they just need to uncover it by peeling away at unnecessary habits

We are always coordinated, just sometimes not as efficiently as is our potential. We often are caught in the trap of considering posture as something to do on top of all of our habits, or as a checklist to complete. Learning Alexander Technique is essentially the opposite of this approach. It teaches us to seek out all we are doing that is unnecessary and eliminate it, releasing into the strength and adaptability that we are born with. This is difficult because in every aspect of our life—and as a result of conditioning in every other skill we have learned in the past—we have come to believe that hard work is the only way to achieve our goals.

The Alexander Technique, however, is about finding freedom and clarity of thought and allowing that to influence our movement. To really learn this technique we need to see what is free and how we are interfering with it. What is most challenging about this work is not learning the physical mechanics involved in moving through space with more freedom, but learning to adapt and involve our thinking and believing that this is enough to sustain the coordination.

I can think of an example with one particular student. We were working together to unlock and release her knees while standing. She believed that this was impossible because (like most of us) one of her legs is slightly shorter than the other; she was convinced that in order to release the knee on the longer leg, the shorter leg had to tighten and lock to support that release. As a result, she was also experiencing some corresponding tightness in her lower back, sacrum and glute area. As she struggled with "getting it" conceptually, she was discovering patterns of muscular holding; she experienced the feeling of tension traveling from one place to the next as she began to release, but defined each moment of retightening as failure and became frustrated with the whole process. She really wanted to allow her whole system to release, but she didn’t actually believe she could do it without falling down.

In the end what she discovered was that the way she responded to this change and challenge was the same way she experienced much of her life: going through and connecting a series of steps that she defined as "wrong" and then dwelling on them, forgetting to see the positive aspects of her progress. It was this habit of thought that inhibited her release of tension, and the overall coordination of her legs and lower back. She was holding on to preconceived ideas of how her legs and back worked, and was unable to look at them a little differently. She viewed the apparent stillness of standing as an activity that required very different coordination than movement, and as a result she held on for dear life to maintain "balance" as she stood there. I challenged her mentally and physically to incorporate the idea of slow-motion internal movement to stabilize and balance her in her standing position, to close the gap in her thinking between standing still and moving, and to stop thinking of them as completely different from each other.

Like this student, most of us envision stillness or posture as a place to hold onto, but this is a result of not fully considering ourselves and how alive we are. Even as we lie on the beach, in the grass at the park, or in our beds at night, there is a whole universe of balance going on within us. Our hearts beat, we breathe and digest, and our muscles constantly twitch ever so slightly. This is going on all the time; we have no choice in the matter. These internal, involuntary actions coexist with all the other movement choices we make for ourselves all day long.

Your thinking is interconnected with the rest of you; it registers in every part of you. Your thinking is also quick: in the snap of a finger, your thoughts have already made their way through your body and had a profound influence on it. So if you have a negative image of yourself or if you focus only on what you believe you can’t do, then you will indeed limit your own potential and leave yourself with fewer available choices at any given moment. We want to hold on to what we think we know and are often subconsciously resistant to new thoughts that may challenge our inventory of things that we "know." We are unconsciously so attached to our way of processing thought and moving that right at the beginning of learning a new skill we are interfering with our own freedom. If your desire is to change posture or movement habit you absolutely must address your thinking first.

- Kate Kobak

- F.M. Alexander

"When anything is pointed out, our only idea is to go from wrong to right. In spite of the fact that it has taken us years to get wrong we try to get right in a moment." 

- F.M. Alexander