Intelligence in Action
Impossible Posture & the Problem of Pain
by Graeme Lynn, GCFP, CSTAT
A common misconception about posture is that it exists! A second common misconception about posture is that it matters! A third is that you can do something directly about it!
Firstly, responding to gravity is never actually static, as the word 'posture' implies. That is why 'acture', coined by Moshe Feldenkrais, connoting the always-dynamic response to gravity, is a preferable term.
Secondly, no amount of correcting a static pose can significantly affect what a person does the other 99.9% of the time when they are active. In fact, it is not useful to instruct or show someone how to stand 'correctly' (even according to the so-called 'plumb-line' rule, which instruction is not essentially different from our teachers' admonishments and is, in fact, equally misguided!), and expect that to have any lasting effect on a person's active life. This is because state-specific learning is ineffective. That is, learning is not effective and lasting change if it pertains only under specific circumstances - in this case, following instruction about the way to coordinate yourself in a static pose only.
Thirdly, the belief that you can correct the way you stand (or move) and accurately know whether you are correct is downright wrong. If you could in fact correct the way you stand (or move) by adjusting yourself you would already have done so because you would already be feeling that your movement or coordination is wrong. And you cannot sustain any corrections that you may make because your 'wrong feeling' or faulty self-sensing undermines your will to consistently adopt a new form. This was F. M. Alexander's critical discovery more than a hundred years ago - and the conundrum in which he found himself - when he was attempting to correct his own chronic 'use' problem. And the discovery changed his life. Alexander found, through observing himself in a mirror and trying to correct his movement by doing something, that it was impossible for him to rightly and truly do so! - because the very faculty upon which he depended to make his adjustments - his self-sensing - was giving him wrong information.
The self-senses are the senses that tell us about ourselves: balance, joint articulation, felt movement, tissue pressure, tissue tension, and pain. (These are to be distinguished from the senses that tell us about the world: vision, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, and the senses of heat and cold.) These senses are inextricably interrelated with the movement function (and the function of coordination altogether) in the nervous system via a cybernetic-like feedback circuit. That is, movement impacts self-sensing which impacts movement and so on. And that is how self-sensing can go wrong when something goes wrong with movement. Movement and coordination can err because of reflex responses to stress, injury, surgery, disease, and traumas of every kind, and because of lifestyle habits, emotional patterning, character strategies, core beliefs, poor nutrition, faulty development, imitation in youth, and other such factors which instigate faulty patterns of doing (or of movement and coordination) - and thus of feeling (or self-sensing).
So, Alexander discovered that it is not fruitful to correct 'doing' alone (standing 'straight', for instance), but that he had to first re-educate his feeling, his self-sensing. This took him years of self-study. And this is why not only 'posture' but chronic or recurrent pain - which, like poor 'posture', often results from habitual coordination that is not harmonious with one's physical structure - is such a tricky problem, because it too cannot be resolved directly.
If a person knew how to move correctly he would already be doing so. If that is not the case, then he has to learn again to feel, that is, sense how and what he is doing. And it must be realized that a person with a pain, posture or 'use' problem is really not presently sensing clearly what he is doing because, if he were, he would already not be doing the thing that is harmful or problematic. This paradoxical profundity, which was Alexander's discovery, is not generally understood and not accounted for in conventional treatment of functional problems, whether they be stiffness or tension, back or neck pain, inflexibility and clumsiness, arthritis or joint disorders, voice or breathing difficulties, postural or spinal problems, post-traumatic or post-surgical limitations, myofascial or musculoskeletal pain, and so on. And that is why conventional treatment is largely ineffective in these areas.
Physiotherapy, fitness instruction, and the like, which often teach models of 'good posture' and 'right movement', are part of the conventional medical model. Though there is great value in allopathic medicine and its associated modalities, their application is not universally effective in the field of human health. Self-sensing and movement, or the sensory-motor functions, are not in their field of expertise, fundamentally because the sensory-motor process is an holistic process, involving the body as a totality and the mind-brain-body as a totality, whereas the medical paradigm denies the existence, or at least the importance, of the mind and treats the body as a sum of its parts.
Alexander discovered that his self-sensing was unreliable and that it was the very thing upon which he depended to move well, which was thereby impossible. Good movement and coordination (which rely on the dynamic response to gravity) remain impossible for anyone until they re-educate their self-sensing.
Teachers of the Alexander Technique re-educate a person's self-sensing through instruction and with their hands, which hands are uniquely trained to sense subtleties of movement and tension. The teacher's expertise is in his or her ability to best organize or coordinate, through refined and gentle manipulation, the pupil's movement, coordination, and response to gravity via an ongoing address to the pupil's core dynamic around which all movement is organized. ('Manipulation' here indicates the strategy of touch and handling and in no way implies brusqueness, force or psychological coercion.) The Alexander teacher guides the person through primarily gentle active movements while always finding and facilitating the easier way, which easier way is rooted in the teacher's deep understanding of and feel for this core dynamic. At the same time, the teacher enlists the individual's innate capability to attend to him- or herself and to become aware of habitual patterning, and, through this gentle guidance, stimulates the person's sensory-motor self-exploration and growing capacity for freedom and self-control of the physical mechanism. The teacher works to ease out chronic action of muscles that are doing too much and coax the appropriate degree of activity from muscles that are under-used. Through thus guided simple activities such as sitting, standing, lying down, bending, reaching, and walking, the pupil learns to free him- or herself from misuse patterns and allow natural poise and balance to re-emerge. In time, the person becomes able to generalize the practices and principles learned so that lightness, ease, and freedom of movement become the common experiences of everyday life.
'Acture', the always-dynamic response to gravity, and movement are thus effectively, and indirectly, re-educated. The grace and poise that are our natural inheritance are consciously and intelligently re-created. Through practice, one unlearns faulty habits and relearns right use of oneself in action. A 'virtuous spiral' of self-improvement is initiated.
The Alexander Technique is a unique and uniquely effective method of somatic or sensory-motor re-education, founded on the principles (and values) of self-awareness, embodiment, holism, learning or self-realization, and transcendence of habit or freedom. These principles, which emerged from Alexander's profound and persistent practical self-exploration, establish the Alexander Technique as good philosophy and a primary discipline of good health. Because of these its profound foundations it has implications that exceed its humble purposes. That is why Alexander believed that the Work, as he called it, could serve to reverse the 'vicious' downward spiral of civilization, could indeed serve humankind's conscious evolution. His work has in fact had a significant positive impact, not only in ordinary people's active lives, but also through its influence on some of the most renowned scientists, educators, thinkers, psychologists, and artists of the twentieth century.
To schedule lessons, please contact Graeme in Toronto, Ontario, at 416-964-7026, or click to email.