Intelligence in Action
Relaxation in Action
by Graeme Lynn, GCFP, CSTAT
STRESS and stress-related pain, illness and dis-ease take people to doctors more than any other ailments. The neuromuscular component of the stress response is the reflex – that is, the inevitable and unconscious – rising of muscle tonus of every muscle in the body, that is, increased over-all muscular tension, something we can all feel when ‘under stress’.
There are methods of relaxation, exemplified by massage, wherein a therapist releases the parts of the passive body, successively, gradually removing the tension throughout. Not to undervalue the pleasures and many therapeutic benefits of massage but, like all such methods of relaxation defined by passive, partial, piecemeal release, the patterns of action remain unchanged: that is, when one rises to go on with one’s life, one has no means whereby to practice the relaxation in action. And so, the stress-bound problems return.
The Alexander Technique is uniquely founded on the potential of conscious freedom of the physical mechanism inaction. This freedom is rooted in the realization that there are higher human faculties – namely, attention, intelligence, and intention - which we all can use creatively and responsibly and which can guide our actions, specifically that arena of human action involving physical coordination, movement, self-sensing, handling ‘tools’, and the ongoing and dynamic response to gravity – the sensory-motor functions.
Alexander discovered that there is a senior functional pattern or which all other sensory-motor functions are subordinate: he called this the ‘primary control’. He found that the primary control governs the organization of our physical mechanics, and that attention, intelligence, and intention can be rightly used to master it. The primary control is the dynamics and coordination of the relationship of the head with the neck and of the head-neck relationship with the back and, via the centre, with the rest of the body. Alexander found that if, in the course of movement, we consciously release ourselves out of our centre and upwards from our support along the axis of the spine, the head freely poised and the breathing unrestricted, any action can be performed with a minimum of strain and a maximum of effectiveness, that is, with ease and poise. By learning, over time, to orient our higher faculties, first in an intensive way and then randomly and artfully, to the primary control of action rather than to the parts, the parts find their rightful place in the whole.
The familiar joke about the centipede’s bewilderment when asked to pay attention to each of its legs as it crawls is like our trying to pay attention to the parts of ourselves in action (or relaxing parts of ourselves passively). The primary control organizes and frees action centrally and singly. It is one complex, as each of us is one whole. The primary control ultimately involves the whole of us. That is, as we begin to free the first ‘link in the chain’ of the primary control – the head-neck relationship – we go one to become responsible for more and more of the ‘chain’, which further serves the freedom of the head-neck relationship. And as we come to master more and more of the chain, our control and sense of ourselves as a whole becomes more and more refined, in an ever-advancing ‘virtuous circle’ of learning and self-mastery.
Thus, one learns to free the body centrally, and more and more over time, first in the circumstance of a lesson in the Technique – which involves such simple actions as sitting, lying down, bending, reaching, and walking – and then, in more complex situations and actions. A lesson in the Technique is rather like a lesson in the piano, with its early emphasis on scales and studies, and subsequent advancement to musical compositions. The significant difference is that few of us have a natural talent for the piano, whereas each of us, by the fact of our being our bodies, has a natural talent for the coordinated action of and as our bodies. Each of us, therefore, can learn a self-released manner of use. Indeed, the human nervous system is the most advanced learning mechanism on the planet. The greater part of our nervous system is concerned with sensory-motor function. So, everyone is a natural student of the Alexander Technique, or of the right and free use of the body in action.
Thus, through study of the Alexander Technique, one can learn relaxed control in response to the challenging circumstances of daily life and thus obviate stress-related problems before they arise.
To schedule lessons, please contact Graeme in Toronto, Ontario, at 416-964-7026, or click to email.