How to Draw Attention to a Part
A Very Important and Subtle Skill!
It’s finally here! A delayed blog!
I’ve been busy with family fun and stuff so I thought it best to wait and write a decent blog today. Hopefully you took the break to do something fun if you managed to get one!
The Obligatory Blog Pre-Amble
Today’s topic is very much related to my last 3 articles on How to Allow the Neck to Free. In those articles, I refer to roughly 5 landmarks within your head and neck that you should be able to quietly feel. If you have a sense of these you will have a chance of allowing your neck to free so that the helicopter of your head can balance with ease.
I say CHANCE because I have not given too many description on how to draw attention to these parts.1
Drawing Attention
How we develop and use our sense of feeling is a HUGE part of the Alexander Technique. I’ve told you many times “No Pulling. No Pushing.” in this blog, but WHY?!? What exactly are we looking to avoid?
The single biggest source of persistent pain/tension in ourselves coms from the helicopter of our head “landing” on the spine with downward force. Learning to soften the neck and feel the helicopter flying over the fulcrum of the atlanto-occipital joint is CRITICAL. This gives us a feeling of POISE.
Unfortunately, if there is pain elsewhere in the body, we need to be able to investigate this area.
Honing Your Sherlock
Investigating something like the upper back, hip, or even traversing through the 5 landmarks of the head is possible! In general, there are 2 ways to investigate a part:
Fly your helicopter and “stay with the pilot” while you gently allow information from the part to find you.
Send the sense of feeling into the part and crash land the helicopter onto the neck.
Ideally, you will learn to tend to use 1 more than 2. However, if you can tend to correctly identify the difference between 1 and 2 then you are making TERRIFIC strides in your understanding of Alexander’s Technique.
What Does This Look Like?
Sometimes I will refer to Type 2 attention as a game of Whack-A-Mole. I’ve taken a bit of time to make some DUMB DRAWINGS to illustrate what this attention game actually is.
Let’s take a gander at a person that is feeling Under Pressure.
Ugh. He feels so blah!
Fortunately, this Bad Dude has been taking the time to STOP, dissolve with expansion, and think about his neck freeing and helicopter flying. He does all of this with a ‘What is this?’ attitude of curiosity and starts to feel like this:
Nicely done! The helicopter is starting to fly and things feel more balanced in the head. But what about that damned stuck torso?
Type 2 Thinking
Flying this helicopter is a relatively NEW experience for our Bad Dude. If our Bad Dude gets a little too obsessive and impatient about that heavy torso, he’ll start to bully his sense of feeling into the torso and either end up back in his frown (pic 1) or like this:
In the case above, all is not lost. Our Bad Dude has lost his head, but he may have felt something slightly new in the torso in the process. I would count this as a win in the long run as long as our Bad Dude can feel that the helicopter has crashed a bit.
If our Bad Dude ends up back at Square 1, all is not lost! He can simple go through a similar process that he had in the past to re-discover Fig 2.
Type 2 Dangers
If you believe that you exclusively use Type 1 or Type 2 thinking, you’re in trouble. Everyone makes mistakes - yes even the best Alexander Technique teachers - and everyone has a tendency to slip into Type 2 thinking. All it takes is having a little bit of a desire to GET SH*T RIGHT.
So personally, I do not fear ending up in fig 1, 32. What I fear for anyone doing this work is that they become rushed and obsessed with movement and fail to even recognize that they have slipped from fig 2 or fig 3 back to fig 1.
I very much want you to be able to sense when these transitions happen.
Type 1 Thinking
So let’s go back to fig 1 and consider what this process looks like using Type 1 thinking.
Our Bad Dude finds himself down again. He’s got enough practice under his belt that he has a sense of how to STOP, dissolve with expansion, and think about his neck freeing and helicopter flying. He does all of this with a ‘What is this?’ attitude of curiosity and starts to feel like this:
Success again!
He can feel that his torso is stuck but he’s spent enough time flopping back down with Type 2 thinking that he has decided to NOT do Type 2 thinking. He will REFUSE to force his sense of feeling into his torso and bully it into balance.
Instead, he doubles down and STOPS, dissolves with expansion, and thinks about his neck freeing and helicopter flying. He then quietly adds the thought “I’ll continue flying, but I wonder what is below my head?”.
In time - and with several more blog posts on the back - something happens to our Bad Dude and:
Generalizing This Story
Ok, so you can’t take this example super literally. After all, I didn’t draw a neck (or anything remotely anatomical) nor did I draw any of the anatomical landmarks I say you’ll need to fly your helicopter. This has been done on purpose.
I would expect that you would need to go through a process of learning Type 1 thinking just to get a sense of the 5 landmarks of the head. If you can do that, you really have all of the tools necessary to learn this technique. You’ll need to keep on keepin’ on and discover stuff (and things) in your chest / hips / legs / arms / VOICE. But it should become subtler and you should start to feel suppler along the way.
Thanks for Your Readership
This is post 97 of this little blog project of mine. I’m very much hoping these posts give you and my students helpful clues as to how this technique all fits together. It’s a damn simple tool in the end, but the hardest things to learn in life are often the simplest of things.
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In either case, you have my deep thanks for reading.
Get In Touch
If you’re in NYC, you may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com.
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I’m quite happy when one of my students arrives at fig 2.