How to Use the Sense of Feeling

More analogy than guide...

Earlier this week I was teaching a friend from out of town. Carolina came for her lesson and we worked for about an hour. At the end, she was going to put on her hoodie and I stopped her; “Take your time putting it on so that you can feel your arms and back moving.”.

She stopped and slowly put on her hoodie. “Oh wow! The movement is so much more dynamic than I realised. Way more dynamic than a weight lifting class!”.

I let her ruminate on that while we walked across the street. She chatted away about this, that, and the other while I guided her past a house that had a motion activated yard ghost. As we walked up to it, it sprung into a scream and Carolina jumped about 10 feet.

I was extremely glad that I scared her.

Happy Halloween!

👻🧛🎃💀👻

To the Blogsss

I’ve written about the sense of feeling in the past and I think it’s time to do so AGAIN! If you haven’t read my post, You Can Be Sherlock Holmes, you might enjoy it. It will be a similar analogy to today’s post, but I think it takes multiple analogies to describe anything effectively.

So here’s another one!

The Problem At Hand

People come to the Alexander Technique for a variety of reasons. It may be because of back pain, TMJ, poor posture, or even performance anxiety. Sometimes folks come into a lesson because they feel totally fine and they’ve just heard good things about it through the grapevine.

That’s all great! But does that mean that I will be giving you a list of exercises to perform? Nope! I am far more interested in helping you develop a sense of kinesthesia so that you may have an improved sense of self and balance.

So what exactly is this sense of kinesthesia?

Kinesthesia: noun

a sense mediated by receptors located in muscles, tendons, and joints and stimulated by bodily movements and tensions

also : sensory experience derived from this sense

As children, we are taught that we have 5 senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. You might think that the sense of touch and kinesthesia are the same, but they really are not. The sense of touch exclusively refers to the sensory information you get from making tactile contact with an object. It is different from the information you get from feeling a joint move or - say - the expansion of the diaphragm.

As we develop in childhood, we develop all of our senses slowly by experiencing the world. These experiences help shape us and provide a foundation for adulthood. For some of us, the sense of kinesthesia develops quite well and we can live healthy and productive lives without issue.

But oftentimes we develop injuries or are asked to live extremely sedentary lives and the development and use of our sense of kinesthesia takes a backseat. When this occurs, our sense of balance begins to suffer and we slowly stop feeling what we are and how we are functioning. Learning to train the sense of feeling is a foundational component of learning to improve your sense of balance and move with greater suppleness and ease.

Carolina’s experience of movement while putting on her hoodie occured because we took the time to train the sense of feeling.

OK John, how the F*CK does that work?!?

The Sense of Hearing

I’d like to give you an analogy to demonstrate how we train the sense of feeling with the Alexander Technique. It’s about the best analogy I’ve cooked up to date. Hopefully you find it meaningful!

Espresso Macchiato

Imagine that you are walking into a cafe. As you enter the cafe, you can hear all of the people at their tables talking. You cannot hear anything specific to any one conversation, but you certainly hear a lot of stuff and things.

This general sense of hearing is natural. It is critical to your experience. And dismissing it by yammering away in your head about the 20 things that you have to do today will block you from noticing what is happening.

That is, you are missing an opportunity to hear.

After you have grabbed your coffee, you sit at a table. You can still hear the general chatter of the cafe but you know that you have a choice. At any moment, you can attempt to eavesdrop on a table and listen to what the people are talking about.

Without putting any effort into the switch, you simply choose to hear that the next table is talking about a graphic design project (yeah… I live in Brooklyn). You listen for a bit, but you can also hear the barista call out someone else’s name. At that exact moment, you might lose track of the graphic design conversation, but that’s not a problem; you just allow you attention to go back to the table and follow along.

What you DON’T do is interrupt the table and ask them to repeat what they were saying. THAT WOULD BE WEIRD. If you missed a moment, you just have to pick up the conversation as it’s happening.

If you wanted to, you could eavesdrop on many tables. Each time you switch your attention, you will lose track of the table that you have abandoned, but you will not lose the general sense of the cafe chatter. So not only can your sense of hearing function at a specific level, it can function at a general one.

And neither of these levels requires ANY muscular exertion (as far as the functioning of the sense is concerned… life does require exertion).

This analogy very closely tracks with how FM Alexander asks us to train our sense of feeling. It also helps me understand the meaning of the directions in the Alexander Technique and the meaning of the mysterious phrase, “altogether and one after the other.”.

Tying to Directions

Allow the neck to be free

So that the head may balance forward, back, and up on top of the neck

So that the spine may lengthen and the torso expand into volume

So that the knees may be away from the hips

So that the ankles may free and the feet expand through to the heels and toes.

Allow the neck to be free

So that the head may balance forward, back, and up on top of the neck

So that the spine may lengthen and the torso expand into volume

So that the shoulders may expand away from one another

So that the elbows are free

So that the wrist may free and the hand expand through the thumb and fingers.

Now, that little list of directions should take you a full minute to read and feel through. You can think of each line of the directions as a table at the cafe. If you skip the step of feeling your whole self at a general level, you will be able to jump your sense of feeling around and feel things in specific places. But if you do this, you will lose a sense of context.

Staying general with your sense of feeling and slowly adding specific areas of feeling into your sense of your whole is a reliable method for building your sense of kinesthesia and balance. The cafe analogy breaks down because at the cafe, everyone is talking about something completely unrelated to the table next to them. In your case, the tension in your neck is very much related to the sensations in your arms or legs. It’s all interconnected and you’re learning to take the time to sense it.

Get In Touch

If you’re in NYC, you may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com.

If you’d like to book any lesson time with me, you can find my booking link here.