Lying Down Part 6
One Down One Up
Happy Sunday!
This week has been an interesting mixture of lessons. At this point, I’ve got roughly 15 unique students coming in for lessons. Each one comes in accordance with their own needs and has their own evolving understanding of themselves and the Alexander Technique.
Naively, you might think that this would mean that some students are “advanced” so they do more complex feats of movement while the “beginners” are doing rudimentary exercises. While that might be true for learning certain things like language and science, learning the Alexander Technique is more like learning to make fresh pasta; the ingredients are simple but the technique takes a lifetime of skill to refine. For most of my students this week, the main theme of the week was learning to sense your relationship with the earth.
AKA How Does Gravity Feel?
Asking someone how gravity feels is a bit of an insane question… at first. It’s extremely open ended and can leave a person feeling lost. At best, someone will report that they feel heavy or stiff when they first meet me, but oftentimes it’s just not even in a person’s awareness.
I’m interested in talking and sensing gravity because that is a fundamental ingredient in how we balance. If all we ever do is try to sense the feeling of tension in our muscles and figure out what is too strong and too weak we will quickly fall down a rabbit hole of bodily micromanagement. Learning to balance with gravity can bring a great sense of simplicity to this whole business of learning poise and feeling better.
One Down One Up
As an experiment, I’d like you to take a hand and gently press it into a hard surface (like a table top). If you have a relatively soft wrist and elbow, you will feel some force traveling through your arm and up into the shoulder (you might even feel this in the neck). This press from the hand will feel like the table top is pressing back into your arm with equal force.
This equal opposition is happening all the time as we stand, sit, lie down, and do all of our normal daily activities. When we begin to exert extraneous force upon ourselves, we will sense this in various ways. In past posts, I have described this as stiff weight, dead weight, and buoyant weight, but I thought it would be fun to share a few other insights from my students.
Swimming Salmon Vs Hot Garbage
The other day, I asked a new student to lie down quietly. I placed hands on his ribs and did nothing. After a few moments, I asked him how he felt. He told me that he felt like he had salmon swimming all inside him.
It was an astute observation. From my perspective, it felt as if he was jumping about internally; constantly and subtly squirming. Those salmon were definitely trying to go upstream!
I asked him to just ask for a little calm and have a rest. It was Friday and most folks are pretty spent by the end of the week. Within a minute, the salmon stopped swimming, his eyes got heavy, and he released a big yawn. His torso was no longer trying to jump off of the table and he found some balance.
Shortly after that, I had another student come in. We went through a similar activity. She was fairly tired from the end of the week and when she lay down I recounted the story of the swimming salmon to her. Her take was that everything internally felt like hot garbage; which we decided is either a punk band or a Garbage cover band.
In the case of hot garbage, the weight of the head, ribs, hips, and legs felt as if they were all pressing quite heavily into the table. I gave her the following image and we got to work:
In the image above, the green arrows represent the weight making contact with the floor and the yellow arrows represent the natural upwards force that you get from the floor pressing back up into you. If you are allowing your neck to be free of tension, it will not feel like it is pressing down towards the floor at all and will instead feel like it is suspended between the head and upper back.
While this is a nice idea, we can all find ourselves out of balance in some way. In the case of the swimming salmon, there were part of the back that were subtly and perpetually attempting to lift off of the table. In the case of HOT GARBAGE, the head and back were pressing down extra. I think this extra press happens when something in the person says, “I’m DONE!!!” and collapses to force rest.
Do the Wrong Thing
One of the simplest ways we can figure out if we are in balance or not is to purposefully and gently press ourselves into the table during a lie down. If you do this on your own, I’d like you to first press your head into the book a bit and see if this grips up your neck and upper back (heck the head press might even force the hip to grip). Then, I would like you to press your upper back into the table and see what that does to your head and neck.
If you tend to be full of swimming salmon, you likely just need to let yourself have a big dose of quiet, calm stopping. That can be tricky for some folks but stopping is the answer most of the time.
If you tend to be full of HOT GARBAGE, you likely need to draw attention to the small yellow arrows drawn along the front of the body above. When we feel extra heavy, we can gently stop and draw attention to how our back relates to our front. This effectively is a way to allow yourself to feel how gravity is pushing back up into you…and flowing all the way through your whole structure.
Does This Resonate With You?
These blogs are hopefully a way of helping you better understand yourself, how you function, and why things sometimes feel off in a general way. If these posts are helpful, I encourage you to subscribe, leave a comment, ask a question, or check out the archives for my previous articles. I like hearing from everyone and I’ll do my best to respond as I can.
Get In Touch
If you’re in NYC, you may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com.
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