You Will Never Know How This Works
And don't believe anyone that claims to know...
Last week I shared a post about the Whispered ‘Ah’. I think it’s quite possibly the single most important Alexander Technique procedure to practice because vocalising exposes habitual strain in a way that I certainly can’t ignore. It’s also the procedure that I can best describe without the aid of animations…
Where’d I’d like to go in the coming weeks and months is a general description of how joints can open (and what I mean by that) and how you can use various positions of mechanical advantage to help you find ways of being less compressed during the everyday acts of writing emails and doing the dishes. But before I get into the weeds of all of that, I’d like to leave you with a high level thought that helps me:
You will never know how to soften and expand.
WHY ARE YOU WRITING ABOUT SOFTENING AND EXPANDING IF YOU CAN’T KNOW HOW TO DO IT?
That’s a good question! Part of what got me into the mess of trying to explain the Alexander Technique to you is that I have to explain something if I’m going to be a teacher. The other part of this paradoxical mess is that there IS a way to change!
So rather than explain to you how we can’t know how to soften and expand and should never even attempt to do the impossible, I’ll instead keep things simple and explain…
How Does A Muscle Contract?
In order for a muscle to contract, the brain sends a signal to the muscle and the muscle responds. There’s a lot of science behind it and I found a nice YouTube video on the topic. If you don’t have the 12 minutes to watch it, he cuts to a synopsis at the 11 minute mark. But that’s the gist of it.
This means that all habitual muscle stiffness is a dormant signal running from the brain to the muscle saying GOOOOOO!!!!!! The implication is that if you want to relax a muscle, the brain must stop sending a signal to activate and this stopping of a signal will initiate a chemical process that relaxes the muscle.
The long and the short of it is that all you must do is STOP and things will change.
Do You Know How to Stop?
If you haven’t guessed from the title of today’s article, I believe that the answer is no and that it will always be no. If I or anyone knew exactly what was required in a moment to create this wonderful full STOP and guarantee that unnecessary tension never crept into your life…well… then that person would have written one perfect and short blog article and you would never have needed to read anything else again. But if you can not worry about all of that for a moment, I think this information does liberate me in a sense…
You never have to make yourself relax a muscle.
The best that you can do is look out and ask if a region can do less work. But there is no direct command that you can give yourself that makes muscles relax.
It’s more of an undoing that a relaxation.
What Does Undoing Feel Like?
If you watched the YouTube video above, you would have seen the animation of the muscle fibres contracting. As the fibres contract, they become shorter. And as these muscle fibres tend to connect to bones, they will pull those bones closer together.
If contraction is making muscles shorter and pulling bones closer to one another, then to NOT contract will create muscular length and allow for more space between the bones. This process of adding length gives me the feeling that my muscle are expanding all around and that this decreasing effort and muscular expansion shifts my bones around.
It almost feels like I’m inflating without effort in every direction but down.
OK…But It Sounds Like You Know
With practice, I’ve learned how to slowly start the process of quieting down and stopping. FM Alexander’s directions are a terrific tool to help organise your thinking. But if at any point in time you attempt to command a muscle to relax or command a bone to move away from another bone you will slam tension into yourself to some extent. Even when you know the sensation of a muscle relaxing and things begin to feel good, you must persist to tell yourself that you have no clue what’s coming next and you’re totally cool with that. Once we KNOW our Sherlock turns off and we stop feeling and thinking.
Please bear this in mind as I begin to give you more information on how to lengthen and widen… 😂🤣
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If you’re in NYC, you may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com.
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