20191011_Q&A_the task of reasoning out the movements of the parts of the torso

———————— question

1. The method of learning by experiment and working on your own initiative/incentive: it seems to me that it’s not only that we learn by doing, solving problems and figuring things out – but it’s that this very act of reasoning out movements that is developing and strengthening the higher cognitive functions we need to actually do the work. So the method itself has a sort of positive feedback loop… Is this correct? Can you clarify this fuzzy thought for me please?

————————end question

The answer to this question is already written in the books.

My experiences, therefore, convinced me that in any attempt to control habitual reaction the need to work to a new principle asserts itself, the principle, namely, of inhibiting our habitual desire to go straight to our end trusting to feeling for guidance, and then of employing only those “means-whereby” which indirectly bring about the desired change in our habitual reaction—the end. The task of REASONING OUT and SELECTING the effective means of bringing about psycho-physical change according to this new principle is not an easy one, but the REAL TASK begins when we start to put into practice the procedures which WE have decided upon, for this, as Dewey puts it, presupposes a “revolution in thought and action.”

(Alexander, F.M.; The universal constant in living, Chaterson L.t.d., 1942, third edition 1947, p. 25)

The real task and the real change starts when the pupil develops his capacity to reason out and select the effective means which apply to his own old habits of coordination. Therefore, you are absolutely right here, “it is the very act of reasoning out [concerted] movements that is developing and strengthening the higher cognitive functions”.

The authorities of the modern Alexander technique pedagogy have dreamed that the task of reasoning out and selecting the effective means of bringing about psychophysical change had already been solved by Alexander, and that they only needed to apply an invariable procedure containing an invariable series of orders: {performance inhibition + the rehearsing of the preventive orders (let the neck be free to let the head go forward and up to let the back lengthen and widen…} to each and every pupil without discrimination. Obviously, with this attitude of mind, they did not develop our capacities of reasoning out and selecting the new means whereby orders, i.e. the orders which describe the effective movements which could correspond to the individual we are teaching: when their touch-lesson is at an end, every pupil is left with the same litany^[1] of words (preventive orders) and the memory of the feeling they experienced during the touch lesson. No wonder that quickly the preventive orders or directions started to convey very little reasoned sense, and instead, became simply a hollow container to hold whatever somatic experience had been registered by faulty sensory appreciation,

1. because the authorities thought that saying “no” and repeating the “preventive orders” associated with a sensory experience were the means-whereby Alexander had in mind, and
2. because this highly technical decision blurred all differences between “preventive orders” and “new orders”.

In the few lessons you had with me, I have shown and demonstrated many times that the new directive orders which you must rehearse to direct in a concerted way the different concerted CORRECT MOVEMENTS of the parts of the mechanisms had to be definite, reasoned out precisely, in an explicit way, to correspond and correct your personal way of synchronising the movements of the different parts of the torso. This need to base your lessons upon your actual manner of reaction explains amongst many other things:

1. why lessons are one to one,
2. why we must train ourselves to consciously control with objective measurements that the performance of our decisions goes according to the geometrical plan which we decided upon in the first place, and,
3. what kind of a revolution in action we are asked to initiate: we have to subordinate our concerted activity to a series of orders of definite performance and definite inhibition of movements of all the parts which does not feel “right”¹, but which matches a reasoned and geometrical plan.

The teacher must ask the pupil to rehearse the orders NECESSARY TO THE PARTICULAR PERSON IN QUESTION, and such mental orders or desires must be those which will be in accordance with the CORRECT MOVEMENTS which the teacher will ensure for the pupil during the manipulations which follows” (Alexander, F.M.; Supplement to re-education of the kinaesthetic systems concerned with the development of robust well-being, 1910).

———————— question

2. Is it useful to have a pupil do an extreme isolated movement – by feeling, in the beginning – just so they understand the possible range of movement of that part? And then to be inhibited as part of the CG [conscious guidance] instructions for concerted movements… is this helpful as a temporary tool to be discard later? (it seemed like you had me do this in early lessons when i couldn’t make anything happen with the sitting bone, for example.)

———————— end question

If I understand your statement correctly, I think that the answer to this question is already written in the books.

At the outset of respiratory re-education [re-education of the concerted movements of the parts of the mechanism of the torso principally] one has to contend with a mechanism which has not been consciously controlled, and this can only be met by using indirect means through the agency of ordinary volition.For instance, it is quite useless to ask anyone to raise or depress the diaphragm,^[2] but if he is asked to push out or draw in the pit of the stomach, first placing a hand on the part of the abdominal wall named, the mind has something to work upon; and this applies still more to other parts of the muscular system of the inspiratory mechanism. (Alexander, F.M.; Introduction to a new method of respiratory vocal re-education, 1906, in Fisher, J.M.O.; Articles and lectures, p. 46)

The mind of your pupil must have something to work upon, even if it is an isolated, non-concerted movement which we are talking about. In my translation of this passage, I consider that what Alexander calls “ordinary volition” is the will-to-move one part at a time from one location to another, like in the instruction “pull the pit of the stomach back”. You should always remember and stress that what we train in our lessons of the initial Alexander technique is “thinking in activity” or in other words, “revolutionary volition” in which the pupil is required to order with his own will a series of simultaneous movements of readjustments of a number of anatomical bony landmarks {“pull the pit of the stomach back & pull the *throat* upward away from the *Iliac* & pull the *Ribs at the back of the Armpit* away from the *Sitting bones* and pull the *Iliac* away from the *side of the knees*, etc}” in a number of opposite and definite directions. This is the revolution in thought and action that we are talking about.

Yet, when we agree that it is useful for the pupil to do an isolated movement which FEELs extreme to his faulty sensory appreciation, (when you bring back tissues into play, they will FEEL inert, difficult to command, resisting, etc. yet, as soon as you break the barrier of what feels natural to you, you will discover in fact that these tissues become much more responsive, elastic and strong with WORK as times goes on) we must understand that we are not really asking him to guide that movement “BY FEELING” as you suggest, but by looking at the movement itself with their own eyes. The difference is that, considering the geometrical end-result that we propose as a target, the pupil is not going to move in order to feel “right” but he/she will move in an in habitual way not matter what sort of tension he feels, no matter how wrong he feels in doing so.

The truth of the matter is that in the old morbid conditions which have brought about the curvature the muscles intended by Nature for the correct working of the parts concerned had been put out of action, and the WHOLE PURPOSE OF THE RE-EDUCATORY METHOD I ADVOCATE is to bring back these muscles into play, not by physical exercises, but by the employment of a position of mechanical advantage and the repetition of the correct inhibiting and guiding mental orders by the pupil, and the correct manipulation and direction by the teacher, until the two psycho-physical factors become an established psycho-physical habit. (Alexander, F.M.; Man’s Supreme Inheritance, (Second Ed. Revised, 1918), p. 203)

In the last part of the quote I have chosen to reiterate the purpose of the re-educatory method we teach, Alexander should have written “and the correct [INSTRUCTIONS OF] manipulation and direction by the teacher”, because it would have saved us many equivocations. As I have noted in my last article, Alexander is using a neologism when he talks about “manipulation”. He is not saying that a touch-teacher should “manipulate” the clerk in his attempt at guiding a plough, but that the subject himself should manipulate the movements of the different parts of the torso in order to orientate the plane of the torso relatively to the future line of the furrow (directing the parts of the torso so that the frontal plane remains comparatively steady, following as nearly perpendicularly as possible the not yet traced line of the furrow). See the quote below about the clerk which wanted to become a ploughman.

“Acting under the guiding principles of reasoned and conscious control, he will consider first the “means whereby” he may achieve his object, rather than that object itself. He will take time to consider well the factors to be overcome. It will be obvious to any one who will take the trouble to watch another man at the plough, that a great deal of proper manipulation is necessary to keep the share embedded and a straight furrow. The manipulation requires firstly the maintenance of the ploughman’s equilibrium in very difficult circumstances. This consideration will make it clear to him that his body [torso for Alexander] must remain comparatively steady and support the arms and legs as the trunk of a tree does its limbs, following as nearly perpendicularly as possible the line the furrow should take. (Alexander, F.M.; Man’s Supreme Inheritance (Third Ed., 1946), p. 144)

---

[1] Definition of Litany: a series of verbal petitions that are used to appeal to some supernatural being.

[2] “Depressing the diaphragm” is obtained by pushing out the pit of the stomach: this is one of main reason why Alexander is always condemning in the strongest terms the habit of protruding the abdomen. “Children, too, accept their parents’ defects as normal and admirable. The boy of twelve or fourteen never dreams, for instance, that his father’s protruding stomach is anything but the condition proper to middle-age, and often, doubtless, figures to himself the time when he will arrive at the same condition. The time will come when such things as these—I refer to the abnormality of the father—will be considered a disgrace. (Alexander, F.M.; Man’s Supreme Inheritance (Third Ed., 1946).pdf, p. 69)