It is a common misconception that all that is necessary to change a harmful habit is to practise an improved way of moving, once it has been pointed out (cf Dewey, as cited in Jones, 1976: 101). Only a person who already has good habits “can know what the good is” (Dewey, as cited in Jones, 1976: 102). Man has no kinaesthetic knowledge of an act before actually experiencing it, and therefore is blind on a sensory level to the new movement that is being required. Having to let go of the security of the old, well- known sensory experience at the same time, further complicates the re-education process.
The difficulty arises from the fact that the habitual way we use ourselves has become so familiar that it feels right, even when it might be inefficient and harmful (Alexander, 1932: 84). This sense of rightness is intimately bound up with the patterns of movement and posture that we have developed throughout our lives; even our memory patterns are closely connected with “the substratum of muscle-tone” which underlies our use (Barlow, 1973: 196). “This means that, the moment we try to carry out a basic re-education of USE, we very rapidly run up against our attachment
50 to our old feeling of ourselves” (Barlow, 1973: 196l). As new use will bring about new and unfamiliar experiences, they are bound to feel wrong if the old use felt right (Alexander, 1932: 32). The sensations accompanying new use can feel so wrong that one might not want to go through with the new use, but instead revert back to what feels familiar and right. “People don’t do what they feel to be wrong when they are trying to be right” (Alexander, 1941: 110).
This untrustworthy sensory awareness makes it very difficult to change one’s behaviour, as there is no reliable sensory standard that can act as a guide in the new way of moving. In trying to correct a particular problem, far too much effort can be used, thereby producing side effects that are as undesirable as the original condition (Jones, 1976: 20). Deliberately taking up a new position and “trying to be right”, causes new faulty tension patterns and inevitably promotes anxiety (Jones, 1976: 20, 191). Unreliability of sensory awareness can even lead one to do the very opposite of what one intended to do (Alexander 1932: 23).
Proprioception is the sensory mechanism through which the brain receives information (mainly from the joints, tendons and muscles) about the state of the body (Stevens, 1996: 35). It is equal to the five other better-known senses, and it is the sense that the Alexander Technique is primarily concerned with (De Alcantara, 1997: 41). It was known vaguely as “muscle sense” in earlier times, and only clearly defined and named as proprioception in the 1890’s (De Alcantara, 1997: 40).
De Alcantara, 1997: 40:
Proprioception concerns itself with all aspects of muscular activity: orientation in space, relative position of body parts, movement of body and limbs, the gauging of effort and tension, the perception of fatigue, static and dynamic balance.
Without proprioception, the body becomes “blind and deaf to itself…and…ceases to ‘own’ itself, to feel itself as itself” (Sacks, as cited in De Alcantara, 1997: 41). Although the sensations of position, mass, and movement form a very large part of the impressions received by the brain (Jones, 1976: 165), proprioception operates primarily on an unconscious and automatic level. Most people are not used to making kinaesthetic observations and prefer to rely on feedback from the other senses, “rather
51 than critically examine…feelings of tension and weight” (Jones, 1996: 180). Alexander’s great discovery was that the proprioceptive system could be brought under conscious control (De Alcantara, 1997: 41).
De Alcantara, 1997: 41:
Alexander’s genius consisted in (1) understanding that your conception of movement, of action, of yourself, of others – your conception of life – is entirely dependent on sensory perception; (2) highlighting the importance of proprioception in relation to the total use of the self; (3) realizing the pervasiveness of faulty sensory awareness; and (4) developing a method for bringing proprioception into the sphere of conscious, reliable guidance and control.
Sensory awareness becomes unreliable through the misuse of the self: “The freer a body part is, the better able it is to sense accurately what it is doing” (De Alcantara, 1997: 42). Tension in the body distorts the information that the brain receives about where the parts of the body are relative to each other. The many proprioceptors, or muscle spindles, in the neck are pulled and stretched by every movement in the body, stimulating stretch reflexes that help to maintain balance (Hogg, as cited in De Alcantara, 1997: 28). Any mal-distributed tension patterns in the body will inevitably cause the neck muscles to contract, thereby disturbing the many proprioceptors in the neck and distorting their feedback (De Alcantara, 1997: 42). “Misuse, in other words, always causes a distortion of sensory perception” (De Alcantara, 1997: 43). By the same token, sensory awareness can only be improved as the use of the whole self is improved, with a change in the relationship between the head, neck and back (De Alcantara, 1997: 165).
Alexander believed that the reason that re-education procedures usually failed, was because “they did not take into consideration the wrong mental attitudes that were inextricably bound up with the wrong physical conditions” (Jones, 1976: 20). While all stimuli to action are received through the sensory mechanisms (Alexander, 1932: 43), it is also sensory awareness that links conception to experience: sensory feedback (kinaesthetic, visual, aural etc) shapes our idea or interpretation of an experience (De Alcantara, 1997: 43). This idea, in turn, will determine how we respond to the next stimulus for that particular experience, creating a vicious circle in which experience creates conception, and conception determines experience (De Alcantara, 1997: 43).
52 Barlow (1973: 72) calls this our “body-construct”, shaped by the sum of all the “previous learned experience of the body”, through which we subsequently interpret everything we experience. “Such a ‘body construct’ produces (and is based on) our habitual USE of our bodies, and it forms the background to our perceptions” (Barlow, 1973: 211).
This circle is kept closed through faulty sensory awareness, as all instruction to better use will be interpreted according to one’s habitual, faulty sensory perception, leading to a misconception of what is required (De Alcantara, 1997: 43). When this misconception (of the instruction to better use) is executed with one’s customary misuse, and the results of the completed action evaluated through faulty sensory perception, one is led even further away from the desired end. This will be the outcome “as long as faulty sensory awareness conditions both (one’s) conceptions
and (one’s) experiences” (De Alcantara, 1997: 43).
Through using his hands to give a pupil “a new experience, untainted by…preconceptions or by the memory of previous attempts” (De Alcantara, 1997: 44), Alexander succeeded in breaking the vicious circle caused by debauched kinaesthesia. The improved use that is brought about through the guidance of an Alexander teacher’s hands causes an automatic and indirect improvement in sensory awareness, “awakening the pupil’s capacity to compare and discern” (De Alcantara, 1997: 45), as the proprioceptors in the body, and especially in the neck, are no longer being disturbed by faulty tension patterns. The sensations generated by the guided movement become a background against which unsatisfactory and ineffective habitual behaviour can be recognized.
Jones, 1976: 51:
When the pupil perceives directly through the kinesthetic sense and can compare a habitual with a nonhabitual way of doing something, he doesn’t need words in order to grasp the significance of the experience.
Through the way in which touch is used in the Alexander Technique (and the improvement in the head-neck relationship that is brought about), an individual can be made more aware of sensory feedback in relation to the key relationships in the body
53 (Jones, 1976: 168), so that tensional patterns can be perceived that would otherwise not be noticed. Once one becomes aware of harmful behaviour on a sensory level, it becomes possible to inhibit1 such behaviour, freeing the reflex systems of the body to work optimally, and bringing about improved use.