Just curious
Simply curious, just here to read
Welcome
No need to decide anything. Maybe you’ve noticed the way you hurry even when there’s time, or the shoulders that rise when the phone rings, and you’re curious whether it could be different.
Or you’d simply like to read. Settle in with stories from lessons, reflections on movement and habit, and ideas gathered over many years of BodyMinded writing.
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Where the work came from
Curious about where the work came from? Frederick Matthias Alexander was a Tasmanian-born actor whose voice kept failing him on stage. With mirrors and great patience he observed that how he used his whole-self shaped how his voice worked. He discovered that he could change only by pausing his habitual reaction and coordinating with his whole-self, so that his mind and body could present a new, less stressful and more optimal way. He tells the story himself in the first chapter of his book The Use of the Self (1932).
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How it works
At the heart of F. M. Alexander’s work is what he called inhibition: interrupting your habitual reactions by reorganising your whole-self in the moment. Over the years this has come to be called “the inhibition of unnecessary and unwanted responses to stimuli.”1 That places it in the territory of behaviour and choice, not only movement. Guidance in lessons focuses on noticing, locating, thinking, allowing, choosing, moving and cooperating in place of just doing or reacting. When your coordination begins to work well, then the right thing will become easy, as Alexander often said, “the right thing does itself.”2
1 What he actually said was: “(1) the inhibition of the instinctive direction of energy associated with familiar sensory experiences of wrong habitual use, and (2) the building up in its place of a conscious direction of energy through the repetition of unfamiliar sensory experiences associated with new and satisfactory use.” F. M. Alexander, The Use of the Self (1932), chapter 4, “The Stutterer”, p. 85 (Gollancz 1985 edition).
2 A saying from Alexander’s teaching, recorded by his pupils rather than written in his books. Walter Carrington recalls him repeating it: “The right thing does itself, the right thing does itself, the right thing does itself.” Walter Carrington, Thinking Aloud (1994), “Teaching Directions to Beginners”, p. 75.
A gentle next step
In their words
We notice, with growing amazement, very striking improvements in such diverse things as high blood pressure, breathing, depth of sleep, overall cheerfulness and mental alertness, resilience against outside pressures, and also in such a refined skill as playing a stringed instrument.
Nikolaas Tinbergen, Nobel laureate
