Habits: Friends or Foes?
And adults too. How many times have you read a magazine article advising you to "sit up strait"; while using a computer, or "walk tall" or "hold your head high"?
What this kind of advice ignores is that it's asking you to change what your body does without changing the way your body functions.
It's a little like taking an automobile that's pulling to the right and driving it with the steering wheel always turned a little to the left to keep the car moving strait ahead. You've certainly changed the way the car moves, but it's still not functioning properly.
Most drivers understand that's only a temporary solution and take steps to adjust the car's alignment - a fairly simple job for a trained mechanic.
But with human beings, the problem is a quite different - we have to be our own "mechanic". And that poses special challenges: Our posture, coordination and balance are directed by our thoughts. If that directing is done sub-consciously - if it is habitual - then in order to make changes in it, we have to learn how to make the directing process itself conscious.
And that's not all. As any experimental scientist can tell you, it's a very tricky business to make fundamental changes to a system when you're using that very system to make the change. As John Dewy, the great American philosopher and educationalist said, "No one would deny that we ourselves enter as an agency into whatever is attempted and done by us. That is a truism. But the hardest thing to attend to is that which is closest to us, that which is most constant and familiar. And this closest "something" is, precisely, ourselves, our own habits and ways of doing things..."
F. Matthias Alexander faced precisely this challenge in confronting a serious problem with his voice. In the course of overcoming his difficulty, he developed a method - today known as the Alexander Technique - which can be systematically taught to others.
If for any reason - pain, discomfort, the desire to be able to do things better - the idea of making a fundamental improvement in the way your function appeals to you, the Alexander Technique is well worth your investigation.
RESOURCES
Mind and Muscle - An Owner's Manual and a great many other books, videos, and CD's can be ordered from The Alexander Technique Bookstore at http://www.alexandertechnique.com/books
Information about the connection between John Dewey and F. Matthias
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