Be Kind to your Body!

Are you kind to your body? I mean really kind in the way that you would be kind to a child, or a loved pet, or a good friend? And do you take your body seriously as a source of information and wisdom? For the majority of people in our goal-orientated and driven culture the answer a lot of the time is probably “no, not really”.

Us human beings are an animal like any other — except with an additional clever, rational, thinking, decision-making part sitting on top. The main thing that sets us apart from other creatures is that we are not entirely controlled by instinct. We also have this strange ability to stand outside ourselves, to consider the past and future, and to make decisions about what to do even if it goes against our natural inclinations. Apart from this our bodies and nervous systems work in pretty much the same way as those of any other mammal.

This means that you (meaning the ‘I’ inside your head who seems separate from your body) have quite a responsibility. It’s as if you are in a symbiotic relationship with an exquisitely designed and extraordinary living creature which has its own kind of intelligence, and its own needs, wants and instinctive responses. And these wands and needs may sometimes be quite different to what you imagine or wish they would be.

Think about your breathing for a moment.

Of course a cat or a dog doesn’t think about its breathing at all — for them it just happens appropriately as it should. Whether they are resting or rushing around, their system automatically regulates their breath so they are always getting enough oxygen without excessive effort or waste of energy. However when I ask you to think about your own breathing, I bet it immediately subtly changes. The thinking, reasoning part of us, which the cat or dog doesn’t have, can get in the way and interfere with the body’s natural processes.

It’s surprising how much most people do this. Many of us habitually interfere with our breath for a range of conscious and unconscious reasons. We may hold our belly in to look thinner, interfering with the ability of our diaphragm to descend. Or we may subtly hold our breath without realising, to make ourselves feel a little more solid and secure whenever we are faced with a situation that is at all challenging or stressful.

And what about posture and balance? Again, a cat or a dog doesn’t need to think about these things — their body knows how to move with grace and ease. It adjusts delicately, effortlessly and automatically to gravity and to the demands of the moment. They always seems so effortless and free, both in movement and at rest.

Compare that to most of us modern humans. We don’t allow our body to self-regulate in this way. Often we are so focussed on our personal goals and wishes that we don’t leave time or space for the body and its natural processes. We force ourselves to ‘sit up straight’; we hold on to ourselves; we slouch and slump; or we brace ourselves against gravity rather than allowing our system to balance itself. Many of us have completely lost touch with our body’s innate ability to effortlessly and easily hold us upright: we no longer allow the subtle, automatic adjustment and support-seeking that happens in the body when we allow it. 

Most of us like to express ourselves, and talk about what we’re thinking and feeling. But what about the body’s need to express? Animal bodies shake and yawn and sigh to release tension when needed. If they’re uncomfortable they get up and move about. They don’t drive themselves to complete a task without a break like we do, sitting at the computer for hours completely absorbed in our heads, shutting off and ignoring the body’s cries of distress. We may deny our body the expression and freedom it desperately needs because of social etiquette, or ambition, or shyness — or simply because we’re so wrapped up in our thoughts that we no longer notice what it’s asking for any more.

Imagine if you treated a beloved pet in the way you treat your own body — driving it to do you bidding; telling it how to ‘hold itself’; interfering with its balance and posture mechanisms; preventing it from resting or moving when it’s tired, or from finding the release it needs in a sigh or yawn — even interfering with the very breaths it takes! 

How unkind and wrong that would seem. And yet so many of us treat our own, sensitive physical organisms (which, after all, are the only ones we have) exactly like this! We shouldn’t be surprised if we feel ornery, or uncomfortable or stressed, or in pain, or if our bodies start to let us down much earlier in life than we would like them to.

As an Alexander Technique teacher I’m often suggesting to people that instead of trying to turn the lessons into another way of bullying their body into doing what they think it should, they focus instead on developing a sense of kindness and warmth towards it. I suggest that they take their body-self seriously, and encourage them to realise that it has its own wisdom. And I ask that they allow it to be itself and to express, feel, and release excess tension. If you listen the body will always tell you what it needs.

This sort of kindness is contagious. People tend to find that, as they discover such an attitude of kindness and acceptance of their physical self, it begins to ‘love them back’. It starts to offer more physical and emotional support. It shares surprising wisdom about what what is right — and not right for them. And it offers a sense of comfort and ease which they can carry with them as they journey on through life.

How to feel more supported and secure

For many of us it's easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of the challenges and demands of our lives. Some seem to swim through life without too much trouble, but many others feel that they could do with a little more inner and outer support and security — or else may take pride in their self-reliance and dogged determination while paying a price in terms of stress and isolation!

Human beings evolved with a wonderful system to physically support and carry us  — and this in turn would have been held within the container of a supportive group or tribe. Today few of us fully experience this free flowing support on either an outer or inner level, and many carry wounds which can be traced to a diminished sense of community and loss of contact with our bodies.  As a result we may feel a lack of trust in ourselves and a nagging sense of doubt and insecurity in our relationship with the world.

Security has an inner and an outer aspect. We get literal support from our physical structure, and from the experience of being embodied—and also social support from our relationships. These two sources of support are interrelated and inseparable. If we don’t feel a fundamental sense of physical security and support within ourselves it's hard to feel safe and secure enough to receive support from others. And it’s hard to access this physical feeling of support in ourselves if we are not giving and receiving practical and emotional support from our culture and those around us.

Inner security

Our inner sense of security starts with feeling a secure and relaxed sense of self—and our most fundamental sense of ourselves starts with the body. We may think that ‘ourself’ is a product of our mind, but it is only through sensation, feeling and contact that we know we exist in the world at all. Our sense of selfhood develops from being a body interacting with itself and the environment. So a true feeling of security is only possible if the sensations and feelings we receive from the body give us a feeling of safety. If the messages we receive from the body are not confidence giving (for example if we are constantly getting messages that the body is unbalanced, fixed, rigid, collapsed, incompetent, precarious or untrustworthy) then this will profoundly how we experience ourselves and our relationship to the world.

A question of trust

The body’s sense of security is fundamentally related to our relationship with gravity. We are upright and (uniquely) unstable creatures, and this brings us into a very different relationship to the ground than other animals. We need to feel secure, safe and competent even while balanced precariously on two legs — and from this balanced place be open and responsive, leaving our limbs free to do all the tasks which are part of living and survival for human beings. 

This is a tall order. When we first come into the world we are not able to support ourselves in any way at all. We are not only dependant on care-givers for food and nourishment, but also for physical support. A new-born horse can stand and run within 30 minutes, but for the first month of our lives we cannot even support our head and it needs to be held for us — and it takes up to four months for us to be able to hold our head against gravity when upright. 

In the first few months of life it is essential that we are held, and that we sense it is safe to let go and relax into that holding. In time our postural support and balance systems develop and start to activate. These systems enable us to fulfil one of our fundamental tasks, which is to be learn to be supported in the earth’s gravitational field. To accomplish this they make use of deep muscles of postural support, controlled predominantly by ‘lower-level’ and largely involuntary/unconscious parts of the nervous system—including simple reflexes in the muscles and spinal column and the cerebellum in the brain. If all is working as it should, the balance/postural system is there for us to—in a sense—gently lean on. So long as there is a general intention to be upright and supported it will effortlessly and efficiently support us in a balanced, dynamic upright state. We don’t have to do posture, we just need the intention or wish and then to get out of the way and allow the system to work as should. This means that, when all is well, uprightness and relaxed poise feels like letting go.

However, to be able to let go into support like this implies an ability to trust. We have to be able to trust that our (neurologically low level) postural system will support us if we let go of higher level control. For some people this is fairly easy but for many others it is not. From the earliest age, and throughout life, we receive messages about trust and trustworthiness, and a sense as to whether it is safe to let go. As babies we need constant, dependable physical support to relax into, and if that is not forthcoming—or is qualified by, say, an anxious or overly demanding caregiver, we may have a question mark near the centre of our being about whether or not it is really safe to let go and trust in support. Later in life this impression may be contradicted by good experiences—or it may be reinforced by further experiences of lack of safety throughout our lives. 

If our primary experience is that is not safe to let go, it is likely that this lack of trust will find physical expression in us gripping with our large movement (phasic) muscles in an attempt to grab support rather than relaxing into the safety and security of our postural system. Instead of allowing fluid, dynamic uprightness we lock ourselves into position by holding parts of ourselves rigidly in relation to each other.

Trust in relationship

As well as needing to trust ourselves we also need to be able to have faith that is possible to respond freely to other people in order to create and maintain relationships in which we are able to give and receive support. Much of human relating happens way below the level of speech and reason. As essentially tribal animals, our nervous systems are highly tuned and responsive to each other and we pick up and respond to the subtlest physical cues from those around us, much of the time unconsciously. Our bodies are continually communicating with each other whether we’re aware of it or not. 

To relate freely and easily to each other there needs to be freedom for this unconscious dance to happen at a physical level. When we are unable to relax into the support of our postural system it becomes harder to connect with others. It may feel that we subtly keep people at arms length, or find it hard to fully settle and relax into each other's company. One reason that alcohol is so enjoyable for many is that it temporarily releases the muscular holding we carry with us and allows us to respond more freely to others—albeit often with a diminished level of consciousness and presence!

Support for the journey

Changing our patterns of trust, support and relating is a challenge and a journey. We may need to both look at our relationship to ourselves and our internal sense of support, and grow into new ways of finding trust and connection with others. We may need to let go of feelings and beliefs from the past which cause us to feel unsafe and unsupported and which no longer serve us. As our physical sense of support increases we find that our relationship to other people changes too. Increasingly we are more able to respond to and be supported by others while having a greater capacity to respond to them and offer support in turn. And as our relationships become more mutually trusting and supportive we find a deeper level of belief in ourselves and are more able to relax and let go so that we can gently ‘lean’ on the natural physical support our organism offers. As always, change in one aspect of a pattern is reflected in change in an other. Step by step life becomes easier, we feel more secure, and life begins to flow....

Letting Go of Stress: a Contradiction and a Misunderstanding.

Do you ever wish you could be less stressed, tense and internally ‘noisy’? Have you ever tried to de-stress and quieten yourself down but without much success? 

When we want to quieten down but find it difficult there are often two things which are getting in the way: the first is that there is a contradiction in the way we are setting about things which we may not be aware of. The second is that there is often a specific faulty belief about the situation which — even if we understand the contradiction — can stymy our best efforts to change.

The Contradiction

Being caught in a feeling of stress and tension is a bit of a ‘double bind’. If your nervous system is in a buzzy, over-stimulated state (which for many of us is the case a lot of the time) then you tend to lose touch with your innate ability to stop. When an organism becomes over-stimulated it becomes excessively hooked into that function of the nervous system which is to do with ‘action’ — with instigating and initiating things. The nervous system has another, complementary function, which enables us to ‘stop’, withhold consent or refrain from acting — but when we are in a highly over-stimulated state it becomes much harder to access this.

Take a moment now to think about quietening down and notice the response to that idea. I’ll bet at some level (perhaps quite subtle) there is a feeling of effort or strain. We want to do something to quieten down — but that doing is in itself not quiet. Our contradiction is that we want to be quieter but because we are over-stimulated the only mode of action which seems to be open to us is to do more — to chase this quietness; and the chasing is in itself more noise.  Though we believe at some level that our efforts will help (or we wouldn’t do them) we are actually putting even more stress into our system.  This compulsive wish to do something to get the result we want is like an endless chain. Noticing that we are doing it we probably then want to do something else in response. And again in response to noticing that! 

So what is the way out of our conundrum? How can we be more present and quiet without the search itself causing internal effort, noise and stress? There is a clue in a very old Hindu practice called ‘net-neti’. Neti-neti is a Sanskrit phrase meaning ‘not this, not that’. It forms the basis of a form of meditation in which ultimate reality is seen as something entirely beyond our everyday experience. Being beyond what we know, this reality can only be sought indirectly by noticing everything that it is not. When all these other things have been removed (negated) then what is left is the thing we are seeking. 

At a more down to earth level, neti-neti can help us in our wish to quieten down because we have a similar problem to the meditator: we want to approach something (quietness) but the only tool it seems we have at our disposal (‘doing’, effort and trying) are the opposite of what we want. So we need to change our focus from chasing the desired result (i.e. a quiet nervous system) to simply noticing the responses inside us which are not quietness. As the philosopher Krishnamurti noted, when we really see what is going on, the seeing is itself intelligence and right action. Our actions are always a reflection of our understanding. As we begin to notice and understand that our search for quietness is, in fact, more noise, this greater understanding allied to a general intention or ‘wish’ to quieten down, is itself enough to start things changing. Furthermore, as our organism quietens down a little it has more and more access to that function of the nervous system which enables it to ‘stop’, or refrain from doing things. As we notice and understand our habitual, effortful responses it is easier and easier for our system to ‘not go there’. A virtuous cycle is established.

The Misunderstanding

So much for the contradiction. I also promised you a misunderstanding, and there is a big one which, even when we have understood the problem, can still catch us out. This is that we may not understand that an over-stimulated nervous system takes time to settle. We tend to think that change should work like a ‘switch’, when in fact it is often more like a process. The body-mind is a highly complex system of feedback loops, chemical reactions, tension responses, habits etc. Like an engine with a big flywheel all this complexity takes some time to slow down — even after we cut off the petrol! 

Our trouble is that another side effect of our over-stimulated state is that it tends to make us anxious for quick results to prove to ourselves that we are on the right track. In our eagerness we keep checking to see if things have quietened down yet, and then get despondent because it is not happening. But often the problem is that we simply don’t understand that it takes a little time. It may take some days or weeks to allow an over-stimulated organism to calm down. Rather than chasing instant change ‘in the moment’ we need to see ourselves as engaging in a wise process in which we are allowing our bodies and minds to gradually grow in understanding and quieten down in their own time. 

What else can help?

Having a few sessions with an Alexander teacher is a powerful way to help ‘kick start’ this process of quietening the nervous system. The teacher is able to use their presence and touch to help your own system to quieten down. This can really help you to become aware of your responses and can help nudge you out of the cycle of doing and effort that keeps you caught in the trap. As you proceed, a teacher can help keep you on track, and offer guidance to avoid the pitfalls along the way….

On wanting to be different by staying the same.

Whenever we have a problem or symptom our immediate feeling is usually that we would simply like it to stop. Even if we are conscious that there are things we are doing which are contributing to it, a lot of the time what we really hope for—deep down—is that there is something we can do to make it go away so that we can carry on just as we were before. In other words we want to change so long as we don’t have to be different! That’s understandable, but unfortunately things are rarely that simple—we are wholes, and all the parts and aspects of us are linked and work together. A specific problem is often a surface manifestation of a much bigger pattern. Even if we get rid of the symptom that is bothering us, the fundamental cause will still be there and will eventually cause the problem to recur, or a different one to appear in its place.

It’s human nature that when people come to Alexander lessons often part of them is determined to hang on to the way of being which is at the root of the symptoms which have brought them there. We love what is familiar and hate to let it go because it feels safe. “I will do anything”, they think, “so long as it does not involve giving up my favourite habit.” 

I once had a pupil who was a very ‘driven’ type of person. He came to have lessons after many years of working his way up the corporate ladder and was feeling stressed and overwhelmed; in addition his hands had started to hurt from typing and he was worried they would get so bad he wouldn’t be able to do his job anymore. As a result of his worry he was having trouble sleeping. I worked with him lying down for a bit and suggested that, at least during the lesson, he stopped trying to get things right or to achieve anything at all and that he just allow things to quieten down. We carried on in silence for a little while. “How do you feel?”, I asked after some twenty minutes had passed. He looked surprised: “Really good! I feel quite different, calmer and relaxed”. And it was true: a quality of peace and quiet awareness had entered the room.

But then this energy changed. He started to ask for concrete things to do once he had left the lesson—he wanted to know what he could busy himself with to hang on to the lovely feeling of relaxation. I suggested that this desire to be busy and occupied with things to do all the time was a big part of the reason why he was so stressed and tense, and that since overdoing things was one reason he was there, maybe just to be gently thinking about doing less and letting go a little would be a good place to start. But his lifelong habit was to address any problem by frenetic activity. He wanted something to do, whereas what he actually most needed in order to solve his problem was to STOP. But any approach to solving a problem that did not involve busy activity felt wrong to him, and because his problem had become so distressing, doing what felt wrong in relation to it was a frightening thought. 

We talked about this over several sessions but it was some time before he was willing to really try out what I was suggesting. Gradually he came to realise that his approach was self-contradictory. He wanted to relax by doing more and this doesn’t make sense! In time he found that the world didn’t end when he was able to let go of his need to be busy and in control at all times. He also found to his surprise that as he became more centred and relaxed in himself he achieved more, not less. 

A lot of the time when we are compulsively busy we are not accomplishing nearly as much as it feels that we are. Paradoxically as we do less of this we find that there is now more mental space (and more physical support from the body) to dedicate to achieving what we want. We also find that the habit which we felt was such a central part of ourselves is not really part of our core self at all, but is just something which we learned a long time ago and have since hung onto. Letting go of it we feel more like the person we really are.

So the bad news is that sometimes we really do need to let go of something we are attached to if we want to get rid of our symptoms. The good news is that letting go will benefit us in surprising and unexpected ways. It involves a shift in how we act in the world—and it’s absolutely worth it!