Ian Lyons asks: Is direction thought or action?

Location, location, location

«continued from previous page saying: ‘There are answers to questions that are never asked’”.13

For Erika the training course was primarily a study of one’s own reactivity and use in daily life: a means to an end, not an end in itself. She was of the opinion that the group which began to focus on ‘how to take people up’ were making that the end, thereby leading Alexander’s work in a wholly different direction. If Alexander’s oft repeated injunction “Don’t copy me!” had been heeded, then each person who began to explore and give life to these ideas might, instead of trying to conform to some kind of ideal, discover their own individuality; other forms of teaching could then emerge – rooted in practical self-knowledge developed from the application of the principles to the activities of life, in all its rich variety.14 Visiting training courses after a gap of half a century, Erika saw the consequences of those events in the 1930’s. Many students were struggling to make the link between the kinaesthetic experiences of the hands-on work and daily life. What to Erika had been a fluid and experimental investigation of the inner content of Alexander’s discoveries had now taken on a definite form – with procedures, checklists and regulations. Now we are all copying Alexander. Erika’s comment that it was “all about teaching” began to make sense. She always refused to play the role of the teacher, gently shifting the character of each encounter to sharing moments in time and space; you were simply being with Erika. All this is not meant to criticise or denigrate all the wonderful teachers who do teach by releasing muscle tension, by ‘taking people up’. On the contrary; thank goodness for them and the pioneering work of the first-generation teachers and their dedicated students. Nevertheless, perhaps a whole other discipline, glimpsed by that ‘other group’ all those years ago – less about ‘teaching’ and more about ‘living’ – has yet to evolve.

Notes 1 F. Matthias Alexander: The Man and his Work, Lulie Westfeldt, p 135. Published by Centerline Press, California. 2 Ibid. p 41. 3 An Examined Life, Marjory Barlow, p.81, 2002), Publisher:

How our culture’s preoccupation that we are “in” our heads” made it difficult for Alexander to describe his experiences (and for us to understand them). By Ian Lyons

What form of activity did the words ‘direct’ or ‘order’ indicate, for example? Did they mean ‘thinking’ or ‘doing’ or some unknown activity mid-way between the two...? (F. Matthias Alexander: The Man and His Work. Lulie

Westfeldt. p.601)

It was 1931 and the first ever Alexander Technique teacher training course was in its first year. Lulie Westfeldt, an American - bright, educated and feisty - who had suffered with polio as a child and then endured a series of disastrous remedial medical blunders, was one of the first cohort of 7 students. Westfeldt’s was a young, vigorous, self-assured culture without the old traditions and social hierarchies of England hanging round its neck, in which everything was up for question and debate. Assumed authority, of whatever sort, was no place to hide from the fray. I imagine she must have found the somewhat confected atmosphere of timeless Edwardian gentility she met with at 16 Ashley Place a bit of a shock. She fired off questions and was met with what she felt to be an imperious refusal to engage. Here’s how she describes it:

Although I had come the previous March and had had a lesson every day, I still did not understand Alexander’s initial instructions, nor did I know how to carry on the work by myself. Questions were not only not answered but were looked on as symptoms of bad use, and one was

‘reassured’ by being told that as one’s use grew better one would stop asking those things. This was the attitude one met in FM, his brother A.R., and his secretary.

I was treated, and saw others treated, kindly and indulgently, but as if we were going through a stage of adolescence - ‘the question period’. They’ll get over that when their conditions change ... FM’s secretary often expressed it in just this way. (ibid. p.58)

I think this a very interesting passage, which I’ll come back to later.

Thought is action, but ‘direction’ implies otherwise. Turning first though to the specific question, “Is direction thinking or doing?”, we need first to agree on

«continued from previous page an interpretation of the word “doing”, since Alexander introduced, and we have persisted with, a set of alternative meanings, or shades of meaning, for the word. In fact, I think that in this case Westfeldt means “doing” in its original plain English sense of “action”. So I suggest we rephrase the question to: Is direction ‘thought” or is it “action”?

Since problems with terminology are a subtext of this article I will just say briefly in passing that this hijacking of the verb “to do”, which is such a cornerstone, certainly of all modern European languages, in order to confer upon it a new “technical” meaning, was extremely ill-advised in my view. It was inevitably going to lead to a lot of confusion, as I think has proven to be the case. For reasons of space though, that must remain a discussion for another time.

My own answer to “is direction thought or action?” has changed in just the last 10 years or so. Whereas I would once have said that direction is both thought and action because action is determined by thought, I now see this to be a fundamental misconception. I now think that direction is both thought and action because thought and action are one and the same. The thing that has brought about this change for me is that I’ve freed myself from the belief - the tyranny of the belief - that thought is something that happens in my head.

If we believe that thought happens in our head and we intend, for example, to lengthen the fingers of one hand, we cannot help but think of the thought and the action as two different things, since one goes on in (or is done by) one bit of us and the other in another. The action, the lengthening, is apparently primarily happening in the fingers (although in reality involves changes in much of our musculature), the thought in the head. But once you’ve freed yourself of the conviction - I would call it “illusion” - that thought happens in your head, lengthening your fingers now seems very different. It seems as if the thought or the intention is in the fingers, just the place the action is, or seems to originate from. So you find you can’t distinguish the two. The thought seems to be the action and vice-versa. You might call it “thought-action unity”, and it is one possible meaning of “mind-body unity”, or “psycho-physical unity”, as Alexander preferred to call it.

Was this what Alexander understood and meant by the term though? I’d like to think so because, personally, I think this is the true sense in which we are such a unity. But there are real problems in understanding Alexander’s position because, it seems to me, the way he described it was ambiguous. And nowhere is this more clear than in his terminology. To take the term particularly in question here, “direction”, the problem is that “direction” is something done by one thing to another. According to the dictionary, it is “to control the operations of; to manage or govern”. It brings with it the notion of hierarchy, control of the peripheral (lower) from something central (higher). It brings with it the notion not of unity but duality. But if the thought or intention is the action, all going on in the fingers, what else is involved? I think it would be far better to use some term which implies unity, such as “conscious action”, or possibly “intentional action”. So why did Alexander come up and persist with the evidently dualistic “direction”? One part of the explanation I think is that, contrary to all of us who follow him, he had the experience first and had to find the words after. Casting about in the strongly dualistic language of his culture for some suitable term for his apparently entirely novel experience, he alighted upon “direction” and thought it the best or closest fit. Even if the experience he was trying to describe was a strongly integrated (“psycho-physical”) one, such as I describe above (and I suspect it was), for reasons perhaps of his background and lack of formal education he may not have had sufficient freedom from the tenets and conventions of his culture (and its conviction that our thought “happens” in our head) to feel able or confident to describe it in this way. And the trouble is that when you understand something, particularly when you understand it experientially and therefore implicitly, it is very difficult to comprehend what it is like not to understand it. The words you choose to describe it, however unsuitable, come to seem to you to nail or encapsulate it, they come to seem to you to hold your understanding within them. But in fact they do no such thing. To everyone else they remain just words. I think that Alexander had a tendency to succumb to this illusion. He alludes a number of times in his books to having received criticism for his choice of words but says that, even (apparently) with the help of his scientific friends, he can find no better, or that he has his reasons for using them and not others. Or he tries to clarify more precisely what he means by some word or expression, but at no point does he seem to realise or admit that his choice of the key terms is the problem. And yet, elsewhere, he speaks of his frustration that

«continued from previous page people seem not to be able to understand properly what he’s saying.

Frank Pierce Jones, a classicist, so someone with a professional interest in words and their meaning, and who knew both of the Alexander brothers well, said of them that: ... they believed in a one-to-one relation between the word and the thing. ... They were confident that the words they used to describe what they did were the best that could be found. If a pupil did not understand, they repeated the explanation verbatim, assuring him that ultimately it would be perfectly clear. One day when I was having trouble understanding the relation between my thinking and the kinesthetic experiences AR was giving me, he said, “Be patient; stick to principle; and it will all open up like a great cauliflower.”2

This, then, is very similar to Lulie Westfeldt’s report, and all the more interesting coming from the very sober and evenhanded Jones. It is also reminiscent of (FM) Alexander’s writing style. No amount of repetition of his stock formulaic constructions seemed too much for him, as if simply to repeat them often enough would somehow bludgeon the reader into understanding (or at least submission).

I would say this is a peculiarly rigid - obstinate even - approach to verbal explanation. It’s not what we usually do. If someone clearly doesn’t understand us we try to find a different approach, a different way of putting it, to see if this unlocks something. And to think, at any stage, that the words you use to describe something are “the best that could be found” seems arrogant to me. I find it difficult to imagine. How would you ever know such a thing?

The trouble is that those of us who follow Alexander - and those who follow us - start not with the experience but with the words. For us therefore the words have a different significance: they are pointers into an unknown abyss of possibilities. That they lead in something like the right direction is critical to understand or we can end up wandering around lost in the abyss for years, which I think is broadly what happened to me. And maybe to Lulie Westfeldt too. And not just her. She describes in her book how none of her fellow students (the number had now swelled to 14) appeared to understand what Alexander meant either. When finally you find the “right” place, you look back at the words, the signpost, and see that it’s pointing the wrong way. For the reasons I outline above, this is not an insight available to the originator, the person who came up with the words in the first place. But, whilst it remains very difficult, I think, to work out exactly what Alexander meant by terms like “direction” and “psycho-physical”, I don’t think his terminology has by any means been solely responsible for my difficulties, the inordinately long time it took for the penny to drop. As I go on to describe below, I think the real villain has been the thing that led to Alexander’s unhelpful terminology in the first place, the “programming” that we all of us receive at the hands of our culture. The terminology, though, as one manifestation of this, certainly hasn’t helped, and I think we can and need to do much better.

Being in our head: how we got there

I don’t think that the belief, what I have described as the “tyranny of the belief”, that thought happens in my head is, or was, unique to me. I think that, broadly speaking, it is ubiquitous in our contemporary Western culture, and also more or less specific to it. People of other cultures do not seem necessarily to think of themselves this way, and neither did we in the distant past. But I think that the way in which our culture creates this illusion for, or in, us is not straightforward: there’s more than one thing going on. This complicates the picture considerably. This said, I think we can usefully draw out two basic mechanisms. The first of these is due to what we might normally describe as “poor use”, or “misuse”, but I would prefer instead to call “poor coordination” or, better, “incoordination”. I prefer this partly because, according to English language idiom, “use” is inevitably something one thing makes of another. As with “direction” then, not unity, but duality (I think there are also other serious problems with ‘use’, but once again due to space constraints, that must be a discussion for another time). I think that an acute awareness of the fact that movements of, and changing tensions in, our faces, particularly of the eyes, forehead and speech apparatus, are an integral part of what we call “thought”, and that this is probably innate and therefore experienced by people everywhere, of all cultures. It is an important part of our non-verbal communication. What I think is particularly marked in our culture though is a tendency to blot out the rest of us. And I think that this is a product, or a part, of incoordination (poor “use”). It is as if the incoordination renders us numb to, or involves what a neurologist might term a “neglect” of, our wider bodily selves. I think this primarily because my own experience of a

“Lulie Westfeldt... writes in her book how none of her fellow students appeared to understand what Alexander meant either.

«continued from previous page slow, steady improvement in coordination, over many years, has been of my sense of myself becoming more distributed, about my own body and also my immediate environment, particularly those parts of it with which I am in physical contact (for example, through my hands, an Alexander pupil). It is as if I have been drawn out of a hiding place an inch or two behind my eyes and come instead to inhabit the whole of myself and, to some extent, my immediate environment. I also know that I am not alone in this experience, that it seems to be widespread in the Alexander community. Maybe all of us have had, or are having, it? What I am characterising then as the numbness or neglect of incoordination has the effect of leaving us with little but the vivid sensations of facial, particularly eye, movements and so tends to give us the impression that this, our face or head in general, is where we are, where our thought happens. This phenomenon is particularly marked in our contemporary Western culture I think because it is primarily in our culture that you find the phenomenon of incoordination. It may be that “civilising” events like the Industrial Revolution, and more recently the so-called information revolution, have accelerated a process of decline, broadly (but not exactly) along the lines Alexander describes in his books. A slightly different but entirely compatible way of looking at all of this is to see it as a manifestation of fear, to see our society as one that is slowly becoming more and more fearful, and, conversely, to see an improvement in coordination as a process of becoming less and less so. That (the latter) has also been my personal experience, as I have described before3 . The withdrawal to a place behind our eyes might then also be viewed as a fearful retreat to a place of imagined safety. This then is one mechanism, but there is also another, again largely (until recently) specific to our culture, but this time not a product of internal experience. Instead it comes from the methodical accumulation of observations and interpretations of events and phenomena external to us, and therefore in theory visible to us all - what we have come to call “science”. For some time now, something like the last 500 years, our culture, through its steadily increasing alignment with this “science”, has been moving in the direction of regarding the brain (alone) as the “organ of mind”. More recently, this has taken a particularly dangerous twist in that we seem to have started to regard the mind as the brain. You hear expressions like: “That’s just the way my brain works”; “My brain doesn’t remember faces”; “My brain’s not woken up yet today”, and so on. There is, I think, a series of serious misconceptions which have led to this parlous state of affairs. One of them, due to neuroscientists, who really should know better, is to mistake the brain’s undoubtedly pivotal role in bringing forth our conscious experience, for the brain being all there is to it: to use the philosophers’ parlance, mistaking “necessary” for “sufficient”. I (and many others) think the reality is that the mechanism, the physical substrate of our conscious experience, is far more distributed than that, involving not only the whole of our neuromuscular system but also our interaction with our immediate environment. The argument for this is a long and involved one which I don’t have space to do justice to here, but it involves observations such as the fact that muscles send more information back to the central nervous system than they receive from it. As a whole, they constitute a large and complex analogue computational device which embodies or encodes our physical relationship to the three-dimensional world and gravitational field in which we live, and which helps control how we move about it. And since (reflective) thought is in reality a specialised (abstracted) form of movement, we would predict that the whole of our neuromuscular system is involved in that too, which I think is demonstrably the case. I have talked a little about this and related issues in these pages before4 . It may seem incredible that the mighty and authoritative edifice which is science could make the schoolboy error of mistaking “necessary” for “sufficient” in regard to the brain’s role in consciousness. In fact, historians and philosophers of science will tell you that such things happen all the time. “Revolutions” occur from time to time in any given field, in which the prevailing orthodoxy is thrown out and replaced by a new one. We’re long overdue a cataclysmic revolution in neuroscience. But also, in this particular case, I think it inevitable that scientists have been led astray by their own personal experience of themselves being in their heads, in other words by their own incoordination. So although we can usefully draw out these two different strands of explanation for our thinking ourselves to be in our heads (experiential and scientific), we find that in fact they interact with one another, and have been for hundreds of years in the steady (d)evolution of our culture. The brain being thought the “organ of mind” is then part of the problem arising from our increasing alignment with - I would go as far as to say “worship of” - science. But there is a more general one which is that I think we can no longer really properly countenance or understand the notion of “mind” (I’m using “mind” here as a convenient catch-all to encompass consciousness, thought, perception, etc). The problem with “mind” is it’s not of the physical world and therefore doesn’t operate according to the laws of physics. You can’t, for example, detect it with any scientific instrument or apparatus. The only mind you can really know is your own. It does all manner of strange things like change size and shape; for example, as our sense of ourselves enlarges to take in the whole of us. And it even does time

«continued from previous page travel: when you reminisce, your mind is in the past; when you plan, it may be in the future. This ghostly interloper from another realm is too much for, too threatening to, our secular “scientism”, and so we seek to deny its true nature, to box it in, to force it into a physical mould. We decide that, just as the scientists tell us, it’s really just our brain. This is what our brain “feels” like, what it feels like to have a functioning brain. And since our brain is in our head that’s where our thinking, our consciousness, must be too. But of course it isn’t. We only have to stop and think about it for a minute to see that it obviously isn’t. It may seem to return there from time to time but mostly it’s off on its travels. It is, for example, in the lengthening fingers of my hand, in the eye of a needle as we try to thread it, in the music that we’re listening to, in that wonderful holiday we had last year... etc. It’s just not of the nature of mind to be held prisoner in some bodily organ or other. We can’t, or won’t, see this for what it is because, as I say, we can’t countenance something that doesn’t play by the physical rule book - doesn’t have a lawful regard for place (or time) - doesn’t stay where it’s put. We’re not at all comfortable with it. It’s just way too “spooky” or suspect. So we sort of blot it all out, deny its existence and decide instead that mind is the feeling of our brain - that we are our brain (actually, we can’t feel our brains at all. Neurosurgery requires only local anaesthetic for the peripheral incision. For example, through the skull). And the real trouble and shame of this is that we then proceed to teach it all to children. We tell them that in their head is a thing called a brain and that this is what they think with - thinking is the experience of their brain working. This disastrous lesson is reinforced at every turn by our contemporary language, our turns of phrase - “an idea popped into my head”, “she’s very brainy” - to the extent that it becomes sort of internalised such that, while still young, we actually start to experience ourselves this way. At which point the damage is largely done, the cycle is perpetuated. Some processes that we go through in life are not easily reversible.

The solution

So how do we fix this? How do we reverse the process? Well, at a personal level, we work at improving our coordination and find that this brings with it a loosening of the stranglehold of the “I am in my head” illusion. We find that we start to experience ourselves as being in our bodies and environment as a whole, in the “here and now”. I think, incidentally, that this - what I would call “return to sanity” - is itself justification enough for continuing to engage with our Alexander practice. I think it has profound and far-reaching effects on how we think and behave. But does an improvement in coordination, alone, get us to what I believe to be the right understanding of direction, the right answer to Lulie Westfeldt’s original question? Because this, effectively, is what Alexander, his brother and his secretary (Ethel Webb) are suggesting in the passage I quoted: “... as one’s use grew better one would stop asking those things”, the implication being that “one would stop asking them” because the answer had become clear. The “great cauliflower” would have opened up. But, in my own case at least, I don’t think it has been enough. In addition I have needed to come to understand what I have been outlining in this article: the way in which our culture indoctrinates us with the current scientific orthodoxy that the brain is the “organ of mind”. I have needed to realise that this is a total misconception, based not only on fatally flawed science but also our growing fear of that which is outside the reach of that science. Only once I’d properly grasped this did I have the confidence to let go of the “thought is in my head” comfort blanket, and realise that when, for example, I lengthened my fingers, that this, my fingers, was where my intention was. Up until that point I felt sheepish about believing such a thing, as if it was in some way fantastical or irrational - bonkers even. That is how pernicious a trap all of this is. So were the Alexanders wrong to tell Westfeldt that an improvement in use, in coordination, was enough? Or is there some other explanation for my difficulties? Have I been a particularly “difficult” case? Probably. Or have things perhaps become more difficult since the 1930s, our culture’s conviction about minds being brains hardened and become more entrenched? Quite possibly. But I suspect that, for some people at least, the cultural pressure to see and experience oneself dualistically would already in the 1930s have been another hurdle that had to be to overcome. And one particular manifestation of that cultural pressure was Alexander’s terminology itself. So that became another impediment to understanding. I think Westfeldt had difficulty understanding direction partly because the term is so very misleading. Had she been told instead that what she was learning was intentional action (or something along those lines) she might have found it much easier. I’m sure I would. We are the beneficiaries of Alexander’s particular genius, his extraordinary tenacity and insight. But we should not allow our admiration and gratitude for this to blind us to his limitations, which were very real. In particular, we really need, in my view, to re-examine his terminology, which we have continued to use, essentially uncritically and essentially unchanged, and ask ourselves whether it’s not high time we overhauled it.