Features
Fear
By Ian Lyon
I
was someone who, whenever he crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at the fire, missed. If there was anyone else around they’d tend to laugh, and I’d laugh along with them, to make light of it. But actually I think I found my ineptitude - not just throwing balls of paper into a fire, but any sort of throwing, and catching too - very painful, embarrassing. It seems strange to me now, looking back, that for years I never stopped to wonder why I was so bad at it, what the problem might be. I can only think that it was because to contemplate it at all was too unsettling or upsetting. I just wanted to blot it out. Then, one day, during my second year of Alexander teacher training, I quite spontaneously noticed something strange. I went to throw something at a target - it might well have been a crumpled ball of paper at a fire, I can’t remember now - and I noticed that at the moment I made the throwing movement I sort of blanked out. When, a moment later, I came to, it was to see my projectile sailing to one side or another of its target. I knew straight away that this was what I had always done - the experience was entirely familiar - but up until this moment I hadn’t seen it for what it was. And this was all the more surprising given that it wasn’t just some sort of gentle or neutral absence from the moment. It was more like a momentary blind panic, a fear or even terror, specifically, I could now see, a fear of failure, of missing the target. Physically it was manifest as considerable tension, rigidity and distortion of my frame. No wonder I couldn’t throw accurately under these circumstances. I was like a person or animal cowering and bracing, trying to numb myself in anticipation of a blow. But the blow in this case was a conceptual, or perhaps social, one - the embarrassment of failure. I don’t know exactly why this all of a sudden became apparent to me. I’m sure the fact that it happened during my Alexander training was not a coincidence but I can only guess at the mechanism. My guess is that over the preceding year or so there had been a considerable change in my resting state, in the way in which I held myself upright, in my body shape, and this was associated with a general calming down in my mind. Against this changed, calmer and more balanced backdrop I think that the sudden disturbance, physical and mental, of my habitual blind panic when trying to throw something was brought into sharp relief. It may also have been that I was less frightened of confronting the reality of the situation, less determined than before to blot it out. I don’t know. I find these things complicated and difficult to understand, difficult to have much insight into. It wasn’t difficult though to relate what I’d stumbled on to what I’d been reading about in Alexander’s books and, through this and my work on the training course, I also knew how to approach or work with it. I practised throwing something at a target while taking care not to pull (rotate) by head back on the top of my neck, and not to pull my neck
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forward and down. And, sure enough, with a bit of practice I found that in this way I could not only avoid creating the physical tension and distortion but, with it, the feeling of blind panic, and, seemingly for the first time, I was present throughout the throw, could keep my eyes on the target and, to my surprise and delight, actually hit it. I’d demonstrated to myself that it was my fear of missing the target alone that made me miss. Apart from that there was nothing wrong with me - at least when it came to throwing crumpled up balls of paper into a fire. I was struck by the sheer stupidity of the situation, that I could have got into such a senselessly self-defeating way of doing something. How much else in my life was I unknowingly sabotaging for myself to this extent? And to what extent were other people like this too? I felt that I was re-making Alexander’s original discovery for myself, which in a sense I was, which in a sense we all of us have to. It seems to me that the crux of Alexander’s insight was to recognise the distinction between the self-debilitating reaction to the intention to act, and the action itself - to see that they were separate or separable things. If you can tease them apart you can hold the self-debilitating part in abeyance and in so doing transform the way you perform the action. This is a process in which your whole conception of what it is to perform this action changes profoundly. The change of conception and change of action are one and the same. In fact the word ‘action’ in this context can be rather misleading since all of the same applies if the action in question is what would generally be regarded as purely mental, like the requirement, for example, to add together two numbers (without using pencil and paper), or to understand a philosophical position, or make a decision. In fact, nothing that we do is purely ‘mental’ since our physical selves are involved too, and, not only our brains and central nervous systems, but our peripheral nervous systems and muscles as well, since the distinction between these various parts of our neuromuscular system is just arbitrary really, an artefact of our way of looking at it, anatomical rather than functional. But that’s a whole other story. The thing that interests me most about all of this is how it all seems to revolve around fear. Fear’s a difficult thing to understand. We tend to think of it as a conscious experience, only existing when we’re aware of it, but, as this example shows, you can be frightened, and hugely debilitated by this fear, without having the slightest inkling of it. Often we mistake fear for something else. Some people become and feel angry in certain situations where it can be clear to onlookers that the real issue is that they’re nervous or frightened. They’re behaving much like a frightened animal which becomes aggressive when cornered. But what they experience is anger - or perhaps a more suppressed form of it, like irritation or impatience - not fear. How then can we talk or think about fear if some, or perhaps
