time of Covid Fear by Ian Lyon

Fear

By Ian Lyon

Iwas 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 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

most, of it isn’t apparent to us? I think the answer is that we must define it behaviourally rather than experientially, and specifically that we should define it by its characteristic musculo-skeletal signature, what Alexander variously referred to as interference with the primary control, pulling down or misuse (a term which I personally find very unhelpful). Let me give two more examples which I think support this (possibly quite contentious) position; the first, another personal experience, the second, a somewhat more objective observation. At one point during my Alexander training, a group of us, along with the training course director, were to be featured on a BBC television programme and we travelled to the studios in Birmingham to record it. In the studio, under the lights and in front of those big old-fashioned television cameras, I became very nervous, as I was prone to do in stressful situations. During a break in proceedings I told the training course director this and he gave me a quick ‘turn’, out of view behind a bit of scenery. The effect was quite extraordinary. The almost overwhelming feeling of nervousness completely vanished. How could this happen? I expect that the familiarity of being worked on and the director’s confidence in the situation must have helped, but I’m also sure that something else, far beyond just simple reassurance, was going on. The inescapable conclusion was that my feeling of fear was associated with, indeed dependent on, the physical tension and resulting distortion of my frame which it was my habit to create in these circumstances, and which the training course director was able to guide me out of with a five minute ‘turn’. For a long time then I thought that fear, and indeed probably all other negative emotion, must inevitably be bound up with, dependent on, this physical tension and distortion of my frame - let’s call it ‘pulling down’ for the sake of brevity. I think now that it’s more likely the other way round, that all pulling down is dependent on, or is actually the same thing as, fear. Not necessarily fear which we recognise as such, but fear nonetheless. But why should this be? Where has it come from? I remember being very struck when I first saw this pair of photos in Frank Pierce Jones’ book, Freedom to Change, of a young man in profile before and just after a sudden,

“Given the prevalence of pulling down in our society, if you accept my hypothesis that ... it is fear, then you have to conclude that we’re a very frightened bunch.

unexpected loud noise. Cringing for cover, ducking, getting your head down, when something unexpected happens, particularly if it’s a big or nearby event, is I think an instinctive defence reaction. The unexpected is always initially an unknown quantity. Until you’ve had time to work out whether it’s a serious threat or not, best to assume the former and adopt a defensive position. But the thing that struck me about Jones’ photos was that the pattern of the cringe - the head retracted backwards on the neck and the neck pulled forwards and down - was so like that originally described by Alexander as constituting, in his terminology, interference with the primary control. It seems to me extremely unlikely that this striking similarity could just be coincidence. I think that, in a nutshell, we have the origin of our pulling down revealed to us in the right-hand photo. Given the prevalence of pulling down in our society, if you accept my hypothesis that in essence or in origin it is fear, then you have to conclude that we’re a very frightened bunch. I think that’s about right. But we don’t necessarily experience ourselves this way. It seems to me that as a society we’re significantly more fearful than we were even just 100 years ago. I think that the events of this year in response to a new pathogen which, in the scheme of things, is relatively benign - compare bubonic plague, Spanish Flu, Ebola or even MERS (a fairly recent and still current coronavirus but with a mortality some ten times that of Covid-19) - bear this out. Freud thought that what he termed ‘civilisation’ makes demands on human subjects that are too much to bear. I suspect he was right, and that those demands are not only getting greater, but doing so at increasing pace. The Alexander Technique has never been needed more than it is needed now but the question is, do we know how properly to make that case?

If you’d like to respond to any of the issues raised here feel free to email me at ian@ianlyon.net, or, alternatively, why not start up a conversation on the STAT forum: https:// alexandertechnique.co.uk/forum.