On being an explorer

In making improvements to our overall poise and use of ourselves, one of the difficult ideas to grasp at first is that of allowing something to happen, rather than making it happen. Most of us (well, certainly adults) are accustomed to doing things in an effortful way, so it doesn’t feel like we’re doing something properly if we aren’t making an effort, and if we can’t feel something very definite happening in our muscles.

This is a factor that can hamper your attempts to become less stiff and uncoordinated. We can undo some of these muscular knots we’ve tied around ourselves, and learn to do things more easily.

When I’m attempting to show someone how to move more easily, and improve the way things are working, I might say something like “let your knees go forwards” or “let gravity fold you at the knees and ankles” and they will be a bit puzzled and say something like “uh… so you just want me to bend my knees then?” At this point it will be clear that they simply want to do something they’ve done before, selecting a familiar program (“bend the knees”) from a storehouse of remembered kinaesthetic experiences; in this case, one that – in many cases – involves using the leg muscles in a very stiff, controlled way (with an accompanying tendency to stiffen unnecessarily in the back).

To experience a new way of moving your legs, for example, requires a certain bravery or willingness to just let something happen that may be unfamiliar, and that hasn’t happened before. To this end, Alexander Technique teachers sometimes recommend viewing yourself as an explorer. Or at least, someone who is willing to have experiences and perform movements that are alien and unfamiliar to you, kinaesthetically.

The Alexander Technique outlines a fairly clear principle that you want to work to (instead of just trying to perform a movement the way it feels familiar to do so), which is to do with allowing the neck to be free, so the head can balance more on top of the spine, and you avoid narrowing or shortening the back so much… there are many more details but I won’t go into it here.

But the unfamiliar kinaesthetic experiences you might have when working with an Alexander teacher, or working on your own, can be a little unsettling. If we find ourselves standing in a way that doesn’t feel like we’re standing (even if we can see in the mirror that we are) then we might simply want to revert to what feels like standing again, because it’s safe and familiar, even if the new way feels much easier and more pleasant… You can view it as a struggle between your feeling self and your rational, thinking self. 

Help! My body’s disappeared!

I was recently reading an account by an Alexander Technique teacher, Missy Vineyard, of one of her early lessons in the technique, after which she felt like her body had disappeared. She felt like she wanted to look in the mirror to confirm that it was still there. 

It’s one of the odd experiences people can have when working with this discipline. When things are working well, and you’re not used to it, it might feel like your body is not quite “there” in the usual way. This is partly because there is a relative quietening down of muscle activity. If you think about it right now, if you’re aware of certain parts of your body as you read this – perhaps the backs of your hands or the back of your neck – it’s because there is muscle activity going on there (perhaps muscle activity that you don’t really need).

After a good Alexander lesson, there will tend to be an overall quietening down of a lot of this unnecessary activity, which can produce a sense that you’re not really as aware of your body as usual. But it’s important not to misinterpret what this sensation means.

In my early days of going for Alexander lessons, I wrongly believed the feeling of “my body’s not really there anymore” meant that I wasn’t in touch with my body any longer, that in future I should recreate this improved use of myself by shutting out the sensation from my body, screening it from my awareness.

At first this seemed to work a little, to help me return to what felt like a state of good use, of lightness and freedom in movement, but not for long. I was – I now suppose – simply relying on a conditioned response, produced by the lesson, to this feeling of “I’m not very aware of my body right now”.  When I returned to that feeling, some of the good use I enjoyed in the lesson would seem to return.

What was really happening in the lesson was that a lot of my muscle activity had quietened down. In fact you’re more aware of sensations than normal when you’re using yourself a bit better – it’s just that there’s maybe less going on for you to be aware of. Well, it’s probably also the fact that the new use has an unfamiliarity about it that can create the (wrong) impression that you’re not aware of your body so much.

So yes, I guess I would advise my earlier Alexander self not to try and ignore bodily sensation (this is probably very important – the “repression” alarm bells will possibly be ringing in some people’s heads as they read this). And also, now, I find it helpful to scan my body and notice what parts of me I can feel, and allow the activity in these areas to quieten down a little, allowing myself to maintain more of an easy, poised state.

Exercising more choice over how you come across

Many people are unconscious of the postural habits that take over when they’re in conversation. (Image courtesy of *clairity*, Creative Commons Attribution licence).

It’s often fascinating to be shown how you can exercise a greater level of choice over how you respond to situations, and to be less of a slave to unconscious habit.

This has far reaching implications, from improving posture (and ridding yourself of problems like a sore knee or back) to approaching situations of all kinds in a more spontaneous, fresh and creative way, including social situations.

Just to give a concrete example: I used to find myself gesturing compulsively with my hands when I spoke. It was something that people often commented on, but I didn’t think there was much wrong with it. I felt it helped me get my points across if I had to make a speech, for example.

It wasn’t necessarily a problem except that it had become a habit which I had less and less control over, so that even when lying down, supposedly still, in an Alexander Technique session, my hands twitched and moved a little as I spoke. I wasn’t aware of this until it was pointed out to me.

I think it’s reasonable to say that you want to find yourself doing things because you’ve chosen to do them, rather than just because you’re in the grip of an unconscious habit. And I realised that my relentless gesturing had become something slightly robotic and compulsive.

On a postural level, this is obviously particularly relevant to actors. If you habitually hunch your shoulders and slink your head and neck forwards as you speak then that’s no use to you unless you’re playing the role of a slightly shy, fumbling person (notwithstanding the fact that this fixed way of holding neck and shoulders will be contributing to a general sense of postural collapse, affecting breathing and increasing your likelihood of developing back problems).

So if this is your tendency, for example, experiment with stopping it. Perhaps if you find yourself in a slightly dull conversation where your mind is tending to wander, you could practice this skill while you listen. Notice your tendency to do whatever your postural habit might be in conversation – whether it be hunching the shoulders or nodding compulsively or tightening your neck – and see if you can stop it or do it less.

You might notice some slightly uncomfortable feelings coming up, such as a fear that you are being rude or that you look odd. See if you can just calmly observe these feelings while carrying on the conversation, and see if they gradually pass. Or they might alert you to some problems you have with social anxiety that you want to work on.

If you want to go back to the habit of hunching your shoulders or whatever, then try to do so only as a conscious choice. On the other hand, you might notice that you feel a bit less tense and a bit calmer letting yourself quieten down these compulsive muscular responses. It might be something you want to carry on with, or adapt into your movement repertoire.

And if you practice Alexander Technique already, you’ll find it a bit easier to let your whole body just come into a natural, non-held state of poise.

So it’s useful to keep an eye on your postural habits and consider whether or not you want to carry on with them, particularly in social situations – which tend to cause most of us to stiffen a little, especially in the neck region. You don’t need to spend your life in the grip of unconscious habits. As well as improving your poise and general well-being, making you less prone to feeling tense or stiff or tired, this kind of practice is also cultivating your natural spontaneity and ability to respond to situations in a fresh and considered way.

Strength or flexibility: does it have to be a choice?

The aerial feats of Circus Artemis (image courtesy of K.Kendall, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

Do you have to compromise flexibility to achieve strength? It’s a debate that crops up in online fitness forums from time to time.

It all comes down to how you do it. In my experience it is possible for people to train or work intelligently, where activities that require muscular strength are performed in such a way that you are not sacrificing so much of your innate poise and balance in the process. And in this way, flexibility is preserved, along with your ability to perform skillful tasks (so you don’t have to lose so much of your violin-playing ability just because you operate a power drill for several hours a day, for instance).

That said, I doubt you’d meet an Alexander Technique teacher who would recommend weight lifting to their students. The more strenuous an activity, the stronger is the impetus to do things in a way that isn’t good for the body.

If you read a little further on, you’ll hopefully gain some insight into some of the issues that require attention when doing strenuous activity, at least from the point of view of an Alexander Technique teacher.

Most people approach tasks of all kinds by tightening up and contracting their body’s musculature inwards. There’s an observable tendency for the head and neck to retract into the torso, and for the muscles of the arms and legs to pull inwards towards the torso.

This is a difficult thing to convey merely using words but when we operate habitually in that inwardly-contracted state, we not only put more pressure and strain on the whole body, but we cultivate muscular habits that have an overall rigidifying effect on the body. And we’re more likely to build up habits of chronic tension in particular areas – for example, chronically tense arms seem quite common with heavy computer use.

We tend to sacrifice some of our natural poise and balance and ease of movement when we do things in this inwardly-contracted way. Things also seem to become less well “connected” to each other – a kinaesthetic quality that is tricky to convey in words.

The underlying physiology behind this has to do with a set of muscular reflexes – “antigravity” reflexes, they are sometimes called. When working well, they tend to keep us in a state of poised, balanced, expansiveness, where the muscles can adjust to each other and co-ordinate all the different parts of us in a way that feels easy and natural, and reduces the pressure on the individual parts.

But many people approach strenuous tasks in a way that interferes with the operation of these muscular reflexes, and they’ve been doing this for years so there is a slightly chronic state of contraction or collapse. One of the most significant ways you might be doing this is by tightening up the neck muscles and holding the head in a fixed position on top of the spine. It’s something you can find yourself doing without realising it.

It’s useful to explore doing things, even strenuous things, with as little muscle tension as you feel you can get away with. For example, experiment with gripping your pen or toothbrush less tightly.

Chronic tension patterns also go hand in hand with a tendency to lose touch with your surroundings, and how things feel. For example, the person who grips their pencil fearsomely will also not be very aware of how that pencil feels in their hand. So try to work in a way that maintains your sensory awareness of your surroundings and the physical contact you make with things around you. Continue to feel the little changes in weight distribution of your feet on the ground as you saw a plank of wood, for example, or the way the keys of your computer actually feel under your fingers as you type. Keep your vision in a reasonably lively state, interrupting up-close tasks with looking off in the distance every now and again, and maintaining some awareness of your peripheral vision.

There are various reasons why it’s good to be “sensing” your surroundings in this way. But to cut a long story short, this has the effect of getting our muscular reflexes more involved in whatever we’re doing, making it easier to do it, and requiring less undesirable muscle tension.

Just to give you a quick demonstration of these reflexes, try something now: stand on one leg.

Done it? Great. Now try again, this time with your eyes closed.

Notice the difference? It was probably a good bit harder to balance with your eyes closed. That’s just to illustrate the effect that one of your senses – vision – has on stimulating the operation of these muscular reflexes (or “postural reflexes”, as they’re sometimes called). The more you can reduce interference with these reflexes when doing things, the better your coordination and the easier everything will be.

You can cultivate poise and expansiveness in everything you do, whether it be playing a guitar or operating a power drill, and this will tend to counteract the development of chronic patterns of tension and immobilisation. It’s best to begin this re-education process with relatively non-strenuous tasks, before taking it to the gym. It can admittedly take some time and application (observation) to become aware of these kinds of muscular patterns, and to begin changing them. Taking Alexander Technique lessons can make this a lot easier.

Faulty kinaesthesia and how a mirror can help you

(Image courtesy of gothick_matt, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

Having trouble with posture? Not able to get comfortable? Or maybe you’re struggling with activities that require good co-ordination. It could be that you’re relying on faulty kinaesthesia.

This is something we all appear to suffer from, to some extent. To put it another way, the information coming from your muscles and joints – which you rely on to orient yourself and your body parts in space – is unreliable. If you read further on, you’ll perhaps get a chance to notice this in yourself.

When teaching improved patterns of posture and movement, Alexander technique teachers tend to make use of a mirror. During a session, someone will say: “Oh, it feels like I’m leaning way backwards” or something similar, when they aren’t actually leaning back at all, or not as much as they think. It just feels that way because of long-standing habits of posture and the associated feelings of muscle tension.

A quick look in the mirror confirms this, often with slight shock or hilarity.

If you’re in the habit of slumping forwards a lot, for example, this will feel normal to you, and the physical sensations from your body – or kinaesthesia – will tend to keep you stuck in that habit.

Try something just now: fold your arms. Take a moment to notice how you do it. Perhaps you fold them right-over-left. You probably do if you’re right handed.

Now try it again. Only this time, do it the other way (left-over-right if the last paragraph applies to you).

It may well feel slightly strange. But if you look in the mirror you’ll see that it looks perfectly normal.

This tendency to cling to familiar sensations – even when they might be associated with bad or unhelpful posture habits – is pretty universal. We all tend to suffer from it. But it will hinder your attempts to make constructive changes to the way you sit, stand or carry out physical acts. So it’s something to be aware of.

You can help yourself by using a mirror. If you’re practising yoga or martial arts at home, or even if you’re just trying to get a better position in front of the computer, set a mirror up nearby so that you can verify that your physical sensations match what you see with your eyes.

In practice many of us find it difficult to observe ourselves objectively. As an Alexander Technique teacher pointed out to me recently, we’re much like the anorexic who always sees a fat person in the mirror. It’s taken me a long time to be able to really observe my own postural twists in the mirror, when they occur, and to use this as the basis for changing things. I now find it a great help when I’m doing slightly tricky or strenuous things – for me – like practising new tunes on the guitar.

If I can check my tendency for one shoulder to gradually creep upwards, with the accompanying increase of strain on one side of the body, then I can play more easily and for longer periods.

Care has to be taken here though. It doesn’t do to try and change things directly. If one shoulder appears to be higher than the other, for example, forcing them both to be level to each other will likely mean that you’ve just acquired another layer of unhelpful muscle tension, which might cause other problems. You want to be looking for ways that you can release muscles, and bring yourself into a more poised, balanced, use of the body – where the shoulders are more likely to be level.

If you think this is a problem area for you, it’s worth going for an Alexander lesson, to see what they can show you. Or if you feel you’re not able to do what you want to be doing, in terms of carrying out some physical act, you might want to start exploring this. Maybe you’ve taken up yoga or a sport and found yourself frustrated at your inability to properly carry out some of the directions given by your instructor, and you don’t know why.

Some useful study resources are available here.

Get to know your hip joints

They’re not necessarily where you think they are. (Photo courtesy of cobblucas, Creative Commons Attribution licence)

Where are your hip joints? It’s something you may discount as obvious. But almost everyone, in my experience, seems to have a poor understanding of this area. And – as hopefully will be apparent once you’ve read further down – this vagueness goes some way towards explaining why many people suffer from lower back pain.

When someone asks you to “place your hands on your hips”, you probably rest them on the upper crest of the pelvis, the iliac crest (see image above and figure 1, below). This is the area commonly referred to as “the hips”. The hip joint, on the other hand, the area where your legs join your pelvis, is quite a bit lower down, as figure 1 also shows.

The problem for many people is that they’ve formed the impression that it’s natural to bend at the hips. It isn’t. When we bend in the middle region of the body we should only ever bend at the hip joints. If you think of your body as something that folds in half when you bend over, then it’s important to locate the middle bit here, at the hip joints, not further up at the hips.

Figure 1: Pelvis skeletal system (left) and (right, inset) pelvic region of a real person highlighting approximate locations of hip joint and iliac crest

Just being clear about this can make quite a big difference to the way you walk, for example, with potentially positive repercussions for any back or leg pain you may have been having. You can locate your hip joints by exploring this region with your fingertip, looking for the place where the leg appears to hinge on the body. It might be a little bit sore to press on this area, if you are someone with habitually quite tight and stiff hip joints.

So looking at it another way, the pelvis belongs to the back rather than the legs, if you like. During activity, such as walking, the pelvis should be maintaining its alignment with the back. It shouldn’t swing forwards and backwards with the leg. This tends to weaken this lower back area and leave it more vulnerable.

Having a better experience of walking, where the legs can move independently of the hips and pelvis, felt at first – for me – like I was floating on top of the legs, rather than sitting on top of them, sinking down into them. It made walking, for example, feel fantastic – much easier. But it also felt quite different and unfamiliar, so it was easy to revert back to the old habit. It takes a little getting used to.

Being able to maintain this easier use of the legs while walking – if it’s not in accord with your habit – depends greatly on other aspects of your posture (or postural mechanisms, I should say) working well. So if you are someone with problems in this area, an Alexander Technique teacher would spend some time showing you how to maintain a good use of your head, neck and back area, primarily, before going on to explore this aspect of the legs and how you use them.

Lying down in semi-supine (see this youtube clip) is another very useful practise with respect to maintaining a good relationship between the pelvis and the rest of the back. When you practise semi-supine, your pelvis and back remain in alignment. So regular practise of it helps reinforce the tendency to maintain a unity between these two areas, if it’s something you tend to lose when you are walking or moving around.

We have choices over how we use our bodies, and we can base these choices on what makes sense anatomically, or simply allow ourselves to pick up habits from our parents or the people around us, many of whom might not really know what they’re doing either.

“Does Alexander Technique alter your personality?”

“WHAT did you just say?” Alexander Technique helps tame our immediate reactions, a by-product of the practice”. (Photo courtesy of lanuiop, Creative Commons Attribution licence)

In answer to a question I was asked the other day, I don’t want to navel gaze too much but there are a few aspects of “personality”, whatever that means, that seem to change as you learn to do things more easily and with less muscular effort. There are also one or two potential pitfalls that are maybe worth a mention.

My first impressions
The quality of your perceptions is very much bound up with what’s going on with your muscles and body, oddly enough, and this is something I noticed when I first went for Alexander technique, in London about 9 years ago. I was lying on the teaching table and suddenly became very aware that an overhead light appeared in sharper focus, as though the light coming from it was in higher definition or something – this was in addition to the overall feeling of calmness.

Because I was being shown how to do things without a lot of my habitual tightening and tensing, especially of the neck and shoulders, I also felt strangely vulnerable during the sessions. And when I went into work afterwards, I was sure I must appear an odd sight to other people. But I could see in the mirror that I actually looked quite poised and natural, for want of a better word. I somehow looked less affected, less like I was trying to assert some kind of “personality” or manner of who I felt I should be.

This was just an initial experience of the mind/body connection and how we can adjust its tuning, if you like. And at the time these effects were far less important to me than the apparently “physical” changes – the fact that after a session I found I could walk up stairs more easily and that the joint in my left knee no longer made a worrying clicking noise all the time.

As I continued to learn, these kinds of experiences seemed to plateau, as I became familiar with the new way of doing things, and then every so often they would intensify again as I went through another period of change.

Taming your reactions
A prerequisite for the powerful changes produced by the Alexander Technique is to learn how to quieten down your responses, to allow something different to happen – rather than just doing something in the old familiar way. In doing this, you exercise a mental faculty that Alexander technique teachers call “inhibition” – essentially, making a conscious decision to withhold a habitual response to something (i.e. to stop tightening your leg or abdominal muscles so much as you get out of a chair).

Practising the technique develops this mental faculty much more fully, and it can be applied to many other things than just movement and the use of the body. You get better and better at not reacting to things – or not reacting habitually anyway, but making your responses more considered, if you want to. Some people reflect that this has helped them become a less addictive personality, or less obsessive, with fewer OCD-type tendencies, for example.

By stopping every so often, rather than just being carried along on the wave of habitual responses and familiar behaviour, you can also cut down on the waste activities in your life, and channel more of your energies into the goals you want to achieve.

Exercising this faculty to stop instead of reacting habitually also (it could be argued) merges with the goals of many spiritual disciplines, which place an emphasis on becoming less habitual and robotic in our responses to life, cultivating greater spontaneity.

Paranoid Android
People who tend to think “I’m not creative” or “I’m not spontaneous” are often very interested to discover that they can work on this aspect of themselves, and surprised to find the means to do this in a discipline that appears to be all about posture and the body (well, which is all about learning to make less unnecessary effort at a mind and body level, just to once again be clear).

Learning anything new can be tricky though, and it’s important to go easy on yourself if you don’t seem to ‘get it’ straight away. Many people go through a phase with Alexander technique – more often nearer the beginning of the learning process – where they become even more watchful and careful and cautious about how they are doing things. This can make you seem like a bit of an android (or “Alexandroid” as AT parlance has it). This seems a phase that it’s sometimes necessary to go through, but it should definitely be a temporary stop-off point, and if it persists then you’ve likely missed the point of what the technique is about.

Breathing myths and legends

Photo courtesy of pumpkinmook/Creative Commons Attribution licence

Methods abound that purport to tell us how we should breathe. But there are so many conflicting opinions. So who should you listen to? Which experts have got it right?

Rather than stick my oar in claiming to be another expert, I thought it would be useful to recap a little of what we definitely know about the physiology of breathing. And hopefully this will clarify why Alexander technique teachers tend to advocate the “nature knows best” approach. We tend to counsel that the best way to breathe is to avoid interfering with the natural reflex mechanisms that support breathing, but to let them work naturally (not necessarily a simple matter, if we’ve developed bad breathing habits).

Breathing is something that – in theory – just happens, without our having to do anything, though we are able to consciously tinker with the mechanism, as when we hold our breath going underwater. Normal, healthy breathing involves some degree of movement of both the ribs and diaphragm. When the movement of these parts is restricted, through poor postural habits or excess muscle tension, for example, our breathing will tend to become harder work, and less efficient.

Fig. 1: The lungs are in the upper cavity of the chest

“Abdominable” breathing?
First of all, where are the lungs? This is the logical place to look if we want to know where the breath should be going. Look at the image in Figure 1 above, showing the location of the lungs in the upper cavity of the chest. Pondering this, you may find yourself questioning the logic of so-called “abdominal breathing”. This is something sometimes recommended by practitioners of disciplines like meditation and yoga.

Elizabeth Langford gives an interesting critique of abdominal breathing – which she prefers to dub “abdominable breathing” – in her book Mind and Muscle. What tends to happen when we make ourselves breath in this way is that the organs located in the abdomen are squashed downwards and rib movement is to some degree restricted – not the obvious route to easy, effortless breathing, when seen in this light. She goes on to suggest that the swelling of the abdomen that you can see when someone is breathing in this way indicates a weakness of the abdominal wall, something which often results from deliberate practise of this kind of breathing.

Contrast this with healthy breathing, she suggests. The ribs and diaphragm again attempt to co-operate to maximise the space available for incoming air. The diaphragm presses down on the contents of the abdomen during the in breath, which in turn presses against the muscular wall of the abdomen. In someone whose postural mechanisms are working well, the abdominal muscles will resist the stretch being placed on them, thereby minimising the displacement of the nearby internal organs. This is something that happens reflexly, without our direct intervention, but it may not have a chance to happen if we are pushing the abdominal wall outwards, or if we have postural problems.

Breathing “does itself”, if we let it
Most of us have come to believe that breathing in is something that we have to make some special effort to do, by sucking in air before we speak, for example. But if you think about it, whenever you can hear someone breathing in – whether it be a sniff or a little gasping noise before they speak – it’s a certainty that they are doing something to restrict the flow of air into the lungs, that the air passage is being narrowed or constricted in some way.

So the last thing you want to do is to start taking “deep breaths”. You will simply be exacerbating the things you do that interfere with free breathing. What you may notice yourself doing when you take a deep breath is that you heave the chest upwards to force the air in. You may be able to feel that this also causes the lower back to hollow, which restricts free movement of the ribs and diaphragm – it also tends to weaken the lower back, and is an effect often visible in lower back pain sufferers.

Alternatively, when we are able to minimise the extraneous muscular effort we make in everyday activities like sitting and standing and so on, we find that the ribs and diaphragm can move much more, and more easily, and this sucking-in of air become unnecessary, and breathing becomes silent and effortless.

Experienced Alexander technique teachers generally advise people to be wary of breathing exercises, and alert to the fact that these can do more harm than good. Even if the exercises seem sound in theory, the person teaching you may have an entirely different postural situation to you, and it may be difficult for you to follow their instructions and achieve the same effects within yourself, without first acquiring a better awareness of your own habits of muscle use and breathing (the two are intertwined – try holding onto your leg or arm muscles, for example, and notice what it does to your breathing).

The idea that breathing can be improved by increasingly leaving it alone, minimising the things you do that interfere with it, is one that greatly appealed to me when I first learned of it, and it has proven extremely powerful as a way of dealing with my own breathing ailments. Until a few years ago I suffered myself from regular panic attacks and hyperventilation problems, so I know what it is to be interfering with breathing in a problematic way.

Breathing is a huge and complicated subject on which there is a lot of disagreement. But the idea that it works best when left alone is something you can verify for yourself by taking Alexander technique lessons, and it certainly fits my own experience. The problem is that most of us are already doing so much stuff of which we are unaware – clenching stomach muscles unnecessarily, sucking in air habitually when we speak, and so on – that it is not always an easy matter to just “leave it alone”.

Dealing with foot pronation and fallen arches

Photo courtesy of aussiegall/Creative Commons Attribution licence

Problems with foot pronation are commonly remedied by using arch supports or specially-adapted trainers. But if you’re really interested in re-educating your feet and posture, it’s important to appreciate the limitations of these kinds of orthotics. What else can you do to help matters?
Arch supports and other orthotics don’t take into account the role of the entire body’s musculature in creating and maintaining the arches of the feet. And many people prescribed them find they gain little benefit. It’s also true that people are generally given very little information about how to re-educate the feet and legs to work with these supports, or indeed to learn how you might eventually wean yourself off them – a desirable goal if you’re interested in improving the body’s functioning.
Arch supports can change the shape of the arch to some extent, relieve tiredness and knee pain, and make people feel a bit better. By avoiding some of the damaging consequences of simply allowing the foot to flatten onto the ground – in the case of fallen arches, for example – they seem to be invaluable. But it also seems evident that they don’t really get to the root of the problem and they do little to restore the natural shock-absorbing properties of the foot and arch.

Fallen arches and posture
So what more can you do? Well, as already mentioned, it’s important to realise that our arches are created and sustained by muscles elsewhere – in the calves and legs, most obviously, but ultimately in the way all the muscles in the body work together.
People who have developed a general postural habit of collapsing down will often tend to find that they are pushing the knees too far back, causing the arches of the feet to flatten. It seems reasonable to assume that putting an arch underneath will improve matters. And when the orthotic is in place, the muscles in the foot and calve contract, which seems desirable since one of the features of a flat foot is a lack of the necessary tone in the surrounding muscles.
However, when muscles are held in a state of ongoing contraction, they lose a lot of their sensitivity and responsiveness. So we may have achieved an apparent remedy to the problem, but by sacrificing some of our natural springiness. We will have diminished some of the function of the mechanisms that maintain posture, balance and uprightness. One result is that parts of the body such as the knees are placed under a different kind of strain, which isn’t ideal.

Re-educate your posture
Clearly, it makes sense to seek a solution that goes to the root of the problem, and doesn’t force us to introduce other compensatory forms of muscle tension. We can try to enforce change on the body using external devices, or we can work to improve the body’s functioning from the inside-out. Methods of postural re-education like Alexander Technique fall into the latter camp. This takes some time and effort to learn but the result is that you can do a lot of work to improve the arches in a way that involves the whole body, and doesn’t diminish the function of the delicate muscular reflexes that – when working well – can keep us upright and in a state of lightness, balance and poise.
Running is obviously an activity where the feet and legs are under particular stress. But you can minimise the tendency of the feet to over-pronate during running by adopting a running style where the forefoot lands first, something described in more detail in the posts on running, which appear elsewhere on this blog.

If you’re interested in the effect of arch supports on posture, this article Body and Sole presents a lot more detail, from the perspective of an Alexander technique teacher.

The physiology of creativity

Lego sculpture from the Nathan Sawaya exhibit at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut (Photo courtesy of Tony the Misfit/Creative Commons Attribution licence)

Many people who engage in “creative” activities (writing, painting and making music being just the most obvious examples of this) find that they go through periods of high productivity and other periods where they feel somewhat blocked.
An insight into the psycho-physical aspects of creativity can be helpful. It may seem an unlikely correspondence but – and a little bit of Alexander work reveals this quite vividly – the best way to cultivate a free and expanded musculature is to give up our tendency to focus on the end result of an activity, instead to pay attention to what is happening in each moment.
This is an idea that is very similar to Zen concepts such as “act without any final goal”, “seek not perfection, but authenticity” and so on.
Adopting this kind of attitude is better for cultivating a free and easy use of the body, which in turn seems to make it easier to maintain a calmer, more aware, more open state of mind, better attune to entertaining unusual insights and making it easier to enjoy what you’re doing, to feel “in the flow”.
So if you are playing your guitar, for example, you could try to avoid thinking too hard about playing a particular sequence correctly (if that is your tendency), or of coming up with a tune that is good or which you think other people will like. Instead simply enjoy the feel of your fingers on the strings, the sensation of your breathing coming and going, the atmosphere in the room, the sound of birds chirping in the distance and so on.
After a few Alexander lessons you would also hopefully see the sense in giving some of this moment-to-moment awareness to letting your neck muscles remain un-tensed and allowing your spine to lengthen and your body to remain poised and balanced and relaxed.
If it’s not your habit, it can take a little work to cultivate the enhanced level of body awareness that supports this. But it soon becomes apparent that being aware of this mind/body relationship can be a useful tool for managing your own creative process. When people feel blocked or that their thoughts are focusing down quite a narrow corridor, that they’re struggling to think of something fresh or new, they often find that their neck has tensed up and they are tightening and contracting their musculature.
Purposefully cultivating a better relationship between mind and body can therefore be a useful tool for breaking writer’s block.
Lessons in the Alexander technique give you first hand experience of the relationship between mind and muscle, of how what you think about affects the body and posture, and vice versa.
Most people come to Alexander technique simply because of physical problems but are later fascinated to discover it can help them with activities that they previously considered purely to do with the mind.