Sitting up, standing up, are achievements. We forget this, if we ever realise it, only to take note when we see a baby sitting or up standing for the first time; taking his or her first steps. That there is such a thing as sitting up well, standing well is often missed, unremarked on. The gesture of ourselves to ourselves, to the outside world, too often pre-dominates, to the exclusion of our organic functioning, manifesting itself, in breathing that is held, muscles that are sore, ailments that seem to afflict us, ways of being with others that can terrify us and them.
That these might be linked escapes us, if we approach them through disciplines that have first divided the human being into physical or mental, psychological or physiological, where psychological is not firmly grounded in the concept of ourselves, as actors in and of the world. Such philosophical and epistemological groundings may seem far removed from the distraction of a bad back, the pain of a sore neck, the blinding migraine that occludes the possibility of work. Yet, such groundings are openings towards understandings that can free us of habitual pains and terrors; groundings that Alexander struggled with and understood in terms of action and through not dividing but combining the mental and physical into the psycho-physical.
The psycho-physical for Alexander is his way of saying that we are indivisible into mental and physical when it comes to the ‘act of living.’ Acts, themselves, are approached by him, as mental or physical when it comes to, how use, effects the standard of functioning. This is because he lacks better words, better understandings and what is missed, as I blogged about in the first of this series, are inter-personal acts.
Inter-personal acts require some explaining. In some ways, what I am about to write might seem obvious, but from the nineteenth century which conceptualised people as organisms, to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century conceptualisation of people as information processors, it has been a hard won battle to recognize again that people are people. That we are formed as people by our first relationships; that being understood is often our first step in understanding.
Understanding first of all occurs face-to-face between mother and baby, it is non-verbal in its grounding with mutual gazing providing respite and calm when anxiety threatens. We are inherently social, our withdrawals and individuality existing only within the network of our personal relationships. To be excluded from the personal realm, in the fullest sense, in infancy, is to face non-existence, a terror and an anxiety that is met with a full-throated cry or perhaps, a muffled sob.
Lesser terrors exist; lesser anxieties exist, grounded in this greater terror. Our first attempts at controlling them are to look to mum, or are withdrawals that come with looking away or looking down. Each has characteristics of its own; each exists within a network of personal constructs that are all too easily dismissed, as subjective when placed in ‘objective’ frameworks concerning mechanical or organic functioning.
For some and certainly not all these early habits of control, involving the use of the head and neck to control attention, to control feelings of overwhelm, to control anxiety in the personal realm are what are evoked in Alexander lessons. Early and core elements of experience then are loosened becoming available for reconstruction through a mental act, that is transforming in the present, towards the past and future in new personal acts towards others and ourselves. This allows for the highest standard of inter-personal and intra-personal functioning to be achieved through our conscious understanding and acceptance of ourselves and others, of which more next time.
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