The Secret Destructor in Humans?                                                                 by Patrick Pearson, MSTAT

I’m so amazing!....OK you got me..But it is true; just no more amazing than anyone else, even though I am unique, as we all are.    What interests me is the common ground we share.    Unless we’re particularly unlucky we have massive potential as children when you consider that before the age of four we learn to co-ordinate our bodies pretty well, and figure out a language well enough to make our needs and feelings known.   That’s a serious achievement particularly when you consider that it wasn’t laid on by professional teachers and was driven entirely by our own curiosity about our world.   

Years later in my own life I was looking for a change of career and had rejected the idea of being a psychotherapist, then the possibility of being a hypnotherapist.   By what seemed like a coincidence I began to read about the Alexander Technique and had one of those light bulb moments, and sourced a local teacher and took myself off for the first lesson.    After the usual pleasantries came an interesting conversation,..”So why have you come?”   “I’ve read about Alexander and think it’s really interesting and want to know more about it.”  “ Yes, OK.  But what’s the matter with you.”   “Nothing.”  “So you don’t have anything wrong with you??”  “No.”   “Really???   That’s very unusual!” 

I find it interesting that even in the Alexander world the idea is accepted that people come to pay attention to their well being once symptoms manifest themselves!    Good health equals symptom free and vice versa.   Also what strikes me is that our thinking becomes event based.   “Problem shows up.   Go get it fixed.  Job done.“   As if this were a simple and finite issue.   So here is the thing; when I began my AT work I was considered fit by all the usual applied standards.   I was a reasonably successful power athlete giving away about 20 years to most of my competitors.   I began Alexander’s work in my wind-down year so my training was about half that which it was in the previous year.    I carried on winning because I was getting faster!    That goes against everything we think we know.   A good mindful well balanced training regime; much less of it equals a much better result.   The first thing I discovered from AT was that the strength and endurance I’d worked so carefully to create was getting in the way because my brain did not manage it the way I thought it did.  Once aware of that and later able to consciously control it, performance increased.  The next thing in what had now passed as an event, and become more of a life process for me, was more shocking and dramatic.    I went to my lesson on the Friday afternoon as usual.    Monday morning I went to put on my shirt to go to work and it wouldn’t button up.   There was a large gap between the buttons and the holes.  My first thought was, “ Must have shrunk in the wash!”  I tried another and another till I realised none of my work shirts fitted.    My chest had increased from 41.5 inches to 44 inches between Friday p.m and Monday morning.   So how does that happen?  It happens when unrecognised tensions build up over time despite our doing all the good things that are supposed to make us healthy.   What we need to remember as far as the brain’s synaptic connections are concerned is, ‘what fires together wires together’.   So the original trigger for this could have been physical habitual or have an emotional connection and had begun way back. or may have embedded during some level of trauma.   The question it begs is that how can any fit person do what they do and have a tension compression on their breathing that must constrict the lungs in that way?  Moreover it was not through lack of observing and practising good breathing techniques, but what the brain understood as do-able.   So having pitched up to my first lesson symptom ‘free’, what I came to realise was, that I didn’t know I had a problem until it was gone!  I dread to think of the ultimate outcome if that condition had been left unchecked.

When I came to coach and teach the Olympic rowing team, one of my athlete’s, already a world gold medallist, had a very similar experience.   Years of teaching practice has revealed to me that I am not the exception here but the rule.   Pupil after pupil, regardless of what good practices they do, hold onto discrete problems, that interfere with their health fitness and functioning.   So if a pupil shows up with symptoms the risk is that having cleared that top layer they quit having fixed it. Job done.  Event over.

The deeper problem is that the brain does a great job of seeming to adapt, compensate, cover up and then to defend its choices against change.    So yes we are all of us amazing, and the vast majority reading this will have taken on the responsibility to actively look after their own well being.     We all live lives subject to habit, distress, conditioning, and trauma of varying degrees.   But, and it’s a big BUT, what goes on inside our brains in secret, unrecognised, has destructive elements wired in.   It can’t be dealt with by applied finite events because it operates in at many levels.  It requires an ongoing process controlled by the person themselves, which is the gift available by learning the Alexander Technique.    Much as humans may enjoy their uniqueness, and I celebrate that as much as anyone, the secret destructors are the common ground for almost everyone.  I’d love to say as an Alexander Teacher that because of AT I’m now free from all that but that would be such a lie.   I’m simply a lot clearer of what can go on, and have the means to track it down and confront it.  So please enjoy your individuality, but avoid thinking on this one that you are the exception, as it is so unlikely that you are anything other than the rule.