athite

Alexander told the students on his first training course that one very effective way to encourage the musculature of their back to work was to come back as an integrated unit in small movements from the pivot point of their ankle joints.

The big problem for most of us attempting the activity on our own is that before initiating the movement back from the ankles it’s necessary to be reasonably well-coordinated – your head needs to be going forward and up, your back lengthening and widening, and your knees releasing forward from your free hip joints and slightly away from each other while maintaining a good connection to your feet. That’s often not the case, of course. Many of us obtain an upright stance not by lengthening the stature but by shortening it – specifically, pushing the pelvis forward, pulling the tailbone (sacrum-coccyx) and buttocks upwards towards the lower back, and also locking the knees, hips and ankles. One major result of this tangled malcoordination is that the pelvis is pulled down on to the legs instead of it being an integral part of the torso. As FM Alexander’s niece and first-generation Alexander teacher Marjory Barlow observed if someone is standing in this very common pattern of misuse and then attempts to come back from the ankles this will only serve to amplify or increase the degree of their stiffening.

The dimple test

Marjory suggested that if you have a habit of displacing your pelvis forward and hollowing your back, it’s useful to get a measure of that misuse, ideally with the aid of a mirror, by using what she called ‘the dimple test’. It’s very simple and straightforward. While standing, without raising your shoulders or pulling your head down to your neck, place the palms of your hands, with your lengthening fingers extending downwards along the outside of your thighs so that you can feel the dimple or hollow on the outside of your buttocks. With the heels of your hands you are now aware of the bony prominence of the greater trochanter of your thigh bone (femur) of each leg on the outside of your hip joints. (Note, the greater trochanter, a lever, acts as an attachment for two of your three gluteal muscles that stabilise your hip joint and enables you to extend, rotate or lift your leg sideways.)

Marjory then suggested investigating what happens when you keep your hands on your dimples and then deliberately stiffen your knees so that they turn inwards and backwards. ‘My husband, Bill, used to call this inward-rotating knee movement “squinting”,’ she recalled. ‘But what’s interesting is that a relatively small movement of the knees has a very big effect on the hip joints, which you can feel very easily with your hands.’ If you try this out you will also notice that as you brace back your knees your tail and buttocks are pulled upwards towards your torso (in other words, you are pulling

your back in) and you stiffen your rib cage. In addition, your ankles and the arches of your feet compress and stiffen. Furthermore such a simple experiment concerned with feeling how the hip joints work are not just food for thought for Alexander teachers or trainees – they can be a revelation to students who mistakenly believe that their hip joints are positioned just below the waist.

You can read more about Marjory Barlow’s Alexander teaching techniques in Seán Carey’s new book, ‘Think More, Do Less: Improving your teaching and learning of the Alexander Technique with Marjory Barlow’, which has been written for Alexander teachers, trainees and advanced students. It is now available on HITE and through Amazon.