What can a sailing ship tell you about your body?

Imagine an old sailing ship with hundreds of sailors required to sail it.

On this ship:–

• The ordinary seamen are seasoned sailors. Years of practice mean they do their job perfectly.
• The officers are all relatively new to the job. They believe they have to tell the men exactly what to do. They believe many of the ways the men are working are mistaken and need correcting.

As a result, those officers are constantly giving unhelpful orders.
These unhelpful orders stop the seamen getting on with their jobs.

When things go wrong, the inept attempts of the officers to improve matters only makes things worse.

You are that ship

The ship itself is your body.

The seamen, it's instincts and reflexes.

The officers are your habits, opinions and pre-conceptions. They are the automatic patterns you use. Whatever skills you have learnt, your habits enable you to repeat them without any thought or attention.

The captain is your conscious awareness: your capacity to notice what's going on and apply yourself to the task in hand.

When you learn a new skill, it's your consciousness, the captain, who is in charge.

The captain in you doesn't just learn the new task himself. He also trains up an officer to take charge of that task. Then, when the officer has learnt the task, the captain can go off and attend to something else.

What happens when things go wrong?

It would be easy for the captain to believe his officers' reports and think his crew incompetent. He would then try to teach his crew how to do their job.

The captain no more knows how to do the crew's job than his officers do. Trying to tell them would lead to disaster.

If he watches closely enough, he can discover what's going on.

• He finds that his crew are perfectly capable of sailing the ship.
• He comes to realise that the officers' proper task is to make sure the seamen know what he wants them to do — and let them get on with it.

How can you be a good captain of your ship?

Your conscious awareness is the captain of your ship.
Your habits are the officers.
Your body's instincts and reflexes are the crew.

How do you use that awareness effectively and get the ship back on course?

You get the officers out of the crew's hair. Your officers don't know how to trim the sails. The crew must be allowed to get on with the job.

Just so, your habits don't understand the workings of your body, it's instincts and reflexes. They only exist to keep things ticking over when everything is working smoothly.

So you can be attending to other matters.

When things aren't working smoothly

… you need to retrain your habits.

You need to tell them to stand back and let your body work.

Seeing your body work superbly without being told how, they learn to stop interfering. They learn to simply relay to your body your decisions about what you want to do next.

This is what you do in your Alexander Technique lessons. You re-train your habits.

Your habits run your ship when you are not present.

When they make a mess of things, you simply need to be present long enough to find out that your body knows how to work just fine, thank you very much. That it is your habits that are mis-understanding the situation.

No more than that. Just be present and resist the temptation to interfere. Discover and admire the perfect working of your body when it's finally allowed to work without interference.

It all sounds so easy, doesn't it?

It is easy.

All except one thing.

You need to stop identifying with your habits. You need to suspend belief in what they are telling you — long enough to discover what's truly going on.

If how to do that were obvious, people would always move perfectly.
It isn't so they don't.

You don't know what's going on — and as long as you believe you do, you'll continue to mis-direct your ship.

That's why, without the Alexander Technique, things always go from bad to worse.

Alexander Technique lessons teach you the skills to be an effective captain of your own body.

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