Week 4: Day 16 – Myth
Before I began my three years of Alexander training, I thought I already knew quite a lot. I had been having lessons for nearly a decade and working full time. First the Dartington trainees worked on us daily with whatever they had learned that morning. Then came weekly group classes with a teacher called Richard Brennan, who has written 9 books on Alexander’s work so far. Later I spent years with Rowena Knight in Birmingham, and then with Jamie McDowell in Manchester. After all that time, I believed I understood something about lengthening and widening. I thought I knew how to use Alexander’s directions.
So when I went to Glasgow for a weekend with friends and booked a one‑off lesson with the very experienced teacher Barbara Harrington, I walked into her room feeling quietly pleased with myself. My question for her was about widening the back. I told her I understood lengthening but widening still confused me.
Barbara listened, then said in her straightforward way, “Well Lucy, it turns out you don’t know much about widening, or lengthening for that matter. You are trying to do them both. We are not here to stretch and pull ourselves about, but to learn to think.”
There it was. The myth exposed. As Alexander said, “All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing.” It seems I was one of the darned fools.
I now see exactly what she was pointing out. I was subtly doing my directions. I was trying to lengthen by gently stretching myself up, which resulted in me being slightly fixed and tired. I was trying to do widening by expanding my chest and actually holding my breath a little. I thought I was being a good Alexander pupil. In reality I was overriding my postural wisdom and interfering with the very system designed to support me.
Our postural support system has taken millions of years to evolve. It is reliable, responsive and beautifully designed. And yet there I was, young Lucy, thinking I knew better. I was using effort to hold myself upright, as if my body needed my constant micro-managing.
Barbara set me straight. She called out my well‑intentioned but erroneous efforts with clarity and kindness. She helped me see that I was using my white, fast‑twitch movement muscles to try to maintain posture. These muscles are brilliant for short term specific actions but they fatigue easily. They are not meant to hold us up. The deeper red, slow‑twitch postural muscles are the ones built for stamina and continuous support. They work quietly in the background when we stop interfering with them.
I had no idea I was recruiting the wrong muscles. I didn’t know I was gripping and holding myself up instead of allowing myself to be supported.
Believe me, all my teachers had told me many times in their own ways, and it was on the back of all these previous messages that Barbara’s voice suddenly made sense to me.
Once I learned how to talk to those busy white muscles and ask them to calm down, the deeper postural layers could step back in and do what they are designed to do. Life became easier. Standing became easier. Breathing became easier.
By stopping the doing, I could trust my postural system to organise my length and width without effort. Nowadays I can easily sense the difference. I have learned to discern one from the other and can more readily switch off the unnecessary work so the deeper, wiser layers can take over. It feels like a creative process rather than a correction. A conversation rather than a command.
Barbara helped me see that what I believed I was doing was not what I was actually doing.
Good posture now feels like a creative process rather than a correction, and the unnecessary effort no longer gets in the way.