22 March

I’m at an age where the body often stiffens, and the doctor and physio will advise regular stretching to keep it loose, to stretch out those stiffnesses. To release tensions in the body. The problem with this though is that everything in the body is connected to everything else. Nobody really takes that basic fact seriously. You can stretch one part of you, but that will then tighten other connected parts. None of it makes sense. Or my Alexander friends will talk about ‘releasing the neck’, or ‘letting the neck be free’. But the neck is connected to your head at one end, and to your torso at the other. Your neck can’t be free of your head or your torso unless it’s chopped off. A free neck absolutely does correspond with your body being free everywhere else, because we evolved from worms and where our head goes, the rest of us definitely follows. So how do you free your neck, and therefore allow your whole body to be free? There’s only one way. You take your attention, centred on your head, out into the world around you, and allow the rest of your body, including your neck, to follow it. You ‘release’ YOU, into the world. Then that release cascades down your body, as it follows that attention out in the world, releasing the whole of you out into your activity, in the world. Your attention leads, then your head, neck, torso, hips, legs etc. all follow it, in an articulated cascade, every moment. There’s no tightness or tension because everything is releasing from everything else, out into the world. That’s how you’re designed, like a giant worm. Some wonder, so what keeps you up, if you’re not down in your body with your attention ‘holding yourself up’? The ground underneath you, pushing up into your body. We don’t fall down with gravity, we’re pushed up by it. That feeling of your contact with the ground is a pushing up, not a falling down. That pushing stretches all of you at once, your tissues are elastic and store the stretch. It’s that elastic stored energy you then release, as your body follows your attention out into the world. We’re gravity-powered.