The Work on my Self

Conscious Guidance & Control

Read a chapter of Man’s Supreme Inheritance last night where Alexander touched upon the habit of apprehension in a bit more detail. As he points, when an animal is confronted with something new, its reaction is fear and it can’t function normally in such a situation.

The “supreme inheritance” of man is the ability to be confronted with a new (or indeed familiar) situation and apply “conscious guidance and control”. As he pointed out, though, many people react to new (and indeed familiar) situations with an unnecessary degree of apprehension (fear) when they are in fact in no physical danger.

Alexander thought this was key in civilized society where we are continually stimulated and presented with new situations, if we are not to stay in a constant state of nervous fear.

Key points of conscious guidance and control:

The ability to inhibit any immediate, subconscious reaction

I’d say you need to be aware of the exact physical things you’re doing in order to inhibit the reaction - any “fear” or “mind chatter” is always accompanied by increases in tension in particular muscles. If you can stop the muscular reaction, you stop the associated mental/emotional component which caused it - not always easy but it is something physical and concrete to work on.

Thanks to John for suggesting that I consider “mind chatter” as purely physical and watch out for little movements of the facial muscles e.g. around the eyes, flaring the nostrils. I’ve paid attention to this over the last few days and it “checks out” so far.

Note - the fear response / startle pattern has a particular set of muscular pulls - TODO find out more about this as knowing exactly what to watch out for will help.

The ability to reason out the best response to a situation

Alexander mainly talked about use of the physical mechanisms of the self in this regard, but from the above comments I would say it also applies to the mental attitude to a situation.

He gave some examples where “a person” (who my teacher thinks is Alexander himself, although he doesn’t say) was able, from observing other people and then reasoning out the best way to use the body, to pick up and ride a bike the first time he tried, including busy town cycling on the 2nd day, and to fence straight away after watching an exhibition tournament.

This is contrasted to the “subconsciously guided” approach to learning where you just start trying, and get better by trial and error.

Of course, to reason out the best course of action one needs to be calm. If your habitual response to a situation is one of apprehension, it will reduce your ability to reason. This is probably only a problem when confronting new situations, as in situations you know you’re going to confront, you can reason out the desired response when you are calm, before it happens (hint: if you can’t think about something calmly even when out of the situation, try audio self hypnosis e.g. I found these really helpful).

The ability to perform the reasoned response while continuing to inhibit the unwanted reactions

This comes back to the procedure Alexander developed, and which he described in Use of the Self in the chapter Evolution of a Technique.

I have to go now though, I will update notes on this over the next few days… I need to think more about how it applies to habitual apprehension and mind chatter in particular.

Live without any fear and with total peace of mind

Could this be the way to live without fear and with total peace of mind…? It sounds like an approach at least - and it isn’t the usual airy-fairy rubbish. I think this is a way of avoiding the fear habit rather than fear itself… will be interesting to see how it goes.