If you’re experimenting with Alexander Technique directions, walking is an excellent activity to use for those experiments, and equally important, to test whether a direction is actually useful.  Hard surfaces such as wooden floors make that process far easier than, say, thick carpets, not least because they can provide auditory, as well as kinesthetic, feedback.

In Walking the Floor with Alexander, I wrote: “Floors, and more specifically how our feet arrive at them when we walk, can be a very useful “sound mirror” for observing changes in the way we use our bodies.”  In that post, I go into some detail about how to use that “mirror”.

Observing others as they walk can also help you understand the power of paradoxical Alexander Technique directions such as  “I’m not walking”.

Take a look at the video above.  Clearly, everybody in it is bending their ankle, knee and hip joints to walk.

Notice, however, that the way they are doing these bends, and how they affect the rest of their bodies, varies from person to person.  Some peoples’ feet are coming down very heavily on the ground, some quite lightly.  There are differences in the length of their strides.  Arm and torso movements vary from person to person.

And not everybody is actually walking straight forward!  Some have a habit of veering off course a little bit with each step and will have to make a course corrections from time to time.

If you watch the video at a slow speed, you can start to notice all sorts of more subtle mannerisms that vary from person to person, such as turning one foot out a bit just before it arrives at the ground. A wonderful feature of YouTube videos is that you can slow them down to as low as quarter speed. (Click on the gear icon on the bottom left of the screen, and then click on “Playback Speed)”.

If you were to ask any of the people in the video what they were doing, they would all say they are walking, despite the many differences in how they carry that out. Chances are if you were in the video, you too would say you would say you were walking.

There is the generic, general purpose, word “walking”. And there is also each person’s own version of “walking”.

A paradoxical Alexander Technique direction delivered from your conscious mind like “I’m not walking”, is really a request to the rest of your brain and nervous system to come up with a freer and more efficient version of your particular version of walking.*

You might wonder why your conscious mind can’t just do the job itself, why it needs to outsource implementation to your unconscious mind.  The answer lies in the different abilities of the two parts of your brain and nervous system.

Your conscious mind is great at coming up with new ideas, plans for the future, strategies for how to deal with other people, and the like. But due to the very limited number of thoughts it can have at any moment of time, it simply cannot orchestrate the vast number of adjustments needed to make a useful changes in how you move. If you try to make it do that, you’re likely to stiffen from the overload.

The truth is that while your conscious mind has a huge role to play in your life, it is the world’s worst micro manager!

Luckily for us all, our unconscious mind and nervous system can not only make the required adjustments, but also has our best interest at heart and makes them in the best way possible, given our current coordination. But it is important to understand that it won’t do that on it’s own initiative – we seem to be designed in a way that requires a clear request from our conscious mind in order for our unconscious mind to spring into action.**

Also, for any direction to be most effective, that clear request must not be muddied by any attempt by your conscious mind, however subtle, to “help” the unconscious mind do it’s job. Having delivered its message, it now needs to stay out of the way. Learning how to accomplish this can be one of the most challenging projects for students and, I have to say, for teachers too. Not Even a Tiny Weenie Bit goes in to this in greater detail.

There are, of course, many other paradoxical Alexander directions.  “I’m not chopping veggies”, “I’m not speaking”, “I’m not getting into a car” – the list goes on and on.  Walking just happens to be one of the best places to start, not least because it’s something you can see lots of people doing at the same time.

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*Your unconscious mind could, in theory, decide to make things worse – after all, you only asked for something different. But in my experience that never happens.  I think the implications of that are huge.

**I’ve often wondered why that requirement is necessary.  Certainly it would be easier for us if harmful patterns of thought and movement were automatically corrected. There would certainly be no need for the Alexander Technique!  Perhaps is has to do with free will.

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Walking the Floor with Alexander featured Ernest Tubb singing the original “Walking the Floor”. Below you you can hear Merle Haggard’s somewhat more Barkersfield sound version: