I’ll say a little bit more about Alexander’s expressed view that belief is a matter of muscle tension. I’m pretty certain that what he meant, and what I would mean by such a thing, is that when any of us adopt fixed beliefs and fixed ideas, above all it is from the grounds of security and safeguarding ourselves. We think: “I believe this has to be so because if it isn’t so, then I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where I am, I don’t know how to proceed, I’m lost. So it must be so.” And people who believe in that way – who have fixed beliefs in that way – certainly do at the same time manifest habitual patterns of muscle tension in the body, largely of contraction.
Walter Carrington (“On Beliefs”, a talk given on the Carringtons’ training course)