“There is no such thing as a right position, but there is such a thing as a right direction.”
F.M. Alexander (Articles and Lectures – Teaching Aphorisms p194)

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(…continued from Directions and Directing – Part 1)

Back to lengthen and widen

LW: We can now discuss the final parts of the pattern, the lengthening and widening of the back. But before we begin to consider the back by itself, let us realize that we can never possibly consider the back by itself. We can never, as it were, get rid of the head, because what the head does conditions and determines what the back does. If the head goes back and down, the back will shorten and narrow. If the head goes forward and up, the back will lengthen and widen, even if no further thought is given to the process. But if no thought is given, the process of lengthening and widening will be weak. To have strength, we must give additional thoughts to the back (after we have given them to the head and neck). One never gives isolated thoughts to the back alone; the pattern brings together the various steps in a sequence, each step being dependent on the preceding step.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 13 p139)

LW: One thing that it is important for us to realize in considering the thoughts given to the back is that the back includes the pelvis; it does not stop at the waistline. And what Alexander meant by “lengthening the back’ is that one must think the whole back, including the pelvis, upwards.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 13 p140)

PM: Lengthening of the back may be described as “allowing the spine to extend itself to its full length”, and widening the back as “refraining from hollowing the back in such a way that it is slumped”. Again I would stress that directions are not a number of separate ideas, but a whole – in Alexander’s well known phrase, “Altogether, one after the other”. I amalgamate the two directions to lengthen and widen, as these two impulses – to lengthen and widen – are so closely associated that it is improper to consider one without the other.
(On Giving Directions, Doing and Non-Doing – STAT Memorial Lecture 1963)

WC: If you’re tending to lengthen and widen and to expand, it must mean that quite a lot of muscles that were previously shortened, compressed, bunched up, are now letting go and lengthening, and perhaps some muscles that were slack and limp and not doing very much are now shortening a bit and coming into a corresponding state to the ones that have been very shortened and bunched. Lengthening and widening means that there’s a comprehensive adjustment going on throughout the entire muscular system.
(Thinking Aloud – Directing p107)

LW: The last step in the pattern is the widening of the back. This may be a little difficult for the reader to comprehend, for many people have been taught that lengthening the back by itself is a good thing and alleviates a variety of ills: lengthening at any price – straining, shoving, pulling the guts up, hanging from a halter rigged up in the clothes closet! A few readers may think that widening, by itself, is a good thing, as it sometimes relieves specific pains. But really to comprehend the idea of lengthening and widening, one must be given the experience. The experience is necessary, yet word pictures, by clearing away some of the intellectual difficulties in the way of understanding, can make it easier for the reader to attain the experience. Think of a towel that is pulled taut vertically but not horizontally. The towel is probably much narrower than it is normally, as it may have folds or ridges vertically. Something of the same sort happens in a human body. When a back is lengthening but not widened, a narrowing takes place and the back of the rib cage will be curved inward. There will be a groove in the middle of the back where the spine is, and the shoulder blades will be close together and unduly prominent. In movement, all these tendencies are even more pronounced. If you will just put your hand on the back of the person in question, you will feel when he moves that his spine is tending to go away from your hand and to form a deeper groove. The shoulder blades come even closer together, and the back of the rib cage curves inwards increasingly. Let us now think of a towel that it pulled taut both vertically and horizontally, as a painter’s canvas is, on a frame. This would correspond to a back that is lengthening and widening. This is by no means a perfect analogy, as with a back there is always a dynamic quality, but it may help. In a lengthening and widening back, the shoulder blades tend to go apart, the measurement of the back of the rib cage to increase, and the groove in the middle of the back to become smaller.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 13 p142)

Knees forward and away

WC: The knees going forward and away is the last direction, but it is not less important for being so.
(Thinking Aloud – Knees Going Forward and Away p160)

WC: By getting people to focus on the knees going forward and away, you should prevent, to a certain extent, them internally rotating, tightening, and drawing the legs together.
(The Act of Living – Knees Forward and Away, p91)

MB: When he was sitting beside you, FM would sometimes also put one hand on the knee and one hand on the back and move your leg. He’d apply quite a lot of pressure, and instinctively because of that you allowed the leg to go out.
(Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules – part 2 p82)

WC: Now when you look at it physiologically you find that the adductor muscles of the thighs, the inside muscles that pull the knees together, are very strong and very active. It is like the knees are being drawn towards the pelvis but it is in fact more like the pubic symphysis being drawn towards the knees. There is a tremendous shortening right through the inside – the pelvic floor and the butt muscles are all contracted. You can generate a marvelous amount of tension if you really make a good job of it. You can make massive tension there which has the effect of internally rotating the thighs, pulling the legs together, drawing the knees back and locking the whole thing up. That is what we don’t want.
So, at the outset, never mind what we do want. Everybody thinks that what we do want is what matters, but of course it isn’t. The thing that matters is what we don’t want.
(The Act of Living – Knees Forward and Away p90)

MB: What you have to understand is that you have to get the head going forward and up, and the back going back as the knees go forward from the hips and away from each other – getting all the contrary pulls in the body working, in other words.
(Alexander Technque: the Ground Rules – part 3 p116)

MB: If you were sitting in a chair you wanted to direct the knees forward from the hips and away from each other in order to get good tone going in the legs. If you were standing the crucial thing was not to bring the knees together.
(Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules – part 2 p75)

WC: When people stand, and when they try to stand tall and straight, they have an inevitable tendency to brace the legs, which involves the hyper-extension of the hip joint, the knee joint, and the fixing of the ankle. This tendency is there all the time, stimulated at the drop of a hat, and that is why we need the constant reminder of the opposite.
(Thinking Aloud – Knees Going Forward and Away p160)

WC: People are inclined to take the view that, “I only need to remember to let the knees go forward and away when I am stooping or going into monkey.” Yet it is relevant absolutely all the time, whatever you are doing. It is the fourth zone, the fourth order, and is every bit as important as the other directions. The only difference is that you have got to start with the neck freeing and the head going forward and up. Those have got to be the first directions in time.
(Thinking Aloud – Knees Going Forward and Away p159)

MB: Once you are in monkey the orders FM used to give us were, “Neck free, head forward, knees forward, hips back one against the other like a three-way stretch with the head just winning.” He would often put his hand halfway down your back and say, “Head forward from there,” meaning the middle of the back, “hips back from there and the knees forward.” The hand was on that part of the back to get the head going forward and the upper back forward, which again is a preventative as the rest of the back goes back counteracted by the knees going forward from the hips and away from each other.
(Alexander Technque: the Ground Rules – part 3 p106)

General discussion

MB: Basically, you’ve got to think about what it means when you use words like ‘neck to be free’ or ‘knees to go up to the ceiling’. You have to pay attention to the part you’re ordering. It’s an intentional mental direction. Of course, how I direct very much depends on what state I’m in.
(Alexander Technque: the Ground Rules – part 3 p142)

WC: If you’re not clear about what you want, you’re very unlikely to get it. You also have to remember you want it, because we want all sorts of different things and our wants and wishes change from moment to moment. If you’re going to make a change in habit from pulling down to going up, you have to be very persistent in your wanting. You can’t afford to forget, because every time you forget you’ll revert to your habit. So there’s a persistence and a consistency in the process which Alexander referred to as Direction.
(Direction, a talk on July 5, 1985)

WC: Furthermore you’ve got to find a way of getting it to happen without muscular effort; it’s no good trying to push and pull and strain to take yourself up. You’ve got to talk to it, persuade it to happen. The overall direction, and the most important direction, is up. In order to go up, the neck must be freed and the head must lead the way by going forward and up so that the back can lengthen and widen. You have to want this to happen, and you have to be very clear about what you want.
(Direction, a talk on July 5, 1985)

MB: But where FM was so brilliant was in the way that he gave us the means to improve our use by thinking. The point to note here is that the bad habits we have are in the nervous system. Often people think they’re in the body but that’s quite wrong – habits manifest in the body, but they’re in the brain and the nervous system. If that wasn’t the case, FM could never have got control of the problem. Whatever the impulse as a response to the stimulus was, he realised that if he could stop it at its source – for example, by giving himself the order “No, I won’t speak” he was gradually able to assert conscious control. In the end, he only did what he intended to do rather than something being done by force of habit. He found out that he had to say ‘no’ to his first reaction to the idea, say, to speak, rather than saying ‘no’ to the speech act itself.
(Alexander Technque: the Ground Rules – part 1 p32)

WC: It is like directing a stream of water through your garden. You want it to flow a certain way and the task is to ensure that it doesn’t flow the way that you don’t want it to flow. You are stopping it from flowing here and there, you’re channelling it so that it flows in the direction that you want it to flow in, but the actual flow is something that the water does and the setup does, not you. It’s your role to direct it and control it, to try to direct it and control it, and the teacher’s hands are there essentially to discourage the stiffening, the tension, the pulling down, the distortion, the twisting. When you’ve got your hands on somebody in a proper, free way, then it will be difficult for them to pull down and twist and distort themselves without encountering the restriction, the opposition of your hands.
(Thinking Aloud – Lengthening in Stature p36)

PM: With practice in giving directions they become quite different from what the new pupil at first concedes them to be, and one of the results is that the body, after it has been frequently consciously directed takes on a particular texture or tone. This tone can be recognized by an experienced pair of hands. I call it feeling the flow of a pupil’s body or feeling the life in the body, and it is to get our pupils to produce this actionless activity in themselves that much of our efforts, as teachers, are directed.
(On Giving Directions, Doing and Non-Doing – STAT Memorial Lecture 1963)

LW: The pupil attains this new relationship of the head, neck and back through thought. When he is working alone, it is his own unaided conscious thought that brings it about; when he is working with a teacher, it is the association of the teacher’s hands and the pupil’s thought that brings it about.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 2 p18)

WC: Conscious direction of energy is another matter. That is what we are really concerned about, that is what using yourself is all about – the conscious direction of energy. You clearly direct your energy by thinking about it. How do you direct your energy consciously? Conscious direction we can speak of as a thinking process to direct energy, as an energetic process. So much of our thinking, like so much of our movement, and so much of our life, tends to lack energy. We don’t think energetically. When we just repeat the orders like the neck to be free, and the head to go forward and up, and the back to lengthen and widen, when we repeat them parrot fashion, there is really no energy at all being directed to the mechanisms in Alexander’s phrase: “I wish to indicate the process involved in projecting messages from the brain to the mechanisms and in conducting the energy necessary to the use of these mechanisms.” The energy has got to be conducted. So the conscious direction has got to be an energetic thought. This means there has got to be some continuity about it, some consistency, some flow. It is clearly not sufficient to think just quickly about it or direct it and then think of something else. If you are going to do it energetically, you’ve got to not only think about it but keep right on thinking about it. There’s got to be a concentration of thought, or otherwise the energy will not flow, the energy will not be satisfactorily conducted and the mechanisms won’t work.
(Thinking Aloud – At Our Mother’s Knee p23)

LW: …the pattern Alexander discovered cannot be understood as a number of separate pulls or adjustments. It consists, rather, of contrary adjustments (“head forward and up”, “back lengthening and widening”), which meet together and produce co-ordination. It might also help the reader if he would think of what is involved in putting up a tent. A tent cannot be erected by driving one stake. There must be several stakes, all of which, attached to ropes and taken together, set up the series of contrary pulls which are necessary if the tent is to stand and fulfil its function. It is much the same way with the human body. The whole pattern can now be stated thus: the pupil is to think the neck free, the head forward (in relation to the neck) and up, the back lengthening and widening.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 13 p144)

WC: What you are doing with the orders or the directions is confronting yourself with a picture, and the more vivid the picture, the better. Then, in comparison with that picture, you can consider, evaluate, and criticize your own state. The clarity of that picture is very important, but also the understanding that the right thing does itself enables you to set about seeing why the right thing isn’t doing itself. What’s in the way? What’s wrong? What’s causing the trouble?
If you go along with what I’ve said, and you avoid falling into the trap of doing, you will be able to convince yourself that what I am saying is right. If you see your task in the proper light, which is to stop yourself doing what you are not supposed to be doing, it will experimentally prove itself.
(Thinking Aloud – Teaching Directions to Beginners p76)

Conclusion

WC: Just to recap, in ordinary everyday life, we suffer from weight, we suffer from being heavy, from being relatively immobile. We can say we suffer, because we are creatures constructed for movement. Movement is what our lives are all about. You’ve got to mobilize weight and control it and regulate it, and you do that by and through energy. So, learning to use yourself properly is learning to regulate direction and control the flow of energy.
(Thinking Aloud – At Our Mother’s Knee p24)

FPJ: “Learning how to learn” is what distinguishes the Alexander Technique from all the other “ways to grow.” Thinking, directing, “giving orders,” or however you wish to describe it, is not an end in Itself. It has value and meaning only as it is applied to the pupil’s own life.
(Freedom to Change – Appendix D p193)

WC: So long as we’re alive, we are moving. We are, to a considerable extent, being carried. It’s very much up to us to see that we’re not carried in directions that we don’t want to be carried in.
(Thinking Aloud – Wishing, Willing and Fairy Tales p19)

MB: “Neck free (or free your neck), head forward and up, back to lengthen and widen” and, very importantly, “knees to go forward and away.” He said to me, “If I stand beside you and say those words, you can’t go wrong. But I can’t be with you all the time so you’ve got to learn to do that for yourself.”
(Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules – part 1 p29)