Letting Go Without Giving Up

Alexander teachers are always telling their pupils to 'release' and 'let go', both of their muscles and their preoccupation with a specific goal. This often makes their pupils feel that they should try for a kind of beatific non-involvement with worldly affairs and concern themselves with higher things - which can quickly get extremely depressing. Nothing worse for morale than feeling that you shouldn't be doing what you are longing to do.

What is happening, however, is that we are mixing up 'letting go' with 'giving up'. There's an important difference between these two terms which we often fail to appreciate. I know I used to confuse one with the other until I sat down one day (in a released Alexanderly way, I hope!) and sorted them out.

'Letting go' of your aim or goal isn't the same as giving it up.

Giving it up means deciding that you're not going to have it, for whatever reason. Forgetting about achieving it. It has echoes of 'giving up', hopeless, sad, forlorn.

But 'letting go' only means you stop holding on to it - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you stop holding on to the desire for it.

So if we're thinking of wanting the neck to release, the head to go forward and up, and so on, we don't want to be obsessing about how much we want that release to happen/whether it's working/whether we're doing it right/whether it will work tomorrow/whether it will work for the rest of our lives/whether it will help that bad back...

All that just takes attention and energy away from the release itself.

I find it really ironical that it's our very obsession with the result, the desperation of our need for it, that prevents it from happening. Whereas if we're a bit stand offish, and look away, so to speak, with an attitude of,"It's okay whether it happens or not", it very often does.

This standoffishness can be really difficult to reach, because of course, inside I'm just dying for the release to happen, for my bad back to get better, or my frozen shoulder to release, or whatever.

I always felt a bit of a fraud in this situation, and tried valiantly not to want the result so desperately, but to remain centred - until I realised that the very effort of trying not to do it was tightening me up further. And then I had a minor epiphany and realised that I had to let go of the desire - but also of the desire to let go of the desire ...

...but that would trap me in an endless backward loop and unending conflict ...

until I had the real epiphany and realised that I didn't have to let go of anything - I just had to let go, period.

So if I ask for release, and notice that the desire for the result isn't going away, I don't try to fight it. I just let it be and go back to 'neck free, head forward and up...'