Walking Away to Get There

I think I'll go and meet her', said Alice, for though the flowers were interesting enough, she felt that it would be far grander to have a talk with a real Queen.

"You can't possibly do that," said the Rose: "I should advise you to walk the other way."

This sounded nonsense to Alice, so she said nothing, but set off at once towards the Red Queen. To her surprise, she lost sight of her in a moment, and found herself walking in at the front door again.

A little provoked, she drew back, and, after looking everywhere for the Queen (whom she spied out at last, a long way off), she thought she would try the plan, this time, of walking in the opposite direction.

It succeeded beautifully. She had not been walking a minute before she found herself face to face with the Red Queen, and full in sight of the hill she had been so long aiming at.

A lot of the time, when people land up for lessons, they're desperate to get better. They've tried a lot of other things, nothing has worked, and the doctor's just told them,'Improve your posture,', or 'Take lots of rest,', or 'Don't strain yourself'...
All comments that are useless in practical terms.
So by the time they think of Alexander lessons, they have a single point agenda - make the pain go away. Often, they don't even listen too closely to what I'm telling them; at some level, their minds are still busy with the thought, 'Is there something else that I can try that will make me better faster?'
One young woman who was a brilliant IT professional and was terrified at the thought of losing her job told me that what she'd really like was if she could just have surgery and make it all go away.
Fortunately, or unfortunately for her, the doctor she consulted wasn't a big fan of surgery, and had told her to get physiotherapy done. But I could see she wasn't happy about it, and even had the vague suspicion that he was being difficult on purpose.
It's very difficult to convince such people that what they really need to do is to look at the way they do everything - not just working at the computer, or singing, or dancing or whatever. That they way they sit, and stand, and read the news paper, or brush their teeth, is the way they sing, or dance, or play the piano, or work at the computer. Only they do it with much more tension in these specialised activities because those call for a greater degree of skill, and therefore impose a greater degree of stress on them.
In a stressful situation, what do you fall back on to help you? Why, what you're most familiar with, of course!

Only in this case, that's exactly what's causing the problem.
It takes real determination - in a very gentle sort of way - to deliberately step back from the thing that's uppermost on your mind, and look at something apparently totally unrelated. To have the courage, the imagination and the trust to turn around and walk in the opposite direction.

Surprisingly, though, when you're able to do that, sometimes the thing you want seems to come up and meet you.

To get what you want, you sometimes need to stop grabbing for it.