I owe this idea to one of my pupils - she remarked how we go to a spa or clinic to get a massage, and leave feeling rejuvenated. But very soon all that delightful ease is gone and we're back to square one again.
Whereas with the Alexander Technique, she said, we can be giving ourselves an inner massage all the time. It needn't ever stop - and if it does, we can pick it up any time we like.
That's very true. We do carry around an enormous amount of underlying tension - that's our default state. I call it 'default holding', because at some level, that's what our muscles are doing.
Holding on. All the time.
We carry this into our work, and the pressures there, which for most people are enormous, pile on even more tension on our default state. That's what we pick up, and try to get rid of with massages and similar treatments. The other holding, the underlying one, we don't even register as tension.
But if we learn the skill of releasing whenever we want to, we can learn to shed first this external tension, and over time, we can access the lightness which at the moment is inaccessible to us. That brings in a qualitative change in ourselves and the way we respond to situations.
Once we change the way we respond to a situation, we change the situation itself.
Not bad for a simple massage!
