Fitting Into Your Skin

I remember reading about how people often had to remake their clothes after having Alexander lessons because their bodies had changed - become straighter, more poised - and their clothes no longer fit in the old way.

But I have realised another thing - I am beginning to fit better into my own skin after lessons. I realise how cramped and contracted I'd been, as if I had been shrinking into myself, not expanding to take up all the space I had available in myself. And I didn't even regard me as particularly lacking in confidence!

Joanna Field, in her book A Life of One's Own, describes how she allowed her awareness to expand so that it filled all of herself. She called this 'that fat feeling', and found that if she used this when she was feeling tired, in a very short while, she felt refreshed with a new sense of energy.

I'm also reminded of Marjorie Barlow's statement in her Alexander Memorial Lecture - 'It is as if each of us is trying to take up the least possible amount of room in the Universe.' (Marjorie Barlow incidentally, was Alexander's niece, pupil and then assistant teacher for a number of years.)

But it is so true that that most of us are continually trying to make ourselves small, to reduce the amount of space we occupy, and the more diffident we are, the smaller we try to make ourselves. Often, in a blind reaction to that, and with a vague feeling that something is wrong, we force ourselves into the opposite - we push aggressively forward, quick to lose our tempers, and insistent on our stand that 'I'll take no nonsense from anyone.' Which actually doesn't fool anybody.

And when we're comfortable in our own skins, we lose that frightened feeling that we need to be protecting ourselves all the time. We can be calm and collected, but we can also have the confidence to be wrong sometimes, to look a bit foolish without feeling that the world has ended.