The Knot in the Gut

One of the most memorable discoveries I made after I started learning the Alexander Technique was the presence of fear in my life.

There really was no apparent cause for it at that point - I was thoroughly enjoying my training, I'd got interesting work to do that paid for all my living expenses, I'd made wonderful new friends... in short, I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and into my day every morning - no matter what the weather - and that, for the UK, is saying quite a bit!

But then, through all of this, there was also a layer of tension at a very deep level; it surfaced, I think, simply because other, more superficial tensions began to drop away; that was great, because I realised that it was possible to live with a simple and uncomplicated pleasure -if only I could get rid of this clutching in the gut!

That was when I began to get a dim idea of just how much unnecessary fear we cart around. I thought around to all the people I knew, friends, relatives, acquaintances... anyone I could think of, and they were all living with this deep and diffuse apprehension that wouldn't let them enjoy their lives.

All of that terror, and where was it being held? Of course in the body! In the neck, the shoulders, the hips, the guts, in deep insidious knots that makes sure you are nicely tightening and shrinking. As I discovered, it wouldn't go away just because I was asking it to - and this was the point where I really felt I'd hit a wall.

This was the baseline from where I was living - under all the pleasure, pain, excitement, sorrow and all the myriad emotions that make up our daily lives, there was this layer of nameless dread; it surfaced as my habits began to change, and was just there -that knot in the gut, a solidly physical presence that kept me from living life as completely as I wanted.

But the real revelation for me was not this - it was the fact that this was the way I'd been living all along - this fear filled, apprehensive quality defined my life, and I hadn't even known it!

Then, of course, I can't help thinking -

What else do I not know?

Physical Responses to Thought

We can think of thoughts and emotions - mental processes generally - as having a grip on our muscles. Or rather, if we consider the Alexander stand that mind and body are one, then the muscles patterns are the thoughts, and vice versa.
So it needn't only be the so called 'negative' emotions - fear, anger, hate and so on - that cause the neck to tighten. It could just as well be happiness, excitement, anticipation and so on. Add the fact that very often we have mixtures of 'positive' and 'negative' feelings in us, and we can see that the whole process of tightening and releasing is not as straightforward as we might have thought.
We hold on to these emotions, so that our muscles are continuously locked into one emotional pattern after another as we move mindlessly through our day. No wonder we feel ragged with exhaustion at the end of it!
Perhaps what happens when we direct and allow release is not that we stop feeling the emotion, but that we stop locking it into us. We stay released, allowing it to flow through. Just as our muscles have to engage to a certain extent in the effort of picking up something, in feeling an emotion, too, our muscles have to do the same. But if there is just the optimum effort involved, we can get back to our normal, released state when the emotion passes.
And perhaps, in some cases, we get the time to pause and realise that we don't really need to feel that emotion after all.