Body Learning part 2

Primary control refers to the importance of the relationship between the head neck and torso. It is not a specific button on your body so to say, but a relationship to help functioning in every position. It has to do with grace and ease in movements, and correct Use. Primary control leads to easier and more natural breathing and a fuller grasp of your internal experiences interacting with outside stimuli. You can't force your body into things, you have to allow it to maintain correct and upright posture, for example. "The primary control serves as a key to coordinating the organism as a whole."

Unreliable sensory appreciation refers to when your feeling of rightness of action is untrustworthy. How can we be sure we are actually doing what we think we are doing, when we are not really watching ourselves? It is easy for our bad habits of Use to become familiar and right to us, even when we have bad Use. We can feel at ease and correct when in fact, we are wrong. For example, we do not always know the correct amount of tension and energy we need to use for simple tasks and we often over exert, although it feels natural. Discovery an accurate sensory appreciation leads to finding and fulfilling our true needs.

Inhibition is the ability to stop and delay a response or choice until we are adequately prepared to make it. To improve your Use, one must not comply with our bodies habitual response. Humans have the ability to almost control their inhibition and choose the response to make, either right or wrong. In today's society it is easy to become worked up and tangled in problems. We need to stop and allow our inhibition to take charge and take more care of our responses.

Direction refers to how Alexander learned how to allow his body to do things, instead of doing something or putting his body in a certain position. He learned to direct his body into certain patterns of Use that became more habitual and like a pattern. This takes a high level of awareness because we are usually not aware of every movement and choice we are making. Direction sets out to energize the reflex that holds the body up against gravity.

Ends and means is about the process of attaining something, and being prepared to try and try again instead of simply focusing on the goal itself. We have a tendency to allow ourselves to be taken up by large focus on goals in our near future, However, ends and means is about finding a way to reach our ends intelligently. "Until one takes intermediate acts seriously enough to treat them as ends, one wastes one's time in any effort to change habits." The goal of this technique may be to ensure that our means are always rationally ans physiologically the best for our purposes.

The thing I find most interesting is when they talk about the real life examples of his teachings and how it affected certain pupils and even the author himself. This makes me very interested in these techniques and want to try them myself. It just blows my mind how these things that all seem so simple in retrospect, are actually very complex and have a way of changing a persons life. It is so cool to me.