Don't Narrow the Back

Primary Explorations Part 3

This week I’m back in Birmingham to spend time with my mom and brother. My father, Guy Dalto, recently passed away peacefully from a long journey with Alzheimer’s. He was a great Guy. He taught me to write.

If you’re thinking of making a charitable donation this season, I’ll give a humble plug to Alzheimer’s of Central Alabama.

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This week I’d like to finish up my series of articles on primary control. Remember that this is a term Alexander used to describe the importance of the coordination of the head, neck, and upper back. I wrote about it at the 30,000 ft level in my article Opposition and you can see it in action in my article What Does Poise Look Like. I think it is extremely helpful to watch videos of people with terrific coordination and look at how they coordinate their head, neck, upper back, and beyond. It may not tell you what you need to do RIGHT NOW to BE BETTER, but it will give you a better sense of what you want to build for yourself going forward.

Alexander’s technique is designed to improve self-mastery at a general level. He’s quite explicit in qualifying his use of the word ‘prevention’ and ‘cure’ as being relative terms rather than absolutes. That is, we in the Alexander world want your coordination trending towards improvement on a general basis.

As you go about exploring what it means to allow the head to be forward and up, Alexander found that it was not possible to achieve this coordination without also preventing the chest from lifting and the back from narrowing. This term - back narrowing - can be a bit of a mystery as well as Alexander’s instruction to coordinate all three of these in “a particular way”. I think it’s worth taking the time to talk about the narrowing/widening of the back and figure out how to move that stuff about!

When we’re talking about preventing the back from narrowing it seems like a completely odd concept in the beginning. Is a torso not just one volume? It’s not like I can throw away parts of my stomach (I wish) or carve out portions of my lower back!

What we’re looking at in the Alexander Technique is how your whole organism is coordinating and balancing stresses. The simplest example I can give you of taking away from the volume of the torso would be to ask you to suck in your stomach and hold it there for a bit (pleases don’t pass out!). You’ll see that you can in fact make yourself look smaller overall. Similarly, you can hold your stomach far out in front of you and inflate your lungs as big as you can to make things look bigger. Neither of these movements will address the particular type of narrowing/widening that I’d like you to explore this week, but it will hopefully help you get your head wrapped around the idea that you can manipulate the volume of your torso (back).

Oftentimes when we have worked long hours at a job, our middle back becomes immobile. This region of the back is where the thoracic curve of the spine transitions into the lumbar curve and the whole area is filled with the diaphragm. You can feel it out for yourself by taking your hands and finding your floating ribs. Go ahead and do that and then wrap your hands around to the front of the back and the back of the back to get a sense of the whole region.

Now that you have an idea of what I’m talking about, why not try the following little exploration? Here’s an example of a big arch in the mid back!

In the picture above**, I’m doing my absolute best to arch my mid back in a rather extreme way. I promise you it does’n feel wonderful if you hold yourself this way 4EVA!*** I’ve highlighted in blue the curves of the front and back of the torso. The red is highlighting the middle region I want to move. The only way I can move this region is to move all of me very slowly (if I jerk myself about I can pull a muscle).

When you look at me, take a look at what has happened to my head. I had to shove my head backward in order to achieve the mid back arch. The two are very much linked and while I can do less shoving backward with my head while keeping the spine locked in that arch, I almost can’t keep the head shoved backward and release the mid back tension.

The weight of the skull must always be mobile!

So what happens as I try to un-arch my middle spine? Take a look!

To put the above picture in perspective, my photographer (aka brother) snapped about 20 photos as I slowly worked out how to release the tension of the back and begin to lengthen the spine. I have done this lengthening very slowly while not sucking in my gut and without plunking my head into dead weight (dropping it towards the floor).

The feeling that my middle and lower back gets when I do this is that it feels like I have completely curled my back into the shape of a C. I have this strange feeling only because I am very habituated to arching my spine. The benefit of using mirrors and cameras to check yourself out is that you get to SEE that things look very different from how they feel. This is a critical component of exploring and will gradually build a more reliable sense of feeling!

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If you have sufficiently explored the basics of the head, neck, upper back, and middle back, you will begin to get a sense of how all of these things can coordinate at once. This will feel STRANGE. And this will not feel OH BABY AMAZING until you have extended these explorations to include ALL of YOU.

This may seem like an overwhelmingly slow process to go through, but once the primary control is sufficiently coordinating, you are off to the races on building consistently supple and wonderful coordination!

If you try this activity on your own, bear in mind that I have almost zero pressure flowing through my arms resting on the wall. It’s more like I imagine that I’m conducting an orchestra with the arms rather than supporting my weight. Also bear in mind that it’s far better to spend one minute on this activity and then go for a little walk and try it again rather than to bully your back about for an extended period of time.

Here’s me showing off how little weight is going through my arms…

When in doubt, try it out and ask me a question!

** This general shape I’m in is referred to as a Position of Mechanical Advantage or colloquially as monkey. It is best thought of as a mini squat with the ankles, knees, and hips bending. I prefer these back explorations to the yoga style cat/cow or plank where you are on all fours because it takes strain off of the shoulder girdle. In time, you should be able to do all of these things without strain or injury.

*** Notice that I have not done a full backwards back bend. This type of move can be done in a healthy way where the middle back does not over-arch backwards. That is, the degree of arch in the neck, upper back, middle back, and lower back are in proportion with one another and all moving together. Timing is everything!