Feel the Squeeze

Hint: That's what you DON'T want!

Today (Wednesday) I had a rather frustrating morning. I had a nice little idea for an animation and sat down to start making some drawings. The first one came out grand so I started working on the second one.

Only I kept forgetting to hit the magic ‘save’ button.

No big deal. I’ll just start over again!

So I go back and start editing this little drawing and about half way through it I start to feel this all encompassing squeeze. It basically felt like every part of me became obsessed with a singular objective. I had completely ditched my sense of quiet thinking and started rushing towards that idea that I needed to get my drawing done RIGHT NOW.

This sensation is one of the things that we want to learn to identify and STOP.

What Did I Observe During The Squeeze?

• My pen strokes felt laboured.

• My head started to drop into the iPad.

• I began to hold my breath.

• All of my muscles began to tense up and get this electric buzz.

Did any of this hurt? Well, it didn’t have any sharp pang of pain. It’s more like it just felt gross and tiring.

This feeling is insidiously sneaky because it is tempting for me to carry on with the squeeze, complete my job, and just stomach the ICK. This trade-off between my sense of feeling and the immediacy of the task at hand is a big topic for FM Alexander. He calls it END-GAINING and it is absolutely what I started to do this morning.

Feel the Squeeze / Hate the Squeeze

Rather than give you a purely theoretical description of end-gaining, I hope that you can begin to feel this same squeeze on your own. I can’t say for certain that it will feel exactly the same for you, but it certainly is how I and a lot of my students feel. If you do manage to sense what this end-gaining feels like, you can take a moment to STOP and see if the squeeze can go away.

If you can sense this, you’ve made a pretty big win.

What Happens When The Squeeze Stops?

So there I was feeling the squeeze while drawing this morning. I stopped. And as the squeeze abated I said to myself, “Ok, let’s draw again. But let’s simply say NO to even the slightest bit of squeeze while we draw.”¹

Not only was the squeeze not there, but the pen strokes felt smoother. It felt like I could actually draw with ease rather than just pound my way through the activity. And it literally just took about 10 seconds to allow that shift.

Is this all there is to the technique? Nope! If you don’t have any sense of how tension claws its way into you - if your Inner Sherlock is asleep at his desk - then the game is not afoot. But this should not discourage you from observing, stopping, and playing these experiments!

This is a process of learning!

Get In Touch

Thanks for reading “Feel the Squeeze”. If you’re in NYC, you may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com.

If you’d like to book any lesson time with me, you can find my booking link here.

1. Yeah… I talk to myself in first person plural sometimes… cause I’m royalty…