What Are Unreliable Senses?
What Are Unreliable Senses?
And how can you improve them?
In my previous posts, I’ve described the Alexander Technique as way to restore your sense of poise so that you can prevent harmful ways of conducting yourself during the day. In Mr. Alexander’s case, he had discovered that when he went to speak on stage he stiffened his neck so that it cocked his head back, sucked in air, and thought about doing a good job in his stage performance. This was creating extra pressure on his vocal cords and he theorised that it was the source of his injury. What he found most surprising was that he had not been able to sense that this was injuring him until the pain had gotten so bad that his voice stopped working altogether.
This conundrum is certainly similar to my story. Using a broken chair and wonky mouse at work for a day was ok, but as days turned to months the discomfort created a full distortion of my head, neck, back, and arms and made me associate doing a good job with stiffening up. I erroneously believed that if it took 4 months to create my injury, it would only take 4 months of using a healthy chair and mouse to undo it. What I had not considered was that once I was given an ergonomic chair and mouse, I was still sitting as if I was in the broken chair. My learned pattern of sitting was causing me further harm and would persist until I learned to change my whole self.
In both Mr Alexander’s case and my own, our difficulty in correcting our harmful Patterns of Use was that we could no longer sense what we were actually doing. Our sense of where and how we are in space had gone askew. Alexander called this phenomenon Faulty Sensory Appreciation and his work centred around building a new and reliable sense of how you are.
This is quite possibly one of the most useful concepts you could understand on your journey to improve your health; even if you ‘feel fine’ and are just feeling slightly tired or overworked.
As you do your daily lie downs (and I hope you enjoy them!), it can be very helpful to gently notice what is going on. Please, read my post on Lying Down so that you can familiarise yourself with the basic process.
While we will have different patterns of harmful use, I have found that there seems to be a universal experience in what an overstrained and overworked person will experience. Bear in mind that this process of learning what an unreliable sense feels like is truly best experienced in-person. I will describe some of these feelings so that you can potentially identify them for yourself:
A general sense of fatigue
A quality of anxiety in the musculature - this can feel like an electric buzz
Extreme tension or pain around a joint
A feeling of heaviness - almost like dead weight
A mind racing from one issue to another
Heavy or stacatto breathing with an over-exerted movement in the diaphragm
If you don’t experience these things, don’t sweat it! You either are in amazing health, are different from me, or you just need to be patient and enjoy that overall sense of exploring the unknown without striving to ‘do the right thing’. Your sense of noticing yourself will grow in time.
If you do experience these things, it means that you are human. You’ve done nothing knowingly wrong to get yourself into this state. If you had known how to slow down at work and find a more healthy way of doing whatever it is you need to do, you would have done it. Instead, trust that you are taking a great first step and gently ask for a general sense of melting into supple volume to permeate your whole self rather than dwell too long on any pain or negative sensation.
If you can notice these sensations during a lie down, you may begin to notice them at other points during your day and use them as a cue to take that next lie down, look up from your screen at the people around you, or go for a gentle walk. This is a great way to change up your day and begin the process of rewiring your sensory appreciation.
There are things that you can do to guide your pattern of use into a more healthy and reliable pattern. Alexander’s discovery of the relationship between the head, neck, and back is critical in building a reliable sensory appreciation of yourself and building new patterns of use. But if you cannot feel the wrong thing, then you will be quite lost when you Wish to Prevent the Wrong Thing and discover this coordination for yourself.
I hope these articles give you something to consider. Seemingly subtle changes in your self can often feel dramatic. If you’re noticing any changes as you go through this process on your own and have questions, please ask me!
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