Stop doing the thing

F. M. Alexander was a young Shakespearean actor in Australia in the 1890s who kept losing his voice on stage. The doctors found nothing. So he set up mirrors and watched himself speak, for months, and saw what no one else had: at the moment he began to recite, he pulled his head back and down, tightened his neck, and squeezed his breath. The habit was invisible to him and it was ruining him. When he learned to stop doing it, the voice came back.

The Alexander Technique grew out of that. It isn't exercise. It's the study of what you're doing to yourself without knowing it, mostly with your neck, head and spine, and the practice of not doing it. Teachers use their hands, lightly, to show a student what a free neck feels like. It has been taught to actors and musicians for a century, and a large British trial in 2008 found it one of the most effective things ever tested for chronic back pain.

The key, and it's a big one for the month of the Body, is the idea Alexander called inhibition. Not suppression. Pause. Between the impulse to act and the act itself, there's a gap, and in that gap you can notice the habit about to fire and decline it. He was teaching, in the body, exactly what Covey was teaching in the mind on day three: between stimulus and response there is a space.

Most of us tighten before we do anything. Before we stand up, before we speak, before we lift, before we open an email. Alexander's whole teaching is that the tightening isn't necessary, that it was learned, and that what was learned can be unlearned, one noticing at a time.