Becoming conscious of our unconscious Self allows us to understand how much the experiences of the past condition us. In other words, our physical, mechanical habits, as well as our mental and emotional habits, are running the show we call “ourselves”.

What we can discover and learn, as students and practitioners of the Alexander Technique, is that to change physical and mechanical behaviours, we have to address the beliefs, conscious or unconscious, that support those behaviours. Most importantly, we need to transform the personality that energises the loop of feeling, thinking and reacting based on habitual patterns.

Concentrating on the physical structure, having a go at solely reorganising a mechanical balance, is a dangerous trap in which to fall. In my opinion, without the harmony of the emotional, the mental and the physical components, we won’t have an evolution, a constructive and profound transformation of the Self.

In our work, we talk about directions and inhibition. I find they are most effective when we translate directions as the expression of a potential Self, a creative Self that can only be manifested when we choose to close the door of the familiar behind us, and inhibition, as the key that opens the door of possibilities.

Without stopping, without inhibition we won’t create a new Self, and the result will only be a variation of the known, maybe a better-organised version, but we won’t have tapped into those potentials that can only be accessed beyond familiar experiences.

Expanding the Self, in my experience, is indeed the creation of something new, a powerful and dynamic project of transformation through which we can express our individualities without limitations.

How we use ourselves, is the expression of a conscious choice, and choosing the unknown for the known is the first step towards creation.

© Ettore Arcais