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Floor of the Pelvis

4^th Hour

5^th hour, rectus, psoas

Heart conditions

Abdominal surgeries

Alexander and Feldendkrais

(0:42) I know you want to see pictures, but to emphasize this, and emphasize their general concepts of the specificity of minerals for certain glandular activity. I thought that this would be of interest specifically to you people. And this he is going to do, and he is also going to talk to Bob Driver, because he claims absolutely that he can handle leukemia through – that leukemia is a lack of a certain mineral. (And he claims that he will personally see Bob Driver after or before or something and give him this.) But I’m sure of what it is, it’s that whole business of beets, which I have sent for but which hasn’t arrived yet.

(1:38 student) Don’t tell Dr. Winthrop.

(1:42) Well, don’t tell anybody, listen to what he’s got to say. And as far as I’m concerned if I had what was bothering Bob Driver and somebody claimed that whole beet powder would fix it, I’d sure try it. It can’t hurt. Nothing that this guy would give him would hurt him. They’re all food supplement things that are simply concentrated you see, grown in organic bases, etc., etc.

(2:13) But I thought that this would be of particular interest to you. You see, he feels so precise about all this sort of thing that this yeast that I gave Don for instance, all of this stuff is imported from Europe, because there is no comparative product available here in the states.

(2:36 student) Is he a source of supply for these things?

(2:38) Well, he is a source of supply for about 3 or 4 different products. That is all. The only stuff he supplies is stuff that he feels you can’t buy in a health food store or the equivalent. And this is the only stuff he bothers with. So, obviously the man is not merely out to make a lot of money or hem in on this whole supplement deal.

Floor of the Pelvis

(3:14) Anyhow, looks like we’re all here now. This is, (the day that the lord hath made, is what comes to mind). (6^th hour), 5^th hour, right?

(3:28) It’s the end of the 5^th hour, in other words at the end of today you are through 1/2 of the work that you are going to do. Now go through – half of the manipulative work that you are going to do –, so we better see to it that we really understand what is going on the way.

(3:57) Now, as I indicated yesterday, when you get to the 4^th, the 5^th, and the 6^th hour, you have a package in your hands which is the central core of what is going to be done here. The 1^st and the 2^nd and the 3^rd hour you have been preparing to get to this. But the 4^th and the 5th and the 6th hour you are doing your stuff, you are doing what you are going to do with that pelvis to get it organized, horizontalled, the floor of it – the stuff that keeps the stuffing in – balanced, so the stuffing stays in; it doesn’t sort of ooze out around the corners.

(5:07) You see, this oozing out around the corners isn’t such a bad metaphor at all, because you actually get this sort of deterioration of tone, which lets everything pound down on the base of the pelvis. And what are the commonest things for which both males and females get into hospitals, even as of today, if I’m not mistaken? Somebody's got to take the uterus of the female out, and somebody's got to doctor up the prostate in the man; because there has been no support, and support is not a solid thing underneath.

(5:50) If you want to have some fun thinking, you get back in a corner, and realize the change in the ideas of support that have come in the last 75 years, (since the turn of the century). When I was young, the symbol of support was the rock of Gibraltar, was as firm as the rock of Gibraltar. And an insurance company used as its symbol the rock of Gibraltar, and a bank used as its symbol a pyramid, or an Egyptian temple or something of this sort. This was support in those days. This was [cementy], this was something you could rely on, but this is not what you can put the contents of a pelvis on. It’s no good for that. (It’s not much good for banks; those of you that lived through 1907 knew that too.)

(7:03) So that the whole idea of support has changed. Nowadays our banks are “secure”, when you put them into glass so you can see the farthest corner of them any hour of the day or night. It’s an interesting change.

(7:32) And you see, this is reflecting in another department of life, that whole change that came in around the turn of the century when we began to understand relationship.

(7:46) And now that which is secure is that which is in a secure relationship; that you’re a hammock, that you’re an energy that you’re not going to fall out of, something that is supported by imaginary lines. But apparently this gives you support, provided the lines are where the lines belong. Now as soon as you break down the place of where the lines belong, your support breaks down.

(8:30) And you see we haven’t gotten that far away from this old idea of support yet. We sit around and we talk, and we philosophize about this newer type of support, but the number of people that live on the face of the earth who really mentally live in this idea are few and far between. They talk about it.

(8:59) Now this is where your problem lies; to jack yourself up into the level where this type of support is real, and to drag with you, in varying number of other people, so that they can “share your heaven”.

(9:23) And so you see, that floor of the pelvis now becomes an outward and visible indication of how these lines of force are balancing.

(9:40) Where’s Sharon? Oh, there she is. And you all realize why I was thinking of her.

(10:00) To me, it is interesting to see how ideas develop. You take in mental and religious ideas for example. It’s now just about 100 years since the whole episode of American metaphysics opened it’s eyes back in New York state, and Vermont, and so forth and so forth. And out of it has come the whole Christian Science movement, the whole religious science movement, and various other lesser sects. All of whom are living and thriving, who believe that thoughts are things, who believe that you do healing through thinking. And this is interesting, because there was a certain amount of healing that I know darn well you can do through thinking, because I’ve seen it. But the interesting part of it is that this is where the change in that idea came from 100 years ago.

(11:05) And now as we go on, instead of relying on this thinking tool, we are relying on a shifting of energy levels, energy ideas, as a means of mental and physical healing. And by healing I’m not talking really about fixing up a broken bone, or remedying a stomach ache; I’m talking about making a man a whole man.

(11:41) And you see, it was those metaphysicians really, who first got the idea that there is a wholeness coming in somewhere, but they so precisely pinpointed their very rigid approach that it prevented them from getting further away and seeing it in a larger range, and it’s only after 100 years that we’re now beginning to see these as outward invisible symbols of the progression of the ideas of energy.

(12:15) Now, I’m going to get the tarot cards, and astrology presently too. If Gus what’s his name will do it down in [ ] I can do it up here.

(12:28) Anyway, so all of this, if you can get that floor of the pelvis where that floor of the pelvis goes, you have an energy web underneath you which then lets you come up. It not only lets you come up, it buoys you so you are more comfortable up than you are down.

(13:10) And you see how you have developed this idea of the floor of the pelvis. You have first gone into it very primitively, so to speak; you have actually approached it in terms of the muscles, which literally attach at the edges of the floor of the pelvis. It’s logical.

4^th Hour

(13:42) And this has been your 4^th hour. And you’ve gone all around it. You’ve made your first step into the area by way of the adductors, all of the adductors, because it is the adductors that are most intimately attached to the actual muscles, which constitute the floor.

(14:20) And then you realize that by the time you get to the adductor magnus, you’re not really in a true adductor, in the sense that it attaches to the ischial tuberosity, and it is the immediate neighbor of the hamstrings. And it’s function is not that different than the hamstrings. And I’m not quite sure as to why it was made as an adductor, 'cause it didn’t have the simplicity of function that the adductors have.

(15:07) But at any rate you’re still going around the edges of the pelvis, you’re still making it possible to shift the pelvis in terms of the resilience that you’re giving their [naturals].

(15:30) And so, in that 4^th hour, let’s settle this once and for all now, we are going to do the adductors. We are going to finish with the hamstrings.

(15:48) And by the time you’ve done all that, those patients of yours, those subjects of yours, have had it. And you’d better bring them to a place of balance where you can terminate the hour appropriately with a pelvic lift and something to organize the neck as you understand, and call it a day.

(16:32) Now, when you come back the next time, you still don’t like what you see, because you’re still seeing a pot belly, and you’re still seeing a certain amount of pulled downness of the thorax, and an imbalance that doesn’t please you. And as you begin to try to find out what else you can do to please yourself better to relate, and now you’ve got to start relating things to the pelvis, (rather than only freeing the pelvis); you’re now getting into a more complicated set–up.

5^th Hour, Rectus, Psoas

(17:24) You are now getting to a place where you have got to make a thorax think it belongs to that pelvis. If not, where are you? You still haven’t got a whole man, because it is the whole man with which you are thinking, and dealing, and working in this room.

(17:58) And so as you meditate about this, and you are sharp eyed as Bev over there, you see to it, “Well, there’s something here that isn’t right.” And you go in and you use your head at this point and realize it, that you have to deal with the rectus.

(18:25) Now, the minute you begin to getting into the rectus, you begin working your way into some other considerations. For one thing, that rectus is going to organize; it’s going to pull the pelvis up in front. This is the most obvious thing. It’s going to let the rib cage, below our ribs, the sternum etc., go up, lift.

(19:10) But you are now getting into a different level of operation in that body, because the rectus is the antagonist of the psoas. And this is a something, a fact, which nobody seems to have ever put to work consistently. Now, the psoas is a relatively unique structure in the body.

(19:50) Listen to what I’ve said. I’ve said that the rectus is the antagonist of the psoas, and this seems to be a piece of just plain nonsense. When did you ever hear of an antagonist lying right next door to its agonist? And yet this is the way the thing works.

(20:15) As they cross the rim of the pelvis, (the pubes), the psoas is practically contiguous with the rectus. And I’m telling you, I’m telling you, question mark, that these things are agonist and antagonist. Yes I am, and you’ll see it.

(20:41) Now the psoas, as I’ve said is unique in many respects. In the first place it does have a motor function. But in the second place it has a different quality about it than the average motor muscle, because it is so intimately connected with the autonomic nervous system; because the lumbar plexus is practically imbedded on the surface of the psoas. And therefore, anything that exercises the psoas – that gives that pumping function, which is exercise, which changes metabolism of an area – is going to affect the metabolism of the lumbar plexus. Now the psoas is not very far from the solar plexus, but it’s not as intimately connected as it is with the lumbar plexus. The psoas is not very far. Well, as you go down the line the psoas gets further away, because the psoas diagonally crosses the pelvis. And the autonomic centers are still lying right in front of the spine itself. The distance between the psoas and the spine becomes greater the lower you go.

(22:18) So, that that psoas becomes very intimately connected with everything that is controlled through the lumbar plexus. This is particularly true of the whole bowel excretory function. Now, look at the great American illnesses. How many dollars worth of anti–constipation remedies are sold annually, daily? What have you? How does it get that way? Why does it get that way? It gets that way because the psoas is literally thrown out, geared out. It’s geared out because the rectus…is the muscle that we trained in all our orthodox physical training programs. All the push–ups, all the pull–ups, every last one of them is designed to shorten and to thicken and to do something funny with the rectus abdominus. And here, you see, you are disturbing the balance between agonist and antagonist; because the more you shorten and thicken and make the rectus funny, the more you gear out the psoas and its function, letting it little and little completely deteriorate, so that you have no appropriate metabolic support for your nerve center now.

(24:38 student) So push–ups are not good to do, that they shorten the rectus –

(24:44) Look Beverly, go back and sit in a corner and by and by you’ll get an answer. It won’t be today.

(24:56) So right here and right now you begin to see from whence comes all the bay windows. From whence comes another irremediable cause of bay windows, of course, is the amount of surgery that has been done. Fortunately this younger generation is no longer getting it, but my generation: you just didn’t find these people without seeing a nice big star across that abdomen, which now prevented – permanently prevented – the falling back of the abdominal wall.

(25:42) And you see, all of this gives you a picture of what begins to go wrong with the individual as he gets into the 30’s and the 40’s and the 50’s, and by the 60’s it’s really wrong with him! He’s been fighting all the way along the line, and now he’s lost the fight.

(26:00) But you see what you’re dealing with here is now the growing conception of your need to deal with the psoas, you’re need to understand the psoas.

(26:20) Now there’s another function of the psoas that you also need to put “in it’s place”, and that’s the recognition of the fact that the psoas is the motor link, connecting link, between the legs and the diaphragm – the rib cage – so in other words it’s the thing that holds the top and the bottom together.

(26:54) Remember, that the psoas attaches on the anterior aspect of the 1^st, the 2^nd, the 3^rd lumbars. And the crura of the diaphragm lies immediately adjacent to it on the anterior surface of the 1^st and the 2^nd lumbars. So along about the time that you get your psoas balled up, you’ve also got your diaphragm balled up.

Heart conditions

(27:33) I remember in the old days when I was developing this, (and I wasn’t developing it from a developed philosophy, but from the actual practical experience), how amazed I used to be that many heart conditions didn’t respond until you got into the 4^th and the 5^th hour), when you got down there, I thought, to the attachment of the rectus. I didn’t understand this. But now, what I say is, that I wasn’t dealing with the rectus at all, I was dealing with the psoas, and through the psoas with the diaphragm, and the solar plexus, and the whole rhythm of the heart control coming through there…

(28:41) Now, maybe I was dealing only indirectly with the psoas by virtue of the agonist antagonist thing, but the fact of the matter remains that right down here is a control for the whole cardio vascular system. Not the control, a control. It may not be a control, but when it goes wrong everything else goes wrong too. That’s what I’m really trying to say.

(29:17) So that now you are getting into the 5^th hour and you are dealing with the rectus abdominus, and realize that you cannot deal with the rectus abdominus except as you are also dealing with the psoas. These two things can’t be separated. And if your psoas, through polio or some other situation, has been retired from service, so to speak, that rectus is taking on a burden, which it cannot carry indefinitely. It, in its turn, is going to try to get help from here and there and the other place.

(30:17) So that now you begin to see the significance of that 5^th hour in which you are dealing with the rectus as a unit, and with the psoas as unit if you can get back there. You can’t always, and you can many times. Many times you can just get your fingers back and literally go scrape on the front edge of the lumbars, literally. And in your scraping it isn’t that you scrape the psoas off, but that you scrape some energy into the deteriorated structure.

(30:54) But with people, particularly with a mesomorphic type, you have a lot of trouble getting back there. Endomorph you can get through, an ectomorph doesn’t have anything to keep you out. And a mesomorph is not going to stand for it without an awful lot of fuss.

(31:15) So this is what you were doing yesterday, and this is what you are going to be doing today. You start up there around –

(31:30) By the way, [Beverly] where does the rectus attach? Look at your –

(31:36 student) at the xiphoid process, and also at the –

(31:43) Not really. The xiphoid is pretty independent of the rectus…

(31:51 student) The book says that –

(31:52) The book says they’re really attached?

(32:00 student) and that the 5^th 6^th and 7^th costal –

(32:10) It goes as high as the 5^th rib. So you’re going to start your work way up around the 5^th rib. And it goes quite a way out on the 5^th rib. And as you look at what you can’t get – I mean you get the feeling of how the 5th rib and on down should look – and then you look at the individual and you can’t get it. And then you have to look as to why you can’t get it, and sometimes this will carry you far afield. But what I complain about is when you just go afield, as Owen went afield yesterday on Fritz. And I say, that isn’t 5th hour way over under there. And yet maybe Owen was right, maybe this was the place that literally held it.

(33:18) But the problem is that in a proper 5^th hour there is so much to be done that if you go gathering daisies right when you start you’re not going to get to the end of the road in the time allotted. So you have to get considerable discrimination, and your immediate goal is this business of getting elasticity into those two rectus muscles.

(33:57) Now another one of the things that you have to bear in mind – this is a practical warning, and I bid you, be warned – it is highly possible for you to pull those 2 rectus muscles apart; it has never happened to me or anybody I was working with, but in theory at least. If you just go after a single rectus muscle, or you go after it this way instead of this way, you are doing a very dangerous hazardous business. So always bear this in mind that however you are dealing with those rectus muscles, you always have a component, which brings them together in your fingertips once they’re off the rib cage.

(34:59) I know that you all know about umbilical hernias. As a matter of actual fact, in the case of an umbilical hernia, which has only relatively recently happened, you can get them to heal this way. I don’t make any promises, but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen umbilical hernias the size of a silver dollar (I’ve forgotten, you people don’t know what a silver dollar is) – but I’ve seen this thing just close itself right up again if you bring the rectus in. And realize that. This becomes a dangerous procedure unless every one of the eyes in those 8 fingers keeps looking to see how the strands of that rectus lie, and keeps bringing them together. And you see they belong together, and it is when they are together that you are able to induce the appropriate elasticity. Because you remember the 1^st rule of Rolfing is you bring the structure into or toward the direction in which it should be, before you start demanding movement of it. So that part of the 5^th hour direction is that you bring those recti together.

(36:25) And then you have organized the top, the attachment from the 5^th rib down. You’ve sort of pretty well cleared up as it goes over the edge of the thorax. Get the feeling that it’s not stuck on that rib, so the rib and respiration is dragging on it. And then sometimes it pays better to just sort of hop skip and jump down to the other end. And sometimes it doesn’t. This is something you sort of have to get a feeling for.

(37:19) At any rate you're going to have to do the two ends and the middle, and when you go down to the other end, hear that voice of the top dog talking to you – (as Victor would say) – reminding you to visualize the relationship at the other end between the rectus and the psoas, let your fingers tell you, let your fingers talk to you.

(37:58) Now, the funny part of it is that you will find pubes in the strangest places. They may be almost literally projecting outside the abdominal wall, and they may be so deep in that it’s all you can do searching with your fingers to find them. You’ll say, “My God the guys lost his pubes.” And it may take a considerable search to find it.

(38:35) And either of those situations when you have cleared the psoas and the rectus, either one will come to a mid point, to a balance and a midline where you find it easily with your fingers, and it talks to you, and it’s clean, and your fingers can differentiate between rectus attachment and psoas transmission.

(39:05) Sometimes you will find that the whole pubic structure just dives down on one side. You can’t find it on one side, and it’s a perfectly normal position on the other side. The guy has trouble with his walking and he doesn’t know why. He has pain in one hip and he doesn’t know why, etc, etc, and all of these things your fingers are going to learn about. But always remember, as the boys in the top dog’s say, you should get those things up where they are balanced and where you recognize that the pelvic bone belongs, if you are going to get your horizontal pelvis. Because you are still [gutting] for a horizontal pelvis. And the discussion has only added to your understanding of why you want your pelvis horizontal. Now this constitutes the 5^th hour.

(40:32) Do not forget that in that 5^th hour you also have a minor goal of organizing the legs to the proper width; many, many times those legs are too close together; many, many times those legs are too far apart. But in that 5^th hour as you see, as you go down into that groin area, it’s your job to get the length of the connections that hold the leg into the pelvis wide enough that the legs can sit out where it belongs, or narrow enough that it brings it in where it belongs. This is par for the 5^th hour work; the organization of the whole groin structure and of the groin structure as a whole, belongs properly in the 5^th hour.

(41:38) And you see now you are beginning to really get to a place where a lot of the work on that pelvis is done, and then you will be ready to go along into a 6^th hour tomorrow.

(42:08 student) To be continued.

(42:10) To be continued.

(42:11 student) ‘Till tomorrow, the next exciting chapter.

(42:13) The next exciting chapter. Shall we have coffee? Shall we get to work?

Abdominal surgeries

(42:25 student) I see a lot of people whose abdominal muscles that are flat, far lateral. I think it’s a common thing to –

(42:29) Oh yes, [bring them in]. There will always be, everything in a body tends to move lateral, and having gotten stuck like that they have to keep going around and around and around and around and around and around. But one of the most difficult problems with the rectus muscle nowadays is the surgery [it starts]. And as I say it’s nothing like as difficult as it was 20 years ago, because there was so much more invasion of body surgery than there is now.

(43:05 student) There’s a lot more transverse incisions than there used to be.

(43:14) Yeah, but even these vertical incisions, the scar tissue really messes things up in a big way.

(43:24 student) Well, surgeons used to think that the best way to incise an animal was to open parallel to the muscle fibers. But actually opening perpendicular to the muscle fibers is much more effective.

(43:40) Well, I do know that I just don’t have as much trouble nowadays as I used to have. Of course, in the old days there was a period, again about 25, 30 years ago; when anytime a woman got into any consistent menstrual problem, some surgeon thought it would be a very good idea to take the uterus out, and then, you see, you have the whole area of the uterus, and these things had to be filled in with connective tissue.

(44:14) One woman came to me and reported that, she had been to a gynecologist and he had said that the next time she got into trouble like this he was going to take the uterus out, because it always seemed to be a poison in a woman anyway.

(44:31 student) Well that’s not an unusual viewpoint.

(44:35) Well maybe they shouldn’t have knives if they’re gonna keep that view point. As Downing says, an M.D. is just fine so long as you don’t put him in the right coat; as window washers, and what else was it? Plumbers? Carpenters?

(Tape skip)

Alexander and Feldenkrais

(44:55) The first man, no he wasn’t really the first man. He was the first scientifically inclined man to look at the fact that body structure and body behavior had a relation.

(45:12student) Before all of these guys was William James too.

(45:18) Reich's view was not the view of a man as a whole. Reich's view was the view of a man as a pelvis. And a man may be basically a pelvis, but he’s more than that.

(45:35) Alexander saw the light, perhaps more than any of the rest of them. A.M Alexander. But you see Alexander was not the scientifically trained individual. He was an actor. He was a neurotic down to the core. He didn’t want to convey what he saw. He wanted to keep himself – in my opinion, this is what I see in his books – he wanted to keep himself up on his own little pedestal as he knew and of course you couldn’t know. Because you weren’t as bright as he. But in his field Alexander is very, very interesting. Do all of you know it?

46:16) Well, Alexander was an Australian actor, and he went to London, and somewhere in the middle of his London acting he lost his voice. Now he was an actor not only without a job, but without a voice to get a job. And this went on for year, a year and a half, two years, and finally his voice returned. And as he was in good voice there, he thought, and he got back his job and went back to the stage, and low and behold in the middle of the performance, he had no voice.

(47:00) Now, anybody else with all those psychoanalysts around them would have known that he just didn’t want to sing, and that therefore he lost his voice, but Alexander wasn’t bright enough to know that, so he started looking for a different premise. And Alexander went back to his room and he decided that he was doing something on the stage which cut off his voice. And so he started practicing his songs, or speeches, or whatever it was, before the mirror in his bedroom. And he saw, you see, that he was doing this, and that somehow this cut off his voice. And from there on he started thinking about how do you get your head on top of your neck, and your neck on top of your shoulders, but particularly your head. And he worked through the only medium that he knew, which was a voluntary direction to do something, and then to do it. In other words, this was a mind-body technique which he now developed. Technically speaking, it was a self-hypnosis technique sort of thing. It was a suggestion sort of thing; top of the head straight up, back of the head straight back. And he’d do it often enough and various things happen.

(48:38) You see, Alexander and Reiche had now done to two ends of the line, and nobody put them together in the middle.

(48:45) And Feldenkrais – this was in the early years of the war; it was in ’42, ’43, something like that, maybe ’41,’42. Feldenkrais was a well-trained physicist. He’d worked with the Curie group, and in fact one of the basement rooms at the University of Paris at this day there is a bronze plaque that says that Curie, and what was the name of his son-in-law ?, and Moshe M. Feldenkrais worked in this room on the problem of so and so.

(49:28) So, Feldenkrais was a man who had done a lot of thinking in terms of physics. And why and how, this guy who was born a Russian and Ukrainian Jew, and who later became a citizen of Israel – how he happened to be in England and subject to English service requirements, I don’t know, but at any rate, he was stationed up in [Stafford flow], in some of radio installations up there or something of this sort. And here he was stuck away in [Stafford flow] and there wasn’t a physicist within a thousand miles, and he was pretty lonely and he couldn’t think what to do with his evenings.

(50:13) So he sat down and he started in thinking about structure and personality. He had already had a lot of Freudian analysis, and he was thinking in terms of Freudian analysis. And you see, he went somewhat of the route of Reich, in the sense that Reich I think was probably the first one who realized that if you were gong to get Freudian results you had to have a mechanics through which you got them. And Reich set out to try to find that mechanics, and with in limits, Reich did.

(50:45) But Feldenkrais went further than this, and again, he was not limited in his view of the man to the pelvis, as all these psychoanalysts were doing. He was putting the man together as a whole, and he was calling attention to the fact that the man as a whole, in terms of his posture – which is behavior – betrayed other levels of behaviors, psychological, either maturity or immaturity of behavior.

(51:24) And so, Feldenkrais, sitting up there on [Stafford Flow] wrote that manuscript, and when he got some time off, he went down and he got an appointment with F. M. Alexander and he called on Alexander, and Alexander was pretty cool to him, and he left his manuscript there, and asked him to read it. He would call for it the day after tomorrow or what have you. And when he got back F. M. Alexander just about literally – now, I’m telling you first hand. Feldenkrais is the one that told me this– he just about literally kicked the guy down the brownstone steps, and the manuscript after him. And why he did this, I don’t quite know, except that he probably recognized the fact that this was a very dangerous competitor. And that was the end of Feldenkrais and Alexander. And Feldenkrais kept his cool about it, but Alexander obviously didn’t, but then Alexander wasn’t cool about anything or anybody. Alexander was a man who saw to it that he didn’t get along with anybody, and the people that surrounded him were his own family, who couldn’t escape from him. And the only one in the world that could influence him at all was a certain niece of his, who then saw to it that she lived with him, keeping track of uncle, and saw to it that uncle ate on time and things like that. And she married a young doctor, and this young doctor also went in for the Alexander thinking and work, and he is no longer a young doctor – I’d say he’s in he’s 65 or so. But at any rate he has the Alexander technique – or he did have when I used to play in England – set up in hospitals with reasonably good documentation. He has a lot of photographs and so forth, showing what the Alexander technique has done. And the Alexander technique still has a fairly good reputation in England.

(53:35) And then within the Alexander school, there were 2 or 3 other relatively gifted teachers that stood out above the rest of the gang, and presently they broke off, because you see with this kind of personality at the head of the thing, the thing couldn’t hold itself together. And I forget the name of the man that made the biggest dent, I think he’s dead now too. At any rate, he had as a patient, a man who was the lord of the treasury in England during the war years. He was a socialist, Sir Stafford Cripps and Sir Stafford Cripps is very much impressed with what had been done with, for him. He wasn’t a particularly rich man, but he saw to it that this splintered group got itself pretty well established in England, and Lady Cripps after Sir Stafford’s death. Later Sir Stafford who was…. I think he literally died as a result of a gastric ulcer. Anyway he had a frightful gastric ulcer all during those years when he gave his services to the treasury, to the lord of the [ ] in England. And how the guy carried on, I don’t know, apparently he thought he carried on by virtue of this Alexander technique. And Lady Cripps supported this group, (I don’t mean exclusively, but she gave her moral support, and the support of her altitude and so forth to this particular splinter group rather than the main Alexander group), so that this became one of the principle factors of the Alexander work in England.

(55:26) I knew Lady Cripps, in fact I treated her once or twice, and she left me to go to Africa to visit a daughter once that was married to one of the politicians down in Kenya or something. At any rate that’s the story of Alexander. Except, he was an exotic guy. He never had any money in his pocket, and when he happened to get money in his pocket he would go to the racetrack, and invariably he would succeed in loosing all the money he had, and he would have to practically walk home. And so forth and so forth. And he actually would go down over and over and over again. He never learned, but he was an interesting figure.

(56:10) And he had one brother, who apparently was not as interesting a figure, but a man who was more by aptitude, attitude, more suitable for the work, and this brother did a lot of spreading of the true Alexander gospel, and this brother came to north America, and did a lot of work along the east coast, particularly in Boston. And from there he went up into Montréal. And as a result of the work of that brother, there is at this point still quite a going group of Alexander teachers in this country.

(56:54) They don’t make as much noise as perhaps they’re entitled to make, but you see the Alexander is a work basically – a suggestion work. And suggestion does work, but after it works you’ve got to keep on suggesting.

(57:15) This is the reason why what you are doing is not a competitor of the Alexander method; what you are doing, what would not be as precise if I had never heard the ideas of Alexander. He contributed a great deal to my thinking. He was the 1^st man, perhaps the only man before this school of work, right here in this room that ever gave real consideration to where a head belonged with relation to a body. There have been no others, really. There have been people who thought where top vertebrae belonged, the atlas, the axis, but there’s been nobody that has related the weight of the head to the structure of the supports.

(58:17) And so you see, you people owe a debt to Alexander, and you better know it, because this question will come up over and over again, “Oh, have you ever heard of the work of F.M. Alexander?”, and you better say yes.

(58:35 student) Dr. Rolf, there’s a new book, “The Resurrection of the Body”, and it has a footnote that gives some insight into what he does, all of them, is a help…

(58:53) I have heard of it, and I’ve been intending to do something about it for a long time. It’s a collection of F.M. Alexander’s.

(59:05) But Alexander himself didn’t want to communicate, and if you read his books this is perfectly obvious. On the other hand, Alexander had some of the same problem that we have right here. He was trying to communicate a something that nobody had thought about before, and he wasn’t that much of an intellectual that he knew how to deal with the problem of words. And so he talked around and around and around and around. And as far as I’m concerned reading those books of Alexander’s is an absolute punishment. But you try it. Maybe you like to be punished. Because he doesn’t get to the point, he doesn’t say what he really means. And what he did in his books was simply to build up his own reputation. And this was all right too. Alexander had a schedule book that read like the [almanac to gopher]; everybody on the top drawer in England went to Alexander or to this other guy that was [ ]…And this was the story of Alexander.

(1:00:14) Now, it behooves you to think of this and to recognize the fact that this other end of the body that you are going to be dealing with next week, it’s a related problem, but it’s a problem that warrants as much thought as your pelvic end. And you have to relate it into that whole pelvic problem.

(1:00:43) Now, this is what Alexander didn’t do. He thought about the head, he was interested in the head, he was interested in the throat because he was pervasively an actor; I mean everything I’ve been talking about is this temperament of a very gifted actor.

(1:01:11) But he didn’t recognize the fact that until you set that head on top of a well defined, secure structure, you didn’t have something that was going to stay with you.

(1:01:25) Now, Alexander had a pair of very gifted students, (had a lot of very gifted students), but there was a Mr. and a Mrs. Gerald Lee, who came at various times from North Hampton, Massachusetts and New York City, who were among his most gifted disciples. I say that because they had further insights, and because they had further insights, Alexander really threw them out. Gerald Lee was a little bit of a guy, and Mrs. Lee was a little bit of a gal. In fact Mrs. Lee was more like a humming bird than any woman I’ve ever known. She had been a teacher of creative writing in Smith College for endless years, 50 probably, before she died.

Continued…

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