From "Ideokinesis" by André Bernard, Wolfgang Steinmüller and Ursula Stricker
What has come to be known as ideokinesis is a discipline that employs the use of images as a means of improving muscle patterns. It is one of the oldest mind-body training techniques. The work was developed by Mabel E. Todd, a voice teacher from upstate New York who taught voice improvement in Boston near the time of the First World War. Sometime between 1900 and 1906, while she was in high school, she reportedly injured her back, which impaired her walking ability. As she moved on to college, she was constantly searching for a means of improving her condition. The doctors had told her that her walking ability would be impaired for life, but Todd was a very determined and feisty person, and she continued to search for and experiment with ways to correct her condition as she was teaching voice. The information she gathered in her search to find a way to improve her walking forms the basis of ideokinesis.
Todd not only corrected her condition but learned to walk again very well. She was noted for her ability to climb and descend stairs with extraordinary grace for the rest of her life. As her condition improved, she discontinued teaching voice and established a studio in Boston where she taught others with movement and postural difficulties to improve their own conditions. Toward the end of the 1920s she moved from Boston to New York City to teach this work at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her first book, The Thinking Body, was published in 1937, although some claim that an earlier edition came out in 1934. Prior to that, she had written short pamphlets, articles for the New England Journal of Medicine, and a syllabus for her students at Columbia University. She also gave lectures at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Asked why she had waited so long to publish her first book, Todd replied that since she was creating a new discipline, she wanted time to test its validity before publishing a book on it. Todd continued to teach into the 1950s and published her second book, The Hidden You, in 1953. She died in 1956.
Another pioneer in this work was Dr. Lulu Sweigard, who had been a student of Todd’s in the late 1920s at Columbia University. Dr. Sweigard taught the work at New York University from the mid 1930s through the mid 1950s when she retired. After leaving NYU she went on to teach at the Juilliard School of Dance, where she continued teaching until her death. Dr. Sweigard’s only book, Human Movement Potential, was published in 1974, shortly after her death.
The third major pioneer in the development of ideokinesis was Barbara Clark. Clark was a registered nurse who came to Todd in the early 1920s with a locomotion problem. Having had poliomyelitis as a child, Clark had a lot of difficulty with walking. Todd was able to help Clark correct that condition so that she was able to walk again very skillfully. Clark was so impressed with Todd’s work that she studied the work further and became one of the teachers at Todd’s Boston studio.
While in Boston, Clark specialized in teaching children. She left Boston in 1949 and came to New York, where she taught privately. She also assisted Dr. Sweigard at New York University. Instead of writing a book on ideokinesis, she wrote several “manuals,” as she called them. These have been reprinted in the book A Kinesthetic Legacy: The Life and Works of Barbara Clark, by Pamela Matt. Clark moved to Urbana, Illinois, in 1972, where she died in 1982 at the age of ninety-five.
Todd, Clark, and Sweigard are the major early pioneers in the development of ideokinesis, although there were others who made significant contributions. Many teachers of this work who are of the younger generation are also contributing to its further development.
Ideokinesis has many faces, many dimensions. In order to give you a wider understanding of its scope, here is a list of some of the identifying labels that have been used for the work: neuromuscular education, psychophysical education, psychophysiological education, psychomotor education, ideomotor education, structural hygiene, body mechanics, and physiophilosophical training.
The label ideokinesis was coined by the American piano teacher Bonpensière, who was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Bonpensière, who used imagery in his piano teaching, invented the word ideokinesis from two Greek words, ideo (idea or thought) and kinesis (movement), to describe his piano teaching method. Sweigard borrowed the word from Bonpensière to describe her methodology. Ideokinesis can be translated roughly as “the image or thought as facilitator of the movement.” Ideokinesis began to be used as a label for the work after the publication in 1974 of Sweigard’s book, Human Movement Potential, in which she used the word.
In order to understand why imagery is used as a means of changing muscle patterns, one must understand what movement is. Movement may be defined as a neuromusculoskeletal event. This means that in order for movement to take place, all three of the systems alluded to in this definition—nervous, muscular, and skeletal—must be involved. Each system has its own specific role to play; the nervous system is the messenger, that is, it transmits impulses or messages to the muscles to contract or release; the muscle system is the workhorse or the motor system; the skeletal system is the support system that is moved by the work of the muscles.
The critical point to be aware of in order to understand how the image can change the muscle pattern is this: The nervous system is more than just a simple messenger. It also organizes the muscle pattern, and it does this on a sub-cortical level, that is, the level below consciousness. Let us also be clear about what the muscle pattern is. It is the complex of muscles that perform a desired movement: organizing the muscle pattern is a highly complex and sophisticated task.
It is fortunate that the nervous system does this for us below the level of consciousness. Not only do we not have to organize the muscle pattern consciously, but we should not attempt to do so, because this will interfere with the process. Our conscious role in movement is to focus on the movement, because the nervous system, in organizing the muscle pattern, is responding to the clarity of one’s concept of what the movement is. If the movement is not done well, it means the muscle pattern is poor, and the muscle pattern is poor because the “wrong” message (a faulty concept of the movement) has been sent to the muscles. This wrong message is the result of either a lack of clarity about what the movement is or a previously established poor muscle pattern associated with the movement. The objective is to change the message—that is, to rethink the movement in order to change the poor muscle pattern. This rethinking the movement is formed into an image and used as a means to change the muscle pattern.
The lesson is usually divided into two parts: lecture and laboratory. In the lecture part, basic concepts of anatomy, physiology, and body mechanics are discussed. The images used in the laboratory part of the class are based upon this discussion.
In the laboratory part of the class, the students pair off, with one partner giving assistance to the other mostly in the form of “tactile aid.” Tactile aid is a light touch—including stroking, tapping, or just holding—on the part of the body that is to be imaged. The touch can be stationary or moving. Its purpose is to clarify where the image is taking place and the direction in which the image is moving, bringing focus and kinesthetic awareness to the process. Tactile aid can be self-administered, but it is usually done by a partner or a teacher.
In the beginning classes, the students receive tactile aid in the “constructive rest position”(Fig. 2). The constructive rest position, or CRP, is one in which the student is lying on his or her back on a firm surface such as a floor or a table with a pad underneath. The legs are flexed so that the angle at the knee joints is about ninety degrees. A small pillow or piece of foam rubber is placed under the base of the skull and another under the balls of the feet; the arms are folded softly over the body; and a tie is tied slightly above the knees to prevent the legs from falling outward. While working in CRP the student must not engage in voluntary movement; instead, the student focuses on the given imagined movement(s). This process takes about twenty to thirty minutes. When the process is completed, the partners reverse roles.
The students are expected to practice CRP each day. At the next lesson (usually a week later), new images will be discussed and given to practice in CRP. When practicing away from class, it is not necessary to receive tactile aid. In later lessons, when the student has become proficient in the CRP, imagery is used in sitting, standing, walking, and during other simple movements.
Occasionally, after constructive rest, the group might improvise, playing and moving about freely, using the images practiced earlier in the class, as another way of incorporating their responses to the work.
Ideokinesis is not a quick fix. It is a thorough, long-term educational process, which helps improve not only the neuromuscular system but also all the other systems of one’s being. It leads toward the condition called homeostasis, which is a stable state of equilibrium among the different but interdependent elements and subsystems of the entire organism. This is experienced by a person as a general feeling of well-being, less fatigue from the day’s activities, and a dynamic relaxation that gives one greater freedom in movement and unleashes one’s creative powers.
Interview with André Bernard
Richard Rosen with Nancy Lyons
Richard Rosen: Your teaching is popularly called “the work,” but you have given some other names for it. What would you prefer to call the work formally?
André Bernard: Informally, I often refer to it in private workshops as a creative approach to human movement and alignment. Basically, that’s what it is. Lulu Sweigard chose ideokinesis, the word coined by American piano teacher Bonpensière, because she thought it expressed the methodology used in the work, that is, the use of imagery . . .
RR: . . . to facilitate movement.
AB: Yes, and ideokinesis translated would be roughly “the image or idea or thought as facilitator of movement.” So I would have to say that it depends upon which population you’re trying to reach. I think in the university the term ideokinesis is OK, but in the broad community, I don’t think it would mean anything. Something that’s more informal, like “a creative approach to human movement and alignment,” would maybe resonate a little better: I think the word that I contributed, and that’s possibly also not appropriate for the general public, is physiophilosophy. I feel that, as much as anything, this is a philosophy of the body and how you relate to it. So that implies that it’s something that you think about, and of course again we get back to the methodology, which is image or thought.
I met with Sweigard quite a number of times and one of the things she said was, “In this work each individual will use it differently, will use it according to their background.” So that’s somewhat the same thing as I’m saying, it depends upon which population you want to reach as to what the ideal terminology for it is. It’s a work that almost defies labeling.
RR: Because it’s so malleable, because it can be used in so many different contexts?
AB: That’s right. It’s very difficult to make a system out of it, and I think that’s one of the reasons that neither Sweigard nor Todd, nor any of us who came later, has tried to make a system out of it. By its very nature it has to have that room, that flexibility, that malleability that you spoke about.
RR: How did you get interested in this work? You studied with Erick Hawkins, who, I believe, first directed you toward it.
AB: That’s true. As a matter of fact, Erick Hawkins was directly responsible for my doing this work. I had come from a background of chemical engineering. Something like this work was so utterly foreign to me, because in engineering you have a rather rigid training. I think it’s a pity that engineers are not given a more liberal course of study. But underneath, somewhere, I knew that there was more. And so I decided, after I got out of college, that I really didn’t want to be an engineer. So I never really practiced it; I only got a degree.
As a matter of fact, in the last year of my training I switched over from the school of engineering to the school of arts and sciences, so I could take some courses that I really wanted to take—some psychology, some biology, some literature, some foreign languages. So I did all that in my last year, because I already had enough credits from engineering school to get a degree in chemistry and mathematics. That’s the way I graduated.
But already my being was searching for something different. I had done some amateur theatricals in college, and I did them well and I enjoyed them. I was working my way through school as a radio announcer. By the time I got out, I knew I wanted to pursue something more in the performing arts field.
I continued with the announcing and went from there into acting. I was touring up and down the eastern seaboard, and I remember I was in Atlanta, Georgia, and Erick Hawkins and Martha Graham were performing the night we were off. So I went to see the performance. I just can’t tell you the impact seeing Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins dance had on me. They were at their best. I did something that I never did much of, and never do now: I ran backstage and introduced myself to Hawkins—Martha Graham wasn’t available—and told him how much I enjoyed his work. I said, “Look, we’ll finish our tour, I´ll be back in New York probably the end of the year, and I want to work with you.” So Erick was a very nice human being; he said, “Sure, come to see me, and I’ll be glad to have you.”
We were delayed getting back to New York, and by the time I went looking for Erick, he and Martha Graham had gone their separate ways. I went to where Erick had told me to come, which was the Martha Graham studio, and he’d gone. And it’s very hard to find somebody in New York, because he wasn’t that famous then.
RR: This was in the early 1950s?
AB: Actually the year I saw him was 1950, and then I got to New York later than that. So I studied with Martha Graham for a couple of years, and then I did find Erick and I worked with him. After I worked with Erick for a while, I saw something in the movement that he and his good students were doing that was very profound, but I didn’t know how to get it.
So after class one day I went to Erick and I told him just what I’m telling you: I said, “How can I get this? Because I don’t seem to be getting it from just taking your class—there’s something quite involved, quite foreign to my being able to develop on my own. Is there anything I can do to begin to get a deeper insight into this?” He said yes, and he sent me to Barbara Clark, with whom he had worked—actually he had worked with Sweigard too, before that.
So I went, and again, this was very strange to me what she was doing. Remember, this was in 1951 or ’52, and the people of my generation, they were not as oriented to the work I’m doing as you folks are, because things have progressed in some ways in all those years. The use of images, and the use of thinking this way is not so strange as it was then, particularly for a person with my background. Not everybody was as rigid as I was [laughs].
But I went to Barbara Clark, and she gave me a lesson. I remember where it was. I think it was above the Art Students’ League on Fifty-Seventh Street in New York, by Carnegie Hall. So after I got out, I went to catch my bus in front of Carnegie Hall, and I was thinking, “What is this strange woman doing?” I didn’t understand it. And she gave no explanations, you know. I give somewhat of an explanation for the general tenor of the work, and also before each specific exercise I try to orient the students, so at least they have an idea of what they are going to be doing, whether they understand it or not. Anyway, I thought, “What is this strange woman doing?” and debated whether I should go back or just forget this.
On the way home I began to think: Now Erick is a very talented person. I got to know him very well. He was very generous with his students. He sort of sheltered me and pointed me to books that were in the direction of where I was going, things I needed to know about and didn’t. I was all technical information, so he would talk with me about some of the books on Eastern philosophy, which he was influenced by quite a bit. So, I thought, Erick is intelligent, talented, and has the utmost integrity. Maybe—and I didn’t want to face the fact—there is something lacking in me.
So I decided: I`m going back. I’m going to find out what Barbara Clark is doing, and I’m going to stick with it. So I did that, and as I began to see her more and more, I began to understand and I began to get quite proficient at it. And she recognized that, and then—see, when I met Barbara she was already sixty-five, and she asked me if I wanted to assist her in teaching. I was interested in improving myself, for dance and for acting. I really didn’t have any designs on teaching. I told Barbara that, that I didn’t really want to be a teacher, but I felt I owed her so much that I would assist her and I would do my best. And that’s the way I got involved.
Nancy Lyons: Can you say a little more about your early performing career?
AB: As I mentioned, I was acting when I got interested in dance, and even though I studied a lot of dance, I considered myself to be an actor who danced, not a dancer per se. My first performing with an established dance company was with Charles Weidman, and it came about quite accidentally.
I had a friend who was a member of his company, and I used to drop by their rehearsals. Charles, who was a wonderful humorist, was planning to redo the Thurber fables and needed a narrator and asked me. I said, “Sure, I’d be glad to.” He didn’t simply have me stand on the stage like a stick, but he choreographed little, simple movements for me. As we began to work more, he could see that I had a movement background; that I could move. After we finished choreographing that, he asked me to do some straight dance for him. That’s how I got started dancing with a professional company.
Of late, I’ve been working with Mimi Garrard, another dance humorist.
RR: You talk about the work being based on images.
AB: I don’t know that I would phrase it that way. I would say that the methodology employs the use of images, for the most part.
RR: OK . . . to redefine movement patterns?
AB: Actually, to reeducate movement patterns. I would like to say it this way, to make it a little more accurate: What you are doing is reestablishing or reeducating the neuromuscular patterns, which are responsible for the movement patterns to a great extent.
RR: Now, what about the patterns themselves? How are they fixed or stored in the body?
AB: They are implemented, created, and stored by the central nervous system. Now, this is very interesting, I’m really glad you asked this, because it is at the basis of how to really understand what the work is about. You could say that movement is a neuromusculoskeletal event and each of the systems has its own specific role to play. [See explanation in “An Introduction to Ideokinesis,” preceding this interview.]
In terms of movement, what you want to do is to learn what the movement is, not how to do the movement: to learn what the movement is, very specifically and very precisely. If you have that very clear in your intention, when you decide to do it, the nervous system will often choose the most efficient muscle pattern. The problem is that many of us have already established inefficient patterns, which need a little more work to make the change. That’s where the image comes in. It’s a way to tap into the system. It’s still somewhat indirect, but it is used to modify the message that is going to the muscles in order to make a change in the pattern.
RR: All movement, then, is based on an image or picture? You mentioned you have an intent that is subconscious. Could that be an unconscious image or picture of the movement you are about to make before you make it?
AB: That’s what I think. In fact, I include, as part of imagery, “thought” in general. Of course, the image of movement is very specific. If you want to get up out of this chair and leave this room, you have to think it before you do it. It is not just going to happen. So in that respect I think that is a form of imagery. Thought, desire, intention, insight, and attitude: I consider all these things as forms of imagery, which can be used as a part of a specific image in the technique to change the muscle patterns.
Anything you think is influencing you. We don’t realize it. I’m interested in the health field in general, and so many of the health people believe you are what you eat, and I along with others believe you are what you think. Sometimes, I say to my students not to waste too much time on negative thoughts and destructive thinking and idle thought. It’s not good for the individual.
I’ll give you an extension of my thinking on it, beyond just improving the neuromuscular system. All of the systems in the body are tending to go toward what is called homeostasis, which is the body trying to bring itself more nearly into balance all the time. So if you work on one system, and you’re somewhat successful, it tends to bring the others into balance also. This work is going to affect the whole being.
As I look at this technique, I see it on an even larger scale than what I’ve just described. We human beings are constantly re-creating ourselves, moment by moment, year by year. Our thoughts, our intentions, our desires, our insights, our attitudes, all of these things that we are involved with in our daily life are changing us—albeit on an unconscious level; we aren’t going around doing this deliberately.
One of the major benefits of the technique is that maybe we could use it in a flexible way, not in an authoritarian way or in a rigid way, but in a constructive way, so that we might guide this process, so that it doesn’t happen so haphazardly, as it does in so many of our lives.
RR: It’s a framework for change, or a means to channel change in a proper direction.
AB: Exactly. We wouldn’t look at ourselves at the end of, say, five or ten years, and wonder how we got that way, but rather realize that we did it, we created ourselves through how we lived for those years. G. K. Chesterton said, “After the age of forty, we all have the face we deserve.”
RR: And the body too.
RR: These patterns that we‘re attempting to redefine through your work don‘t like to be redefined; they resist change.
AB: That’s correct.
RR: I’d like to know about the images: How do they function to redefine these patterns? How do they work on the level of the central nervous system and the brain?
AB: I’m going to explain it the way that I work with it. Let’s go back to something else in the development of the work with Sweigard and Todd. They learned early on that movement performance and skeletal alignment are completely interdependent, and that improvement in the mechanical efficiency of either one automatically leads to improvement in the other.
I know that sounds very strange—it did to me when I first encountered it—but if you think about it, it really isn’t strange at all. If the structure is in balance, that means the muscular patterns are in balance, because they are responsible for maintaining the alignment. So you’re not going to have a balanced alignment with an imbalance in the muscles, which are creating the alignment. That is why we are able to put this emphasis on the alignment in order to influence the muscle pattern.
RR: You go below the muscle pattern to create the alignment? You’re not working directly with the muscles to create the alignment; you’re going straight to the source, the nervous system?
AB: Yes. The nervous system doesn’t know muscle in the way many of us think about it. It knows movement; it knows alignment. If you intend to perform a certain movement or achieve a certain alignment, the nervous system will organize the most efficient muscle pattern to carry out your intention. It is responding to your intention in regard to the movement and/or the alignment, not to your intention in regard to what muscles to use. When practicing movement, think movement, not muscle.
RR: You‘ve suggested in the past that there’s really no such thing as one muscle.
AB: I said that muscles do not act singly in normal functioning. The mistake that even experienced anatomists make is that they will analyze a movement and they will find that a certain muscle is involved in that movement, and then they list that muscle’s function as creating that movement. That’s all right, because it’s partially true. But if you’re not careful, you can get the idea that that muscle is the only muscle that performs that function, whereas if I take a step, 118 muscles are involved—that’s the “guesstimate.” Some yogis have learned to isolate single muscles, but that’s not normal functioning.
RR: This idea of “mechanical efficiency” must have appealed to you as a former engineering student.
AB: Right. That is one of the things that attracted me. Todd and Sweigard laid a very heavy emphasis on structural alignment. It is what Sweigard gave a very special name to, postural pattern, that is, structural alignment. She maintained that each individual had one and only one postural pattern.
RR: They are different for different individuals, depending on body type.
AB: Body type, and also how you use the body. So each individual has one and only one postural pattern. I make this point because some kinesiologists use the term in the plural, and what I think they are referring to with their definition is “positions”—in other words, they are calling different positions different postural patterns. What Sweigard was saying is that when you change positions, the postural pattern doesn’t change, the position changes.
For instance, let me give you the definition of postural pattern that she gave: the postural pattern is the constant and persistent alignment of the skeletal parts in relation to the central axis in the fundamental standing position—which is just standing on the two legs, feet parallel, hands hanging by your sides. That is opposed to the anatomical position, where you have your arms spread out and legs spread.
An individual, for example, can be right-sided—not right-handed—as when you use the right side in such a way as to pull the bony structure to the right of the central axis and actually you’ve created another axis.
RR: An imbalance that can occur when a person always uses one side of the body more than the other; say, for example, a mail carrier or someone who habitually carries a bag over the same shoulder?
AB: Exactly. If you sit, stand, or walk, or change positions, your bones are still to the right of center.
Then Sweigard proceeded to give a definition of what the ideal postural pattern would be, and it is simply one that conforms to mechanical balance. She defined it in this way: the ideal postural pattern is one in which the skeletal parts or weights are balanced as close to the central axis as the structure permits, and the center of gravity is as low as the structure permits—again, in the fundamental standing position. The proviso “as the structure permits” simply means that you’re not going to distort the normal contours of the human structure in order to have that happen.
I want to give you the derivation of “postural pattern.” It puts a human face on it and is where Sweigard got it. Mabel Todd was a person who had a fantastic imagination. She thought in terms of the cosmos. Sometimes she compared human organization to something that is basic to our world.
RR: She drew an analogy between the structure of the individual and the structure of the universe?
AB: Yes. Todd compared the organization or structure of the human body, what Sweigard called the “postural pattern,” to the organization of matter in the universe. The heavenly bodies—for example, the planets and stars—have a certain relationship, and even though they’re in movement, that relationship is consistent. So that when we look at the Milky Way or the solar system, we recognize it because of that relationship of its parts. Or, on the microscopic level, we can take the molecular organization of matter: the molecules are arranged in a certain pattern that is specific to that particular bit of matter, whether it’s wood or iron or whatever, so that when we see it we recognize it for what it is. Todd compared human structural alignment to this cosmic organization and maintained that we often recognize people by this structural organization—again, what Sweigard called the “postural pattern.” Todd said this was particularly true about people with whom we’d been in close touch—parents, children, spouses, whatever.
RR: You could see someone in the distance and know who it is by the way he or she is walking or standing.
AB: Yes. That’s where postural pattern comes from. Sweigard organized it in a more scientific way to present it on a university level. I want everyone to bring it down from the abstract, intellectual level to everyday life, so that everyone understands its human face.
RR: Now, everyone has a postural pattern that is characteristic of them. Is there also a postural pattern that is the ideal pattern for that same person?
AB: Yes. As I said, the skeletal parts are balanced as close to the central axis as the structure permits. That’s the ideal. Sweigard called it an unattainable ideal, because nobody is going to be perfect.
RR: Because perfection implies an end, and, as you’ve mentioned, people are process.
AB: I feel that. And I feel that it is very healthy to think of any of these processes as continual, as never reaching their fruition totally, so that you are always in process.
RR: That works on the level of the images too. The movement never stops as you use the image.
AB: What we are doing, for most of the work, is using imagery that images movement of parts of the structure in relation to the central axis—do they need to move up, down, in, or out? When we imagine that movement, the nervous system responds to create a muscle pattern that would do that movement. Some of the muscles need to relax. Other muscles need to tense. There is what I sometimes refer to as “differential relaxation” involved, but it is not total relaxation.
RR: You have to create right tension.
AB: Correct. We use images to work with that. One group of images releases muscles, and the other group brings more tone. It’s very simple. Those images that seek to create more distance between the skeletal parts generally are the ones that are going to be releasing muscles, because it is those muscles that tend to pull the bones closer together. Those images that seek to bring two bones closer together would be ones that encourage increased muscle tone. You have to create tone. All muscles need to have some tone. Complete relaxation is death.
RR: That’s the point Todd makes at the end of The Thinking Body about relaxation being not complete flaccidity. There is a balance between activity and release.
AB: Absolutely. That is one of the things that is quite often not understood in Todd’s work. Relaxation, the kind she’s talking about, is a balance between the work and the rest phase. If you look at the physiology of the body, you’ll see that all of the work phases that are autonomic, as far as I have been able to determine, are balanced by the rest phase: heart beat, breathing, the cellular activity, all have pauses in them. Otherwise the organism wouldn’t be able to function for a lifetime without shutting down for a long period of time, and life would cease.
In balancing the structure through imagery, you are balancing the muscle system overall, which balances the structural pattern. So a good postural pattern implies that the muscles are balanced. Generally speaking, the muscle patterns of the body in toto are a reflection of the postural pattern and vice versa.
RR: The muscles pull the bones into proper alignment.
AB: That’s true. I think it’s better to say that than to think of the muscles as supporting the weight. There has to be some muscle work to maintain the upright position, and that’s understood. But it isn’t so much that you pull the weight up into the muscles and hold onto it, supporting it that way; it’s more that the muscles are busy lining up the bones efficiently with gravity, so that there is the least amount of support of the weight needed by the muscles. It is so much less than people understand, because many of us are going in for overwork. You can maintain a beautiful upright position without that extra work. What I’m saying is that you can get that ideal alignment, but if you are just holding that posture rigidly, it is not truly an ideal postural pattern. I feel that rigidity is one of the major sins we commit in trying to improve the postural pattern or structural alignment.
I would also like to emphasize that the whole thinking behind the postural pattern really needs to be a state of balance. The key word is balance, because if you’re balanced, by its very nature, balance can’t be a holding procedure. If you’ve ever seen tightrope walkers, if they got static while walking on a rope, they’d fall and break their necks.
We need to appreciate the idea that the biped is actually very precariously balanced on these two thin poles we call legs, and if it weren’t for our balance ability, we’d fall. This process is happening moment to moment. We don’t think about it because it’s already become somewhat of a reflex. That’s the key word in the whole thing: balance.
RR: What makes an effective image?
AB: The image, in order to work, needs to make a strong imprint on the nervous system, and in order to do that it has to be unusual. It should not be boring, and it should be of great interest. It can achieve those objectives by being outrageous, ridiculous, or so beautiful, or anything that is excessive, in order to grab the attention of the nervous system.
RR: I liked what you once said about the image as bait and the central nervous system as the fish.
AB: Yes. And you have to make the bait as attractive to the fish as possible in order to get it to take a bite. That’s where the “creative” part of the title that I quite often call the work I do comes in—creative approach to movement and alignment—because it is the individual creating the conditions to make the change.
Todd said something that was so wonderful in her book The Thinking Body. You can read it again and again and always get something you didn’t get before. She said that good movement takes place the same way that it rains, snows, sleets, and the wind blows—because conditions are right. I think that is such a profound way of saying what it is, and of getting us out of these mechanistic concepts, talking about the synapses, etc. You need this kind of understanding, because one’s understanding is part of the imagery.
RR: You give four very specific principles to observe in the use of imagery.
AB: First, the image must be moving, it must be in the present participle—it is happening; it needs to be dynamic. If it is static, held, then you are creating a static response from the nervous system to the muscles, which creates kind of a holding pattern.
RR: Which won‘t be effective in movement.
AB: Nor in the standing position. Now I’ve just fallen into a trap; I knew I was going to. The standing position is actually movement, because no one is ever perfectly still. There is always some movement to and from the central axis. And Sweigard thought, and I agree, that the more dynamic the postural pattern, the more rapid the movement and the smaller the deviation; and the less dynamic the postural pattern, the less rapid, and it deviates more from the central axis.
The next thing is that you need to be clear about where the image is in the body, and since the image is going to be in movement, then it has to have a clear direction. The fourth principle when using imagery is that there be no voluntary movement.
I divide the images into two general categories (though you can divide them in many ways). The first category includes what I call the skeletal imagery, which is simply imaging the skeleton—bones and their relationships. An example of that is imagining that the weight of the body is resting on the tops of the thighbones.
RR: You show pictures of bones and use a skeletal model in your classes. Do you think it’s important that students have a good idea of what the bones look like before they try to image them?
AB: I think it’s a very good idea that they have that, and better than a picture is the bone itself. I want the students to have a sense of the shape and mass of the bone, and the structure of the bony system, from a sense of touch.
RR: The images themselves are directed at the bones?
AB: Yes. Let’s take a pair of images we have, two of the “nine lines of movement” outlined by Sweigard that go together: one is to think of narrowing across the front of the pelvis; the companion to that is widening across the back of the pelvis. Now that is not going to change the actual structure of the pelvis, but it influences the muscles in the front of the pelvis to contract, and the muscles in the back of the pelvis to release. So again, we are using the skeletal system and imagining its ideal alignment to affect the muscle system.
RR: And the second category of images is called abstract images?
AB: Abstract, or non-anatomical, imagery uses a representation of the skeletal structure or body such as the “suit of clothes.” That is, instead of imagining the movement of the bony structure, we imagine the movement of the “suit of clothes.” In this case, you’d imagine a pair of trousers with two pockets in the back moving away from one another and two in the front coming together.
Whether you use one kind of image or the other, the whole body is going to be affected—that is, if the nervous system “takes the bait”—because the whole body is going to adjust to any change you make in one part of the body.
RR: Are these images also related to what Todd called the “compression and tensile members” of the body?
AB: Todd points out that weights are supported either by sitting or hanging, or by bracing. “Sitting” is when the weight is resting on a structure below it—a compression member, generally the bones. “Hanging” is when the weight is suspended from a structure above—by a tensile member, generally muscle. And “bracing” is a combination of the two.
Todd said that we should, as much as possible, relegate the resistance to the stress of gravity (that is, the support of weight) to the compression members, so that the muscles, the tensile members, are free to move the bones.
Of course, you can‘t just be balanced on bone without some muscle work because the body is irregular in shape—it’s symmetrical bilaterally, but not front to back. So in order to maintain the sitting or standing position, there has to be some muscle work to maintain uprightness and balance. What Todd tried to do with her work was to teach people how to get a balance between the bone support and the muscle support. That is one of the seminal concepts that Todd brought to body training, the idea of balancing the weights that are sitting on the bones and the weights that are hanging from the muscles.
I’ve often pointed out that what we’re doing is just shifting energy around. When you get a release in one part of the body, there’s going to have to be a concomitant energy exchange, where you need support for what you’re releasing. Otherwise you’d fall down. This is particularly true in the classic Todd image of “up-the-front and down-the-back of the spine”: the “up-the-front” activates the tensile members in the front of the spine; the release in back is to relegate the support to the spine, releasing it from the muscles in the back. If you don’t have that “up-the-front,” then you can’t release in back when you’re in an upright position, because you need some muscle work or you fall down.
One more thing about the images: in constructive rest there should be no voluntary movement. Whenever one goes into voluntary movement, usually the established pattern for that movement is going to be utilized—on a subconscious level; it isn’t intentional. That’s the message going from the nervous system to the muscles to have you move. That message is pretty much on automatic.
Now here you are, wanting to change the message. When there is voluntary movement during constructive rest, you have conflicting messages going into the nervous system; it’s like a tug-of-war between the established muscle pattern and the new one that’s trying to be established. And the established message or muscle pattern is usually going to win out over the new image.
Movement is what activates the old pattern. If you are lying down in constructive rest, then you are not activating that pattern, because you don’t have to use muscles to maintain the position. So it is the position in which we use imagery a great deal of the time. It’s like a blackboard: you need to erase the blackboard before you can put a new message on it. This position affords you an opportunity to erase the blackboard.
There’s something related to that, which is that you should not be evaluating the process while you are in it. Because if you do, you are not feeding the image message into the nervous system, but you are feeding extraneous information, which has no relation to what you want to accomplish. Like debris, cluttering up the process. After, you can evaluate it or whatever, but it’s just that while you are in the process, you shouldn’t do that.
The fact that the constructive rest position is a position we’re not often in also has an effect. Change of position helps to break up old patterns. There was a jazz musician in New York who worked in nightclubs. Before each set he would go out into the alleyway at the back of the nightclub and he would assume some odd position, such as hanging over a trash can, because he knew it would change his patterns, free up his creative energy. So changing positions, even when they’re not so passive as the constructive rest, contributes to changing patterns.
RR: You once said the goal of the image is to “become the image,” to exclude everything else for the time being while you are working with it and become the image.
AB: That’s right. It’s like a child playing a game and pretending she’s something that she’s not. The child knows that she is not that, but for that moment she is believing that she is, but underneath fully realizing that she is not that. That’s what a good actor has to do. Another reason this work appealed to me was my acting experience. You become the character you play. I take the time to point that out because when you say “Become the image,” you know somewhere you’re not an image.
RR: What you’re bringing out here is something I didn‘t quite realize before, that there is a very strong play element in all this work.
AB: Yes. You should play with the images, play with the process, have fun with it.
RR: The student goes to your class and uses the images that you present in the class. How does the student then go about creating a “library” of his or her own images? Things that may be particularly effective for the work that he or she is doing?
AB: What I ask them to do is at first to use the images fairly close to what I have given them, or from Todd, Sweigard, or Clark, but then as they get proficient with them and realize the essence of the image, then they can tailor the images to their own specific needs. I think they shouldn’t do this at first, because at first they quite possibly are not understanding what they are going after.
One of the reasons I don’t spend too much time explaining what they’re going after is that it’s not a good idea to do what F. M. Alexander called “end-gaining.” If you get too involved in the end result, which might be desirable, you are going to confuse the nervous system. Also, you’re going to shut out any other response the nervous system might have that is not what you really desire for the image to be.
I do emphasize that the student remain open to other things happening to her or him. Then you can eventually understand what other things you need. You know yourself better than anyone else. Once you get this better kinesthetic understanding, then you know what to do.
Just remember that the tailored images need to be interesting to the nervous system, which means interesting to you. I can give you an example: the image of the “suit of clothes.” Each person will have his or her own desire for the style or the color or the texture of the clothing. Some might see the style as attractive, or it could be the opposite, that is, obnoxious. The principle here is that the image needs to be quite active, and it needs to be extraordinary, or even outrageous. So the style could be appealing, or it could be obnoxious—that would get the attention of the nervous system. That would make the “bait” more attractive, even in a negative way. Some personalities thrive on that way of getting attention. My own preference is something very attractive.
But we’re all different in our nervous system organization, and I think that’s responsible for our tastes. Some students respond to some of the images very well; they like them, find them effective. Others will look at those same images and find nothing in them. The problem isn’t the image or the individual, but just that different nervous systems are organized differently.
RR: Then do you offer different images?
AB: I do it all the time in class, hoping that if I stay long enough with a group of students, I will reach them with some image. So I do give a variety of images.
You need variety. Even if an image works well for a person, the nervous system is dulled by repetition and eventually it’s going to be “old hat.” It will hardly respond at some point or reject the image. So you need to use other images. What I advise anyone working with the system is that if you find an image that doesn’t work for you, don’t force it. Use the images with which you feel the closest affinity. Not to discard the image that doesn’t seem to work. Rather, keep it in repertoire and come back to it. As you do the work and change, it’s like giving the image to a different person. As the postural pattern changes, you see the world differently.
RR: So if you want to tailor images to your own needs, it’s something that you have to experience directly, to find out what’s most effective for you.
AB: The important word is “experience.” Images should lead to an experience; they must not simply be cold, mechanical images. If you don’t get an experience from the imagery, then I would say that the nervous system is not “biting,” it’s not taking the bait. It’s like art. If you dance or perform, and you’re not involved in it, there’s nothing happening—it’s sterile, it’s not art. It’s the same thing with the images.
I think one of my contributions to the work is emphasizing the art, the application of ideokinesis, rather than going into the technical side of it.
RR: Is there anything else you’d like to say about your contribution to the work?
AB: I think one contribution is the fleshing out of the image to be more than just the mechanical picture. I brought into the process, in general, an emphasis on all thought as influencing the muscle patterns, and indeed the entire body, and specifically intent, desire, attitude, insight. All of these are actually involved with the image. These are specifics I give the student in order to bring the image alive, to make it dynamic, to make it attractive to the nervous system.
As an example, take the classic Todd image of thinking “up the front” of the spine and “down the back.” I give that as imagining a river flowing up the spine and down the back. The student is asked to imagine as well the temperature of the water, the colors of the water, the rate of flow, and to imagine the sternum as a bridge (the river flows under the bridge). As the river flows down the back, imagine the posterior spinous processes (the little knoblike structures on the back of the spine) tumbling down.
RR: What are the differences between the approaches of Barbara Clark and Lulu Sweigard?
AB: Sweigard emphasized the scientific aspect, and Clark the art.
RR: Is there anything you can say about how each one of them advanced the work or changed the way the work was taught?
AB: There’s no question that Sweigard made the work more acceptable among the scientific community by her strict adherence to scientific principles.
Clark’s great contribution was humanizing the work. Not that Sweigard was inhuman, but Clark’s artistic approach made the work more human, even more so than Todd. Also, and this is my opinion here, Clark was gifted with an ability to create images for what needed to be done that was just extraordinary. She just seemed to have that knack of speaking the language of imagery. That’s what she imparted to her longtime students—myself, Pam Matt, John Rolland.
One of the most delightful things I remember about studying with Barbara Clark is that we got to where we talked in the language of imagery, instead of the language of technical information. That makes all the difference in the world in terms of how you use the work. If you want to improve your movement, you’ve got to talk in the language of movement. It’s very much like an actor: if you analyze a scene or a character psychologically, as some actors do in the modern era, that’s all right, but that analysis is not useful to the actor in terms of creating the character unless he has some ability to translate it into behavior.
RR: Is there much movement in your classes, or are the classes mostly passive?
AB: There’s not a lot of movement in the class. A lot of it is imagined movement. There’s not much physical movement, but the class is not passive. It’s very active mentally. The concentration, the mental energy that it takes to do images well, is enormous. Not all of us realize how important mental energy or concentration is to physical activity, to performing our daily tasks, whether they be physical or mental.
Furthermore, it’s a very important part of dance, the ability to concentrate on what you’re doing, which is really using imagery. As I watch my dancers at NYU, if they fluff a phrase, I can see where it comes from: it’s the mental process that’s gone blank, or somehow they get fatigued mentally, and that’s when they lose that concentration, that’s when the movement goes awry.
RR: What role does the breath play in your work?
AB: Sweigard said this so well. She said: you can’t breathe any better than what your postural pattern allows. If you have holding patterns, or are misaligned in terms of being stooped over, etc., that is going to automatically limit the effectiveness of the breath. So my basic approach is that we want to free the organism so that the breath can take place freely.
From Ideokinesis by André Bernard, Wolfgang Steinmüller and Ursula Stricker, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2006 by André Bernard, Wolfgang Steinmüller and Ursula Stricker. Reprinted by permission of publisher.
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