Why Does The Head Go Forward and Up?

The phrase "LET the neck be free to let the head go forward and up" is probably the best known phrase within the Alexander Technique. 

But why does the head go forward and up? I capitalised "LET" as it's the most important word in the phrase. It's not something you do, it's something that happens naturally if you don't interfere with your balance mechanisms.

It's important to point out that Alexander's work was born out of observation of human behaviour rather than from theory, so AT is a trueism. What Alexander noticed was that when his head was allowed to be "forward and up" in relation to the spine, he coordinated better and had less interference from habitual tension. It’s a great observation, and one he could have justified and explained far better with the ground breaking work of his contemporary Albert Einstein.

It's been a personal bugbear of mine for a while now that gravity is still taught in schools as if it's an attractive force between masses, and this is the commonly held view by the majority of society. Only those who go on to study physics at university come to understand Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and that gravity is actually a curvature of space-time caused by mass, a gravity well.

Why does this matter? Well, if you believe you're being pulled down by an attractive force you'll behave like you're being pulled down, when the opposite is actually the case. As strange as this may seem, you're not being pulled down, but pushed up! Bare with me, I know that sounds counterintuitive. 

You wouldn't teach people to swim without discussing buoyancy, or worst still, telling people the water is actively trying to pull them under, and I see no reason for this to be any different in teaching people about "posture" (I prefer the word poise). 

So, an upshot of General Relativity is that the atoms of the Earth resist being crushed as they're pulled together into the gravity well, and the force that they repel with is known as Proper Acceleration. The only two situations where gravity is strong enough to crush an atom is a Neutron Star or Black Hole. A Neutron Star is so dense from having the space within the atoms collapse that a teaspoon full would weigh 10 million tonnes on Earth. Anyway, I digress, the point is that Proper Acceleration provides an outwards force.

That's right, the contact your feet feel standing on the ground is it accelerating up into you. Obviously that sounds weird as you would understandably ask why are you not moving upwards, and that's because there's an equilibrium between the gravity well and the nuclear forces keeping the atom from being crushed.

Instead of getting hung up on the physics though it's more helpful to consider a simple thought experiment. If you were in a spaceship in interstellar space you'd expect to be floating around with the lack of gravity, and you would be right as long as the ship maintains a constant speed. But something interesting happens if it starts to accelerate, it will start to push into you in the direction of the acceleration, and you would be able to orient yourself against this accelerating surface to push into your feet so you would have the sensation of standing. If the ship accelerated to 9.8ms² you would find the experience indistinguishable from standing on earth, as that amount of acceleration is 1G, one Earth Gravity.

So that's where the "up" comes from in the "head forward and up", what about the "forward"? The skull rests on the spine via the atlanto-occiptal joint, and that joint is slightly to the rear of the skull, the pivot point is off-centre. As the spine accelerates up into the skull it tips it forward over the atlanto-occiptal joint such that your nose bobs down and generating length in the neck and upper back muscles. 

All organisms in the universe evolve to take advantage of the support their environment offers, and as bipeds this is how we've evolved to take advantage. Posture isn't a position but a balancing act i.e. a movement, as you instinctively, spontaneously and creatively route the support of an accelerating surface through your structure. 

Without wanting to sound too heretical, I personally think Alexander's book The Use of the Self is a misnomer, as we don’t use ourselves, we use our environment. All functioning is a relationship with the environment. A fish can't swim without water, or ever evolve to do so. Just as you have no personal weight (mass x acceleration), you have no personal functionality.  Not just Psychophysical Unity, but Self/environment unity.