You have three joints the are supreme to all others – in my humble opinion.

Can you guess the three?

Let me start with some hints. 

A feature of stress is having a disjointed bodily feeling.

By this, I mean that you have all sorts of different sensations coming at you. Sore eyes, aching back, tired legs, some breathlessness – an assortment of symptoms that feel unrelated and disconnected. Your thinking is the same – darting around between different thoughts - some brutal to you - and finding it hard to focus on what you need to do.

FM’s 2nd Discovery I avoid talking about because of its subtlety.

If you perform at all – dancer, musician, actor, singer, speech-giver, narrator, clown – it means one thing: stop trying to feel what you are performing.

“But why in Heavens name do you go to M.S.I. for help in the practical side of the work when you have the actual statement of technique in the chapter “Illustration” in the later book C.C.C.?”

Alexander to a Student, Nov 11th, 1929
“Letters – Volume 1”, p. 30 (Mouritz, 2020).

The human imagination is fantastic.

We think of it as something we can control, but it falls into the same category as breathing. Yes, we can mess around with it some, but imagination is deep-wired into our brain – it will happen with or without us.

“Dearie the brown bread has ever so much more nourishment for the people than that beastly white stuff… [later] …The food there is certain to be pretty bad & I cannot eat bad food. I can do with ever so little but I can’t stand bad stuff.”

Letters to his wife Edith, April 1917
F. Matthias Alexander, "Letters – Volume 1", p. 21,22 (Mouritz, 2020).