The Power of Quietness

The place to find is within yourself.  I learned a little about this in athletics.  The athlete who is in top form has a quiet place within himself, and it’s around this, somehow, that his action occurs…There’s a center of quietness within, which has to be known and held.  If you lose that center, you are in tension and begin to fall apart.
– Joseph Campbell

True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has come to go forward. In this way rest and movement are in agreement with the demands of the time, and thus there is light in life.

The hexagram signifies the end and the beginning of all movement. The back is named because in the back are located all the nerve fibres that mediate movement. If the movement of these spinal nerves is brought to a standstill, the ego, with its restlessness, disappears as it were.
–I Ching, Hexagram 52 (translated by Richard Wilhelm)

Early in my training, one of my Alexander Technique teachers shared with me Hexagram 52 from the I-Ching (Book of Changes), ancient Chinese texts based on accounts of divination dating back to the second millennium B.C.  He awakened me to the fact that Alexander did not invent or discover anything new.  He re-discovered ancient truths whose inner workings he set out for the Western mind to understand and make use of, a kind of Zen for the Western Man.’

Central to his Technique is the importance of quietness and the integrity of the back and spine which is revealed in this state of deep inner quiet. The roving mind stops jumping ahead and comes into the present moment, into the body which only knows the ‘now.’  When this happens, we can begin to see just how much we overdo.

The essence of our work in the Technique is non-doing, and central to our aim of bringing the Technique into life—and of course into music—is to reconcile stillness and movement. How does quietness prepare one for movement, and how does movement contain at its core a stillness which constantly sustains and renews it?

The translator Richard Wilhelm says: “…the Book of Changes holds that rest is merely a state of polarity that always posits movement as its complement.”

I sometimes use as an example a force of nature such as a hurricane which contains at its center the eye (the calm of the storm) with tremendous power radiating outwards in concentric rings:

The eye is a region of mostly calm weather at the center of strong tropical cyclones. The eye of a storm is a roughly circular area, typically 30–65 km (20–40 miles) in diameter. It is surrounded by the eye wall, a ring of towering thunderstorms where the second most severe weather occurs. The cyclone’s lowest barometric pressure occurs in the eye, and can be as much as 15% lower than the atmospheric pressure outside the storm.[1]

The stillness emanating from an athlete or artist at the peak of their performance is one of the extraordinary manifestations of human movement. Anyone who has visited a game reserve or watched the big cats on screen, hunting and chasing their prey, can see the same paradox of speed and power unleashed from a perfectly quiet, concentrated state.  It unrolls almost as in a slow motion dance, not a movement wasted.

Power is not generated by more and more exertion of force, which only leads to an accumulation of tension. It comes about by a release of energy through the balance of opposing forces, and that balance only arises from stillness present at the core of movement.

Most musicians who come to my Alexander studio have never been acquainted with the practice of quietness, and it is generally a revelation to them to begin to enter a state where they have nothing to do, and most of all nothing to plan. This preparation is the essential first step to unlearning habits, and is best accomplished lying down on one’s back on a firm surface (preferably the floor, not on your bed!) with the knees up and the feet on the floor. A small book under the head will support the neck and prevent the head from falling backward. A half hour of lying-down work daily can transform one’s ability to learn and to sustain concentration.

At first the mind resists, wanting to get on with the business of life. Monkey mind, my teacher calls it…chattering away and constantly on the move. But as one trains a small child, gently and patiently, the mind, emptied of thought, over time will assume its proper role—considering, stopping to think things through—and then the quiet state becomes the source of repose, refreshment and renewal.

The practice of quietness brings us back to ourselves, literally into our back, our source of power and strength.  The back learns to stay back in its true place, not rushing forward as we are accustomed to do, unthinkingly. There is an extraordinary intelligence in the body which lies underneath our layers of habit; becoming quiet allows this intelligence to work through us far more efficiently and effectively than all our intentions put together can do.

Over the years, through this practice of quietness, the words of the I Ching begin to come alive in oneself: The back is named because in the back are located all the nerve fibres that mediate movement. If the movement of these spinal nerves is brought to a standstill, the ego, with its restlessness, disappears as it were.

Footnote:
[1] Wikipedia contributors, “Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlantic_Oceanographic_and_Meteorological_Laboratory&oldid=769557038