Eric’s Story: How He Came to Use Imagery

(excerpt from the book: Dynamic Alignment through Imagery by Eric Franklin)

At the Gymnasium Freudenberg (Mountain of Joy), the Swiss Latin preparatory school in Zurich that I attended for six and a half years, I learned many valuable things. My back, however, acquired the skill of stooping over Latin verse for hours on end. The school’s rigorous class schedule, which started at 7:10 A.M., was hardly what you might expect in a gymnasium, a place where physical activity takes place. At the Gymnasium Freudenberg, little emphasis was placed on sports: There was no football team, no track team—or any team for that matter. But I loved to dance, and in the evenings I danced and exercised in the cellar at home, alone or with my brother. When I graduated from school, therefore, my posture was not as bad as it might have been, although it took years to reverse the “Latin-verse effect.”

When the school put on its first theatrical production, to my surprise I was selected to play the lead. I knew nothing about auditioning, but I had apparently struck the right note. I remember being told that I didn’t have to do much to be funny. I wasn’t sure what the director meant by this statement until I rolled onto the stage for the first time. We were producing Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and I played this rather simple-minded, rich bourgeois trying to learn to dance. As I bounced about the stage with great enthusiasm during rehearsal, the fellow playing the dance teacher was very perturbed. His dancing was, of course, supposed to look totally superior to mine. Finally, I learned to look clumsy. I believe my trick to achieve this awkwardness was to imagine my legs wiggling like rubber and my neck stiff as an oak. (You are welcome to try it.)

When I first attended a ballet class, the teacher told me that my back was crooked as a banana. This correction was given in the strict Swiss manner of teaching: First teachers told you how sorry you looked and then they yanked you into the right shape. The remark was delivered with an undertone of “How dare you show up in class with that kind of back.” I can still see the outraged look on the teacher’s face, which naturally made me feel sad and self-conscious. I wondered how to straighten my back. I was taught the pulling-up method, which seemed to be the standard procedure. My belly button was supposed to stick to my lumbar spine, my buttocks needed to “tuck under” somehow, and my chin had to recede. The question was how anyone could enjoy dancing in this position. Breathing seemed out of the question. My back didn’t actually feel like a banana, so I kept trying to imagine what the teacher was seeing. I tried to imagine my back in a position that would justify such a cry of indignation. But this didn’t bring me closer to solving the problem.

REINFORCING WHAT YOU WANT

I now know that I was actually reinforcing the opposite of what I wanted. If you don’t want your back to look crooked, you shouldn’t focus on it not being “crooked as a banana.” Instead you need to replace the image of a banana with that of something straight—a waterspout, for example. Put simply, your mind is a large screen filled with the images you have absorbed throughout the day. It is instructed by these images and the thoughts that accompany them. The problem is that most of your 50,000 or so thoughts, flashing images, notions, and so on, are similar to those of the previous day. As the images and thoughts repeat, they slowly but steadily effect a change in the direction the images suggest. According to Indian Ayurvedic medicine, if you want to know what thoughts you have had in your life so far, you should look at your body (Chopra 1990). To help clarify the connection between thought process and posture, try the following experiment.

Sit on a chair in a slumped position and think: “I feel great, fantastic . . . never better. I am having the time of my life.” Notice the discrepancy between your posture and your thoughts. Now reposition yourself in a vibrant, upright sitting posture and think: “I feel awful, sad, dejected.” Again, your thoughts do not match your posture. In a good posture, it is more difficult, albeit not impossible, to have depressing thoughts. Posture reflects thoughts; thoughts mold the physical being.

If posture and thought process are intimately connected, then, in a sense, your thoughts are constantly sculpting your posture, changing your alignment. The reverse holds true as well: Your posture influences your thinking. Your thoughts are part of a powerful matrix that influences your posture. The flood of words and images around you affects the way you sit, stand, and walk. Notice how comforting, encouraging words of praise from a parent or trusted teacher can immediately improve your posture: “Good! Well done! Perfect! Beautiful! Excellent job!” Conversely, observe the tension stifling all movement in a class being told it’s “not good enough.”

Both the pictures and the words in our minds influence the feelings in our bodies, which in turn feed our thoughts and mental pictures. To create powerful and dynamic alignment, we can use this roundabout cycle to our technical advantage if we fertilize with constructive information and weed out destructive thoughts.

excerpt from the book: Dynamic Alignment through Imagery by Eric Franklin