Just ask for it
by Simon Gore
Mr. Alexander is reported to have said: “The trouble with pupils is they just don’t believe that all they need do is think”.(See: Diary of Sir George Trevelyan, published in The Philosopher’s Stone Mouritz 1998 (p73)) In other words we all, to some degree, hold to the conviction that we have to “do” something in order to change; that a simple change of what we are thinking and how we are thinking it is not enough.
In the ITM we talk about the technique of “asking for what we want”. The idea being that the success mechanism Maxwell Maltz talks about in his book, Psycho-Cybernetics will give us the answer easily if we ask clearly enough and we resist the temptation to “do” something to help it along. I’m now beginning to wonder whether we even need to be all that clear.
I recently gave a lesson in which one simple idea was all the student and I had to work with. I couldn’t see an answer to the problem she had asked me about and therefore I couldn’t teach one. The student had no answer either and therefore couldn’t try to make it happen.
The student was a French horn player who was struggling with a new right hand technique. As you may know, when playing the French Horn the right hand is inserted in the bell end of the horn and takes some of the weight of the instrument from there. The new technique in question involved relationships of horn, hand and arm that were causing quite a lot of stress at my student’s wrist joint and not a little pain.
The student talked me through the process very carefully, demonstrated the act several times and spoke with clarity about the reasons for the technique. I could see that the weight of the horn was causing a shearing force across the wrist -- from back to front -- where there is no bony support and I could see the resultant stress at the joint, but I couldn’t see any way to make it better apart from putting the horn down. As far as I could tell, the student was being asked to do something that was bound to hurt.
I don’t know anything about playing the French horn but I do know that the wrist is not designed to bear weight straight across the joint from back to front. The only bony support available comes from compression of the carpals against the radius (one of the bones in the forearm). In other words, the wrist is primarily designed to withstand forces going from the hand towards the elbow. (Yes, I know it’s more complex than that but this is close enough for the purpose of this illustration.) Presumably there are lots of other French horn players out there using this technique successfully, but I had no idea what the answer was.
So I said to my student: “I have no idea what the answer is, I don’t know anything about playing the French horn, but I do know that the wrist is not designed to take weight in this direction (I pointed across the wrist joint, from the back to the front), but in this direction (I pointed from the hand toward the elbow)”.
My student looked at the offending wrist, thought for a moment and put her hand back in the horn.
I don’t know what she did differently, she didn’t know what she did differently. The change in angles and relationships was far too subtle for either of us to see, but the difference was immediate and profound - no stress, no pain, no problem!
She put the horn down and we talked for a while about how wonderful the result was and, of course, about how the teacher hadn’t done anything to make it happen. When she picked up the horn again she was deeply distressed to find that the old condition of stress and pain was back in place. What a disaster! Naturally she wanted to know what she had done differently the time before and how to get back there and how on earth she was going to do all this without a teacher present (in spite of the fact that we had agreed i hadn’t done anything.)
I still couldn’t see why it was going wrong or what the student had done differently the time before or what to do to fix it. So I said, “I still don’t know why it’s going wrong or what you did differently or what to do to fix it. But I do know that the wrist is not designed to take weight in this direction (I pointed across the wrist joint, from the back to the front), but in this direction (I pointed from the hand toward the elbow)”.
My student looked at the offending wrist, thought for a moment and put her hand back in the horn.
No stress, no pain, no problem.
She then got out a piece of paper and wrote: “The wrist is not designed to take weight in this direction (as she drew an appropriate little picture), but in this direction (as she drew a different appropriate little picture)”.
I never figured out what that student “did” differently. We could have spent hours or even days working out precisely how to change which angles to redirect which forces which way and I can’t imagine we would ever have arrived at such a good result. But just by having that concept of wrist structure and function clearly in mind, the student was able to ask for a solution in such a way that her system was able to give what was being asked of it. Whatever that change in thinking had been, it was enough.