When I am prompted to consider the nature of man there comes into my mind, unbidden, the figure in the frontispiece of the "first-aid" books ­ transparent, map-like, erect, both palms turned forward, perfect in proportion, and above all balanced. It probably reproduces the skeleton in the cupboard of the anatomical lecturer; and this, I have always thought, in the last word in free-swinging equilibrium because it is off the ground, so that gravitation is at work upon every detail of it, unhindered by muscular tensions. I had been feeling for some years, without undue worry, that I should both look and feel bitter if I could always be slightly off the ground when I met a man who is an expert in psychosomatic re-education.

It only means mind­body training, but it disposes at once of my levitation theory of deportment by taking the human body in all its normal uses ­ sitting, walking lying, breathing, relaxing, reading, thinking, speaking, playing ­ and teaching people how to do these things without tension. It is an acquired self-discipline and involves, for periods that vary greatly with the individual, a deliberate "awareness of self" on the part of its neophytes. It is the special teaching of Mr. Charles Neil and his colleagues at the Isobel Cripps Centre in Holland Park; and it is necessary, before I describe a recent visit there, to recall the more famous teaching of Mr. F. Matthias Alexander. For it was after studying his methods that Mr. Neil developed his own different but relaxed technique.

Mr. Alexander, who was a "professional reciter" in Australia more than sixty years ago, suddenly lost his skill and his livelihood owing to voice and throat trouble. Impatient with prolonged and unsuccessful medical treatment, he began ­ with his doctor's lively interest ­ a series of experiments upon himself (he describes them in his book The Use of the Self) which led to his discovery of the primary control of self and the evolution of a technique for its development. He says himself that he brought the control of the use of human mechanism from the instinctive on to the conscious plane; and in his several books he describes a self-discipline that has seemed to me, on paper, incommunicable except to those partly familiar with it, empirically or otherwise. All such training must be done in person: merely to read about it is hard going.

One of his trainees, from 1932 to 1937, was Mr. Charles Neil. "But I am not teaching the Alexander technique," Mr. Neil told me. I owe a great deal to him and shall always be grateful for what he has taught me. But the study of methods other than his, both here and on the Continent, has led me to methods that differ both in theory and in technique from his."

The Isobel Cripps Centre, to which Lady Cripps lent her name because of the great interest that she and Sir Stafford had in these methods, is a school of self-management, not a clinic. Mr. Neil and his staff teach people to overcome bad habits of posture, movement and tension; they neither diagnose nor treat disease, making, it abundantly clear that they are neither qualified nor concerned to do so. Three kinds of visitors go to the Centre. First, there are pupils who go to be taught posture, movement, and the capacity to relax. Secondly, there are pupils who have symptoms of asthma, migraine, "slipped disc," neurosis, arthritis, "fibrositis", spastic conditions, speech defect and other ailments; these may be sent by their doctors or may come unannounced, and in the latter case their doctors' consent is always sought by the Centre before teaching begins. Thirdly, there is an occasional nosy-parker like myself.

"Will, you sit down?" said Mr. Neil; and although he may have been trying not to notice the way I did it, I got the impression that he winced. He told me that when you stand well, you have gone more than half-way to achieving good posture and good movement. The secret of good standing lies in the alignment of the head and the spinal column. The spine is the core of the whole body, and its series of arches and curves, which distribute shock and give greater strength, must not be flattened. (All the training I have ever had has set out to flatten mine.) Mr. Neil pulled a skeleton out of his cupboard and swung it round in profile to me. Its spinal column was like a long sea-horse. "It's got curvature," I said. "It is absolutely normal and natural," said Mr. Neil, "but this is what people do with their spines, and this and this." And he pulled the "S" about into different shapes, so that I saw the pain, the distortion, and the slipped discs that people inflict upon themselves.

You can listen in vain, as he talks, for quackery or boasting. Apart from faulty posture or disordered bodily mechanism, he says, one of the root causes of illness is "emotional overcharge," which I gathered is what I should call nervous tension. Yet stress and tension are dealt with now, if it all, only by drugs and rest cures, both mere palliatives. "We teach people at this Centre," said Mr. Neil, "that they can govern themselves, reducing stress in their ordinary lives; not necessarily eliminating it, altogether ­ that's almost a test of greatness, and you can't be completely relaxed until you are dead ­ but helping them very considerably towards the achievement of bodily freedom and control. In some ways there's nothing new in all this: what's new is the presentation of it ­ I believe I've made it easier to understand."

Mr. Neil took me into his well-equipped interviewing room, and invited me again to sit down. This time I did it with studied grace. I got no better marks, and he spent a little time showing me not only how to sit down, but how to arrange myself when I had done it, and how to. get up again ­ without, he said pointedly, pressing my hands on my knees. My head, too, sat (or rather crouched) uncomfortably upon my tense neck and shoulders, and probably accounted for my migraines. When I stood, I did it pigeon-chested because most men, at some time or other, are taught to stand with the chest out, belly in, and shoulders "braced" ­ which, to Mr. Neil, must seem almost indictable. He arranged me in a decently relaxed stance before a long mirror, and I liked it so much that I have been practising it ever since.

I know a man who has, almost literally, been "up one side of Harley Street and down the other" in search of a cure for migraine. Has he a predisposing state of tension or bodily awkwardness? Many doctors will now send such a man to the Isobel Cripps Centre. Some doctors go there themselves as pupils; perhaps, indeed, all doctors ought to be trained in the "use of the self" before they start diagnosing and treating the condition of others. "Take the case of a child whose parents take him to a doctor purely as a preventive measure," writes F. M. Alexander in The Use of the Self (p. 63):

The child shows no symptoms of illness, but the parents want to make sure that there are no harmful tendencies latent which, if allowed to develop unchecked, might lead later on to illness or defect of some kind or another. The doctor examines the child, and finds no symptoms or tendencies which in his opinion call for attention or treatment. He therefore gives the child a clean bill of health.

But the medical curriculum includes no training in "psychosomatic re-education"; the doctor's study of the child is incomplete, since he does not know what to look for. The "clean bill of health" may be a passport to lowered functioning and weakened resistance to disease.

Self-management, I concluded, becomes a conscious equation between a variety of forces ­ muscular control, the pull of gravitation on the bony structure, the mental stimuli directing all behaviour, rational breathing, "natural" movement; an acquired "second nature" skill that should be accessible to all. I perceive that it has one potentiality, perhaps not sufficiently urged even by its teachers, of transcendent importance in an ageing population: to people who can be induced to learn this technique before they are too old to travel or to leave their homes, it offers the possibility of an old age unprecedentedly free from pain, crippledom, stress, and dependency upon others. It could also revolutionise medical diagnosis, which at present seems to work within boundaries suggested, on the one hand, by the well-know theory that "there is only one disease," and on the other by the late Sir James Mackenzie's estimate that seventy per cent. of human ailments are not yet identified.