by Joan Arnold
As an observer of movement behavior through this past election season, I’ve carefully watched each candidates’ physicality — that universal language of the body that we all respond to, deep in the gut. The debates were less about ideas, said David Brooks, more about demeanor. John McCain’s was jagged, contracted and fearful, Barack Obama’s expansive, fluid and noble. We ultimately chose that noble expansion over the contraction of fear.
McCain was back on his heels, flung by his own stress response into erratic swings. He was unable, as most candidates are, to keep his personality intact. Everything we loved him for – opposing the Bush administration’s passion for torture, for one – he seemed to lose. To McCain the candidate, everything was a fight; he reacted to each national convulsion impetuously. In one debate photo, his back was arched, hands like claws, raised in alarm. One of Obama’s stated aims was to keep his personality structure, and he did. His posture was a vision of ease and calm.
“You notice first of all,” wrote Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books of his appearance at a Philadelphia rally, “the physical grace; he moves like an athlete much more than a politician . . . bursting up on to the stage, the lanky highly stylized movement, gathering everything into those constantly clapping hands . . . nodding all the while, embracing each politician in turn, big full-bodied embraces, all of it done with unhindered pleasure of the body.”
What we see as grace is the perceptible evidence of efficiency and flow, the complex muscular interplay that comes from doing what’s required and no more. Without excess effort, the body’s complex sequential movement proceeds. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. Before the eyes of soldiers in Kuwait and the world, Obama made that memorable basket. His stride over the tarmac is buoyant, the head easily balanced, allowing for the fluid spring of the spine.
As his first decisions are made, Obama sustains his measured manner. At one point Gail Collins wondered whether this ease simply signaled a low metabolism. I see it in the terms of the mind/body method I teach, the Alexander Technique. F.M. Alexander created an amazing, accessible way to relieve tension and enhance performance. As a young actor struggling to overcome his strangled, gasping elocution, what he found most effective was not introducing another action, but undoing the compression that caused it, a skill he called inhibition. Unlike Freud’s use of the word, Alexander’s is in the language of the nervous system – inhibition and excitation. Rather than letting an overcharged psyche jolt us into impulsive decisions and mindless actions, we can evolve the capacity to pause, consider and choose a response. Alexander gradually realized that inhibition was the essence of his work. He developed an approach to stripping all tasks – simple or extraordinary – to their essence.
Alexander saw the relationship between head and neck – brain and body – as crucial to our entire operation. If the head is “back and down” – chin lifted, base of the skull pressing down on the spine – that signals the startle pattern, the stress response. The body floods with adrenalin, blood rushes from the internal organs to the limbs preparing to fight, flee or freeze. These are great options for survival in the wild, but when this defensive posture becomes fixed, it causes tension or pain, clouds our thinking and narrows our view. Over time, such compression reduces the torso’s volume, starving the organs of space and oxygen, pressing down on the spine and robbing this springy structure of its natural resiliency. We become rigid, tense, defensive and reactive.
On a national level, we have seen the tragic result. In the waning days of the administration, they are still trying to scare and rush us into one travesty after another. Whether the Iraq War, the wiretapping of our domestic conversations or panicky drilling for oil, as a nation we have been flung from one blind reaction to another. Now we have a model for another kind of decision-making from one whose genuine interest is in governing and whose fluid style seems anchored in both toughness and intelligence. Now we can see that it is possible to function at the highest level with discipline and calm, the words we hear daily to describe this nascent administration.
On a personal level, the legions who suffer from chronic back and neck pain are unconsciously stuck, rigid. But, as I see again and again in my own teaching, we can learn to inhibit this reaction. Our higher selves can inform our limbic aspect that a traffic jam is not a charging lion. We can notice when we tense and see it for what it is – over-the-top effort. When we undo that defensive feedback loop, the heart stops pounding. The adrenal response recedes, and we are more in command of ourselves, our decisions and our responses. Rather than act from a raging turbulence of stress bio-chemicals, we can find inner calm, even in a storm of stimuli. Releasing the head into a more favorable forward pivot on the spine, we can restore the body’s natural buoyancy. Coordination improves, breath eases, the mind clears and we are freer to respond to the situation at hand.
Obama is known to be imperturbable, a quality that, when they were kids, drove his sisters crazy. His personal qualities have marked his organization. This is in stark contrast to his predecessors. We have watched one Democratic candidate after another cave under the klieg lights and the pressure. Al Gore seemed to divide into five fuzzy images before our eyes as he shifted his ideas weekly, unable to hold his own among focus groups and zealous advisers. Who can forget that agonizing public smooch, meant to prove that Tipper was still hot, still his? John Kerry became ever more ponderous, weighed down by his vocabulary, his facts and his chin. Hillary Clinton’s shrill, mocking, defensive tone vanished once her presidential campaign ended. Suddenly, we could see who she really was. John McCain’s charm and humor have returned; away from the unimaginable pressure of his goal and his handlers, the dented distortion of his personality has filled out once again.
Obama is an unflappable natural. We saw him ease his own expectations as he aimed for that basket in Kuwait – “I might not make it the first time.” We have seen him symbolically flick insults off his shoulder. We have seen him indignant, but we have never seen him angry. Head lightly balanced, voice impassioned, we have heard him make sense, expressing principles that bring us back to our country’s democratic ideals, that bring us forward toward a world barely imagined by our founding fathers.
We have chosen a leader who is poised and in calm command, not frozen in a defensive recoil. Over the past eight years, we have been guided by fear into a time of contraction. We will be suffering from the results for years to come. But what we have seen is that people are most available for new options when they are in pain. The current national emergency has pushed us toward a surprising openness to change. Now that we have a leader who is not fixed but lightly poised, let’s hope our next phase is marked by expansion, resiliency and compassion.
