How Do We Direct? — Continuing the Conversation

After posting ‘How Do You Direct?’, I found myself deeply moved by the richness, honesty, and diversity of the responses. What struck me most was not agreement, but aliveness: a sense that ‘Direction’ remains a living question, one that refuses to settle into a single definition.

Some spoke of direction as attention and intention intertwined; others as internal messaging, subtle communication, or the flow of consciousness through the body. Some described it as emerging when we stop trying to direct at all. Others leaned into words, imagery, sensation, spatial awareness, or relationship with the environment. Again and again, people said: ‘It’s hard to talk about’. That, in itself, feels significant.

For me, Directions are a space of meeting — the place where I encounter myself. They are the space in which I recognise myself as open, released, and in quiet dialogue with life force. There is something nature-like about directions: wordless, intuitive, sensed rather than explained. And yet, as a cognitively oriented person, I deeply value the capacity to tune in consciously — to recognise when I am in flow, in movement, in flux.

This feels close to what many of you were pointing toward: that directions may begin with words, images, or intentions, but they do not end there. They evolve into something subtler — something lived.

It is often said that ‘Where the mind goes, the energy flows’.

 - When we touch the body with our mind, we touch both the neural and the energetic systems. Attention itself becomes an activating force, awakening vitality, whether we call it life force, prana, or chi. This resonates strongly with comments linking Alexander's work to Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Wu Wei, and other traditions where intention and non-doing coexist.

Years ago, in my studio, I ran a children’s clinic using biofeedback equipment. When sensors were attached — even to the big toe — and the child was simply asked to ‘think about the big toe’, the machine’s sensors would respond, showing a Neural and energetic response, even in people with impaired neural connections, including paralysis. Nothing was being done. And yet something unmistakably woke up.

This echoes what some of you described so beautifully: that sometimes ‘something wakes up, and direction follows’. Or that flow appears when we are in an observing, mindful mode.

In this way, ‘directing awareness becomes a pathway to proprioception, both energetic and physical’.

If we gently scan the body, from feet to crown or from crown to feet, touching different regions with our attention, neural and energetic pathways begin to organise themselves. Life force moves. Maps update. Not because we impose order, but because we allow communication.

This understanding lives at the heart of the Alexander Technique. When we attend to the relationship between head, neck, and back, we are not imposing alignment — we are inviting a natural flow. Orientation reorganises itself. Ease returns. The body remembers how to inhabit space with fluidity, responsiveness, and quiet support.

What I hear across the comments is an exploration of how many doorways there are into understanding Directions, and how personal those doorways can be. Verbal or non-verbal. Felt or imaginal. Internal or relational. Conscious or quietly emerging in the background of attention.

Perhaps Direction is not something to define, but something to keep meeting, again and again, as conditions change, as we change. A living conversation between attention, intention, body, space, and environment.

Thank you all for stepping into that conversation so generously. It feels very much alive.