Sensory Untrustworthiness

“The reader who reviews the experiences that I have tried to set down…will notice that at a certain point in my investigation I came to realize that my reaction to a particular stimulus was constantly the opposite of that which I desired, and that in my search for the cause of this, I discovered that my sensory appreciation {feeling} of the use of my mechanisms was so untrustworthy that it led me to react by means of a use of myself which felt right, but was, in fact, too often wrong for my purpose.”

“I draw attention to this point, because over the long period of years in which I have been engaged in teaching pupils to improve and control the manner of their use of themselves, I have found that untrustworthiness of sensory appreciation is present in varying degrees in all of them, exerting, as in my own case, a harmful influence upon their use and functioning, and consequently upon their manner of reacting to stimuli. The whole experience, indeed, convinces me that the prevalence of sensory untrustworthiness is of the utmost significance in relation to the problem of the control of human reaction.”

F.M. Alexander
The Use of the Self

When you Notice, sensory untrustworthiness stops being a problem because you stop making choices based on whether or not something feels right to you. If you Notice before moving you can evaluate the quality of that movement solely on the basis of whether or not you Noticing at that moment. If you are Noticing, moving in that way is increasing the ease and flexibility in you. If you are not Noticing you are mis-coordinating yourself.This doesn’t mean that you won’t also have a kinesthetic experience of the activity; it simply means that the you stop using the "rightness" or "wrongness" of the feeling to determine future choices.