Find my sitting bone
The points I've discussed so far are, all fall under the header of inhibition, as I see it. Although it took me quite a lot of words to describe them, it only takes a relatively short time to realise them, sometimes a few seconds, sometime a few minutes.

After that, I shift my attention to directions. How I do this, depends on the situation: sometimes, when I'm very busy in my head, I say them, so that I have a concrete starting point to work from. But most of the time, I simply become aware of the different body parts. Where awareness is not the same as attention or focus. Awareness, to me, is acknowledging the existence of something, say, my neck, in relation to, or without losing sight of, the rest of my body. Attention or focus is noticing the existence of something, and forgetting about everything else.

This is an important difference for me, because when I wish my neck to be free, my usual reaction is to focus on my neck, rather than becoming aware of the neck-head-back relationship: I start thinking about freeing my neck, trying to feel it out, which leads to narrowing. I think Alexander's directions are a bit tricky in that respect; just because the neck is the first one to be let free, doesn't automatically mean that it's the starting point for direction. I don't know whether Alexander ever talked about this, but I've always wondered whether directions have a source, a starting point, and if so where it's located.

So, even though it is about the neck, it's not about the neck. That's the nasty thing about language: in order to talk about non-doing, you still need a verb, which by linguistic definition is about doing. In order to talk about the absence of a thing, you still need to mention the thing (the classical 'do not think of a pink elephant' paradox).

That's why I usually start conscious direction by finding my sitting bone, or my heels, for that matter and become aware of my entire spine. I've discovered that, for me, this makes it much easier to leave my neck alone. And it's in line with what I was taught; to send directions up along the spine. I find that my sitting bone is always much lower than I think, and that, once I've properly found it, I'm already halfway home.