Concept Spotlight: Spirals
In the last Concept Spotlight, we discussed two of the “building blocks” of movement: primary and secondary curves. By way of a brief recap: primary is the fetal curve, the forward curling of the spine that mimics a baby in the womb. It’s called “primary” because it’s the first movement we do, taking place even before we are born. Secondary is the curve of spinal extension, what we might call “arching” the back. It begins when the baby’s neck muscles develop enough to support its head, allowing it to look up and placing a secondary curve in the cervical spine.
Put these two curves together at the same time and you get the third building block of movement: the spiral. When you break it down, a spiral can be described as a primary curve across one diagonal of the torso and a secondary curve across the other, taking place simultaneously. One shoulder tends forward towards primary while the other tends back towards secondary.
The spiral is a complex movement that can, fortunately, be executed effortlessly and quite naturally with the proper intention. Think back to Dart’s work and the idea of developmental movement. The most easily-noticeable first place to recognize a spiral is in a baby learning to roll over. If you’ve ever seen a baby rolling over for the first time, you’ll notice that the intention in her movement begins with the eyes. Perhaps the baby is lying on her stomach and getting a bit miffed that she can’t see her surroundings very well. She looks up and around to one side, allowing her torso to follow naturally as her hips stay weighted towards the floor, until finally the weight of the head overtakes the pelvis and she clunks gently over onto her back. The movement of the eyes is crucial to the effortless performance of this roll – the movement is what we often refer to as “head leads, body follows.”
And it’s not just restricted to humans, either – check out this video of a sea otter spinning through the water!
This spiraling pattern is integral to most of the movements we do everyday. As an Alexander teacher, I spend a lot of my time pointing out spirals within movements to students interested in performing them with more ease. Perhaps a ballet dancer is having trouble with an arabesque, and needs to pay more attention to the spiral through the supporting side of her body to maintain her balance. This photo shows one of my colleagues, Luc Vanier, leading a dancer through an arabesque-spiral exercise to increase her awareness of this connection. 
Non-performers use spirals just as much, though – perhaps your dentist is chronically twisted to one side from years of standing on the same side of the chair to perform exams. Becoming aware of the spirals within your life is a simple way to begin to think spatially about the way you move – where are the spirals and are they balanced?
Incidentally, most of us have one side that is an easier spiral than the other. Some research suggests that this side-favoring may go all the way back to our birth – when a baby is born, it spirals out of the birth canal, going from face-down to face-up as the body follows the head out of the mother. Perhaps your easier spiral is the way you turned when you were born!
Forward and Up! is a Pittsburgh-based private practice offering quality instruction in the Alexander Technique in a positive and supportive environment.
