The study of expression, to choose only one example, reveals to us, the necessity of a right poise of the body. One of the leading teachers of science in this country, after fighting tuberculosis for three years, changing climates and using all the help that science has provided, determined at last to go back to his work and to do his best even though he lost his life.
Making a constant and careful study of himself he again began his life as a teacher. He met with one with great knowledge of the human body, one who had studied it from many points of view. He was surprised when that expert said to him:--"Your dieting will not do you much good, that is not your trouble. You do not sit right nor stand right, your chest is too low, it not only cramps your breathing but what is still more important, it cramps your stomach and all the other vital organs." The scientist eagerly asked what he could do to recover his strength, and he received a few valuable suggestions, which he followed, and in six months he was stronger than ever.
As a student and teacher of human expression for nearly forty years, I have found most important connections between man's mind, body and voice. The right use of the voice is next to impossible unless a man stands properly. There are certain inter-relations between the simple conditions and actions of the body, and the conditions and the true use of the voice are determined by the way a man thinks and feels.
A man must not only have right feeling but must express it. He cannot get right expression without right thinking. Health, itself, is one of man's mental and emotional conditions.
This book is an endeavor to study human unfoldment from an all-sided observation of the whole nature of man. Man is a unity, and an endeavor to establish health from a mere material point of view has always failed. Expression is a study from a higher point of view. The organism is studied from the point of view of its mental function. Expression implies the subordination of the body to the actions of the mind. This gives a truer point of view for an all-sided human development.
It also implies a study of the especial significance and use of certain primary acts of our lives:--such as the way we wake up in the morning and certain movements which are taken at that time by animals and normal beings. The stretches, yawnings and breathings, peculiar to that moment, are never lost by animals, but human beings, with their higher possibilities but greater power of perversion, lose the significance and helpfulness of this primarily instinctive movement.