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Showing posts from November, 2009

Regulation

Just caught up on all the emails and info about UK regulation - my goodness, what a tiring issue to be worrying about. My sense is to re-invent AT and sell that. Who needs to be an "Alexander Technique teacher" anyway? It's not like it's a fabulously well known brand folks - don't kid yourselves. There's some gravitas to be sure, but you wouldn't lose that anyway: "Based on F. M. Alexander's discoveries but the Alexander Technique NOT." Except for Japan - God bless them. We don't have to worry about all this here. I once went to a lawyer asking him about regulation and how we might handle that? He asked me how many members were involved - it was under three digits at the time. When he got up off the floor from laughing, he told me to come back when we had a million or more were involved. Until then, the Japanese Government couldn't care less. Personally I think AT is situated wrongly anyway - human potentiality is more relevant than h

Seeing the Self

Our friends all suffer from our personality disorders, yet we rarely see or understand them ourselves - although these days I am coming to notice my own more clearly. To me it is perplexing - why is that a problem for other people? How can I possibly change this aspect of myself? Is it my problem or theirs? Finding answers only comes when the information about the disorder is clear. And there's the rub - the flip side of our disorder is often the very thing that creates our success. In my own case, I have a talent to plan, to imagine, to create an endless cascade of ideas and possibilities that mostly overwhelms and discourages people closest around me. When I go into flight, people either feel that it is too fast and noisy and they simply can't (and don't want to) catch up, or that I fill the space around me so thoroughly with myself, that there is no space left for them to simply be. To those who know me - I am aware of it. And it costs me, in small and significant ways.

Giving Directions

Alexander was adamant - you must first think one thing, then while continuing to think of this, you think a second thing, then while continuing to think those things, you think another and so on: this whole process Dewey called Thinking in Activity and “anyone who does it will have what a new experience in what they call thinking” (FM in UOS Ch 1). However, FM was only adamant about that in his discovery story that he recorded into writing during his first training in 1929~33. He was not adamant about this all his life - in fact he came to the point, which he never recorded in his writing, where he believed we must stop this process of “giving directions” as quoted by Walter Carrington in his diary: “At tea FM said that he had, at last, decided that we must cut out in future teaching all instructions to order the neck to relax or to be free because such orders only lead to other forms of doing. If a person is stiffening the neck, the remedy is to get them to stop projecting the message