Christmas Sciatica

"Even the teachers are running"

That's how the Japanese describe their Xmas season - of course it is not Xmas here, much as the big department stores would love it to be so. But it is bonus time - all the corporates pay out, and everyone's running around planning what they will do from next April, including BodyChance.

People are leaving jobs, planning moves, deciding what they will study in the New Year. It is a busy time for BodyChance also. Take this weekend for instance. It started organising things around the Body Thinking One Day Human Body Users Guide workshop - this is the workshop that graduates of the two year BodyThinking course will be certified to teach. The graduation is coming up in April, so the next three months of the BodyThinking unit will be orientated to the content and pedagogical methodology of teaching to groups.

The course concept will be presented to about 70 Bellydance teachers and students who are coming to BodyChance's "Bellydancing Event". The BodyThinking One Day Users Guide to the Human Body Course is a teaser for AT lessons and joining our one year Ippan (public) program. While preparations for this are going on, we scheduled a meeting with our new "Medical Advisor" Dr Tsukasa Fujimoto. He is joining the BodyChance Research Project and helping us develop and hone the measurements we are collecting every 6 months on the progress of our ProCourse trainee members. We are coming up to the two year mark, so now we need to figure out how to analyse the data in a meaningful way that 1. gives us a clearer picture of how our members are changing in relation to the work and 2. the beginnings of a consumer product that we can start offering the 100+ members of the Ippan program.

The vision is to spin off a new company which will offer a "Co-ordination Health Assessment" for consumers, with a series of conclusive prescriptions that send them across the road, clutching their report, to book into BodyChance Ippan Program where our "technicians" (BodyChance teachers) will educate them on how they can manage their co-ordination effectively. After 6 months, it's back across the road to see how they are progressing on a series of measurements that demonstrate the changes that have occurred in a way that is difficult for even a hard-nosed sceptic to argue against, but of course they will.

Dr Fujimoto is an eminent Japanese Neuro-surgeon who has recently retired, having just published his autobiography. Yes, he is quite famous here. He spent his career investigating and assisting people with headaches - which led him to us, and a process of learning about Alexander's stupendous discoveries. His wife, an Opera singer, is a ProCourse member (trainee).

Same day, but after teaching a three hour class of the Directors Course Unit of our training, a late evening meeting with Yasuhiro, a ProCourse 3rd Stage trainee member, who is heading up our new internet Alexander books course - which is becoming a new Unit of the training, but one that does not require your physical presence. I wanted to pull study of the books out of the training to free up more time for practical work, but I still see studying Alexander's books as a critical part of the training process. You don't have to love them, you don't even have to agree with them (like me), but you do need to be familiar with them.

Part of that project - the reason is took so long to get going - is finding the money to get them translated into Japanese. Now that we have secured the rights to UCL and, soon CCCI, we have two people (Yasuhiro on CCCI & our new Board Member from SONY Yuko Suzuki on UCL) working on their translation this year, so we are ready to launch more book units in 2011.

I've left out the two Management meetings, the ATI assessment, the 2nd Stage assessment process for Yoko-san in class, the organising of the legalities and tax issues (and writing the agreement) for selling 42 shares in BodyChance to graduates of the ProCourse to help me raise money for the new Sydney studio I am planning for 2012. And yes, I also had to wash my clothes, talk to my girls, arrange buying a car in Australia, pack up everything for an 8 month "sabbatical" from Japan, organise the management issues for the three new full-time staff members that will join us in April and, somewhere in there, eat.

So is it any wonder that my old, old sciatica returned to my leg. Oh dear - what is that telling me? I concluded one thing - if I move in my old way, I think in my old way. So all of me is having a daily, hourly, minute by minute conversation with my right leg - which still stubbornly believes that in times of multifaceted activities, lateral rotation at the hip joint is definitely the solution. It's all part of a re-energised habit kicked off by my retinal attachment operation which basically retained the sight but decimated my ability to see. So I started unconsciously turning my left eye forward, creating an invitation for my right leg to resume it's laterally rotating support system, which had been on holiday for many years.

It's December in Japan and yes, even the teachers are running.

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