Everything Is About Movement

This is a post in reply to a question about my statement:

EVERYTHING IS ABOUT MOVEMENT, EVEN BEING.

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One of my favourite chapters of Alexander's writings, after Evolution of a Technique, is Habits of Thought and of Body (MSI Part I, Ch 6) - and he is basically writing what you are saying - that all movement arises from conception - and I agree wholeheartedly with that.

And I personally characterise my conceptions as movements, very subtle movements and confusing ones too: who is the thinker of the thought? who is the watcher of the thought? who is the asker of the question? They are all "me" at different moments, all me in different movements, so even "me" is a movement: a collections of habits, experiences and ideas that constantly move: now I am a great guy, now I am an arrogant guy, not I am a useless guy etc. etc. So even "me" or "self" is in constant movement.

Here's a quote from FM, taken from that chapter, on this point:

...we see how easily the fallacy arose of assuming an entity for the subconscious self, a self which at the last analysis is made up of these acquired habits and of certain other habits, some of them labelled instincts,...

Alexander, MSI: Part 1 Ch 4, p.53

And that's a wonderful thing - because if I wasn't always in movement, I simply couldn't change. If I try to think of something that truly is still, all I can think of is space. Space doesn't change, nor does it function. It "is" in the way people seem to think of "being" or "stillness" i.e. as in "back is back" - but space isn't functioning at all! It's not doing anything, not changing, it can't affect a single thing - is that how we want to conceive of our self?

There is not a particle in this universe that is not in movement, that is not changing from nano-second to nano-second. My effort in applying this work is to constantly ground my understanding in whatever factual basis is available. And the physics indicate that this is how things are existing - in constant change or movement. So the concept of "stillness"? Well, at best it is a term relative to something else, at worst it is a deception, based on feelings, that would have person believe they are remaining in a certain condition. It just isn't true - they are never remaining anywhere. There's no such thing as stop. It's just a human invention, handy at times, but in contradiction to how things actually exist.

Which is why I also gave up on teaching this idea of stop and inhibit. All that mostly does, from my observations, is cause people to get stiff. Same reason - when you perpetuate a misconception, you interfere with nature's plan. I don't deny that the idea of "stopping" is a useful tool, I talk to myself that way sometimes, but these days I find there is often a more effective "replacement plan" that achieves the same thing by leaving out this extra step of an hallucinatory moment of stop.

Anyway - maybe I've gone too far of track, but I thought it only fair that I underline how this goes to the core of my understanding of the work. Everything is about movement, even being.