Alexander Technique

The Inner Life of a Basukubotcher

2011-10-18T18:44:00.000+09:00

I am a Basukubotcher, aren’t you impressed?

Not impressed? Oh… ☹

Well, let me tell you what I can do!

If you’ve got a bad back, I can cure it. In fact, tell me of any pain you have, I can most likely show you how to get rid of it. (BTW, orchestral musicians can also get better at playing.) Did I mention I can improve your golf stroke, help you sort out that communication problem with your boss and get you faster at running? As well, I can make you more aware of your time management, turn your once strenuous swimming into a pleasurable experience and facilitate more communion with your inner child. And your eyes will definitely get better – you can even throw away your glasses! So there. I can do all that. Yes, that’s what a Basukubotcher can do! Do you believe me?

Well, OF COURSE NOT!!!

Who would believe one practitioner of ANYTHING could achieve all that? Now you understand the fundamental marketing problem of an Alexander Technique teacher (which, BTW, is what a Basukubotcher is more commonly known as).

The answer of course is not to claim all these things. However, that’s easier said than done. Why? Because in each group lesson at BodyChance, it is the case that each of the issues presented above did in fact occur.

In 2009, a journalist once visited my group lesson in order to write an article for a prestigious magazine in Japan. She watched these wildly different activities as each student presented today’s “activity” request. At the end of the class she looked at me quite bewildered: “But where is the technique? What is it that you are doing? What do I write about?” I understood her dilemma immediately.

Alexander’s discovery is unfathomably empty of form. Alexander tried to give it form, and what his community ended up with 50 years later is a series of stereotyped activities with teachers arguing about the most inconsequential details – such as: “How far must the hip joint flex before I rise from the chair?” Does it matter?

Not to me. It’s relative, not absolute. It depends on what you want and where you are going. Nothing lives devoid of context and when we imagine it does we do so at our own peril. And Alexander Technique teachers are in peril if they live devoid of the concept of a marketplace.

How is it possible, that 117 years after the first Alexander Technique lesson was given, this work still languishes in relative obscurity? What are we doing wrong?

It’s a question that vexes me every day. At BodyChance we still see growth. Every month, we attract around 50 new faces to our studios for an introductory lesson of some kind. Some are there for the first time, others the second or third. Enrollment in our public membership program is currently at its lowest ever, yet our Professional Teachers Education Program is still powering on – currently 83 students. Our conversion rates have fluctuated between 5% and 45% without any clear explanation as to why. Not that I can figure out.

It's great that we are educating teachers, but we also need to create a market place for them to teach in. That’s what woke me up at 3.30am this morning, bright as a button, wondering and wondering what to do next…

The niche. It’s all in the niche. My newest idea is to coach BodyChance stars – teachers willing to go out there and attract a crowd of loyal followers. Each herd of followers are collected around a niche: a hobby, a profession or a wish that acts as a glue to bind them into one coherent community.

Once you have that, you can then write a convincing AT message-to-market match. Be it running (Malcolm Balk), swimming (Steven Shaw), golf (Roy Palmer), vision improvement (Peter Grunwald), playing the horn (our very own Basil Kritzer) or personal coaching (yours truly), the Alexander Technique message needs to offer just one clear benefit that convinces the niche it is operating in.

Is this the right way forward? I have no idea. I am in a trial and error process. Although Alexander seemed to degrade the trial and error approach, I found Tim Harford’s explanation of it’s positive aspects in a TED talk quite enlightening…

So my trial and error process continues. Who knows where it will end? I do have a set of 7 principles I have recently adopted, but the jury is still out on that. I still carry around my big vision thing, but I am feeling more battered and chipped these days. The constant failure to meet my own expectation is silencing my propensity towards grandiosity. Let's try the humble approach that expects nothing, and is surprised by a just little….

BodyChance Challenges

2011-06-21T17:37:00.003+09:00

What's news in Japan?

I know several of you that are interested in the goings on in Japan and have wondered when I will offer an update. This is it. What are the challenges?

Creating a profitable service industry company is the overriding challenge. Our salaries are currently at 54% of revenue - that makes it a challenge to generate meaningful profits. Why do we want profits? To expand stupid. No bank or investor will hand over actionable money to us without a record of gorgeous profits - such a record has yet to be established by BodyChance. It is the challenge facing us now. I've had conversations with very rich people who might, one day, be willing to invest - but step one is proving that there is a business model for Alexander Technique that makes money.

How are we meeting this challenge? Several ways.

1. Build a niche presence. We are repositioning BodyChance into a niche market. i.e. a service that talks to the needs of our potential clients. In Japan that market is katakori. Kata = shoulder, kori - pain to translate simply. It is huge in Japan - everyone and his dog is out to grab a piece of the action.

Last night we launched the second round of KST = Katakori Sayonara Trial. What's it a trial of? Our monthly continuity membership program - BodyChance Basic - offering you the opportunity of attending BodyChance groups morning, afternoon and evening 6 days a week. If you attended every one (one some do God less them) at market prices you are getting over $4,000 worth of group lessons. Yet for now we only charge $178 as the monthly membership fee. $197 if you adopt the individual lesson plan.

Welcome to Japan, especially Tokyo, one of the most fiercely competitive markets in the world. 30 million people within one hour's travel from our studio door, with an uncountable number of businesses combating each other for a piece of that consumer pie.

Last night, one our guests was a person who completed our first KST program in May this year. "I was completely cured" she declared when I identified her to the group. (Thank you, I thought, you are doing my job for me.) You could see the other people shift in their perception, and begin taking the idea more seriously. Later she signed up for BOTH our Oban Intensive and our month long trial. She's the lucky one.

On the niche strategy thing - once we get KST automated, we will add another niche. Once that is automated, another. I believe we need to build at least three such marketing niches to move into serious profits. These marketing machines automatically pour the punters into our studios - and we send them out happier, healthier and willing life long converts to the Alexander revolution - help us build the community please.

2. Build the community. As we graduate more teachers (only 30 in 12 years so far) we are in fact generating our own competitors. That's a good thing, but why would someone choose us over getting individual lessons when they want them, where they want them, with no commitment beyond the next lesson and probably paying less!? It's the community stupid. So we are busy building community. We have shifted our whole focus from individual lessons to group teaching. Guess where are retention rates are higher?

The individual lesson will eventually become a high end product, which means branding our company as "the place" to go if price is not part of your decision process.

But the groups is where bonding occurs. It is where people meet others than in normal Japanese society they would never cross paths. We create something unique in Japan - Alexander's discoveries cross boundaries in just about every kind of way you can imagine. It makes for a compelling community experience for the highly segmented lives of normal Japanese.

3. Another major change structurally for BodyChance has been introducing a team of full-time teacher managers. Burrowing a page from my other life, I decided that "Actor Managers" would work best at the moment i.e. to build a team of all rounders - people who can teach AT and be involved in the Marketing, Sales and Business building of BodyChance.

Our longer term plan is to open new BodyChance learning eco-systems in multiple locations. (Folks can read my article in DIRECTION for a more detailed description of how this education eco-system operates) Our studio in Osaka is now at the growth stage Tokyo reached three years ago, so we are currently active in finding bigger premises.

4. To manage all this we need better systems. So we have now embarked on the project of generating a detailed Operations Manual which would serve as the bible when opening new learning centres. This is all a struggle for many of our team members - all this business related technology is getting eyes popping and fears stimulated: what has this got to do with the Alexander Technique?

Well, lots if you actually want the work to go mainstream, which is my avowed intention. I reckon I have spent closet to $30,000 of my own money on education in the three skills of marketing, sales and business over the past 4 years. The best people, the actual doers, charge a lot - but who else should I be learning from?

It's starting to pay off, but like the work itself, the more you know the less you know you know. Hmm - that could be a good Facebook muse. Go find me now: www.facebook.com/chancejeremy

Friend me please - I dialogue with people there these days.

5. Strategically, we have decided to jump on to FaceBook and leverage our advantage in knowing that one day it will be huge in Japan, whereas right now the uptake is hovering around the 4/5% level. Only the innovators are on it, (for those familiar with the bell curve of diffusion of innovation) and I've noticed that the "innovators" also turn out to be BodyChance's clientele. Most of them are going on it. That tells me a lot. I wish we could grow as fast of FaceBook but there's the rub…

6. BC Pro - the mother of BC Basic. Professional teacher education. Of course this is THE heart and soul of BodyChance: our four year, full-time Teacher Education program. We have 80 enrolled now, and the challenge pedagogically is building an "Alexander college" as opposed to an Alexander Training School. Of course this is a snail - you can't rush Teacher Education, but there are amazing discoveries I am realised pedagogically which are beyond my ability to share in a few words in this blog.

The question I wonder about these days is this…

“How can BodyChance continuously educate the greatest number of teachers, along a graduated path of individual teaching competence, with the least amount of effort, in an optimum amount of time?”

Would love to see a panel at the Congress tackling that question. It might even tempt me to come!

Over the last few years I have been working to get the synthesis of my own views, and those of our 6 Associate Directors - most particularly Cathy Madden - out of my head and into a curriculum, one sufficiently comprehensible for other teachers to learn from, and be guided by. Now we have been going 12 years, FINALLY there are native Japanese teachers educated by us with the skills to carry on ProCourse Education but they want to know the plan!

This is like a dream come true. I am finally feeling freer from being shackled to the task of Teaching - something I see these days as just one part of my job description.

I am a Master teacher - I know that. What I can do these days even surprises me. I say that because I get the evidence of it every day. What I am not, is a Master of Marketing, Sales and Business. Yet I know that BodyChance will amount to nothing more than an extension of this writer's blathering egocentric attempt to be someone "significant" UNLESS I establish mastery in those areas. I did it once, why not again?

Baring unexpected death, I give my self another productive 25 years to achieve that Mastery. Supposedly it takes 10,000 hours of application, around 10 years, so I should be hitting the mark in 2015! Will the ensuring 23 years be enough time to secure BodyChance as one of the world's game changing companies? Backed by the gold of Alexander's discoveries, I see no reason why not.

6. So I need to simplify my life. I am going into a cave called Japan these days. Gone is the grandiosity of world domination - making it in Japan will do for this life. I nixed my attendance to the Congress, withdrew from ATI, and these days refuse to do anything that doesn't fit into one of three categories - family life, business life, spiritual life. If I can't see a direct benefit from one of those angles - it's gone from my life. Part of me wonders why I am bothering writing this - ego really. We all have one. I love showing off, sorry if I come over badly. In the end, those who know me, understand this is deep.

I have to teach soon. To give you a "taste" of life in Japan for me these days, here is a list of the things I have scheduled during my next 14 days in Japan:

- 33 hours of ProCourse lessons covering 8 of the 12 different courses we run in Tokyo & Osaka.
- two interviews with magazines, one about how AT might help facial expressions with one of the leading women magazines of Japan (who ran me on the cover of a previous issue), the other with a martial arts magazine (we are getting a lot more men to BodyChance these days. They can feel the real possibility of a career in this work).
- one day filming a new DVD about our ProCourse Teacher Education for sale to the client base of the Producers of the video (no cost to BodyChance).
- taking a meeting to develop a new service specifically designed for the Fitness Industry in Japan (which we intend to make serious inroads into) through which I plan to generate another $100,000 in revenue next year.
- three one day meetings with BodyChance's 8 full-time staff. We cry, do business, "connect" a la NVC. You name it. What needs to be done, gets done. This is soul work as much as it is operations work.
- four classes specifically for BodyChance Graduates. No charge to them for this one, I ask instead that they frequent ProCourse to enrich the learning environment for our students. Walter's school inspired that idea. I loved how teachers would always visit his Constructive Teaching Centre in London, and I want to create that culture in BodyChance.
- Two business meetings with the Core team that administrate and implement decisions
- my personal coaching evening - the high end stuff. $970 for three evenings with Jeremy.
- attend two graduation parties (Osaka & Tokyo) for the graduates of our two year BodyThinking certificate programme. It is a part of the Alexander Technique Teacher Education, but the certificate entitles them to lead a one day BodyThinking workshop, which is about creating useful maps of our body's structure and movement. BodyMapping, but we don't call it that. Why? Branding stupid. Own the name, own the income stream.
- a featured class at Asahi Culture Centre in Shinjuku. My photo appeared in the leading national newspaper of the same name (they own the Centre) advertising "Alexander Technique". This is the work arriving in mainstream. They pay me peanuts - but it isn't about the money, its about being "legitimate." Ordinary Japanese worry about getting caught into "cults", and we used to smell a little bit like that at first contact.
- two BC Pro Information nights - Osaka and Tokyo - inviting people into Teacher Education.
- two Intros to our work, where I am letting people know about our new KST program in September.
- observing Cathy Madden start her 25 days of teaching for us in Osaka. I need to be a student too!
- spending an afternoon with Cathy observing the practise session of an A league Professional Baseball Teams before their evening play off at the Osaka dome. Invite from one of their coaches who got told by an American coach at the Beijing Olympics that AT is great for baseballers.
- a phone in with my internet coach in Australia, discussing our use of the website in generating leads and building our list.

And somewhere amidst all that, I write this, study my marketing books, make my daily FaceBook posts, meditate every morning and try to fall in love. No luck with that last one.

I so love the "we-don't-really-need-anyone-else" quality of Japan. It insulates our innovation - Japanese don't know how Alexander's discoveries are supposed to be taught. We are creating the boundaries. This is truly heaven for a maverick like me! When STAT knocked back my application for an approved school in Japan, they gave me a big favour.

So I really must get off and prepare my class. One thing I love about Marj's pedagogy is the student's responsibility for driving the learning process. Of course I always come up with a game and have one or two activities on standby if called for, but these days our students understand that they must come up with the topics for the class, not me. I respond, draw on my 40+ years of experience in this work, and the class does itself. So my plan for the class means creating a nice game/activity (I usually create something new - it is one of my teaching disciplines) and then think through what are the main teaching points I want to come through today.

I am teaching a ThinkingBody class, which - aside from exploring the application of Alexander's discoveries to everyday life - digs down into the learning process: 1. Purpose 2. Observation 3. Analysis 4. Support 5. Experimentation 6. Direction 7. Inhibition 8. Experience 9. Integration.

Don't understand it? It is based on Use of the Self, Chapter One "Evolution of a Technique" so why don't you come along and join our two year ThinkingBody course? Who knows, you might want to continue on when you finish that and do our BodyThinking course. And then, who knows, you might want to continue on after that and do our Teaching Methods course. And if you have done that much, then for sure you may as well decide to go to 2nd Stage and start your apprenticeship as a Teacher. And I mean, well - if you get that far, you may as well take your three assessments and graduate as a Teacher to 3rd Stage. Over 2 years, you only have to give 50 lessons and a workshop before you get a BodyChance Teacher Diploma.

How long will all that all take? Oh, about 9 years. But just 4 if you do it full-time.

As they say in Japan "bye bye".

Nature is Kind

2011-03-31T01:53:00.002+09:00

Been busy, as you can imagine, reliving again in Japan.

Many messages have gone out - not all posted here. However I am posting tomorrow's message to those on our list in Japan.

I slowly evolving my own understanding of the work, and how it can be used to support people undoing the stress they give themselves over the events of the last few weeks...

***

Once upon a time a lone lady in a kimono
waited by the edge of a river.
She needed to cross the river,
but could not get her self wet.

Not long after, two monks came along,
so she pleaded to be carried across the river.
The tall monk agreed, and carried her
across the river on his back.
The shorter monk was shocked
by his companion's action,
and silently fumed for one hour
after the woman had left.
Finally, he could contain himself no longer:

"You were wrong"
he blurted out to the taller monk
"It is forbidden to touch a woman,
but you did even more!
You carried her across the river!!"

The taller monk smiled compassionately.
He looked at the shorter monk and said:

"My dear monk - I carried the woman
for just 5 minutes whereas you have been
carrying the woman for over an hour."

***

Nature is much kinder than our own minds.

Unless you lived through the tsunami,
most people only directly experienced the big earthquake.
And the earthquake lasted only a few minutes
- that is all. But the stress has been going
on ever since. It is not the earthquake itself that stresses us,
it is the thoughts we have about it that stress us.

Like the short monk who fumed for one hour
about the five minutes his taller companion
carried the woman over the river,
our minds tend to replay the earthquake
like a YouTube clip over and over again.

It is understandable that we would do that.
It is human nature to do that.
I am not in judgement of that.
I am not writing that this is wrong.
I am only pointing out that we create
the stress we feel, not nature.
Nature is much kinder - it only scared us directly for a few minutes.
Ever since then, we have only been scaring ourself.

BodyChance is known as the undoing school.
It is the place where we learn how to undo
those things that cause us pain.
Usually at BodyChance we focus
on things like katakori, or back pain.

But on this Friday April 1st,
with the whole new BodyChance team of teachers,
we will focus on undoing the stress of the earthquake.
Not just the earthquake,
but any of the events after it
that are still causing distress in your daily life.

Undoing is a process of seeing the truth.
It is a process of directly knowing
how I am inflicting harm upon myself.

On April 1st I am offering you a unique opportunity.
Come not to learn something new,
but to unlearn something old.

Come not to do new techniques,
but to undo the unnecessary techniques.

If you want help with your current situation
reply to this email and tell us you will come.

I look forward to meeting you then.

cheerfully

Jeremy
BC Education Director.

Living in Truth - Japan #2

2011-03-18T09:28:00.005+09:00

Continuing to post to my blog the messages I am sending out in Japan to the 3,000 on our list. Since yesterday, it has been posted on several blogs, shared in Mixi (Japan's FaceBook) or retweeded more widely. We are getting a positive response - it is good to feel these ideas are supporting people in this crisis.

***

This is Jeremy, BodyChance Education Director.

My guess is that you are thinking about your life deeply at the moment?

I know I am. So many questions come to my mind. So many unanswerable questions…

What will happen in Tokyo? Will I still be able to live here? Should I leave Tokyo? Should I leave Japan? Do I carry on as normal? Do I stay at home and wait? What is the best thing for me to do? Who can I talk to about this?

There are all questions I have thought about. I am guessing you must be thinking about the same.

Soon you realize there are no answers to be found. You don't know what to do…

This is what feels so frustrating, yes? You want to know what will happen. You want some security – some knowledge that is real – to base your decisions on. You wonder "How can I decide what to do, when I do not know what is going on?"

This feeling of being lost is not unfamiliar to people who study Alexander Technique at BodyChance. It is actually how life really is. We think life is certain, we think life is concrete. When we discover that life is not like that, we feel confused.

However, the truth is that nothing ever stays the same.

When my teacher Marj would give me a lesson, I felt terrific. I felt so good. I would think – "Oh, I want to keep this feeling forever. I want to stay like this." Mary would look at me, and quickly say:

"It's never going to feel the same twice."

Marj did not want me to fix things. So about Japan now, you do not want to say to your self "It is like this" . Why? Because tomorrow, you will change. Tomorrow, everything around you will change.

Now you are living in a time which is teaching you this truth. Your life is changing: every year, every month, every week, every hour, every second. You do not know what will happen in Fukushima. Will it be OK? Will it be a disaster? You do not know.

So today you live in this suspended world. And this is the world as it actually is. This is the true world, the world where change is the only constant thing.

So now is the time to live your life truthfully. This day, this moment is real, but tomorrow, next year, next decade, next generation – none of that is real. You do not know what will happen tomorrow, or next year, or the next generation.

Each day you wake up and seek more news. Until you look, you do not know what the world is like today. But you do not have to wait for the news to decide how your life will be today. You do not need to be a victim of circumstances. Instead, you can accept that the world is uncertain, and be certain of its uncertainty. You can decide: "This is how I will live today. In each moment, I can be certain that I do not know what will happen next…"

When you have fearful thoughts, ask your self: "Are these thoughts helping me? How real are there? Do I have any power to change what is happening now?" If you answer yes, great – go do something about it. If you answer no – then what point is there for you to be thinking this way? Do you want to encourage these thoughts?

Sure, you can not really stop your thoughts. That is impossible too. But you can understand "These thoughts of mine are not real. I am only saying it to myself. I do not need to listen to my thoughts as though I was listening to the NHK News!"

This is a helpful question to carry around with you: are these thoughts helpful to me? Are they necessary? Do I want to encourage and nurture these thoughts? Will this help me or not?

And many times you will find "It does not help me to think this way. This is only my imagination. I only know about today. I only know about now. So I will just stay with my whole self."

For those of you who have studied with BodyChance – now you think of your whole body, your whole movement. This brings you back into the present moment. In the present moment, all your power is there.

This is the way to live your true life. It has always been like this. Sometimes it takes a crisis for us to be reminded of how life actually is.

Nothing is sure. Nothing is fixed. But if you love and cherish your self and others, you have the comfort of your self. You have the comfort of this moment. In this moment you can be whole. You can be you. And you can only do what you can do. Nothing more. And nothing less.

My heartfelt best wishes to you all.

The Undoing Way - Japan #1

2011-03-17T01:04:00.002+09:00

I will start posting messages I am sending out to our Japanese list and visitors to our website...

***

Hi,

I am Jeremy from BodyChance, and I am writing to you from the Gold Coast in Australia.

I sometimes wonder why I left Japan the day before the earthquake hit - is there any meaning in that for me?

And the only meaning I can take right now is my determination to come back. It has tested my will, as a foreigner, to know if Japan is really a home for me. I discovered that it is. I plan to return on March 24th and do what I can to support you through this terrible crisis. I don't mind if my life is shortened as a result – I am only afraid to waste my life. I am afraid to go to my grave without being able to say "I did what I could."

I've just come off a conference call with the members of BodyChance's full-time staff, and I ended our conversation with tears in my eyes. I had not felt nor understood till that moment what a crisis of confidence is happening for you in Japan. I want to come back and be with you all. I want to tell you what a wonderful people you are.

So many people the world over care for you now – do you know that? My friends in Australia talk of nothing else - we are all concerned for you, for Japan's welfare. One beautiful outcome of this tragedy can be your discovery of how much you are loved by others in the world.

Right now, many of BodyChance staff are experiencing fear – they have many concerns. I asked to them - how can we offer leadership to others, when we our selves are feeling so unsure? And for that, we look to the deeper qualities of the work we offer at BodyChance. At the top of our website we say that undoing is more important than doing.

What is there for you to "undo" in a crisis such as this?

There is a lot to undo – beginning with all the 'noise' the voices in your head make as you try to understand and cope with what is happening. There are two reactions you have. The first reaction is primary – your feeling. It is strong, present and moving from one state to another. The second reaction is what you say to your self about your feeling – this is the 'noise'. This is the part of busyness that you can "undo".

It will not help to get caught up in your thoughts. Why? Because your thoughts always work to create the worst picture of things – they are biologically designed to do this. However, the design doesn't serve you now as it did 100,000 years ago.

Can it help you now to always be thinking and imagining the worst? Do you have the power to change the outcome now? Basically not. Your thoughts affect you deeply, but they do not, for example, make much difference to the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. And it is not those worries that are really your true experience. Your true experience is not about nuclear reactors, tsunamis or earthquakes.

Your primary, true feeling has no thoughts. Your true experience can be felt without noise of your thoughts. Quietly, silently, I encourage you to be present to whatever feelings you have. There is no wrong feeling to have. You may feel guilt. You may feel excitement. You may feel despair. You may feel frustration, anger, helplessness. You may feel relief, joy and guilt all together. Whatever you feel remember it is just that – a feeling. It does not say anything about what will happen. It is not the predictor of the future.

Your feelings, when left to run alone, will transform into something else. How often have you started to weep, only to find yourself laughing a minute later? Feelings are like this – they naturally move from one state to the next. However, when you embroider your feelings with fearful concepts, you unnaturally attach an idea that is not existing in the feeling itself. You add the idea to the feeling, and think that both feeling and idea are the same thing.

When this happens, the idea carries you away from the natural enfoldment of your feelings. The idea suppresses your feeling, and you mistake the idea for being your feeling. Then your emotion gets fixed by the idea. The idea might be about Tokyo in disaster, the idea might be about losing your loved ones, the idea might be about your business collapsing. They are strong ideas, but they do not live in your feelings. You attach these ideas to your feelings.

You start to believe that this feeling and idea are the same thing. And then you are trapped. This terrible idea, together with a feeling, holds you day and night until you are unable to live any more. Do not let that happen to yourself. Undo that fixing of idea to feeling.

Free your feelings from the ideas that try to hold them. Let your feelings move from one state to the next. Undo belief in your ideas. Instead, see your ideas as just ideas – not truth, not real, not actual. Just ideas. When you can "undo" the idea, and let your feeling free, you will be free. You will be new. You will be more who you really are.

How can you do this? By sharing with others. By connecting truthfully with other human beings who are willing to listen and be listened too. Who do you have like this in your life? Go find them, go be with them. I encourage you to continue your normal life, but continue it with an honest sharing of your feeling. You do not need to pretend you are OK, but you do not need to collapse your life either. Stay with the life you have, and bring into that life the truth of your feeling.

And from this truthful space, you are far more ready, far more stronger, to deal with whatever will happen. It does not mean everything will go well, or everything will not go well – it means you are in yourself ready to deal with whatever happens. The only thing that is really true, is what you are feeling right now. Stay with that, not with your imaginations.

This is the deepest meaning of the undoing way.

Shall We Dance?

2011-02-20T15:26:00.006+09:00

This is a short description of a workshop I will present on March 4th in Tokyo to 300 members of the Dance Federation. In Japan they are known as Social dancers and BodyChance has been developing a relationship with their community. In 2009 I wrote a series of 6 articles describing the Seven BodyChance Movement Principles.

There - betcha didn't know that?

Oh there's a lot going on in Japan that you don't know about. I kind of like it that way actually. But Brendan recently cajoled me on FaceBook to start using my blog to post things I am writing. I am prolific these days - in the last week I think I have written about 15,000 words in the form of Sales Letters, articles, emails to my students - it's all blah, blah, blah from Jeremy these days.

Anyway, enough of that for now. For my Japanese friends who love to read my English blog, this is a advance preview of the talk. Of course it is being translated into Japanese now, and will be published in that form eventually. So this is the only English version around at the moment, and probably ever.

Enjoy...

***

Which is First—Artistry or Technique?
A Radical New Viewpoint
Based on the Discoveries of F. Matthias Alexander

In the worlds of music and dance, there is a constant debate concerning the balance between artistic expression and technical excellence. For example, Japanese are known internationally as having the highest technical standard of social dancers in the world, yet some argue that their artistry suffers as a result. This debate pits technique against artistry – which should take prominence?

But are we asking the right question?

Could it be that the problem is not between artistry and technique, but rather the problem only arises because you divide something that is indivisible? Can you separate your self from your shadow? While you may be able to think of "me" and "my shadow", that does not mean you can actually separate them, does it?

The Seven BodyChance Movement Principles that I explored in my series of articles in DanceWing are based on the discoveries of F. M. Alexander, originator of the Alexander Technique. Alexander had a lot to say about our alarming habit of dividing where no division exists. This debate between artistry and technique echoes our tendency to divide between mind (artistry) and body (technique) – but can mind and body be separated from each other, any more than artistry and technique can be separated?

I have worked as a performer, so I understand the need to divide technique and artistry in your thinking. Van Gough, for example, would go to the art museum and copy the brush strokes in the paintings of many different Masters. Was Van Gogh only doing "technical" work, or was Van Gogh developing his "artistry"? I have been asking myself this question for many years. It is profound question that exists in all human skills, not just social dance.

So first let me demonstrate the problem we have when we divide these two…

DEFINITION OF DANCING "TECHNIQUE"
1. To make something consistently the same
2. Regardless of the situation, to meet the same standards of excellence
3. To meet precise angles, speeds and spatial forms for figures and amalgamations

DEFINITION OF DANCING "ARTISTRY"
1. To create something consistently original
2. To connect authentically with your music, partner and audience
3. To be fresh, responsive and spontaneous within figures and amalgamations

Consider those two definitions carefully – they do seem to be in conflict with each other, don't they? When you realise how contradictory the aims of both seem to be, is it any wonder this is an area of major concern within Social Dance?

So how can you reconcile two opposites?

That is simple – stop dividing them! Alexander had the same problem with the division of "mind (artistry)" and "body (technique)". Of course you are able to imagine them as separate within your thinking, but then your thinking no longer reflects reality. You are assuming a false view. And it is this view that creates the problem you are seeking to fix!

Can you start thinking in a new way?

Yes, of course you can. And what is this new way of thinking? It is the view that does not add separation to unity. I will need to demonstrate this with an example.

[At this point Jeremy gave a presentation of Social Dancers making an entrance]

How can this idea be put to practical use in the teaching of Social Dance?

In this case, we can learn from the way that Alexander himself thought about human movement. How did Alexander think in a way that did not add separation to Nature's underlying unity of all movement? First, he stopped thinking in terms of "body" and "mind". So for the teacher and social dancer, this is the first step – give up thinking in terms of "technique" and "artistry". Secondly, Alexander found a new way of thinking to express what is happening.

What follows is a description of Alexander's way of thinking. To start speaking in your lessons this way will be an exciting and challenging journey, but a journey that my experience shows me can have a profoundly beneficial influence on the effectiveness of your teaching and your dancing…

What is the New Thinking?

1st Step – Let "Now" Be Number One…
In Alexander's case, to avoid thinking in terms of body and mind, he began thinking in terms of the "critical moment". We can also call that moment "now". Now is the only moment that you can perform in. You can not perform before "now" and you can not perform after "now" – you can only perform within "now".

It is quite simple, and obviously true. Does anyone disagree with that? Of course not. So thinking in this way puts you back into Nature's way of being. Whenever your thinking aligns with the reality of how things exist, you will experience harmony. (Alternatively, whenever your thinking falsely represents Nature's way of being, you will experience conflict.)

2nd Step – Continue With Your Attention In Now…
Many dancers have told me an interesting fact: the only time they injure themselves is when they are not paying attention to their dancing. Is that true of you? So this step is a subtle point, but one every social dancer is familiar with: when your attention drifts from the moment of "now", the expressive quality and precision of your movement diminishes. I am sure you have all noticed this fact.

Many things take our attention away from now: fear of a mistake, lack of confidence, doubt about a figure or amalgamation. In every case the mechanism is the same: your attention is no longer placed on what you are doing. Instead, your attention is away with the fairies, hallucinating on some idea that has no concrete reality in the current moment. So, ensure that you continue with your attention in now, then…

3rd Step – Choose To Let Your Dance Do Itself
This is when "technique" and "artistry" could distract you most. You imagine what you want, then try to impose that idea on the movement of your self. Your "idea" does not emerge from "now" - it is not in response to the situation you are in right now - instead (usually arising from fear or doubt) a "mind" imposes itself on a "body". This comes from your abstractive thought. But abstractive thought has no place in the moment of "now".

Every great dancer, athlete, scientist, teacher or craftsperson will tell you the same thing: when they are at the peak of their ability, there is no abstractive thought present. Sports people call it "being in the grove." I am calling it "let the Social Dance do itself." I am sure you understand this, and if you don't - talk with other dancers about it. Many understand this point clearly.

4th Step – Do We Trust Our Own Self?
We can never be better than the best that we are. Our 'best' can only be expressed when we give full trust in our own ability to be our self. As soon as we doubt our self, we have opened our thinking to unhealthy separation. Out of fear we "impose" solutions on our body.

So what are we trusting?

1. Your motor skills – trust the skill you already have. You can not make your self get more skill in the middle of a final performance!
2. Your sensory system – let the music and atmosphere influence your movements
3. Your Partner – connect with them and support each other
4. Your Audience – invite them to be included in your field of attention

Of course these all happen simultaneously, not sequentially. Remember the first step? We only have "now", and everything is mixed into now. The heart of this process is trust, and, most surprising, compassion towards your self.

Artistry Comes From Trusting Your Whole Self

In my experience of over 40 years of being in this work, I have found that the more tension a person has, the more hostile they are towards their self. You can only be hostile towards your self by imagining you actually have two separate parts: a mind that can tell a body what to do. This artificial separation of mind and body creates an unhealthy freedom to brutally manipulate your body.

Artistry is the very opposite of this separation. Artistry happens in the absence of abstractive thought, in the absence of separation. We can not make our self be artistic, because artistry is an expression of the unity of life. The hallmarks of artistry are authenticity, spontaneity and originality. The only "original" moment is the moment of "now" – when an audience feels that we are connected to them, connected to the music, connected to our partner then they too forget their separation, and become one with you in your dance. This is the height of artistry.

Which brings me to a surprising ending – self-love is the antidote for separation. When you care your whole self, and treat your whole self as one, you actually create the best conditions for the blending artistry and technique to the point, where each becomes a complimentary expression of the other.

A Meditation On Fear

2011-01-18T13:27:00.001+09:00

It's wise to have fear when driving through blistering snow on a twisted mountain road in the dark, don't you agree? Or to run east, when surrounded by fire north, west and south?

The young often lack this kind of fear, to their own demise. They drive with abandon and the statistics reflect it. Yet I do admire those without fear, I aspire to become like them. So is fear is a useless thing? Should I attempt to abandon it altogether. Some think so. Others do not...

Tsong Karpa, a Tibetan sage from the 10th century, once commented: "Those who fear death, when death comes will have no fear; yet those who have no fear of death, when death comes, will be very afraid."

I have often mediated on this concept—imagining my own death, or the premature death of my children. Some call me morbid for it, I say I am realistic because it counters sloth and redundancy. Who knows when anyone will die? My brother-in-law was told by doctors he had only 6 months to live. That was over 5 years ago and he's in better health now! Who else doesn't have a story like that?

Then I wonder - can fear be harnessed as a positive force for change, by motivating me to act, as opposed to an oppressing force to remain the same? Can it be that, used with wisdom, the same energy can render either outcome?

So now I have fear as a subtler force to comprehend. The fear that motivates my work - because I will be condemned if I do not do it well - is it wise or stupid? If I get the work done, but only because of that, is it beneficial or not? Well, I got it done didn't I? How bad is that?

Here my fear is not of my self, but of the opinion of others. Then who decides who I am? Me or them? In the case of others, fear is impotent. THEY decide me, not me. This impotent fear is bound to exhaust me, in the same way that trying to bottle a smell is exhausting - it simply can not ever be satisfactorily done; aiming for totality is living in impossibility…

So what would a constructive fear feel like? How would it be different? For a start, as with death, it must arise from an outcome that possesses a stench of inevitability. If it is not inevitable, then to live in fear of it is to hallucinate on outcome, then react as though that outcome was real.

That has to be a working definition of insanity, don't you think? I hallucinate the worst, then start reacting as THOUGH IT ALREADY EXISTED. Which of course, by behaving thus, makes me the agent of its creation. Hmm - that sounds like stupid fear to me. Yet I am sure, in small doses, it is constructive too.

If the only way I can motivate myself to act, is a fear of what others will say - this is a very human quality. We call it shame, and shame, like fear, can be healthy or not. It seems many "negative" emotions are double-edged swords. To thieve from another person generates shame - it if doesn't, we definitely think you are sick. So shame, fear - are they two sides of the same coin?

It comes down to this: do I know who I am? Do I know what I want to do? Do I know what I stand for? Answer those with clarity, then fear becomes transformative.

If I have no clarity around that, then I look to others to help define me. We all started that way - we looked to Mum and Dad for appropriate behaviours and ways of being. At some point - puberty I guess - I started to make my own decisions. Did I complete that process, or is it still interrupted by my vacillating need to seek the approval of others?

When I have the later, then fear and shame start to crush me; when I have the former - that I know who I am and what I want - then fear and shame become healthy devices that prod me back towards the path of my choosing when I start to stray afar…

So the question is not about the fear, it is about WHO I are fearing: my own judgements, or the judgements of others? If I make who I stand for as inevitable as my own death, then fear gives me energy to act towards the outcome that generates joy, for no person stands for gaining more pain.

Ahh… to not have joy - now THAT is something to fear!

Ice Skating on Positivity

2010-11-29T09:57:00.002+09:00

Sydney's gone.

I have closed my school, put my dreams to bed and turned instead to face the mounting challenges of Japan. (Another blog for that.) Me, the eternal optimist, experiences defeat. There is no rosy face to it - I lost. My learning is in the admission - don't try to cheer me up.

I had been ice skating on positivity, but there lurked death-freezing danger as reality created cracks across my veil of thin ice. Can you see me, joyously skating across the lake of my hallucinations? There I am, laughing and shouting then suddenly: GONE. Where is he? Oh, I think he fell into a hole…

It was my wake up call. I still imagined I was 26, but without a million dollars to back me up. BodyChance in Sydney needed money, resources and most of all - teachers. Who was going to staff my studio? In my own article of DIRECTION, I pointed out that a school can not thrive in the absence of a thriving practise. Actually, it was that article for DIRECTION that first triggered my doubt: I was not able to implement what I had in Japan - the very source of our success. I was trying to create a school without first building a public business of teaching.

Those who know me well understand that more than a school in Sydney has fallen apart. My words read lighter than the heart that conveys them.

Yet I am still like those self-righting toys with the sand base at the bottom - I have rocks at my base in the form of belief, who hold me to my task in life and I turn again to building an extraordinary business around the discoveries of F. Matthias Alexander. Albeit just Japan. Good lord - isn't that big enough?!

So there is a rosy face I guess: the learning of defeat. Now I know: if I want to start a studio in another country, I need a lot of available time, a lot of money, many skilled BodyChance teachers, a lot of support and a well thought out plan of constructive action. This time, I had none of the above. It looks so obvious now - why couldn't I see it then?

Madness - but that is what happens when you ice-skate on positivity alone.

Nuggets of Knowledge

2010-11-26T08:22:00.002+09:00

If you're a turkey on November 24th in the USA, just before the inevitable is about to happen, life is a wonderful thing. You are fed, cared for by your owner, who may occasionally have a longing look, so that generally - based on past experiences - why wouldn't the next day be the same as the last?

Such is the danger of habit, for this poor turkey (unawares) is about to be devoured…

My thoughts were provoked by a headline in the New Yorker this morning "Gobbled" with a trio of active turkeys pictured in the glorious morning light of a country setting… A quote from Susan Orlean's piece:

"Unlike megafarm turkeys, which have been engineered to have breasts so disproportionately huge that the birds can’t stand up when they’re full-grown, Royal Palms are athletic and lively and curious."

Read more here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/susanorlean/2010/11/gobbled.html#ixzz16L2PlyWu

In the Turkey World, something close to genocide has just occurred, and with a jocularity and banality which, to this vegetarian and Buddhist, is almost unfathomable. Almost - but I have it in me too. I am not so arrogant to think I am immune to the way we all desensitise ourselves to horror.

Would I upset your sensibilities if I described it as systematic, organised industrial murder? Probably, so I won't do that. We are not accustomed to thinking this way when it comes to animals.

Loving a cockroach is one of the many challenges I have undertaken, and do continue to endure, in my current life. Only when it is our beloved chewawa, or cat or other pet that we have taken for companionship, are we are allowed to indulge in anthropomorphism. But not if we plan to eat the creature.

Gobbled.
(Susan isn't going to eat hers.)

###

So why the morbid meditation on the fate of the turkey?

Because, based on the past, we can not know the future. However, we mostly live as though the future will be a continuation of the past. Like the turkey, if every day was like this, then we can't imagine that November 25th will be any different from November 24th.

Recently I have discovered the failings of the inductive process. Nassim N. Taleb's book "Black Swan" has a lot to say on this subject. But mine is not an intellectual discovery, mine is a raw emotional ride I have been on these past few weeks. (Does it ever stop?)

Life has become unimaginably different these past weeks - edifices built upon deep conviction and emotion evaporating before my protruding eyes. Right now I am musing on the nature of the changes that I am both author and witness too. I can not be concrete, but will let slip nuggets of knowledge as those that will be affected by my changing, will themselves be informed by it.

The biggest news, hidden here for those who actually read my rantings, is that I have closed BodyChance in Sydney. Everyone knows, so that can be public. I'll share more about the Sydney decision, but not now. My other news is already made public, but only for those that can see what they usually fail to notice.

Peering Under the Sheet of Civility

2010-09-17T22:02:00.001+09:00

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;

I've always been attracted to this opening of Merchant of Venice - somehow it speaks to me. It reminds me also of Henry Thoreau's quote:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

In Buddhist philosophy it is called Duhkha or dissatisfaction, a condition that exists perennially at the base of every action we make.

What we usually call "fun" is most often only a temporary cessation of Duhkha. I get hungry, I feel wonderful while I eat, then I get hungry. Those who read my blog will know that every night these days I get hungry, so I have plenty of opportunities to study Duhkha.

These last two wistful days I spent wandering around my Osaka studio, pretending to be intent and focused, were all the time tinged with this delicate desperation. Hanging back at the wings was a sadness, not clearly defined but ever present when I let it.

So where does "will" fit in with this? I practiced my daily quantum accelerator (good boy that I am) and chose enthusiasm as the antidote for this lingering malady, but knew moment to moment that I needed choices that took me away from the inclinations that drove me. Sometimes I did, but after lunch collapse set in, and I supplicated to it.

The focal drive of this object called me is an endless source of fascination! I have many an analysis for the moods that try to possess me—fatigue, missing my little girls and wife, hearing of distrust some staff hold of, the schizophrenia of trying to get a start-up going in Sydney while overseeing an emotional shakeup in the Japan. Seeing it all written down here, the last two days are making more sense.

"Will" has its place, but acceptance is a beaut little tool too. It just is. I continue my disciplined life, my meso practise, my precepts, my self promises and say to myself "What I did today is what I did today." Part of the skill in managing myself is knowing what is kinder of all the choices that face me, providing each choice has a functioning role in the greater vision that possesses me.

I am writing in an odd way tonight, I am not my fingers! It is this mysteriousness of living that attracts me in the Venice quote. That there is the unexplained, that there is still a mystery to manage. If we really knew it all—where's the fun in that?

Tonight I have no answers, I feel some disappointment with myself, I am lonely but not desperate, I am tired but still thrilled to write, I am hopeful while overwhelmed by a multitude of necessities. All these contradictions, and I am sure something sits deeper under that. I have enlisted the support of a coach soon, and look forward to peering underneath the sheet of my civility.

Mr Bone Knows Why

2010-09-03T15:56:00.002+09:00

In Tokyo now, miles away in mind from Australia - only the paper lists keep it living.

This week a small class organised by Ikuo Nishioka, the ex-Chairman of the Intel Corporation of Japan, at his Business schools in Roppongi for some middle level executives from large Japanese corporations. I gave a quick powerpoint, then lots of demonstrations to my now accustomed looks of surprise, wonder and joy. I manage to throw in a mention of Victorinox's 40% productivity increase through AT—that got noticed. And there were the obligatory one or two doubters, looking through a cocked head wondering what my trick must be…

Of course nature's the trick—the wonderful capacity we have for natural movement, pain free. It is always the first surprise I love the most: the way the pain vanishes, the way nothing happens to make the pain vanish "What did you do?" It was a shock, wrote one participant after the evening, to learn that there is "nothing to do." I understand that. It is a huge shock. In these days of power yoga and body control pilates (there is even yogalates now) to learn to do less is almost heretical. Of course exercise is great, tone is necessary, flexibility takes movement—but the point of our work is not any of that. It is not even about release. The pain thing, as spectacular as it can be, is just a side show, and a distracting one at that.

No—the real thing is the evolution of human consciousness, and FM's discovery is a powerful factor in encouraging its development. Of course there are no shortage of other modalities working at the same goal, but none bring with them the concrete reality of using information on how our bones range themselves around joints to calibrate the state of consciousness, in a remarkably reliable and consistent manner. Mr Bone Knows It. Mr Bone Is It.

So BodyChance Japan is working on Gold Membership from April 2011. We seek the time-challenged market, not the financially-challenged market. My overwhelming concern right now is profit. Without a bottom line PL profit—who will invest in BodyChance? Who would lend us money to expand? I have to figure that out, and going up market seems the only way, otherwise we will remain stuck as a one centre marvel, slowly going tacky.

There's only five ways to make money in a business: cut costs, raise prices, sell more to each customer, sell to more customers or sell the business. Being a service industry, and selling our time for money, makes it hard to cut costs, although we try. And as I don't plan to sell BodyChance anytime soon, that leaves just three ways to make more.

Michael Masterson wrote a brilliant book—a text book really—about the 4 stages of a business. "Ready, Fire, Aim" He based it each stage on revenue. 1st is zero to one million in sales (that's us); next is one million to ten million (that's next). Stage two is all about increasing services, offering more variety. My other constant companion is—we need products, not just services. For our work, the obvious product is an information product. So I am dead keen on the development of that. Keep watching our website (if you can read Japanese).

As for new services, well there's the Gold Membership, although there's no gold members yet. Plan to launch that next April. We are also embarking on niche marketing campaigns—currently katakori (like sore/frozen shoulders, a big thing in Japan), presentation and (wonderfully left of field) stuttering. Sales growing at 30%, but still growing.

And my life is sculptured every hour these days—breaks are scheduled like everything else. Not that I have many, but it's the life I choose. I get overwhelmed sometimes at how profoundly small we are. I sit in the bullet train as building after building whizzes by, thinking "We are no bigger than half a floor of that building over there." And there are SO MANY MORE. When we ever be able to make a significant impact socially….?

If I'm lucky I've got 25, maybe 30 years of productive working life left. Then it's all over for me. My deep wish is to leave something that lives independently, that carries on. I think we have that in Japan now. I aim to have it in as many places as possible before the end. Sydney next. Oh Sydney. Don't start me on that…

I Am Still Quite Mad

2010-08-14T20:34:00.001+09:00

I wonder if anyone noticed that I’ve stopped my series?

I write these things, it goes into this virtual abyss, and very little bounces back at me. So I wonder. Do me a favour and let me know if you want me to continue with it or not…?

So I have been away from my Blog, and in a swirl of constant creativity through exploring ways to get the business going in Sydney. What a challenge this is proving to be. Yet now it is starting to look simple. Now I am wondering why I thought it was difficult.

As regular readers of my blog know, I recently passed through my night of despair. Breaking my wrist and requiring surgery was the symbolic cry for help that alerted me to that I could not keep on going the way I was going. So I made major personal decisions—which are not for this blog—so that now interesting, unexpected consequences are manifesting all around me. The real truth is that exceptional results require a little magic.

These days I am filled with possibilities, and overwhelmed with the idea that if I even succeed by 1% of my vision, there will be no teachers available to teach. In Japan we are already examining the issue that we can not educate teachers fast enough to meet the demand we are achieving. 35% sales growth in an economy that’s tanking. This is a nice problem, but a major structural fault of the business—without teachers, how do we expand? And this is a school that currently has 80 people in ProCourse (Alexander Technique Teacher Education), but all at various stages of achievement.

And while sales roar ahead, costs grow even faster—50%—which makes for another impossible problem. The cost structure of the business is lethal—way too many human resources are needed to generate the sales we get. No business can survive long term this way. Are we like the internet companies of the past—more intent on expansion than making any money? No—we are too small for that. We will never make it out the other side.

Of course—what do you do when you’ve got too many clients and not enough teachers? Raise your prices of course. Or introduce a higher end service that makes profit.

Not that I have that problem in Sydney yet, or Japan—but I can see if my latest Oz marketing plan works, we will quickly be overwhelmed with people knocking at our door. To make it happen is going to require a 24/7 focus from me for a sustained period of time. How can I achieve that?

Well, I need something to keep me awake. So will you be surprised to learn what that is? I am going to stop eating dinner. Once I have made my first million—cash in the bank—I’ll start again. Why use the money as the measure? Good question. Because it is real. It’s substantial. If I can’t do that, who am I kidding?

So despite a broken arm, despite collapsing into myself for awhile, despite two major health scares in one year—I am still quite mad.

Transformational Strucuture #8

2010-07-20T09:33:00.000+09:00

THE MUDDLE-HEADED WOMBAT…

My mother loved to call me “The muddle-headed wombat” because my ideas, plans and intention shifted around like leaves in a hurricane. What I have learnt is that being muddle-headed is fine, providing you have a clear vision driving it. In fact, with clarity, muddle headedness can work to you advantage. How’s that? Well, here’s my story…

Three years ago on a bullet train in Japan—on my way to teach in Tokyo while reading a book on leadership by Pat Mesiti—I decided to open a BodyChance studio in Sydney. I had no idea how I was going to achieve that—at the time it seemed enough that I had the clarity of my intention.

I kept that clarity, organised my life around it, and finally arrived back home in January of 2010 to launch my new project. Needless to say, for those who follow my blog, it did not turn out the way I intended. It’s rare that anything does. The divide between conception and reality is never greater when bringing to life non-existent things. Luckily, BodyChance Sydney is no longer non-existent! I have two wonderfully clear and committed companions that breath life into my evolving project.

So I have a school, the same intention, but a wonderful variety of different plans. That’s my muddle-headed part. This is the message to take from reading to-day’s excerpt of my essay on transformational learning structure: intention manifests multiple possibilities—if you are stuck in one path you won’t learn. My continuing journey to create a hugely successful college of BodyChance Alexander Technique Teacher Education in Sydney continues, but it continues in ways I never imagined on my fast-moving train of three years ago. Every day a new piece falls in, every day an old piece falls out.

To realise the creation of something that did not exist before you conceived it, you need a vision of razor sharp clarity, a huge intention of ‘no-matter-what’ and an ability to think creatively on your feet, “to turn on a dime” as the Americans say. My mum called it being “muddle-headed”, I call it creativity.

Alexander had all that, and applied it in just the way I have described above. This is how great transformation in your self and in Society happens. Read it, then please: plan to change the world!

***

ALEXANDER’s JOURNEY

It is clear when you read Chapter 1 of Use of the Self that there was a long period when Alexander knew what he needed to do, but simply couldn't do it. Actually, this kept repeating itself over and over until finally he reached the final Stage 3 of the learning process. The first instance happened like this:

"I now believed I had found the root of the trouble, for I argued that if my hoarseness arose from the way I used parts of my organism, I should get no further unless I could prevent or change this misuse.

When, however, I came to try to make practical use of this discovery, I found myself in a maze. For where was I to begin? Was it the sucking in of breath that caused the pulling back of the head and the depressing of the larynx? Or was it the pulling back of the head that caused the depressing of the larynx and the sucking in of breath? Or was it the depressing

of the larynx that caused the sucking in of breath and the pulling back of the head?"

In this passage, you can see how his intention is clear, he is focused on testing a whether his idea of the cause is correct or not. This research focus then threw up a lot of questions that needed 'testing' so that is the process Alexander entered into…

"As I was unable to answer these questions, all I could do was to go on patiently experimenting before the mirror."

Time passes, his understanding evolves, and then he reaches a new point with a more comprehensive theory of what needs to be done…

" It is impossible to describe here in detail my various experiences during this long period. Suffice it to say that in the course of these experiments I came to notice that any use of my head and neck which was associated with a depressing of the larynx was also associated with a tendency to lift the chest and shorten the stature."

After further testing, he finally comes to a new stage…

"Having got so far, I considered I should now be justified in attempting to put these findings into practice. To this end I proceeded in my vocal work to try to prevent my old habit of pulling my head back and down and lifting the chest (shortening the stature), and to combine this act of prevention with an attempt to put the head forward and up (lengthening the stature) and widen the back. This was my first attempt to combine "prevention" and "doing" in one activity, and I never for a moment doubted that I should be able to do this, but I found that although I was now able to put the head forward and up and widen the back as acts in themselves, I could not maintain these conditions in speaking or reciting."

He carries on this way for a long period of time, slowly coming to a clear and comprehensive understanding of the co-ordination necessary to overcome his hoarseness, which is the second step of Stage 2: formulating a comprehensive and final understanding of what needs to be done…

Transformational Structure #7

2010-07-01T13:13:00.001+09:00

HOW TO LOSE SLUGS AND GAIN PARTNERS WITHOUT EVEN TRYING

I’m having fun reading my own seminar notes!

If you want to have fun, don’t just read it—live it. That’s what I am doing in my journey to discover a way to create another thriving, successful BodyChance in Sydney: employing lots of people, getting great media attention, lifting the work into the minds of consumers in the same way that Yoga and Pilates have already managed. Everyone will benefit, but BodyChance will be ahead of the pack. THAT’S the plan.

So, now it is time for Testing. For experimenting with my ideas. And I am learning (from myself) that I need to let go of stuff. And “stuff” can be people, ideas, circumstances that are not inducive to my vision. Oh dear. So who gets fired? No-one really, I just hire new people around me, and the space is gone for other things. All those behavioural distractions that do nothing but mask the creeping despair… Well forget that! Here’s what I wrote to a colleague about that in an email recently:

“I know the drill - it is hard to lift yourself into the new life while surrounded by the old. I am learning clearly these days that the associations you have are integral to the direction you are going in. To shift that direction comes internally first, but it can be facilitated by consciously re-engineering the outer. That's hard to do with family and long-time friends, but sacrifices come in many forms for great achievement. It just depends how obsessive you are, and what you want to accomplish.”

So how do you “re-engineer” the outer? Well, every 2nd Wednesday: Philadelphia, Sydney, Mudgee and me all Skype about lifting our business game. On every Friday too. And now a local friendship that could evolve into a regular thing (if N is reading this – come on! Email me and we’ll toss around ideas over a coffee in that beautiful place of yours!).

So that’s what the practical application of my episode is about today. To be honest, my article feels rather dry and academic to me now. I think I was trying too much to show “I know something.” Oh poo to that. Sorry it is not so clear, but by the evidence of my own life—there are nuggets of gold if you actually do what I analyzed is necessary to transform your life…

___

Testing

BACKGROUND

From the Stage 1 of the work (i.e. The Wisher who Gathers Information and Finds Meaning In It) you will have discovered new ideas that can be tested in real life situations: how valid is this idea? Will it make any difference to me? By testing your current understanding in a practical way, you gradually come to a clearer recognition of your reality – what is the actual basis of the obstacle to my wish?

Another word for a 'testing' is 'experimenting', but what is an experiment? Generally speaking, it is a controlled observation. So essentially this step of 'testing' is no different from the step of 'researching' in Stage 1. However, the difference is that now you have a much clearer focus, you have a clearer idea of what you are testing. You have definite controls in place and you have a clearer focus for gathering information than you had previously.

Going on from that, in an Alexander sense, an experiment involves giving up something. At a behavioural level, it often means some kind of sacrifice on our part. Harking back to my own habit of drinking, in the end I gave up not only alcohol, but an entire way of living. Friends, social engagements, regular places – my whole daily living pattern changed, and most of the change was about losing what I had, not trying to make something new. The new life followed the loss of the current one. Only after I had stopped doing what I had been doing, did some new kind of behaviour start evolving.

So pupils will have lots of patterns of being that are very entrenched, that feel very much part of who they are. The shy person, if they truly decide to move their whole head and body while asking their boss for a raise, may feel too arrogant and overbearing when they first go about 'testing' this new co-ordination. But they understand that this unusual feeling is all part of how they can realize their wish to be more assertive and clearer in asking for what they want.

WORKSHOP

In working with each person, you need to understand when a person is at Stage 2 in their own process; understand that they are ready to make a decision to work with themselves. You can be rigorous with them, help them see that only they can do what is necessary for change to happen. Insist on their autonomy by giving less support with your hands, more guidance cognitively. Remember – you are primarily teaching them how to act within a process of change.

Many people do come to us at Stage 2 – they already recognise that something is wrong, they have already gathered a lot of information about it, and have many ideas about what to do. So far they have been unsuccessful – visiting you is another step in their Stage 1 plan of researching their problem.

Mostly, these people are lacking knowledge of primary control and choice (inhibition) in relation to their wish. With only a few simple demonstrations, they may quickly embrace the new ideas and start changing quickly. It is wonderful to find students like this! Their wish is already strong – if not, they would not be ready for Stage 2 of the learning plan. You don't need to work with their 'Wisher', you need to work with their 'Decider'.

However, the student who thinks they are already at the end of Stage 2 (as opposed to the beginning) is a different proposition. They 'already know' what is wrong and they have already formulated their own solution. They may be coming to seek help implementing their own faulty methodology, rather than take on a whole new way of seeing their problem. Then it's clear you have to take them back to Stage 1, and convince them to use their wish as a force to understand their problem in a new way, not as a force to dismiss Alexander's discoveries. We have all had pupils who love to continuously 'argue' for their own point of view, blocking any new learning that might come about. If instead you can introduce the concepts of primary control as a positive inhibitory influence on co-ordination and behaviour, and demonstrate their effectiveness in relation to their wish, you will have succeeding in getting them into the learning plan you are advocating.

There can be many games and processes that lead the students into testing out these new ideas. This stage of the workshop assumes they have knowledge of the basics, that what they are doing now is learning how they can apply this in their daily activities.

Ideas here may be spending one whole session going through the stages of a day, and all the activities that you do. Each student picks something they do every day, and the teacher goes through that with everyone, illustrating the kind of experiments that each person could be doing on their own between lessons.

TEACHER TOOLS

Can you devise fun and creative ways for students to understand their thinking processes? By understanding what is going on with the student, are you able to set up a situation that leads them to discover things without being told?

Basically our job is simple: analyse a person's use while in activity, work with them on finding a means to change it, then offer them whatever support they need to make that change until they are ready to be on their own.

The key here is that you don't want to do the students' work for them: you want to find ways that they can learn for themselves.

NEXT TIME: Alexander’s process and how he transformed his world with it. And ours eventually too!

Transformational Structure #6

2010-06-22T09:41:00.001+09:00

THE LONGEST NIGHT OF THE YEAR

Last night was the winter festival at Shearwater, the Steiner school that my kids attend. Parents, kids and teachers all gather outside to watch the 570 children perform on the grass amphitheatre with candles, costumes and chants. As we were standing around waiting, my mentor (whose child also attends) called me over, gestured for me to listen as he talked business with a successful local business man in the town that I live. So I stood and listened to them talk about numbers of people on the mail list, how a google add campaign could lift one aspect of business, schemes to lift the numbers of list, a plan to JV another income stream etc. etc.

As I took in their friendly business banter, I could feel my own business intentionality waking up… “Oh, I could this, and that. I must make my list happen, and campaign to get more people that way…” I came out of the fog, out of the sludge—suddenly, in a few moments, I was back feeling motivated, crystal clear and ready to act. Then I went to the meta-position and thought “Wow! This is what you are missing Jerry.” I understand, for about the 100th time, how critical it is to be in the energy field of others who share your aspirations, who vibrate in the same way, who want similar things, albeit wrapped in infinitely different forms.

The winter festival honours the longest night of the year, and sometimes I have been feeling this year as the longest night of my career. I find direction, I get lost. I find it again, lose it again. Not that my super objective ever gets lost, but the means whereby—the turns, twists, bends and reverses—these I keep discovering moment to moment, day by day, week after week.

In this condition, the primary challenge is motivation: keeping the fire alight—this is true for anyone, whether like me aiming to launch a new business by the mere sweat of my brow, or someone desperately seeking a job to pay the mortgage and care for the family (like me). Every day can feel insurmountable, the urge to seek refuge in behavioural distractions continuous. How can you manage?

That’s the subject of to-day’s 6th instalment on the deeper structure of transformational processes: you can not do it alone. You need mentors, teachers and people around you that offer support, that challenge and give in ways that you need to be able to carry on…

Stage 2: Decider

BACKGROUND

Think about this: what was the tool that opened up Alexander's investigation? It was a mirror. We can think of the mirror as functioning both literally (in Alexander's case) and metaphorically (in the case of teacher and student). The teacher is the mirror for the student: their primary job is to reflect back to the student the truthful information about what they are doing.

We don't change by just researching and analysing alone. At some point, we need to step up to the challenge of change and be willing to take risks, to let go of cherished beliefs, feelings and behaviours, move out of our 'comfort zone' and behave in ways that initially feel entirely alien and uncomfortable to us, even morally wrong in some cases. In the interest of achieving what we consciously wish, we need to subject ourselves to a state of great insecurity and turmoil. This is not something most people can do alone: you need help. You need a constant presence in your life that keeps reminding you to 'decide' to make this change. Whereas we talked about how the "Wisher" influences our learning plan, at this stage wish is not enough. We need a new influence, a new source of energy, now coming in the form of a "Decider" influence: our teacher, our group, some person or thing that keeps reflecting me back to me, just as Alexander needed to do before he could progress. If you look at the chapter, he writes three special paragraphs about how important the mirror was to his progress. (In Use of the Self, Chapter 1 “Evolution of A Technique.”)

Each stage is subtler than the last, so if you had trouble understanding the first Stage of the learning plan, you may be finding this stage even more mysterious. If it is clear to you, you will be excited by the implications that this second stage has in relation to your own teaching pedagogy and/or individual learning process.

An easy way to understand this stage is to imagine yourself or some other person you know with an obviously self-destructive habit that you have clearly seen needs to be changed. I can talk personally about my own past habit: I consumed excessive amounts of alcohol over many years. Originally I saw no harm in the habit, but through an innate process of research and analysis—Stage 1 of the learning plan—I came to the recognition that I needed to change.

So someone at Stage 2 of the learning plan already knows the problem, already recognizes the need to change. They may have many solutions in their mind (as I did) but somehow stay stuck (as I did). For me, just the wish to change was not strong enough—I needed more, I needed a "Decider" within me: in the form of an urge to be willing to do whatever was necessary to achieve the change I wanted.

How do you find your "Decider"?

WORKSHOP

The teacher is the "Decider" in relation to the student. Not that you make any choice about that: your ability to be a “Decider" for a student is entirely based on the student’s willingness to accept you as such.

If a student will not follow your suggestions, there is little you can do for them. This is true at the level of using touch, it is true at the level of behaviour. At the level of touch, I can not make a person's co-ordination change if they are unwilling for it to change. I may be able to force a change by skilful manipulation, but in my book that involves stepping over the line: now I am taking over the responsibility of the student to make the change on their own—my "hands on" is supplying everything. This can only result in an increasing relationship of dependency, simultaneously decreasing the autonomy of the student and their ability to consciously guide themselves. Isn't this the reverse of what the work is about?

Touch can certainly act as a 'motivator' for the student, waking them up to their potentiality, and helping to validate the truth of the information you are offering. This in turn can awaken the student’s willingness to listen and follow your advice, thus activating you as a powerful 'Decider' in their own mind. But it is still their choice that creates you as that in their mind, it does not come from your abilities or skill of touch alone.

TEACHER TOOLS

Winning the trust and confidence of the student, by being an honest role model for what you are advocating, is the most essential tool you have for Stage 2 learning. Unless the student is willing to test out and be guided by what you are proposing, not much change will happen.

Teaching a student at Stage 2 means getting them to do more of the thinking on their own—lots of questions, practical experiments, constantly getting them to test their own ability to learn about themselves autonomously.

Being able to understand how a student is thinking about the problem is essential at this stage of development. Asking questions is an art—the right question often leads the student to discover the answer themselves. Teachers need to be able to learn ways to elicit information from the student, by coupling together their observation of the students' movement and language to guess at some of the 'invisible movements' present in the student's cognitive view. And if you don't know—ask them: what are you thinking about? Don't be satisfied with their first answer, keep questioning until you hear the answer your intuition was guessing was there…

To practice this art, in your teaching, start asking yourself the question: what does a person need to be thinking about in order to move and behave in this way? This kind of analytical skill, and the creativity to imagine what might be going on in a person's thinking, are essential tools to develop in order to guide a student at this Stage 2 of their work with themselves.

ALEXANDER

This stage corresponds with Alexander already knowing what he needed to do—the primary and secondary 'directions' he needed to project—yet finding himself unable to implement them:

"I set out to put this idea into practice, but I was at once brought up short by a series of startling and unexpected experiences. Like most people, I had believed up to this moment that if I thought out carefully how to improve my way of performing a certain act, I should be guided by my reasoning rather than by my feeling when it came to putting this thought into action, and that my "mind" was the superior and more effective directing agent. But the fallacy of this became apparent to me as soon as I attempted to employ conscious direction for the purpose of correcting some wrong use of myself which was habitual and therefore felt right to me. In actual practice I found that there was no clear dividing line between my unreasoned and my reasoned direction of myself, and that I was quite unable to prevent the two from overlapping. I was successful in employing my reasoning up to the point of projecting the directions which, after analysing the conditions of use present, I had decided were required for the new and improved use, and all went well as long as I did not attempt to carry these directions out for the purpose of speaking."

Harking back to my excessive drinking habit mentioned previously, I personally equate this stage to Alexander's words above like way: I knew I didn't want to drink. I would go out to meet my friends with this idea clearly and strongly in my intentions. Yet at the moment I meet with my friend, and found myself being offered a drink, it felt too wrong, too 'out of character' to say "No, I am not drinking tonight." So instead of doing what I intended to do, I would smile “Oh, why not?!” and have the drink. Like Alexander writes above, it didn’t always happen like that. Sometimes I could say no, sometimes not. But on the balance of it, the old behaviour prevailed far more many times than not, and I was at a loss what to do next.

***

NEXT INSTALLMENT: The secret and unique method Alexander devised for solving the problem of what to do when you don’t that which you said you would!

Transformational Structure #5

2010-06-16T11:16:00.001+09:00

Apologies to the 5 people actually reading this series. That's how it feels to me – funny how sensory perceptions colour our states of being isn't it? In fact, it is not a feeling at all. It is a judgement, a conclusion that is mostly based on my hallucinatory projections. To unravel this mess, first I need something more concrete than my own deluded thinking. I could track the number of hits to the blog—there are ways of collecting such information. Based on that, I could then better assess how many people (might) be reading. On that a feeling would also arise, but now based on something more than conceptual cognitions with historic precedents that are no longer related to current conditions.

And this kind of constructive thinking is what the next instalment on running groups is all exploring…

***

Analysing

BACKGROUND

Once we have researched our topic, then the creativity starts: how can we interpret this information? How does it all fit together? Are there any patterns that suggest new ways of understanding the situation? It is not the answer we are looking for, it is the question. We get the answers we want, once we figure out the questions we need to be asking ourselves.

WORKSHOP

One function of a group setting, as opposed to an individual lesson, is that through watching a student's interaction with a teacher, the other observers in the workshop are developing their skills of observation and analysis. They are not passive in their learning roles – with the teacher's prompting, every person can be actively learning.

It is part of a teacher's function in a group teaching situation to make sure that the other participants are being engaged in the process. There are many methods for doing this, and one sure way is to seek out the best teachers (in ANY modality – not just Alexander teachers) and spend time watching and wondering how they do what they do…

TEACHER TOOLS

Taking on the point of view that we are assisting the person in including information about the entire area of their own co-ordination in pursuing their wish, essentially we need to be asking three questions:

i – What is the purpose of this person activity?

ii – What do they need to be doing?

iii – What do they need to stop doing?

During early lessons, we ask these questions and give students the answers, but our aim is to be training the student to be able to engage in this process successfully on their own. How we give 'answers' to the student at this level is often through using touch – a person can experience a new way of doing things, and in the process realise what they have been doing previously, and how they can change that in the future. But the use of touch is not always the most effective way to make a change at this level – offering a student a new way of thinking can be just as effective in certain circumstances. It is important to see that touch is in service of a greater goal, and not the goal itself. Touch is a tool, not an end.

ALEXANDER

After the passage quoted in "Research/ALEXANDER", where Alexander writes about the two facts he had at hand, he then goes on to analyse those facts:

"I considered the bearing of these two facts upon my difficulty, and I saw that if ordinary speaking did not cause hoarseness while reciting did, there must be something different between what I did in reciting and what I did in ordinary speaking. If this were so, and I could find out what the difference was, it might help me to get rid of the hoarseness, and at least I could do no harm by making an experiment."

Later he summarizes his approach by presenting his plan:

"(1) to analyse the conditions of use present;

(2) to select (reason out) the means whereby a more satisfactory use could be brought about;

(3) to project consciously the directions required for putting these means into effect."

At Stage 1 we are only working with (1) & (2), aiming to get a clearer understanding of what is going on in order to decide upon ways of testing out our ideas by making experiments.

***

NEXT TIME: A need for energy that can fuel the change process… Without it, nothing moves!

Biccy Budget Slashed, But ProCourse Continues

2010-06-12T19:38:00.000+09:00

I flew in my dreams last night, in the last quarter of the night when the Dalai Lama says the meaning is most significant. I am on my back, looking up at trees and I can power myself, I can move miraculously across the tips of grass blades, in a field where a white cow is flying over fences designed to constrain him, staying ahead of the black cow in pursuit.

Yes, the Biccy Budget (for buying Arnotts Assorted Cream Biscuits) has been slashed, but our Sydney ProCourse continues. Three people dropped out, after only three weekends. I could be depressed, but I am past that now. I've done dark. We still have four members, so the tide is out. Whatever.

Instead, I march my faithful four down to Darling Harbour, with a fistful of flyers each, to watch as I cajole, terrify, entertain and lure whoever will listen to my declamation: "You can win $50 dollars today!" (And I snap the yellow note between my fingers, hold it high above my head amongst the glistening harbour water) "And the reason you have bad backs is the same reason you can't win this $50 dollars!" (…as an amused group of sunglasses ladies, hungrily holding ice creams in hand, park in front of this odd man in the afternoon sun) "And to win this $50 all you have to do is stand up from the stool without moving your head about."

"I'll do it" pips a little creature somewhere below my knees.

Quickly I think (they could win it) "But you need to have a bad back."

Soon they have one, and clamour again for a chance to win. More people stop, amusement is building - what is going on here?

"Will you take a flyer?" my students ask. Some will, some won't, some hand it back saying "Save a tree."

Than a rangers is there - I register on the video at the Central Office of the Sydney Foreshore Harbour Authority. "You have to stop" says the ranger "You don't have a license." Ah, a license.

So we stop. My students are excited. They enjoyed this little school excursion. We learned so much today - what interests people in this work? What kind of explanations kept them listening? What kind of explanations did not. Who stopped, and why.

Some of you who follow this blog may be expecting the next instalment of the structure of a BodyChance workshop. Well this was it today - creativity, moving out of the box, doing the undoable. That was today's lesson.

And it was fun. I wonder if the cow will fly tonight?

Transformational Structure #4

2010-06-04T23:49:00.001+09:00

This is the fourth installment from an essay I wrote for the Lugarno Congress for Alexander Technique teachers in Switzerland in 2008. In that sense it is written specifically for teachers of Alexander Technique, but as a plan it is generic—anyone working in the field of transformation of restricting cognitive constructions (and name me one that isn't) will understand and use what I am writing about here. To save you time, there is a short synopsis just before the article proper!

However, before then – what is topical for me now? As I write tonight, I have completed the first day of a seminar on internet marketing—how FaceBook, Twitter, a Website, Mailing List and Blog all converge together to create a "story' for people which is compelling enough for them to tell their friends and eventually buy in to the service you (I) am creating.

For your business to work, it best grows out of your life purpose and passion. This is true of me. All my life—since the mystical (hysterical?) calling that prompted me at 18 years to resign from Australia's most prestigious performing arts school (NIDA) to pursue a career (vocation?) as a teacher of Alexander Technique—I have done nothing else. My first lesson was in 1969, so here I am, 41 years later, still doing the same thing.

And I am calling out for support - people who share my vision that Alexander's discoveries is one of humanities greatest gifts to itself, and 116 years after the first AT lesson was ever given in 1894, it is still crying out for visionaries bold enough to claim the mantle it so self-evidently deserves!

Is that you? The please contact me... Especially if you are in Australia now!

SYNOPSIS

My big message from to-day's seminar was: do your research. This is my article topic today—you can't figure out how to navigate your way if you have no idea of your starting point. If you are in Sydney, how is a map of Tokyo going to help you find the Opera House? This is how it is for me building BodyChance in Sydney. Can I assume a successful formula from Japan is repeatable in Australia? Who will come here? What are their needs? Can they afford it?

As in a workshop, so in a business, so in your marriage, addiction or vision. After identifying your purpose and passion, now comes the time for collecting information…

***

Researching

BACKGROUND

Research means gathering information about the obstacle: What does the student already know? What can they tell you about it?

There is a lot of information already available about what we are doing, how things are happening in our world, so collecting all this information within your field of attention is important for being able to do the next step of analysis.

Researching and analysing are two interdependent activities – talking about them as separate steps is slightly misleading. For example: a new way of analysing data can lead you to a different kind of research. So they always operate in tandem, each one becoming a support for the other.

WORKSHOP

The aim is to help the person know:

i - how to seek information about their own co-ordination in relation to corresponding information about their behaviour in seeking their wish; and

ii – how to use that information to recognize their obstacle(s) in a new light.

TEACHER TOOLS

Firstly, your student may be holding valuable information that they don't even realize has bearing on their wish. It is important to listen to them, to help them put together all the disparate facts about their current situation that they already know. It is better to let the pupil tell you about themselves, before you start telling them things about Alexander's discoveries.

Con-currently, you help them along the research path by using one of the most valuable tools you have: your touch. The teacher can use touch to awaken within a person a recognition of what is going on within a totally new framework of reference: Alexander non-doing and head co-ordination primacy. You 'reframe' the obstacle for them.

We are training the student to consciously manage their co-ordination whilst in pursuit of their wish. Under this heading comes the basic concept that head movements govern vertebral co-ordination, which in turn governs the use of the limbs. At this stage, the student knows basically nothing about this – the teacher's role is to awaken this area of knowledge within the consciousness of the student, and then demonstrate for them the diverse and powerful applications it has for researching and analysing what is going on in their lives in relation to their wishes.

ALEXANDER

The first information he gathered was recognition of two facts, things that he already knew before he started:

" When I set out on this investigation, I had two facts to go on. I had learned by experience that reciting brought about conditions of hoarseness, and that this hoarseness tended to disappear, as long as I confined the use of my voice to ordinary speaking, and at the same time had medical treatment for my throat and vocal organs."

These were facts, the analysis came next. (see next instalment: Analysing/ALEXANDER). Although it is not immediately apparent, close reading of the first chapter of Use of the Self reveals that there was in fact an extended period of collecting information by Alexander in his visits to numerous doctors and voice therapists:

"I therefore sought the advice of doctors and voice trainers in the hope of remedying my faulty breathing and relieving my hoarseness, but in spite of all that they could do in the way of treatment, the gasping and sucking in of breath when I was reciting became more and more exaggerated and the hoarseness recurred at shorter intervals. The treatment I was receiving became less and less effective as time went on, and the trouble gradually increased until, after a few years, I found to my dismay that I had developed a condition of hoarseness which from time to time culminated in a complete loss of voice."

Notice a few things in this passage. Alexander refers to "doctors and voice trainers" in the plural, so we can deduce his research involved visits to at least four different people. Later in the same passage, he writes "…as time went on and the trouble gradually increased until, after a few years…" so we know that this stage of his learning plan lasted several years. If you think about that, why would you want to skip over this stage of the lesson with your student so quickly? It is clear, when you read what follows, that this period of his learning helped Alexander develop a view about what was going on.

Another important aspect is to understand that 'research' can involve gathering information by testing the obstacle through contact with different modalities. Alexander's process of discovery does not exclude seeking help within other areas of knowledge or alternative techniques.

***

NEXT: Gaining insights from the information you collected or "When the Fun Starts"…

Transformational Structure #3

2010-06-02T14:18:00.001+09:00

Continuing my series on how to structure a group: today The Power of Wish.

For those just tunning in, the point I have been making (to save you time) is that the first job in any transformational relationship with another person is ensure that THEY are driving the process forward from within their own energy/cognitive construction. If you run the show, you get more of yourself. If you facilitate them to lead, you unravel a mystery…

The greatest compliment I can remember receiving was in Washington DC when I ran a workshop with some AT teachers, a Psychiatrist, a Dance Therapist and a couple of Psychologists back in the 80's. I had been invited as I was exploring "emotional directions" at the time, and how we need to recognise those if we want fundamental change. One of the participants came to me at the end of the workshop and said she gave herself the task to watch how I worked. However, she said she could never "see" me, it was as though I wasn't there. No matter how hard she tried to watch what I was doing, her focus was always drawn in the unfolding world of the participant I was dialoguing with.

Wow was I pleased with that! I do think a great anyone "disappears" in some way, just as a great translator, actor, musician or any other performer subverts themselves to facilitate the ideas, character or music that are being communicated. When we notice the "performer" as opposed to what is performed, I think ego is butting in and telling us "Aren't I great?". And of course – I know all about that.

This is how that principle, albeit slightly differently, is clearly evident in Alexander's own journey…

***

ALEXANDER

[Quotes all from Use of the Self, Chapter One: Evolution of a Technique.]

Alexander wanted to be an actor – that was his overall wish. It was a positive and concrete thing:

"From my early youth I took a delight in poetry and it was one of my chief pleasures to study the plays of Shakespeare, reading them aloud and endeavouring to interpret the characters. This led to my becoming interested in elocution and the art of reciting, and now and again I was asked to recite in public. I was sufficiently successful to think of taking up Shakespearean reciting as a career, and worked long and hard at the study of every branch of dramatic expression. After a certain amount of experience as an amateur, I reached the stage when I believed that my work could stand the severer test of being judged from the professional standard, and the criticisms I received justified me in deciding to take up reciting as a profession."

Whilst this was his clear wish the obstacle was the fact that he kept losing his voice:

"All went well for some years, when I began to have trouble with my throat and vocal cords, and not long after I was told by my friends that when I was reciting my breathing was audible, and that they could hear me (as they put it) "gasping" and "sucking in air" through my mouth."

When a student comes to a class, they may start by only talking about the obstacle, which is a natural thing to do. However, it is important for the teacher to unlock the wish that stands behind the obstacle, as that is the key factor motivating the student. It alone can determine how effective the lessons become. For example, the student may want their lower back to get better, but why? So they can spend more time playing with the kids; so they can advance in their job; so they can go back to leading their 'normal life'. The 'wish' needs to be expressed in the positive, not the negative.

The point to take from Alexander's own experience, is that the bigger the wish, the stronger the drive of the student to apply what you teach them. Unlock that energy in the student, and you have completed half of your job. Ignore it, and lessons will be like walking through mud, with the student always looking to you to supply the drive and energy of the lesson.

Alexander's wish was huge: this is clear when he writes about his emotions while considering the obstacle he was facing:

"My disappointment was greater than I can express, for it now seemed to me that I could never look forward to more than a temporary relief, and that I should thus be forced to give up a career in which I had become deeply interested and believed I could be successful."

Having a wish, or rediscovering the wish that energizes us, is an essential piece of our learning plan, but one that is often ignored in today's teaching environment. Our "great students" are usually the ones who have this wish in place! If we understand this, we can support all our pupils into becoming "great students".

***

TOMORROW:

The role of research in bringing about transformational experiences…

Transformational Structure #2

2010-06-01T11:02:00.000+09:00

The second instalment of my article on the underlying structure of a group that seeks to lead people towards transformational outcomes in their lives. Main point of today's article (to save you some time) is the critical importance of letting your participants set form/activity of the lesson...

***

Stage 1: Wisher

BACKGROUND

You start by wanting something. The something you want is the final result, this thing you want to possess, do, become. The wish needs to be expressed positively. Alexander: I want to act. Once the wish is clarified, then the obstacles to that wish become the objects that are researched. Alexander: loss of voice. The wish is a source of energy, a motivator to do what is necessary to achieve that wish. Without it, there is no direction, no means of calibrating where you are on your journey, no way of knowing how you are doing. Alexander: voice becoming reliable or not.

WORKSHOP

Ask everyone what they want? Get them to participate in the workshop by asking them to set the agenda of what will be explored. If you are working with students over a period of time, keep revisiting this question, and keep including it in the agenda of a workshop.

Also, during the workshop itself, try not to put students in situations where you are dictating the agenda almost all the time. The best structured workshop is the one that addresses the wishes, questions and needs expressed by the students. By linking that with the information concerning Alexander discoveries, you are creating a far more effective learning environment for your students.

Observation and Analysis need objects to focus on – what these will be can be set by the students, not the teacher. The teaching points and principles then arise out of the process of working with those objects of attention. Alexander chose the process of making a decision to sit or stand from a chair. In his model, the teacher decides the activity, the student follows the teacher's wish. An alternative teaching pedagogy is to let the student decide the activity. Essentially it does not matter. As Alexander himself pointed out:

"We are not teaching people to get in and out of chairs – we are teaching people how to make a decision against the habit of life."

So the students wish becomes important to reveal – it drives the workshop or lesson, and gives focus to their desired outcomes.

TEACHERS TOOLS

The teacher needs the skill to unlock from the person the truth of what they really want. Where do you learn that? Like all things Alexander – by consistently working this way yourself!

At the start of lessons, a student's real wish may or may not be apparent, even to the student. Teachers usually get around this problem by supplying the activities: offering chairwork, tablework or one of the teaching procedures that Alexander developed. The goal then becomes subtly distorted until it feels like the lesson is about how to do things more easily, how to be "released, loose and free". This was never Alexander's primary goal, it was merely a step to achieving something much bigger: conscious, constructive control of the individual. When the principles and practices of the work can be related to real life needs and wants of each individual student, then it work correctly becomes the tool or means for that person gaining their conscious intentions or wish.

***

TOMORROW: An analysis of Alexander's story, showing how all the points I make above are demonstrated in his own journey...

Transformational Structure #1

2010-05-31T13:25:00.002+09:00

I write a lot of things, and some of my material lies languishing in piles around my office.

Are you wanting to transform your life?
Do you work in group teaching situations and need a fresh perspective?
Are you teaching, and want to know an underlying structure that informs your work?

I wrote a particularly long and thoughtful piece on "A Plan for Teaching Groups" which I've decided to run in sections in my blog for awhile. It's not been published anywhere. I gave it to teachers at my class in the Congress in 2008, otherwise that's it.

I don't know if it is about running groups, so much as about the process of transformation that I use structurally in all the work I do.

So the beginning of this article goes like this:

***

A Plan For Teaching Groups

BACKGROUND
This is a generic plan that works for anyone wishing to move towards a new situation in their life, whether that involves the gaining of a new skill, the transformation of a social situation, or becoming a different kind of person from the one you perceive your Self to be at the moment. This plan is the context for teaching a person to gain autonomy in achieving what they want for themselves.

WORKSHOP
This plan becomes the basic structure of both an individual piece of work with one person, as well as the structure of the entire workshop. The workshop or lesson is not primarily about helping the person to feel better by co-ordinating better, the primary purpose is to demonstrate how this process works, how it helps you achieve what you want, and how you can practice it on your own.

TEACHER TOOLS
Your own personal understanding of the scope of the work determines the skill set you need to help others. The basic tool set is a precise understanding of your own co-ordination compared to the average person, and the ability to consciously manage your co-ordination in any activity of life. With this skill set, you gain the ability to understand how others are dealing with this issue. From this skill, the ability to influence other people's choices about their co-ordination will naturally flow. The "touch" ability of an Alexander Technique teacher is a subset of their own co-ordination, unless that teacher develops a touch guided by the ideas of intervention and manipulation. Alexander's own pedagogy leant towards the category of manipulation, a word that is he often writes in his books to describe the way he uses his hands in teaching.
In workshops, another essential skill set is the ability to manage the overall quality of engagement of the participants of a workshop, and a use of language as a tool for positively influencing the ability of others to correctly conceive the information that is being offered.

ALEXANDER
The plan for this workshop is based on Chapter One of Use of the Self "Evolution of a Technique." In that chapter, Alexander moves through all the steps described below. If you study the chapter, and compare it to these notes, it is easy to understand how the plan below follows the stages of Alexander's discoveries. My language is different, but careful study will reveal that it is still essentially the same description as Alexander's own in that chapter. By getting this point clear in your mind, you can create a clear workshop structure and gain an understanding of the learning plan we are asking our students to apply to their own wishes for change, growth and development.

***

TOMORROW: Stage 1: The Wisher (in us all)

That's all folks!

Want A Whole New Life Update

2010-05-27T12:48:00.003+09:00

I heard from a friend that my recent blogs, particularly my last, might have come across as though I was re-thinking my commitment to BodyChance in Sydney?

I am surprised to hear that, as I opened that blog by stating how powerfully I remain committed to staying on my current path. But if that isn't convincing to you, perhaps this is…

1st Reason

Since I was 20 years old I have done nothing else but study and teach others the discoveries of F. M. Alexander, so 46 years later I am not about to stop! What would I do? Who's going to employ a 56 year old who has never done anything else but teach AT - Small market eh? I think I could only employ myself!

2nd & 3rd Reasons

I have two compelling and rock solid reasons why I wanted to start BodyChance in Australia - as opposed to just staying in Japan - and those reasons are Angelica and Grace, my two children.

My heart has been moved by how they are blossoming under the influence of Steiner Education. The oldest one, Angelica now in year 5, transformed from a monosyllablatic rock of darkness, to a springy & brightly moving chatterbox. In Japan, without us realising the cause, she had been hiding herself, getting darker and smaller as time passed by. Seeing her now, I can never return her permanently to school in Japan. She's here to stay. Grace two - who is only in Year 2: ten years to go.

So you're stuck with me here!

Want A Whole New Life? Update

2010-05-21T14:09:00.006+09:00

I heard from a friend that my recent blogs, particularly the one below, might have come across as though I was re-thinking my commitment to BodyChance in Sydney? I am surprised to hear that, as I opened this blog by stating how powerfully I remain commitment to staying on my current path.

But if that isn't convincing to you, perhaps this is…

1st Reason
Since I was 20 years old I have done nothing else but study and teach others the discoveries of F. M. Alexander so, 46 years later, so I am not about to stop now! Who's going to employ a 56 year old whose never done anything else but teach AT? Small market eh? I think I could only employ myself!

2nd & 3rd Reasons
I have two compelling and rock solid reasons why I wanted to start BodyChance in Australia - as opposed to just staying in Japan - and those reasons are Angelica and Grace, my two children.

My heart has been moved by how they are blossoming under the influence of Steiner Education. The oldest one, Angelica now in year 5, transformed from a monosyllablatic rock of darkness, to a springy & brightly moving chatterbox. In Japan, without us realising the cause, she had been hiding herself, getting darker and darker. Seeing her now, I can never return her to school in Japan.

So you're stuck with me here! Now, here's the blog that worried folks…

***
Want A Whole New Life?

Those who follow my blog know that I am public about the raging furnace of my aggregated consciousnesses. Recently my fire ran low, my embers are just faintly glowing, but luckily my mission is not linked to my emotional weather report. Emotions ebb up and down, enthusiastic one day, despairing the next - not a reliable base upon which to build dreams. So to those who wonder if I falter (?) know that I do not. My vision is not based on how I feel at any particular moment, and if that is how you run your life (?) I suggest you study the discoveries of F. M. Alexander: "When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won't want to use it."

My current crisis is precipitated by a number of elements - chief amongst them a loss of clarity. Clarity is power, remember? My vision is to build a company that will render access to Alexander's discoveries to everyone on the planet. I don't reckon I will get the job done in this life, so my sub-mission is to put in place the processes which will make that inevitable.

So part of that plan is "proving" that this can be done. That Alexander's discoveries can be harnessed to the energy of money to bring about global transformation of society. That is the BodyChance mission: To make profits through Alexander Education to bring about positive change in society. Is this a mission that interests you? Then I need you help. It's not something I could ever do on my own.

How could you help me? Well, you need to be in Australia, specifically Sydney. But not absolutely so, because any suggestion, advice, relating of experience or duplicate goals in other places could all feed to each other to create a burring fire again.

Japan is proving that Alexander discoveries are attractive to ordinary consumers - how it goes there we will see (we have yet to make real profits) but the prospects are looking good. But it is easy for people to say "Oh, Japan is a special market - you could not do that in the West." So enter Sydney. If I can build Sydney to mirror the success of Tokyo/Osaka (yes, we have two hubs of expanding activity in Japan now) then I have created a blue print to repeat this again and again: London, New York, Seattle, Zürich, Boston, Brisbane, Paris etc. etc. As my lama says: "Think Big. Big love. Big life."

So Sydney is critical to realising the bigger vision: if I fail there, all I am is a loud wind bag of hallucinogenic proportions, blowing foul air on the truths of human society. I could be that, in my worst moments I have been that, but my intuition tells me I am on to something. That this could very well be, THE NEXT BIG THING.

So how can you help me? Well, I'm getting there…

How do I make a success of Sydney? This is the question I have been asking myself, posing a differently shaped question and receiving various advices on an almost daily basis. So the obvious place to look for an answer is within the current success of Japan. Well, those who follow DIRECTION know that a new issue just came out where I penned a 3,000 word article explaining just that - so I won't try to repeat all the insights I gained again here.

The essence comes down to this:

1. Create a product (cost, convenience, content) that solves a problem;
2. Market it to people who can afford it.
3. From that market, build a Professional Course (ProCourse)

In Japan the statistics tell us that of every 100 people who book into our one year Ippan Course (for weekly lessons in group or individual) 10% of them will upgrade themselves into the ProCourse.

So THAT'S how you can build, and sustain, a successful BodyChance Alexander Technique Teacher Education Course.

Except there's one problem - resources. To build that in Sydney I need:

1. A full-time studio in Sydney's CBD, or some other central location. (Expensive)
2. Teachers to teach, who understand BodyChance AT Education (chair and table NOT)
3. A full-time administrator (expensive)

All this equals Working Capital, which I do not have. Now if you are beginning to think "Oh, this guy wants to me to give him some money…" then you are wrong. I don't. (Although if you want to invest, you can always let me know!) No, it's not money I want - it's energy: in the form of relationships, skills, networking - but I get ahead of myself.

So what do you do if you don't have working capital? You build a cash flow business. You get enough clients who pay into the business so you can use that income to build the business. This is the approach I am currently taking. However, this approach means I can not open the Studio in Sydney (yet), I can not build the market that will sustain the school longer term.

Although I have a vital lesson to learn from Japan, I can not apply this lesson in Sydney! It's the money, stupid. Longer term, when Sydney succeeds and Japan is turning over real profits, THEN I can ask other people's money. But right now, I have to "prove" that the BodyChance methodology of monetizing Alexander's discoveries is a valid, doable model.

So - that (finally) brings you to my current dilemma: if I can not build the ProCourse Education on the base of larger Ippan (Public) education - the studio, the central location, the one year course - then how do I build it?

Actually, this is not only my problem. This is a problem that any AT Teacher Education school has. And the sad fact of the matter is: none of them do it very well. The anecdotal evidence is that AT Schools the world over are struggling at various levels. Oh dear - so am I barking up the wrong tree? Maybe. But I have not given up yet.

What I have given up, which is a huge relief, is the idea of building the Ippan (Public) Education Programme any time soon. My goal is to first build the ProCourse Education. Now I have 7 people (or is it 5 as two people need to tell me if they plan to continue or not) and this creates a cash flow of about $15,000. Not much - it certainly doesn't cover the costs. I subsidise the school from my own personal funds at present. These are the true facts that a vision is born from. I am having fun doing all this, but there is never ending risk and surrender necessary to move ahead. If you wonder if you could do this yourself (if you are not already) then that may be your answer. There is not much that is "safe" about this path. Every day is an unknown, but that is why I like it so much. It means living the work in everything I do.

So - here I am grappling with this question: who is going to want to join BodyChance ProCourse Education? Where are they? How can I reach them?

I planned to get much further than this with my blog today, but I have run out of steam. How can you help me? Well, start by giving me your answers to those questions. Tell someone close to you about BodyChance in Sydney (if you can). Come an experience a free introduction with me if you live in Sydney (or close by). Go to this link to book your place:

http://www.bodychance.com.au/events/

If you want it for free, enter BODYCHANCE into the coupon box, so instead of costing $49, it costs $0. That's a simple, effective way you can help me right now.

Who knows - your life may never be the same again!

Wouldn't that be fun?

Deliverance

2010-05-19T21:43:00.002+09:00

Dark days tinged with disappointment and despair have delivered determination unto my decisions...

Ambition has yielded to sobriety, and this creature understands better that balance is a function of intelligence.

BodyChance, that creature of my minds' imagination, absurdly flutters out from my 5 senses, faint projections on unsuspecting bases: which side is real - the base, or my projection upon that base?

The lives of those living in Sydney will continue on whatever I do. And yet, some lives are lived differently by way of my projections, while others remain as indifferent as the stars.

How quickly do I want to proceed? Always in a hurry. Be afraid of death, be afraid. Now, not later when it comes, but now. Then you are ready.

So I hurry. Then I stumble and fall - a broken arm, an eye falling out. Vision lost. My right hand is gone. Is this the way?

Clarity is power.

The Siblings of Achievement

2010-05-12T13:06:00.001+09:00

Can you imagine success fuelled by darkness?
Powered by inner demons seeking escape?
Shielded by dreams that seek to forget?
Startled by tears that convulse?

Snapshots in my life:
a broken arm
tears at Golden Week
relief fantasies with death

It was the last that alerted me most - that ticked away, hidden beyond my daily grasp is desperation, hope is draining away. I want to share this with everyone. BUT. BUT. BUT.

Never Give Up - it is what I am guided by now.

My business life these days is shaped by my family: their needs, their wishes, the possibility of constructive living. My beautiful eldest daughter, who - until only a few months ago - was herself sinking into darkness, hiding herself from the tightening noose of Japanese school life, while puberty overtook her body. I was thinking she had become monosyllabic - hormones dulling her childhood - but once in Mullumbimby, at the happy Shearwater Steiner school, she came out of hiding: a bright face glowing lively again, lightening her voice and confirming to me that our move to settle into Australia had suddenly raced ahead of our deadline for achieving it.

So that is my situation now - a fabulously successful experiment in Japan roaring ahead, despite a stagnant economy, and Jeremy - sitting on the joyful crescent of its success, tumbling down into the emptiness of Sydney. I left Sydney 10 years ago and once the work had flourished there. Now very few teachers earn a full-time living, one school languishes with 6 or 7 trainees, and publicly there is little feeling of care or knowledge about AT in Sydney these days…

I had people helping me - but they wanted co-operation, which I didn't offer, so they left. Then someone on a basic salary - but I can no longer afford to pay that, so naturally empty pockets pull stronger than passion. Many people around me are inspired by the mission of BodyChance, are happy to be involved and committed in heart and soul to its cause, but we all need to earn a living. That is the crux of it, that is why I started BodyChance in the first place - to create a culture of success, to generate interest, excitement and engagement in Alexander's discoveries with the wider community again.

What has happened to that vision? Nothing, but I am understanding now the loneliness of carrying a vision. I am the first person who is never paid. My salary, so painfully developed over 10 years in Japan, now devotes itself to funding BodyChance Sydney and I am alone in funding that vision. If I can pay, I can get support - but without that, well… When you are in my shoes, support is not agreeing to be paid to work for BodyChance - that is employment. And it is reasonable - who works for nothing? It is a ridiculous idea. Except that I do. Hundreds of hours, $30,000+ investment, and still very little to show. It is my vision/burden and it feels more the later than the former at this time. Sigh.

Will I give up? Of course not. Do I feel strong all the time? No. Have I made stupid decisions? Of course. Have I been clever in building BodyChance Sydney? No. Have I learnt lessons? Many, and continue to do so.

I hate to complain, I love to hype, but there is a darker side to creating a vision and I am with that now: a feeling of darkness, even a whiff of despair putrid and poignant. I will regenerate, I will continue - but I wonder if it can be said that vision and darkness are siblings in achievement?

Balls In the Air

2010-05-10T07:18:00.002+09:00

If you can imagine Martha Graham marrying Noam Chomsky - Lucia Walker is the child of that family! She has her own style as a teacher - created mainly by herself, as she does not seem to "follow" any particular lineage of teaching.

At BodyChance Alexander Technique ProCourse Education in Sydney, Australia over the three days of May 7/8/9 2010, Lucia throws balls in the air and then asks you to collect information about all wonder of things…

- do you startle or not? do you think that is a bad thing? really? isn't it part of being human?

- are you annoyed when your ball does not fall into the hand of the person waiting to receive it? are you joyful when it does? isn't this also something natural? isn't it a deep part of your self that when your co-ordination requests are fulfilled, you experience a natural joy? Alternatively, when you fail, you feel some frustration - isn't this only natural?

- when the ball drops, why say sorry every time? isn't dropping the ball as natural as catching it?

- what happens if two balls or more are thrown to you at the same time? the story of the juggler who received 12 of them - inspirations in possibilities...

- as the ball arrives, how is your focus? do you see the ball, the thrower and the others standing in the circle? what would happen if you just focused only on the ball? or only on the people surrounding the ball?

Of course our weekend together was not all about throwing balls - there was Bozo Looking for a Corner too! All about exploring your focused vision and your peripheral vision; your ability to connect with someone, while still holding the group; noticing your excitement in response to the game, but having the ability to guide that excitement appropriately towards the people and circumstances of the game.

Lucia's work is multilayered. Often you start with one simply idea, conjoined with an activity, then build on that - creating the complexity of living within the jurisprudence of a game: non-confronting, non-personal, but "You" am still there, "You" are still behaving in ways that mirror back into your real life, and in so doing engender discoveries and insights that eluded you previously.

Lucia has crafted her own "hands off" teaching technology: that binds a group in happy explorations of human behaviour leading to discoveries that then reflect back into everyday living. The researchers of the Art of Group Teaching need to take attention and learn from this gentle, inquisitive, fun-loving student of human potentiality and intelligent living.

A deeper current that also flows through Lucia's work is that you are OK - that behaviours you condemn yourself for are no more than exaggerated tendencies that are naturally at the core of every human being. The obsessive desire to be right - destructive as it may become - is still part of a natural movement. The regret at mistakes is the source of the vitality that creates success - everything weaves together in a embroidered cloth of living that is deliciously colourful moment to moment, that provides experiences containing everything we need to know about everything we want to know, including the discoveries of the Alexander Technique.

Balls in the Air - wondering at your reactions to the everyday moments that all living consists of, that is Lucia.

Knowing No

2010-04-20T03:59:00.008+09:00

Rosa Luisa Rossi is flying out of Australia as I write this, no doubt saying no to something while receiving information about the results of continuing with her wish towards a new, unknown behaviour—this is the simple teaching, with profound results, that she shared for BodyChance ProCourse Education during these last few sunny April days within Sydney's glorious harbour side environment. It was lunch by the water, and reflections on deep but simply generated changes, wrought from Rosa Luisa's discoveries over 12 months of intensive Alexander related research.

Rosa Luisa, with 28 years experience of learning and teaching the work, worked together with Dr. Joanna Maria Otto—a German neuroscientist and recently graduated AT Educator—by relating together known facts about how our brain functions, with the procedural flavours of Rosa Luisa's teaching technology.

How does the brain govern habit?
How does the brain change habit?

[Note - these were my posing of Rosa Luisa's questions, not her actual questions. Here's Brendan's re-formulation:

"How does the embodied nervous system participate in maintaining and reproducing certain sensori-motor correlations despite variations in context?"

and

"At what points in the circularity of sensori-motor correlations known as habits, do opportunities emerge for conscious redirection of sensori-motor patterns along new lines of correlation?"]

What is the "primary control" in neuroscientific terms?
What is direction and inhibition?
Why do we use our hands? How does that work?

The emerging answers to these questions was experienced by the newest Members of BodyChance's ProCourse Education (Alexander teacher training) at SimplyActive Health Fitness Centre in the heart of Sydney's CBD.

What impressed me most, was the way she deftly re-introduced the concept of no without causing the stiffening "stop" that I had abandoned as a teaching technology a long while back. The reason for my shift away from this approach implied within Alexander's writing, is that I noticed that this two-stepped approach—"Say no to the old stimulus, then give your directions for the new behaviour"—introduced a bizarre response, almost exclusive to Alexander learners. Pupils and teachers alike often exhibited a kind of held, waiting, spaced out look (at its worst) that didn't much look like it was connected to any joie de vive. Closer to the stiff-necked pride of the defeated. I am exaggerating of course, but polemic is one method to stimulate people to think. It also pushes people more rigidly into their corner, so how could I critique myself in a constructive way that would get the point across?

I had been saying "no" to using "no" in teaching and with myself—what Rosa Luisa introduced is the need to know "no", to understand how it functions as a positive in my nervous system to bring about a change in my behaviour. Her simple insight is that no and yes occur simultaneously, not as two steps.

I had come to the same conclusion, but with an entirely different teaching technology to implement this idea. Marjorie Barstow provided the model for my approach, when she asked the simple question: "If your head is moving forward and up, haven't you already inhibited it going back and down?" So the processes of direction and inhibition (noticed I reversed the traditional order that they are usually written?) are not two separate processes, they are two sides of one behaviour.

Of course, when you read Alexander's "Evolution of a Technique" in Use of the Self, it doesn't come across this way. He worked quite hard at separating his wish (to speak) from his means (the directions) because he noticed that any strong wish to speak repeatedly caused a habitual response towards his old patterns of behaviour. So he writes:

"I therefore decided to confine my work to giving myself the directions for the new "means whereby", instead of actually trying to "do" them or to relate them to the "end" of speaking. I would give the new directions in front of the mirror for long periods together, for successive days and weeks and sometimes even months, without attempting to "do" them, and the experience I gained in giving these directions proved of great value when the time came for me to consider how to put them into practice."

I also once asked Marj about that period Alexander spent "in front of the mirror". (Marj was training with Alexander during the time he was writing this chapter—apparently he would bring it in sometimes and read it out to those at the school then.) Marj was emphatic about one point: "Yes, but Alexander was moving all the time." I wondered at that comment, what does she mean "Moving all the time?" when Alexander writes how he was just standing there giving directions.

I mean, there's Alexander, busily giving directions, but not going ahead with what he wanted to do. And this message seems to have imprinted itself on the consciousness of Alexander Technique teachers—first you have to stop the old thing, then direct the new thing, then do your activity. So in certain cases—it becomes three steps!

No wonder Feldenkrais commented that Alexander Technique teachers look like they have a broom stuck up their b#m. From my own experience of training in London in the 1970's, I spent countless hours standing there giving my directions. We even had the expressing "I am setting myself up to…" Little did I understand then that I was, truly, "setting" myself, becoming what these days I call an Alexandroid.

And it all emerges from a profound misunderstanding of the discovery that Alexander wrote about in "Evolution of a Technique". Watching Alexander himself, as he appears in his "teaching" film towards the very end of his life, there is someone who is truly NOT setting himself up for anything. He is process, moment to moment: alive, receiving information, interested and curious about all around him.

And so it was with Rosa Luisa, as we experimented with her ideas over the last three days: saying no to whatever we recognized as being inappropriate to our wish, while simultaneously saying yes to that wish, and continuing in the activity of that wish, and receiving new information concerning how that wish/activity was proceeding. There were no steps, it was one continuous, unified activity.

This way is opposed to the often times practice: "Oh, I am misusing myself (judgment). I'd better stop that (inhibition). Now I will improve my use (by giving directions-often in the form of releases to parts we know get tight) and carry on with my wish (the activity)."

Such a complicated schedule.

Instead of that, give yourself a "no-yes", all in a unified moment richly filled with new experiences, moving moment to moment towards my wish with all my information available, leaving me Freedom to Choose (FPJ's book title)... We enjoyed exploring the work this way, and Rosa Luisa got herself a ticket to come back to Sydney and work for BodyChance's ProCourse Education again in 2011!

Everything Is About Movement

2010-04-04T19:50:00.001+09:00

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

EVERYTHING IS ABOUT MOVEMENT, EVEN BEING.

***

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.

Christmas Sciatica

2009-12-19T09:16:00.004+09:00

"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.

Minister For Everything

2009-12-09T12:11:00.002+09:00

I am a cowboy at heart, not an intellectual.

I try to make it look right, but it's not really me. It's a constant struggle, as many of my goals depend on an enlightened mind that understands and can navigate so many different worlds: business (me?!), neuroscience (me?!), anatomist (me?!), language (hopeless at Japanese still), writing/communication (this), Buddhism and of course Alexander discoveries, with all the pedagogical issues that howl around the propagation of his work.

These last two are most treasured and important to me - the study of human consciousness itself, primarily my own, hence by extension everyone else's.

In 1996, when I was on the small Working Group that organised His Holiness the Dalai Lama's visit to Sydney to offer the 11 day Kalacharka ceremony, my nickname was "Minister for Everything". It was meant as a derogatory remark to accentuate my maddening tendency to want to know everything about anything. And this has always been central to my own disorder as a human being - a case of gluttony, a case of wanting too much, resulting in a lack of focus, of persistence, of commitment. It's apparent in many things I have done, and still do.

Yet, like all disorders, there is a flip side which is extremely beneficial. If this tendency to gluttony can be harnessed to serve one master, then rather than being detrimental to its owner, it becomes magical. Much as many people disliked me, so there were others who were thrilled with what I could do. The sheer volume of creative planning, analysis of different needs, the master plan for whole project, the detailed budget, the staffing allocations, a twist on the publicity, the videoing of it - all of the above and more flowed from my flawed consciousness in service to His Holiness.

His Holiness has often said, that in small measure, our faults can be harnessed to benefit us. He gave the example of two Buddhist practitioners living in the same household. He pointed out that the self-cherishing mind could lead to competition between the two partitioners: "Did you do your practise to day? I meditated for over an hour actually." But a little competition, His Holiness remarked, could be a good thing if it spurred you to practise more.

So I see my disorder this way. I can't not not be me - that much I have concluded. Short of becoming enlightened in this life, I am stuck with the cluster of habits, imprints and personality disorders that were hardwired into my brain a long time ago.

So giving up on the premise that I can fundamentally change the energetic organisation of my personality, the next obvious step it to channel the energy of this personality in a constructive way. Do I believe no transformation is possible? Of course not. But transformation involves effectiveness in directing the energy of activity, of thought , of intention. It is not of the nature of Jeremy becoming His Holiness, or any other spiritual mentor. I think this is a wrong understanding of change, and is usually motivated by people who lack love for the precious qualities of their own human consciousness.

People may think that these "confession session" blogs indicate a disturbed mind, a person in angst, a person in conflict. Far from it. These reflections are born from a recognition of the precious and magical nature of my humanity - how wonderful it is, how extraordinary, the whole "what a piece of work is man" speech from Hamlet. I am in love with my Self, but not the disordered self, but the Self that is ordering the disorder. Terrible choice of words, but the idea comes through doesn't it?

Which all comes down to this: my approach to this dilemma these days, as BodyChance grow richer, is to ask others to do what I really can't (and often don't want) to do myself.

In BodyChance, Cathy Madden is the light behind our training approach, a transforming conduit from Marjorie Barstow, who herself stood upon Alexander's work and said: "Why not this too?" and so a whole new movement in the AT world was born, a movement that is being increasing felt by the Alexander community as time marches on. In England, Don Weed - a long time student of Marj - has shown members of STAT that with the right approach there are plenty of people who want to train - "50 new students have joining the ITM Teacher Training Course" they proudly state on their website.

Here in Japan we have 65 people on our ProCourse training program, and more than a 100 more now signed up for our Ippan annual membership program of one private lesson or one group session every week. We reached that growth in 18 months, and we're already planning the opening of a second studio in Tokyo.

Folks - Alexander's work is still alive and kicking, don't believe the doomsayers. The world is about to be flooded with a whole new generation of teachers, an extraordinary renaissance of our work is coming. Believe it.

For BodyChance, the other thing I am doing is organising a ProCourse Summit in Switzerland before the next Congress in 2011, where all the Training Directors and Associate Directors of BodyChance's ProCourse trainings in Tokyo, Osaka and soon to be Sydney (numbers 10 teachers now) will gather together for three days to do an overhaul of the curriculum and set up various experiments and changes.

Finally the Minister for Everything can take a rest, and feel proud that something good has come from something bad. Personality disorders are great!

Regulation

2009-11-25T03:36:00.002+09:00

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 human repair. So just like Madonna, a rebirth might be a healthy thing. Look out for BodyChance Coaches - OK?

If I decide to do that, please understand it has nothing to do with my idea that I have invented something new or better or different - it is simply a question of positioning the product where it doesn't attract government regulation.

Who needs that?

Seeing the Self

2009-11-16T06:15:00.025+09:00

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. This year alone several people have walked out of a being in relationship to me: their core issue being - I suspect - this inability they perceive of me being unable to hear them. On that score it is often the case that I know people are against my plans - I simply choose to ignore their objections. Sometimes I listen - and I have spent my whole life attempting to develop this ability to listen - but another voice chimes away inside claiming that they just have fear for the unknown, and that if I listen and follow every objector around me, I will simply not get everything done.

I am a person on a frantic mission, no question of that. Frantic? Why frantic? Well, the clock of life is ticking. Death - as the regular reader of this blog will know - is already stalking me with finality and definiteness. Right now I have stumbled upon something the likes of which could reengineer the consumer presence of Alexander's discoveries in the world within a business model that could benefit millions of people for hundreds of years - and make a shit load of cash while doing it. Alexander's work is a commodity - it is like gold in your hands. But just as the internet is a place where you're always needing to be figuring out - what is the next angle? How else can we sell this thing? - so is Alexandersphere a mysterious place to be doing business, a new internet-like something at a scale that has not been witnessed as yet…

It is like an improved software program. We are installing this new software in the human brain - the essence of primary directed movement - and slowly reprogramming the world. I spent a long time thinking about the mission of the company I have started. And after 18 months - and going through many options - the simple truth of it hit me. The purpose of this company is to make Alexander's discoveries accessible to everyone on the planet. It will take hundreds of years, but when it is finally accomplished, as it most certainly will, humanity will not be quite the same anymore.

Alexander fantasied himself about this in his books, didn't he? Was he neurotic too? Probably he was, especially if it turns out that my theory about my disordered Self is true.

Alexander wrote that the adoption of his discoveries by humanity would constitute a new step in the Evolution of the Self that would usher in Man's Supreme Inheritance which is the Conscious Constructive Control of the Use of the Individual as a Universal Constant in Living.

And it will all be accomplished on such a huge scale, that it will eventually generate mountains of cash. It will transform the pain industry, eliminating thousands of jobs while creating even more new ones: rehabilitation programs will evolve into razor shape treatments that are so effective they leave patients better off than they were BEFORE their injury! Any why not?

This is the Alexander Technique after all. This is the thing that two Nobel Scientists have acclaimed, one of them being the father of neuroscience, Sir Charles Sherrington himself. This is the same Alexander Technique that the British Medical Journal in their August 2008 issue published a break through study which demonstrated a 86% reduction of pain in a study of 579 people. If that can't make you money in this world (?) nothing can.

I don't think this is just my drunken grandiosity, but it sure needs a little dose of insanity from somewhere just to keep it gong another day. It will, after all, affect primary school curriculums.

So, what if I could figure out a business model for doing AT on a corporate scale in a huge consumer market? What if I could capture basically the same sized market that Macdonalds does - then can you see why I am frantic about it? Ray Crock was 53 when he started Macdonalds. I am 54 and counting. But I honestly think I am on the edge of cracking something huge.

Macdonalds for a food chain? Well, why not Alexanders for a movement chain? What you eat and how you move - can you think of two things more important that those? That is the arrogant vision I am holding on to inside. I will even be offering shares in a few years. BodyChance has googles of potential. So. Such a vast and drunkenly grandiose plan (I've done my time in AA, NA etc.) requires a highly neurotic person with Niagra Falls in their brain, constantly spewing ideas out onto the early morning dew.

Such a person would be me - meet my personality disorder.
(If I could bow now, I would).

While I function in this hallucinatory world - for that is all it is - protecting myself from feeling any of the pain my insanity is inflicting upon those that surround me - out pops another idea, a new plan: ideas after ideas until all the weary people surrounding this endless thinking waterfall, finally nod off and go to sleep. Meanwhile, I dash out another idea in my drunken lust for planning things while I use this process to distract my attention from the pain I might be feeling if I was truly in empathy with those people around me. I continue to believe that all this is actually real.

So yes, I see my personality disorder quite well I think

But… (and here it comes)

What if I am right?

***

My spiritual teachers assure me that my job in life is to be of assistance to others, and this is at the core of the mission I follow so frantically. At a certain level, there's no room for doubt or cautiousness in me at the moment - yet I can see that this is neither wise nor beneficial to my plans in the longer run. How can being a catalyst for hurt towards those closest around me be congruent with a spiritual purpose? Clearly something is amiss here. Doubt is the artist's friend - without it arrogance, coarseness and stupidity can breed - so why would I choose to ignore that???

So I have my doubt, this blog is actually asserting it. For me there continues to be this unanswerable question pressing in upon the space surrounding my purpose.

Another irritating aspect of my personality disorder for friends and foe alike, is the changeability of my point of view. People start to distrust what I say to them, having already experienced shifts of viewpoint that leave them feeling stranded and betrayed on an island of my making! While I am witnessing this storm around me, what is my neurotic voice chiming to me inside?

Oh, that things change, everything is always changing, and people live with the delusion that things stay the same, when they simply do not. Sure what I said awhile ago is true, but that was then, this is now - things have changed.

Of course, for the opportunist, it is a lovely song. For those left behind in the wake of my new plans, it is no comfort at all. Success in business, it is often said, is dependant upon the speed with which change can happen. The corporate monoliths that finally fail in business do so because they can not adapt to changing circumstances quickly enough. The fourth biggest company in America before the advent of the Ford was a maker of whips. Now they no longer exist.

But at least they were reliable. They made whips, and continued to make whips, and they didn't disappoint the people who thought they were a whip making company. In a way, our Alexander community is a little bit like the whip making company. These days people want something that we clearly don't offer in a way that is wonderful for them. Yet at the core what we have is what they need - so why are so many Alexander teachers struggling to make a living, and most not even doing that?

But I veer from my subject, which is what I always do - yet another frustrating, personality disorder for others to suffer in my presence. So as usual I got nowhere figuring this out. I see what it is that people object to in me - I am not blind to that - but I do not see a way to change that without ceasing to be who I am. Recently I have been concluding that this is the package you get - take it or leave it. I am not without compassion for the effects of my disorders upon others, but I can not see how the engine of my ambition can function without them.
12

Giving Directions

2009-11-09T13:56:00.012+09:00

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 messages that are bringing about this condition and not to project messages to counter-act the effects of the other messages.”

Given the continuing fondness for “giving directions” in our Alexander community, it is surprising to me that this opinion of Alexander’s is not more widely known for being the heretical recantation that it is. If Alexander thought we should stop “giving directions” why are we still doing it?

Well, for good reasons, chief among them being that we all suffer from varying levels of attention deficient - an increasing chronic problem in our modern world. Our quality of attention is at the heart of the issue of “giving directions” so it is worth digressing a little by pulling out some information that has been utilised by meditators for thousands of years to achieve levels of attention that can deliver extraordinary powers of insight and well being to understand how we might intelligently understand what this whole process of “giving directions” is all about.

***

Omniscience is the quality of knowing all things in every moment, of being able to have your attention with every sentient being in every moment, without discrimination of past, present and future. It is a totally incomprehensible concept to our dualistic minds, but in the Buddhist analysis of reality, those that achieve this quality of attention are called realised beings, for they are able to simultaneously know the conventional truth of dualistic existence as existing within the absolute truth of non-duality or dharamkaya.

We - being those that have consciousness - all possess the ability to realise this, and it comes about by the removal of the obstacles and afflictions that suffocate our knowing. Our consciousness is defined as having two qualities: that of knowing, and of luminosity. Neither of these have any material form - consciousness is considered a formless phenomenon - yet in human beings, gross consciousness does exist in dependance upon organs that are essential for the arising of different categories of consciousness: the consciousness of seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching, feeling and knowing.

***

Unless we are omnisciencent - and I don’t remember meeting anyone who was - our capacity to know something fluctuates depending on where and how we direct our attention. Attention is not a faculty that requires any effort on our part. From the moment of our birth, to the fading of our life, attention is filtered by our intention. We place our attention here or there depending on our intentions.

So our attention is driven by our intention, but the two are easily confused. Attention is not something we can turn on or turn off. Can you stop seeing? Even if you close your eyes, you still see something. Even while you sleep, you hear things. Attention is not the same a being conscious of something - that is intention at work. Attention it is simply to ability to receive information. Or that is how I am asking you to consider it for the sake of these ideas.

We receive huge amounts of information every second and we are totally unable to intentionally place our attention on all of it at once. So we must be selective, and that selection is directed by our intention, which in turn is powered by our interests, our desires, our passions.

We can direct our attention any place we like - so how do we decide where we want it to go? Well, as I said, if we have a passion for something - a person, a hobby, a food - then our intention calls us to pull up any information that exists in relation to that object. If the desire is out of control, it is very hard to decide to place our attention somewhere else. We obsessively look information about the person, food and activity we desire.

So part of the ability to bring attention under our direction is to tame the unbridled passions that afflict our consciousness. In the absence of these afflictions, in the presence of satisfaction and contentment, a wonderfully new question might arise in our consciousness: what will I place my attention on now? What do I intend to study now?

Alexander suggested that the most profitable candidate for this newly freed intention is the primary control in the use of our self - intend to pay attention to that by directing it in every activity. Hmm. How does that work?

Intention is fuelled by knowledge, which itself is the product of being able to distinguish one thing from another thing within a holistic framework. When a dancer watches another dancer, they have their attention on things that we, the non-dancer, do not even know. They have educated themselves, so their attention can be placed in ways that we can not do. However, we see everything they see - that don’t see anything extra. So in my analysis of attention and intention, our faculty of attention functions with no limitations compared to theirs, however their intention is vastly different to ours.

Being that they have studied dance for so long, when they direct their attention, they direct it in ways that we can not possibly do. They make distinctions between things that we do not even know you could make distinctions between. The placement of the hand at this angle instead of another angle during the dancing of a flamenco dance, is simply not something we can pay attention to because there is no intention to do so.

Intention is the key, and Alexander made a case for placing your attention on your use of your self, and he proposed a method for doing that. That method is his idea of “giving directions” but this is an intention, it has nothing to do with attention.

But people use their intention to see if their attention has been able to make the change that they were hoping to make based on an experience they had previously. If I use intention this way, I interfere with attention. If attention was a person, it would answer you like this:

“What do you mean is your back still hurting in the way it was a minute ago? I am telling you everything I know. All I know is what you are already doing, so why are you asking me if I can tell you something I just didn’t tell you?"

So intention is not something that looks back, not even for a second. Attention is the report of the intention, of “what just happened” and it is already a settled matter. It is history, be it only a milli-second ago. Intention on the other hand is directive to the future, even one second into the future. So “giving directions” is something projected into the future, something that is not “known” while intending it.

And we can educate ourselves around this intention - second by second, day by day. That is why the repetition of words is meaningless without the company of a vastly growing reservoir of distinctions of intention in relation to our use. The words only exist because our faculty to maintain attention with our intention is so dismally poor.

So by reminding ourselves to stay with the intention by a skeleton or words - or by wordless imagery or any other method that can hold our attention to our intention - then we are growing, However, searching into past experience does not give us much new to consider - it can actually decrease the acuity of our intention, it does not enhance it. Which is why intention is needs to be a fresh something projected one second forward, seeking more information through experimentation with thought, while attention is always the report of that one second - and can not be shaped by anything other than intention. The report is necessary - to shape the next intention. The two dance together, but dwelling mostly on one (trying to feel out what is going on) or the other (chanting words like a machine) do not work. The process starts with intention, it always must, while attention is being directed towards the object you are considering - the Use of the Self.

This seems impossible to most people—they can not believe that the mere throwing of an intention into the future will change how they co-ordinate themselves. Which, when you think about it, is nonsense of course. We do this all the time, but not it seems when our intention is around the co-ordination of our self through the activities of our day.

If this is all making no sense to you, maybe I am too tired to be writing. I am getting a little confused myself - but a reason to write all this was to dig deeper into my own thinking and fault it. I can now - I hear lots of arguments against what I just wrote, mainly of the clarifying kind.

Anyway, signing off as my bullet train is now approaching Kyoto. Maybe I will re-write this to make more sense, maybe I won’t.

Strike One

2009-10-19T04:27:00.003+09:00

Death comes to us all, but rarely do we live with that truth on a day to day basis. This was certainly true of me - until this year. Now my eyes can not see the things I once saw with anything like the clarity I was accustomed just three months ago. There is pain in my groin from a recent operation, and a new thought is germinating in my mind: how soon will my aspirations for this life outstrip my capacity to continue reaching towards them?

In a way, it has already begun: I've experienced strike one in the outing of life, and I have a strange new feeling lingering around me like a deserted mountain held in a mist - the real sense of my own mortality. Lama Tsong Karpa, a great Tibetan Saint of 600 years ago, once wrote that those who feared death - when death came, would have no fear. But those who had no fear of death, when death came, would be very afraid. So I can gain solace from that - death hangs around me now. Goodbye to my dear little children, goodbye to the dreams and aspirations of this life - goodbye to my wife, friends, riches and reputation. Just ashes in the wind awaits me one day.

Not that I have a terminal disease or anything like that - just the struggle to read a book, the difficulty to walk at a speed I am accustomed to. Walter Carrington wrote that the most difficult aspect of ageing was that inside one did not feel one had aged, but the outer truth was incongruent with that inner map - and adapting oneself to new expectations, habits and behaviours was a constant task facing the ageing person.

Everyone around me tells me I am going to fast - while inside I feel I am too slow. Jaldhara says I work too much, push myself too hard, while inside I have a feeling of laziness. Incongruities, unreliabilities - where is the truth? What is the way? Others tell me these blows to my health, happening as they did in quick succession, are an indication that my vegetarian diet of 30 years is catching up with me. My iron is too low, and my macrobiotic mates tell me my food is way too yin - I need more yan.

So do I embark on a new research project to collect information about food intake, food theories - to analyse and experiment in the hope of creating a few more lusty thrusts towards my dreams? Or do I re-emphasis my daily meditation practice, take advantage of this new found realisation of death, and use it to remind myself of what really matters in this life, what truly goes with me beyond the grave? All good questions, with time and contemplation. This is the benefit of the realisation of death - one of the most basic realisations to have in the Tibetan Lam Rim Graduated Path to Enlightenment.

Now that's happy framework for this Eeyore gloominess - I am on my way to enlightenment!

Defective Understanding

2009-09-10T00:29:00.002+09:00

I just read a most wonderful sentence which re-engineers Alexander's contention to be careful of the printed word and how we interpret it:

"Those who impose on texts the stains of their defective understanding derive only a superficial comprehension..."

Lama Tsong Karpa from a 600 year old Buddhist text.

Getting AT into the Sports & Fitness Industry

2009-09-06T21:41:00.004+09:00

This is from a thread on the Alextech list, link is shown above...

***

Years ago I was talking with Marjory Barlow about the DIRECTION issue I published on the work of Marjory and her husband Dr Wilfred Barlow (still available for purchase BTW) and Marjory confirmed how "Bill" (was it?) had put together over two hundred different "Alexander directions". What the actual number was I can't remember - but it was jaw-droppingly high. I had heard about it previously - I don't remember from who - and I was hoping that Marjory could hand over some written material on the subject to publish in DIRECTION Journal. In those days there were stories hanging around that he could sort out someone's frozen shoulder in just one session. Having suffered myself from that condition in the past, I understood how knowledge of the 200+ directions would certainly assist in pulling off such an accomplishment.

Anyway, Marjory knew what I was talking about, but alas there was nothing to print. She mentioned that Bill had been working on something, but I never heard any more. And so I forgot about it.

Until recently. Now I am guessing that Barlow took his training as a Doctor, combined it with Alexander's knowledge of the working unity of human behaviour, and mapped the specific roles of the myiad of interacting muscular forces, to come up with his 200+ directions. I am not advocating this as a model for training teachers - in case you were thinking that - but I do think this hints at a vast new science of human movement, one which accurately relates specificity to holistic function.

The Fitness and Sports industry, and all the medical and para-medical parafernalia that accompany it, are the masters of specificity. We, in our closeted Alexander world, are of the masters of unity. Further energise a process of creating relationships between these two reservoirs of knowledge, and you have the makings of a new brand of scientific knowledge.

Part of the strategy of BodyChance - which is the company I now run - is to situate Alexander's discoveries square and centre in the Fitness and Sports industry. We are currently embarking on a long term project to do just that in Australia - the most sports crazy nation on this earth. (Haven't you ever wondered how a nation of 24 million people manage every Olympics to get themselves in the overall top ten gold medalists, along with nations who number 100 million and upwards?) Our plan is not a quick fix operation, it is an enterprise bound to take several decades. In this, I think we can burrow from the success of Alexander's work in the performing arts world.

Authority flows from the experience and knowledge of the activity you are involved in. Musicians who were trained in AT, returned to their world and started creating a good "buzz" about AT and how it can help. Our strategy at BodyChance is to consciously and deliberately start appealing to people in the Sports and Fitness Industry - sports persons, fitness trainers, small business owners of yoga, pilaties, aerobics clubs etc - and encourage them to come train with us; then support them to position themselves back in the market with a superior product that combines fitness & sports training from the holistic viewpoint of Alexander's discoveries. (After all, Professor Little's study showed that AT with a bit of exercise was an effective formula! :-)

When I look around the Alexander community today, it is obvious that one category of successful teachers are the niche marketers - people who "specialise" in applying the work to specific activity. When you can walk the walk in a particular field, and relate that information back to Alexander's discoveries, you have the essence of a great business. So penetrating any profession or sports is best achieved by training people who are already in it. The technology and art of marketing, focused to sell Alexander's golden product, makes the task simply one of finance, savvy and intent. The outcome is not in question.

***

I don't know about other teachers, but it has taken me decades to achieve the accuracy of observation and confidence to be able to observe high level sports performance, and offer any meaningful feedback that is short on the mumbo jumbo and long on accuracy and effectiveness. For a start, the serious in this field inevitably speak the universal language of movement - and more often than not expect the same from you. There are many language systems that have been created to describe movements - particularly in the dance world - but none have such universal agreement as does the language of the anatomists. Starting from the anatomical position, we can describe every movement with some accuracy. It is still quite a clumsy language, but that's what we have.

This is new thinking for me, evolving as I do in figuring out the pedagogical evolution of the BodyChance training. Only recently I decided that anyone who trains at BodyChance will leave with a good working understanding of the subject. Some have escaped my clutches, but these days my trainees are tested, and don't get their certificate if they fail this exam. Luckily there is a text book available for our BodyThinking module - The Anatomy of Movement. I recommend that any teacher - thinking as they read this that maybe I've got a point - go ahead and buy this book, spend a few weeks getting familiar with it, then keep it near your teaching space henceforth.

Our BodyThinking module is a not a dry attempt to learn terms - it is an ongoing experiment to relate the specific to the whole, to bring the wisdom and insight of Alexander's discoveries to bear on the known workings and functionality of the various movement systems within our behaviour. Every year we will take a new activity and go through the process of analysing the needs, misconceptions and co-ordinations involved in this activity. This year we are analysing Bellydancing - and we are having a lot of fun figuring that out. Like everything I do, it is integrated with the overall business strategy, so BellyDancing in the training school is also part of a marketing push in the Tokyo area to create new members for our Ippan Course (where you take out a membership for a year of weekly AT lessons).

Using this model, I will entice into the training those people who have skill sets that can inform and enrich our BodyThinking module. Obviously the next move is looking at different sports, systems of training etc. and THIS is the seed that will eventually flourish into an Alexander presence in the sports and fitness industry.

***

Another desire I have with the BodyThinking module, is to slowly build a knowledge base available to AT teachers who want to shift from being chair and table teachers, and move towards the application field. Those teachers who think this move is only a matter of making a decision... well, you need to talk to me about that. I was a chair and table teacher for 10 years, so I know what I am talking about when I say that the move into application work was as wrenching as my first year of teaching. And continued to be so for many years after! So I hope that one day BodyChance can start offering training to teachers who want to switch. A "switch" campaign no less! (I hope you can see my tongue-in-cheek amusement around that one...

"Hallo. I am a chair and table teacher."

"Oh, hi, I'm an application guy.")

Anyway, right now I am on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto with nothing else to do, so I have got a little carried away with this post. Sorry for going on so much. I will put this on my blog too I think.

To finish I want to say that as a collective, AT teachers carry an extraordinary understanding of human movement, and mostly this knowledge dies with the teacher who carries it. In this day and age, when computer animators have the potentiality (with enough time and money) to program every movement vector of every muscle in every moment - I keep wondering what would have resulted if Wlfred Barlow had been able to instruct them in his 200+ directions!

Clarity

2009-06-26T10:41:00.004+09:00

Finished two days of Brendan Nichols at the Vasace Hotel in Surfer's Paradise. It was his "Marketing Boot Camp" where he takes us through the ABC of marketing your business to make money. "Marketing is getting them to the door, sales is getting them to walk through it." Greg and Michael were there the first day, but both of them could not stop themselves tracking all his NLP gymnastics, probably seeing him do stuff that was subconscious for him. They spent the breaks swapping stories about how he was constantly embedding messages for people to come back, but they said in the afternoon he relaxed and did more of the authentic work, without the subconscious leading. I saw it more clearly myself the second day - he's got amazing technique.

I realize that an amazing array of strategies are available to create and utilise a list of BodyChance interested folks - the sky's the limit. The limit, as I still suspect, will be the availability of teachers, not the availability of work as the situation stands today. Eventually they will be clamouring for what we have to offer, and there will be many mimicking our model, but without approaching the excellence of our own teachers. For the next five years the goal is to develop teacher training methodology across a number of schools in different locations and cultures (for now Japan and Australia from 2010) and develop a system of training that is followed at every BodyChance Studio. This gives students flexibility, and it gives us a huge experimental resource where we can being testing and measuring the efficacy of our teacher training.

Starting in 2008, we began asking our trainees to accept an experimental program of 7 different measurements at 6 monthly interviews over a two year period. We decided to use the 2 year certificate course - BodyThinking - as the domain for this first venture into finding a set of variables that can be interrelated in a way that offers some compelling evidence of change in their overall, functional unity. Beyond that, we have no idea. Some of the experiments were suggested to me by Neuroscientist and Alexander Technique student Lucy Brown, who spoke at the first Lugano Conference in 2008. We also received suggestions from Yosuke Yamada, a research scientist at Kyoto University's Human Posture Lab. The idea is taking a different approach to developing criteria for qualifying a teacher of this work - find concrete measures that can be calibrated against the head's movement relation to the spine, arms and legs. We also hope to develop a compelling, consumer product that will give people another health measure that is unique, and unseen by medical science. So we are developing this product through Greg, and his contacts at Sydney University's Laboratory of Movement - who could be advising Greg on database construction and ways to manipulate data based on Greg's information. Greg is heading this project, and the prospects for it in the long term are extraordinary. It will be fun developing that business, while also collecting valuable data available for an almost infinite number of mathematical variations.

Selling all these things is Bredan's forte, and I am overflowing with ideas so the question is when, not what. Priorities need to be based on the most effective way to generate a healthy cash flow that can fund continuing development of product streams. Another face that has entered the BodyChance mandala is Paul Cook, Publisher and Editor of DIRECTION (yes, it still lives and very well under Paul's stewardship). Greg & Michael took an early plane home this morning rather than return to Brendan, so I brought Paul along to enjoy the show.

Brendan was great - the idea of marketing Alexander Technique obviously penetrated his thinking, because he kept mentioning about it all day, and was indirectly coaching me on ways to build BodyChance. One suggestion was a whole multi-faceted selling program around themes of Knee Pain, Neck Pain, Arm Pain - you get the idea. Each one I mount a separate campaign, building a story of redemption through AT by addressing more specifically the specific needs and issues that rise for each kind of pain sufferer. AT is horizontal - EVERYONE is interested it alleviating pain at some point of their lives, or helping others around them to do it - but I learnt at Brendan's that horizontal markets are harder, bigger, more diverse. A vertical audience is better: they are easier to target with specific emotional benefits, a campaign that is designed with them in mind. Niche, niche, niche - that was one of Brendan's advice. Like people who suffer from knee pain. AT teachers often try to be all things to all people - they advertise to a horizontal market without the economic muscle to be particularly effective. The result is 125 years of relative obscurity of AT from ordinary consumers.

So from tomorrow we have a series of meetings with Tom, Greg, Michael, Paul and myself about marketing these 9 weekends in 2010, and looking at the general strategy we will follow towards the launch of the Studio in January, 2012. I want to put Paul in charge of marketing and the website, and use Brendan's ideas to achieve a profit off the workshops in 2010. All this is up for discussion, together with a plan for the legal structure of BodyChance, it's relationship to Japan and the way equity can be handled. It promises to be an important week.

Oh - and I bought myself a new home in Mullumbimby, that has the fabulous quality of being cash neutral/positive, though it will cost me $765,000 to buy. It will be a great resource for BodyChance - I can let it out to the company to hold small workshops here for Japanese with all accommodation and teaching fees in one package. This can also serve as a pilot program for the eventual Japanese attendance at the Sydney Studio. Tomorrow, in the midst of everything else, I have to complete the Loan Application, fax everything to Jay and...

Sigh.

EQUANIMITY

2009-06-09T00:15:00.003+09:00

Maintaining an equal feeling towards my two daughters is the focal point of my practise of dissolving the feelings of attraction and aversion that the concepts of "friend, enemy or stranger" so easily conjure up inside my heart. Them, and some irritating correspondents I receive messages from occasionally.

How to feel equal to all these? Well, for now it is impossible to class the correspondents in the same category as my daughters, and indeed there is no need - the concept does not need to be thrown away - I can still label a person an irritant - but the aggression, the inappropriate behaviour: all these things are only harms to myself, and my spiritual purpose.

Many parents will tell you they feel equally to their children, but on the whole they are lying I think. Why would the tendency we have outside the family - to have favourites, people whose company we enjoy more than others - be somehow magically evaporated once you crossed the threshold of your front door? No - don't believe that nonsense, people always try to delude themselves.

Yet I feel great trepidation at even considering this issue in an honest matter - as though the admission of the fact becomes the primary cause of it's own being, feeding the very fire I want to put out. So with great delicacy and care do I meditate on the differences in my attitude and treatment of my children. This is part of the practise of equanimity - not fuel the idea that flames out to burn me, but douse water on any idea that seeks to put prejudiced favour of one before the other.

Douse it with what? With truth, with the absolute understanding that every human being is created with an equal desire for happiness, and an equal right to it. At times the demand of one can outshine the other, and one can appear to give favour, but in essence that moment of decision is based on circumstances, based on a consideration of many things - NOT based on a feeling of feeling better with one rather than another.

Anyway, I am being obtuse as one day those little creatures might even come to read this - so for today that is enough. It was useful to write about it, as I have a clearer understanding of a few things now.

Chairwork II

2009-06-01T17:10:00.001+09:00

In the morning at 2am - yes, sometimes I start the day early - I was searching my email database for something, and came across an email from a teacher about chairwork. No need to mention who here, but I was taken by how lightly the idea of working outside of chairwork was treated, almost as though one only did that if one didn't have sufficient abilities to do chairwork. All said in a nice way, but still overtones of...

So, I got a little carried away and wrote a passionate and challenging response, which later the writer (gently) pointed out that I had I read more of the actual email, rather than read into the email more that he in fact said, I might have had a more balanced response, and I am sure he is right.

Anyway, here's what I wrote (lightly edited):

***

Early in my training school, many students - aware of what is happening in other Alexander circles - started clamouring for me to do "chairwork" and "hands on" - neither of which are part of my training program (other than getting in and out of a chair which is an activity with no special status in my mind).

I refused for the simple reason that I did not want my trainees attached to any "form" - which to me is how traditional chairwork often operates. It can be a safe haven within which one can explore the principles. Ask someone to step out of that haven and explore the same principles, and my guess is that many teachers would simply be at a loss what to do.

I am of the opinion that if you do the same thing every day of your training for three years, you do get some familiarity with how to take someone in and out of the chair. Yes, we still need refined abilities to do that, and the depth that one can go into with this activity is tremendous. No arguments on that score. However, I do think that any action, however difficult, when repeated again and again over a long period of time, assumes a kind of comfortable familiarity.

I put the burden on my students to come up with the subject of our lesson - these are the kinds of requests I have dealt with in just the last three weeks (no kidding):

- I stutter when at my work, but nowhere else (23yo man at intro class)
- People say they can't hear me speak (28yo woman at same class)
- I freeze up whenever anyone is taking my photograph (trainee in ThinkingBody Course)
- I get the same pain as my patient whenever I massage (Trainee in BodyThinking Course)

Firstly, when faced with such requests - there is no form to hold on to. Taking them in and out of a chair won't fly. I don't doubt they would get benefit, but I do doubt they would leave the lesson any wiser in knowing how Alexander's discoveries, and the process it involves, can be an aid and support for them in dealing with the specific problems and difficulties of their lives, as they conveyed them to me above.

Secondly, for me each request becomes a new adventure in discovering how inhibition, direction etc. can be applied in delightfully unexpected ways. These oddball requests test me on how clearly I can understand and apply the work in any situation. There is no chairwork "procedure" to enjoin with a principled approach - the principled approach is all you have; the form to enjoin to that must be re-created every lesson. You need to investigate the request, quietly collect information about their co-ordination, consider it internally, then suggest a means whereby that takes into account all the information you have collected and puts a plan together that allows a person to experience a sense of accomplishment; or at least begin to cognitively AND experientially understand how to deal with the issue they have brought you by using the principles and discoveries of Alexander.

Chairwork

2009-05-27T16:43:00.006+09:00

After a posting by Franis Engel on the google AlexTech list about "Decision-making Tires Out Your Brain?" (click Heading to go to google group with full email history) - I commented that they did not make any allowance for joy, enthusiasm in their study. Which led me to reflect on the pedagogy of teaching AT which asks the students to pick the activity, rather than invite them to get in and out of the chair for the duration of the lesson (unless some tablework is thrown in of course). So I wrote this comment:

***

Again I think this issue illustrates Marj's genius as a teacher - she saw that tapping into the joy of her students ("You always move better with a smile") was less "exhausting" and instead had them gleefully making new choices because of the clear and present benefits that would come to their chosen passion. Fatigue does come - of course - but there is MUCH MORE stamina available for the work.

It's another convincing argument - for me - for AT teachers to give up this relentless obsession of getting in and out of a chair, which to me gets more and more ridiculous as I get more experience in the pedagogy of harnessing a student's interest to the process of making new choices. I don't mean to insult people, but I really do think it's such a waste doing 60~100% of only chair work all the time. These days, my average would be around 2~3%.

I predict the day will come when this is the norm in our profession, and I intend to be one of the key instigators of this transformation of our profession. It's time to give up the tired old pedagogical methods of Alexander's heyday, and come into the 21st century.

Finally, scientific research is giving us some solid reasons to make this change!

***

...which provoked a response in defense of "chairwork" so I felt I needed to clarify what I meant by responding with this:

***

I do regret that you may feel "belittled" by my comments. It is clear from your email that your work with people in the chair has integrity, purpose and effectiveness - I don't dispute the efficacy of using chairwork to teach Alexander's principles. Of course it works - Alexander spread his entire work doing just that. I would be a fool to try to argue against it as a valid methodology of teaching this work. My point is not so much against chairwork, as it is for other possibilities.

-

Once upon a time there were four woman - granny, mother and a friend watching daughter cutting off the sides of a beef to put it in the oven. "Why are you doing that?" the friend asked the daughter, who replied "Oh, that's what my Mum always did." So the friend turned to the mother and asked her "Why did you cut off the sides of the beef?" And Mum replied: "Because that's what my mother always did." So finally the friend turns to the grandmother and asks her "Why did you cut off the sides of the beef?" To which the grandmother replies: "Oh I had to. The oven we had was too small to fit it."

-

If you had the Olympic team of judo - would you train them all in chairwork? And if so - why? Do you believe you can't do everything you wrote below by simply exploring the specific co-ordinations these men and woman are occupied with every day in their judo practice? I know a group of actors who were "taught" the Alexander Technique and every session they were all told to lie in semi-supine and... well, I wasn't there so I don't know what was done. But it basically gives me the creeps when I hear stories like that.

Frankly I believe that a lot of teachers continue with chairwork not because of any powerful pedagogical arguments in its favour, but simply because they don't know what else to do. Faced with a professional opera singer, my guess is that many teachers would shy away from a rigourous analysis of the specific activities and needs of that person while singing, for the simple reason is that they were not trained with the ability to do so. It's the percentage thing that troubles me, not the actual fact of chairwork.

It's fine to do chairwork, and yes - it can be powerful and effective. If it works for you, go ahead. But I doubt I could have built a thriving business in Japan on the back of chairwork. And anecdotally, it seems there are a lot of other folks in the Alexander community finding it hard these days to make a living and I have to ask - why is that? Could it be that our pedagogical approach leaves some people a little mystified and lacking confidence to practise on their own? Or do they just get bored after awhile?

I don't know is the truth. If you want to understand my position better, I wrote about it in the Lugano Congress Papers "Teaching Technology" and the previous Oxford Congress Papers in "A Tale of Two Pedagogies". It is something I have been considering since I first trained as an Alexander teacher in the 1970's, and challenged the then prevailing notion that this work can not be taught in groups. Oh really? Who said that? Your grandmother?

I hope you can understand my point - I have every respect for you as a colleague, my only wish is to develop our ideas of teaching method. In my opinion, they are due for a overhaul.

***

And that is that for another week!

Success Vision

2009-05-18T13:28:00.005+09:00

So, I did make it after all.

Last night I began teaching another of my slightly "out there" experiments in teaching: the Success Vision Course - using Alexander's discoveries to generate temporal awareness so that we can, moment by moment, make the choices that guide us towards the successful vision we generate of our future. This is a uniquely human capacity.

I wonder if Betsy the cow begins every morning with a highly developed temporally conceived plan for the day? "Oh, first I'll go down to the bottom meadow and get some of that tall grass before bloody Alfred eats it all, then I'll head off to the creek for a chat with Phyllis (unless she's overslept again the wretched old cow) and… oh yes! Now I remember: I have an appointment with Mad Fred at the North side gate at lunch-time.."

I wonder. I can't get inside a cow's mind, but I doubt this kind of "plan" is driving Betsy's choices moment to moment. Yet it is possible for us to function this way - to think a thought (in the form of consciously created plans/visions) rather than have thoughts thinking me (in the form of reactions to environmental conditions). Successful people mostly make decisions quickly, but change their mind slowly; whereas unsuccessful people often find coming to a decision difficult, but are changing their mind all the time.

To use temporal awareness successfully, we do first need a plan. The plan does not have to be concrete - like the S.M.A.R.T. goal system (goggle it) - it can also be ontological: developing a state of patience, tolerance, generosity, enthusiasm etc. What is essential is the necessity of our recollection of the 'success vision' acting as a guide for the choices we make within the forever moving critical moment of the present…

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks,
any wind is the right wind.
-Seneca

The Vision Success course was partly inspired by an passage from Alexander's Universal Constant of Living where he wrote:

"The employment of inhibition calls for the exercise of memory and awareness—the former for remembering the procedures involved in the technique and the proper sequence in which they should be used, and the latter in the recognition of what is happening. In the process both potentialities are developed and the scope of the use of both gradually increased. Moreover the experiences thus gained not only help in developing and quickening the recalling and connecting memory, but cultivate what I shall call the motor-sensory-intellectual memory."

That is basically the foundation for the course. These two facilities—awareness and memory—operate in tandem to inform our choices moment by moment. Dear Betsy (the cow remember?) has wonderful awareness in terms of present time – animals are often admired by us for their capacity to be in the here and now – but I suspect possesses a very poor ability to learn and adapt by means of utilizing creative memory to inform the present.

From a totally different perspective, but basically alluding to the same ideas, is this extract from "Burnt Norton", the first of the "Four Quartets" by T. S. Elliot (interestingly written in 1943, much the same time Alexander was writing UCL quoted above):

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the page which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.

I was told, back in the 70's, that this quote was inspired by Alexander's work. I can't remember who told me, and it surely is some kind of nonsense, but nonetheless I feel some kind of continuity between these two ideas, some deeper truth that all things are existing as possibilities, and will be if we are, and can never be what we are not.

Tommy's Teaching

2009-05-11T20:17:00.005+09:00

"I will never try to know you, I will forever try to see you."

Writing now after witnessing the final workshop of Tommy Thompson in Japan, and hugely impressed by the way Tommy has given a voice to Alexander's discoveries in a way that totally accords with the Buddhist view of Self – the lack of anything inherently existing from it's own side. In my comments below, I may be misrepresenting Tommy's viewpoint, so please hold the idea that these are my impressions of Tommy's ideas.

Tommy's view is that there is no "number one" as Marj often cajoled us: " 'Who is the most important person here?' The student? No. The Teacher? Yes." For Tommy, there is no number one person – there is a relationship, an interdependency between you and I which creates us from moment to moment in the "ongoing, forever moving present, which is the only place where change can happen."

Tommy uses his hands to "disperse your commitment to who you think you need to be" so your Self truthfully emerges moment to moment, depending on the conditions present. His version of inhibition revolves around this idea: we have an "identity" that we are "committed to". In Buddhist terms I consider this to be the concept of a fixed, inherently existing Self. That inside me there is a 'Jeremy' that I am committed to. This idea of a fixed 'Jeremy' (and that is all it is, an idea which is given life by tensional habits that interfere with the natural function of primary control) is merely a habituated summary of the person I think I need to be. In Tommy's terms (as I interpret it) this habituated identity is built on the false notion that I can not be who I am being in any moment, but instead must manufacture a person that I consider you need me to be. And the primary 'others' are my parents or primary care-takers, followed by peers, cultural customs, the lure of advertising and all the other influences that are telling me day and night who I need to be to realize happiness.

What a wonderful way of giving voice to Alexander's notion of Self. It neatly sidesteps the whole conversation of 'body' and 'mind'. It is interesting to note that although Alexander himself did talk about "psycho-physical" unity, so imbedding this duality in the creation of a new hyphenated word, he also insisted that there is only a "critical moment" into which our "use" of our "Self" enters moment by moment. This holistic way of considering the work morphs into a new language that Tommy devised to guide people into a new experience of who they consider themselves to be—by "dispersing their commitment to who they think they need to be" which is their habituated self.

However, a different kind of duality starts to emerge in that the "Self" is created not only by environmental conditions, but by vows, decisions, promises, intentions, goals and the like which abide within our consciousness of 'self'. These are not such material things, but they are real in the same way that thoughts are real. As Mother Teresa put it: "Love is not a feeling. Love is a decision." So who I am, emerging as I am moment to moment, is partly shaped by the "other" - which includes other people and environmental conditions – and partly shaped by these "ideas & promises". Are these in the same nature of "belief" as in "I know myself" or do they differ?

I do think there is something different between, say, a vow not to kill any living thing and a belief that there is no God. Both exist very thinly within my consciousness, but one is actionally directive in nature, the other more a basis for making decisions – a premise upon which to build a vow, rather than a promise to behave in a particular way.

Anyway, fascinating as this is to me, I am off the point. The idea I started out presenting as another kind of duality within this model is the distinction between "doing" and "being". Tommy says that "intention dominates our action when we move in the direction of the focus of our attention", and in so doing "leave where I am" or "sacrifice my being". This is Tommy's version of Marj's "I am number one." I do not need to leave where I am to follow the focus of my intention, I can preserve a quality of being while doing whatever I am doing. Whenever I do depart from this quality of being, I am "endgaining" as Alexander put it, or "letting the focus of my intention dominate my action", as Tommy puts it.

From this comes the idea of "attention" – Tommy is primarily interested in observing this, asking the question: how is the person's attention interfering with the efficiency of primary control? Tommy does not observe the "use of the self"—he remarked that that is only "periphery" to his interest—instead he observes the person's attention: what kind of relationship do they have to their intention/activity? This is of paramount importance, because we are always existing in relationship to someone or something else.

So from this evolved a whole series of exercises involving touch that totally reminded me of the days of my training in London, an approach I ultimately rejected as a training director for I think that it 'objectifies' the person I am working with. In this kind of relationship, my partner slowly ceases to be who they truly are, instead slowly becoming "a human being I am touching" – i.e. they are no longer really that human being (i.e. Yumiko, Nao, Ryo etc.) but instead they are the "person/body/thing" I am using to practise how I place my hands on another. Of course the trainees all love this approach – must people do. Only Shigeko (that I know of) got the same uncomfortable feeling that I always got back in the old days of my training.

Anyway, I am definitely in a minority is disliking this way of training teachers, and I am happy to let other teachers pursue it, providing I don't have to either be involved, or agree with them. After awhile the atmosphere of the workshop got a little spooky, with everyone going into this prolonged silence while they considered how they were using their hands in touching the other person. Innocent enough, and hard to see why I object to it, but basically everyone got out of touch with the real world that was all around them. There was an atmosphere of operating within this cocoon of ideas.

However, to argue against myself, I do think there is a need to understand the "technicalities" of teaching—including that of touch—but I would tend to introduce this exploration of touch as part of an ongoing lesson, rather than separate it out into its own activity. However, we do need to explore and know the component ideas that make the whole experience possible. An example of this is in knowing how a person is using themselves. While it is wonderful to look firstly for the infinite potentiality of our pupil so we are "being present to being in relation to something that is bigger than our desire", my question is: how do we see such a thing? Perhaps we don't, perhaps we do – I have no real answer to that. But I do know when it is not there, because I can see how a person's co-ordination is expressing their idea that has fear, ignorance and attachment within it. This is what I see, what I understand is the possibility available beyond that.

Tommy reminds us that we are working with that person's potentiality for becoming other than what they are currently committed to being – this is so much preferable than working with a person's "habit of use" in the negative sense. We don't work with the habit, we work with the potentiality – and I appreciated the reminder of a lesson once learnt that I was due to hear again!

However, I also know that (for me) what lets me understand a person has some kind of ignorance, irritation or obsession operating within them—and that is causing them a harm they do not want—is the detail of my observation of their "habitual" use. Often a tiny gesture or aberration has been my only clue to uncovering a profoundly deep idea that needs undoing for a person to move into a new idea of the possibility of their Self…

And perhaps my need to do this highlights one of the key differences of my own work: rather than give the experience, I seek to introduce an experiment within a person's thinking so that they can give themselves a new experience of who they are. Tommy uses his hands to support a person "dispersing their commitment to being who they think they need to be". Tommy's idea of inhibition involves this: withholding definition of who I am committed to being to allow in new information that informs the experience I am having of me. It is a truly wonderful approach, and helps me learn another way of communicating to a student in a situation that calls for it.

However, from my side, I am still curious to find the activity that doesn't let the old habit take place—that is chosen and thought out by the student, not constructed by the intervention of my hands. This experiment is set up before my hands touch. My touch is not there to open up choice, or to allow a person to accept information other than the information that their habit is committed to, although that can certainly happen; rather my hands are there to give confidence to their new choices, to support the possibility that a person is courageously asking of themselves. We are not waiting until the confidence or support is there, we are jumping over the cliff where habit is no longer living.

Anyway, Tommy's work has been fabulously stimulating, causing me to question and re-decide about fundamental aspects of my own work: to change some of my long held ideas, to confirm others and, most importantly, to continue to allow myself to receive new information of any kind in the exciting adventure I call life!

If he comes to a theatre near you – get some tickets!

Building A Property Empire

2009-04-23T04:23:00.002+09:00

What an exciting three weeks it has been.

My whole idea of Property Investment (PI) has been turned on its head, and I am now striking out in a new direction that joins two parts of my investing/business life into a cohesive whole. For those who don't know, I run a Studio in Tokyo (and just recently Osaka) which is bringing the discoveries of one of the 1988 Bi-centenary 200 Australians that made Australia great to the attention of the world (otherwise known as Alexander Technique).

Well, when you open a studio like this, we have to be very careful about location. Near the station, near your target demographic, right building, right atmosphere. Having picked a good location/situation, you don't mess with it when its working by moving to another location. Expanding might mean (here in Japan) opening another Studio at another station to add to the convenience of members. But never move your existing studio while the business is flowing in.

Then it slowly dawned on me - why not use the cash flow of my business to slowly build substantial equity in the longer term? Macdonalds did it that way, so that now they are the largest holders of retail Real Estate in the world. In the mid 90's it was estimated at USD $8.8 billion. Well, I don't think I can manage that, but leveraging my business to build a substantial property holding is my newest research question in the area of PI.

Of course ABC Learning adopted a similar strategy - and look what happened to them! So, like anything PI, not without it's risks, but if sensible planning, sufficient capital backing and good numbers prevail - I might have a vehicle which gets me out of this schizophrenic mind of flipping between my business (which is a passion) and PI (which is a challenge).

Any thoughts? Is there somewhere I could study up on this approach to building a business?

Self, Others and the Inbetween

2009-03-24T02:44:00.003+09:00

In 2005 Scientific American ran an article called "The Neurobiology of the Self" by Karl Zimmer which investigated how we create a sense of self at the level of the brain itself. Here are two interesting quotes from that article:

1. Several brain regions have been found to respond differently to information relating to the self than they do to information relating to others, even to very familiar others. For instance, such regions may be more active when people think about their own attributes than when they think about the characteristics of other individuals. These regions could be part of a self-network.

and

2. The sight of someone being touched made her feel as if someone were touching her in the same place on her own body. She thought everyone had that experience.

That last one is a real kicker - apparently our brain has to learn how to differentiate what is "self" and what is "other", and some people get it wrong!

Of course, as a Buddhist, I am convinced that the stronger the sense of self becomes - with its selfish demands and ruthless actions to ensure them - the unhappier I become. The more I am able to consider others in the same way I consider my self, the happier I become. What is "self" anyway? It is essentially something we posit in relation to "other". I mean - I am "other" to you right? But I am "self" to me. So who is right about that? So dissolving these two is a key element in generating some kindness and compassion towards each other.

About this I often ponder an Alexander type question: How can you dissolve the sense of self by using a strong sense of self to do it? If we do it like this, aren't we are using the habit to change the habit? I don't think it can work this way. To paraphrase Alexander: Can you perceive a thing by an instrument that is already delusional?

So sometimes I work on thinking of the "inbetween" - something AT teacher Marie-Françoise says she got from Buzz Gummere years ago. This "inbetween" reality I posit for myself is neither "self" or "other" - it is a world in between these two. Just as "self" and "other" are relative concepts, not consistent the way blue is consistent, then why not begin by inventing another one which takes the hardness and edge away from the original two?

The "inbetween" is what happens between us. It helps me to dissolve the sense of "your idea" and "my idea" with the notion that almost everything in my life is happening as a result of reactions to other things that are happening. With just my "self" nothing can really happen - it takes "others" to make it happen. So what I call my "self" experience is entirely dependant on the "other" things and people I am reacting to - to see it like that, not to see it as just "mine."

In my AT work this becomes very helpful (which I why I use it) in that if I begin to feel a negative emotion towards a student or myself, I understand it as a "mix" between my self and the other person right in that moment. So then it is useful to ask - hmm, what's this emotion about? How come I am feeling this now? What is going on with other person? How could I change so they could change so I could change? So the priority is focussing on them as a means of knowing my self.

Maybe it sounds a little weird written like this, but what the heck. I find it helps sometimes and I mention it only as I see that finding creative ways of slowly dissolving this strong sense of self and other is the beginning of being able to develop kindness and compassion towards each other.

Purification & Detirmination

2009-03-13T22:36:00.003+09:00

Monday, March 9th

PERSONAL
Purification and Determination - two things that usually occupy my every Monday morning.

The purification part starts with cleaning my office and, while I do that, thinking about things I regret and would like to do differently. From impatience with my two little girls, to one too many days sipping wine. I'm by no means a slosh, having only 3 to 4 glasses of the red on average in a week, but still I grabbed for a bottle last Tuesday much to the disdain of my 6 year old:

"Daddy - what are you doing? This isn't Daddy day or anything!"

Don't you love 'em? No beating around the bush. 6 years old and full of wisdom. So that gives me pause, I wonder. Hmmm - maybe getting tooooo carried away here? Nothing to be alarmed about, but Monday's the day to catch things before they get to crisis stage. To look at my life again and ask: am I still going in the direction I want to be going?

And then comes the determination - setting goals, both value based and S.M.A.R.T based. Setting resolve is essential. It's not saying: "These are things that I want to do." It's saying: "I will do these things. I will move in this direction." One can really understand and feel strongly that an action is the right thing to do, without really having the resolve to do it. It's the person who jumps into the sea to save the drowning person that has resolve, the ones who watch helplessly from the shore, full of the knowledge of what they know is the thing to do, are the wanters, the hopers, the would-if-I-could-but-I-am-not-sure-yet. I am always hovering about somewhere there, but...

One of my wonderful teachers Marj once recommended: "Why don't you quit hoping and do something about it?"

Mondays: purification and determination.

Japanese Body Thinking Certificate Course

2007-11-15T13:16:00.000+09:00

I am in the process of radically re-engineering my Alexander training in Japan. I am sure to have my critics, but I thought it worthwhile to start jotting down some of the ideas that are driving this change - not the needs to meet the market that I have commented on previously, more the meaning of the work as it is for me today.

I am developing two courses in tandem, the Body Thinking course to be launched next year - the one most resembling what people call "Body Mapping" these days - and the Thinking Body course, which will launch in 2009 with an identical structure, but different content. I thought now I would elucidate my thoughts on the root foundation of the course I am assembling together. This may make it clearer than I am making a hybrid marriage between simply informational/experiential body mapping, and the deeper aspects of AT work.

Remember that my program is actually designed to be the first stepping stone towards the final outcome of being an AT teacher - it is designed with that idea in mind, although it offers "interim" practicing certificates along the way which is where I am sure to experience the most heat from the AT community!

Actually, what the course can become is still in the process of forming - and the formation now is at a very basic what-is-this-work-about, level, not actually concrete processes, more the ideas that underpin it. At the moment the easiest way for me to articulate my conceptual foundation is to burrow from Buddhist ideas, link them to Alexander's and arrive at the 'BodyMapping' conclusion which superficially, the first "certificate" course is all about.

My interest at the moment is the relationship between the object and the label we give that object. The "label" can be my physical structures, my idea of movement, my concepts about time, result, need, wish etc. The object is the thing that is existing that can, in some but not all cases, be sensorially perceived by others. So as we are dealing with a person's co-ordination, the 'objects' are the anatomical structural bits, the movements that they can make together and the concepts that drive them.

The 'Body Thinking' course is taking more focus on the anatomical structures and the movements that they are capable of. The 'Thinking Body' course is taking more focus on the concepts that drive these movements. Eventually I will offer both courses in tandem, in a way that they complement each other. The way I am guiding my movement is influenced by my concepts, so initially the concepts I hold of 'what is a head?' and 'how does it move in relation to my spine?' and 'what is my spine?' and 'how does it in turn move in relation to my limbs' etc. are the basis upon which I evolve strategies for different activities.

[ASIDE: However, I am also keen to create a "stand alone" structure so that doing one still lets you arrive somewhere where you have some skills to be helpful to other people. Part of my ambition is to tear down the huge wall that now separates the Alexander "expert" and the "beginner". I think there are baby steps that people can take, and share with each other which, while obviously fraught with possibility of distortion are, nonetheless, often of more help than harm to others. Anyway, I intend to test that in practice.]

Alexander's idea that we live in delusion I equate with this: we hold the idea of our head as the head itself. When, for example, I think my 'whole head' even with the word 'whole' it is still not the head itself. The label is different from the basis of the label. In Buddhist terminology, they express it by saying there is the label, and there is the basis of designation of the label - and these are two different things. If I say head, I say it on the basis of something that is existing there. What is existing there has society's consensual agreement - 'this is a head' but the thing that is actually existing there is NOT the head, it is the basis of designation of 'head'. It works as a basis of designation because it functions in a way that everyone agrees a head should function, so we label that thing 'head', However, it is not a 'head.' There is definitely something there, but it is not a 'head' there. The 'head' is my conceptional designation, not the object itself. Thinking that both are the same is already a mild form of sensory delusion.

Problems arise when we confuse the label with its basis of its designation. We think that our idea of head IS THE ACTUAL OBJECT, and it clearly is not. From this common way of relating to the objects of the world, our delusionary aspect arises. In Alexander terms, between the actual thing that is existing there, and the label I give it, there is some kind of discrepency, some kind of difference.[ "All the fools of the world actually believe they are doing what they think they are doing" - Alexander] The label can never be the same thing as the actual object because it has been created so there can be consensus about what that 'thing' over there actually is. If we already knew what is was, it would not be necessary to learn the word we use to lable it. What is an 'atama' do you know? Of course not. But actually, for a Japanese, that is what there! There is no "head" there for a non-english speaking Japanese person. However, if we assume that our label and the object are identical, we already have some kind of faulty appreciation. The further my idea departs or differs from the actual existing thing, the greater my faulty sensory appreciation of the world becomes.

In one sense, no matter how healthy we are, we are all hallucinating, we all have some degree of faulty sensory appreciation. There is no such thing as correct or perfect sensory appreciation because the whole process is so individual, so much MY concept of the world, not the world itself, so my concept will always differ in some way from yours. Healthy just means that our view accords more closely to the reality of things, or with what others agree is the reality of things (which may in itself be an unhealthy distortion, albeit a commonly designated one.)

So this process of moving my idea to more closely match the actual world around me us an important process to understand and apply which will lead to increasing harmony with things, and consequently - happiness. (But that's another essay!) I remember Cathy Madden telling me that the American Indians only have two 'rules' or 'guides' - be honest and be kind. I see the process I am describing here as part of being honest - being honest with how things actually exist, not how I want them to exist, nor how I imagine them existing, but how they actually are existing. Which brings us to the BodyMapping principle - we try to move in the way we believe we are built, not in the way we are actually built.

I see this as the key aspect of learning that is on offer in the BodyMapping course (= Body Thinking Course). Of course I may not put it like that to the public - it doesn't flow that well in marketing terms! Still, I still see that as the primary activity: discarding distortions and replacing them with as much clarity as can be mustered at the time. The process by which that can be done is of course linked up with FM's chain of related discoveries.

The subject matter to use as a means of exploring and practising this process could vary. In the Body Thinking course, we take the position that it is really good to get a clear idea of how you are put together: to clarify the structures and clarify how they can move (and how they can not). In other words, do a spring cleaning of all the labels, make new ones with a clear basis of designation which accords better with how we are put together. Just focusing on structure itself is not the point, it is the dynamic between structure and movements that is critical. It is really your normal AT training - but with, I plan, a little more rigour, structure and emphasis. More on why I want that in another posting.

So publicly it is put out as a course on leaning about all your body parts and how they can move. More fundamentally it is about PRACTISING a process of identifying faulty ideas that put us out of co-ordination and learning how to deal with them.

Reincarnation & Cognitive Science

2007-05-11T10:30:00.000+09:00

The idea of reincarnation for me at the moment is more based on faith, rather than being a belief based on logic - but with the advances of Cognitive Science, that could change. The door began to open after listening to an amazing talk by Lama Zopa Rinpoche (LZR) where the walls seem to flutter and everything melt around me. This talk was on emptiness, but touched on reincarnation.

He described the Buddhist logic that, according to the law of cause and effect (which says the result must be of the same nature of the cause - an oak tree will not grow from the seed of a cedar tree for example) our consciousness can not arise from matter, as consciousness is not in the nature of matter. Consciousness is formless, it is immaterial. It is defined as that which is clear (formless) and knowing. Therefore the first moment of consciousness in our life needed a previous moment to come into existence. It would be impossble for it to arise from matter, or from nothing, in the same way it would be impossible to get ice by boiling water or have $10 appear in my hand from no where. There has to be a cause, and if the cause is not in the same nature as the result, that result can not be got!

So our body is material, sperm/egg is material - how can it then be the basis of a moment of consciousness, which is immaterial? That the consciousness combines with matter, is interdependent with matter, is not the issue. Matter can not be the cause of non-matter.

It was convincing from a logical point of view - IF YOU ACCEPT that consciousness is not matter.

In Cognitive Science these days, what is Human Consciousness is the big question, and they are gradually but surely facing down the Materialists who insist its basis is purely the brain organ. There is a crack in this edifice of materialism, in much the same way that Descartes' idea of objective certainty was finally questioned by Hiesenburg's Uncertainly Principle, and so, with Einsten's help, tearing apart Newton's vision of the world by ushering in the mysterious world of quantum physics, and in the process putting into place a firm, scientific basis for Buddha's description of reality as being a relationship between form and emptiness - i.e. emptiness is form, form is emptiness - neither eternalism or nilhism, but a delicate balance that has elements of both, but is in fact neither.

In much the same way today - if Scientists do finally conclude that consciousness is other than matter, then LZR's logic becomes impeccable from a leading edge Scientific perspective.

Voila reincarnation!

The 5 Ever-Present Factors of Mind

2007-05-10T11:58:00.000+09:00

As an Alexander teacher, I am always dealing with a person's mental conception. This sits at the core of all movements. I think it is misleading to think of AT as "bodywork". If we must use terms like that, then it would be better to call it "mindwork" where the practitioner also touches your body to support the new conception of movement that you are being guided towards.

So I am always interested in finding new information about the mind. However, the 5 ever-present factors of mind is not new information. This was first formulated by a Buddhist philosopher known as Asunga, and it constitutes an aspect of the Buddhist epistimology of how our mind aquires knowledge.

There are 54 mental factors (or is it 51?) and the factors that must be present for any mind to function are:

1. Intention: what are you wanting to do right now?
2. Contact: what is the object you are contacting?
3. Attention: not passing by quickly, but maintaining attention on the object (which can be an idea)
4. Discernment: being able to recognise the object as distinct from "other" objects.
5. Feeling: In the sense of 'knowing' that you are in this process.

They do not necessarily run in this order, as they all exist simultaneously. However, it is easier to apprendend their functionality by considering them in succession. Here's an example of how you might use this model...

At my training school, I successfully apply this model to assist my trainees to develop their faculty of observing the movements of their own students. Intention is where most inexperienced observers first misdirect - a person thinks something like "I really hope I can see what is happening this time." This is a totally misguided intention, almost assuring them that they WILL NOT see anything substantive. Following on from that comes 2. Contact - they are mostly in contact with the idea that "observation is hard/I can't do this/I am not seeing anything now!' therefore 3. Attention - is not consistently maintained towords their object (which is not clear to begin with), but instead they are fluttering all about in a chaotic maelstrom of conflicting intentions, objects and attentions. All of which makes it next to impossible for any meaningful 4. Discernment - no real understanding of the process can arise and hence their 5. Feeling - moves towards a sense of uselessness, powerlessness, helplessness in the face of their perceived inability.

Teaching successfully, in the aspect of observing your student, means deciding clearly upon 1, your intention - to observe the movments of my student, so that 2. the contact is clear - of simply receiving the information of the student's movements and so that my 3. attention - is continuing to watch so that from 4. discernment results in the analysis of the movement (from the thoroughly received information) so that your 5. feeling - results in a sense of knowing about the whole process.

Something like that. Try it out next time you teach.

Jeremy, Kyoto, May 2007.

Cognitive Science

2007-05-07T12:38:00.000+09:00

Just finished Golden Week Residential with Rachel Zahn as the visitor. She has an amazing message for the Alexander community. What's happening in Cognitive Science is totally Alexander.

What is Congnitive Science? It's a generic description that cobbles together of a number of different disciplines which all seem to be converging towards the same interests and questions: robotics, artificial intellingence, psychology, philosophy, linguistics and neuroscience. They don't know about us, but the description of what they are looking for matches Tibeten Buddhist mind training (which they DO know about, and are are starting to explore) and Alexander. Which they don't know about - but hey, how do you think they will react when they find that the some of the seminal scientific thinkers who have recently re-gained popularity as laying the foundations of modern Cognitive Science ALL had connections with Alexander: Sir Charles Sherrington (the father of neuroscience who wrote favourable about Alexander in one of his books), William James (who FM wrote was going to come for lessons until he became ill and died), John Dewey (who has just - LAST YEAR - had three of his books translated and published for the first time in French) and Karl Popper - who had AT lessons (Walter Carrington said).

I could go on - but go read Rachel's piece in the Oxford 2004 Congress Papers if you haven't already. Convince your local Alexander Society to invite her to offer an overview of Cognitive Science and Alexander. She told me that one of the biggest names these days, who commands respect from other world class neuroscientists - Alain Berthoz - walks up on stage at a Conference and the first he says is that his entire movement of walking up on stage was guided by his head and neck. And this guy knows next to nothing about Alexander's discoveries!

Very exciting times. The technology and understanding has finally arrived to catapult Alexander's discoveries to the front line of neuroscience. Rachel's message? We need to get ready. It's no longer a question of us looking for them, THEY will soon be coming looking for us.

Buddhist Epistemology Applied to Learning AT: Essay

2007-04-18T09:27:00.000+09:00

THE SEQUENCE OF COMING TO KNOW AN OBJECT
Buddhist Epistemology Applied to Learning the Alexander Technique

In this essay I will take the Buddhist epistemological 5-fold division of coming to know an object and explore its relation to coming to know the object of natural human co-ordination. The process of discovering this object was the work of F. M. Alexander. It stands in my mind as one of the outstanding discoveries of the 20th century, yet remains largely unrecognized precisely because the knowledge can only be understood in its full impact by a process of direct perception. So I think it is quite interesting to explore how Buddhist epistemology can be understood in an Alexander context.

In this essay I will explore my own knowledge and experience, from my first lesson in 1969, to my experience today as a trainer of Alexander teachers in Japan.

The Epistemological 5-fold division is as follows:
1. Wrong View
2. Doubt: towards wrong view, equivocal, towards correct view
3. Correctly Assuming
4. Inferential Cognition
5. Direct Perception

1. WRONG VIEW
A great debate rages in the Alexander world: how should we advertise ourselves? If we actually say what we do, people just don’t get it. If we talk in the way people expect — just do these things, pay this money, and you will get better—then aren’t we selling ourselves out to the very ideas we are attempting to re-educate?

So every Alexander teacher is usually faced with the same problem when first beginning to guide a new student into knowing their own co-ordination—the student’s profound wrong view of how movement actually works. It is not the kind of ignorance where they are lacking information—that would be easier to remedy—it is the kind of ignorance where they are actively entertaining the wrong idea.

From a very early age, most of us are “told” to stand up straight, to sit well, stop slouching, keep our shoulders back, look sharp, stand to attention etc. etc. The underlying presumption in all these directives is that both parties already know what constitutes good co-ordination. However, even the casual investigator of people’s everyday co-ordination will soon infer that this knowledge is not known. The ubiquitous stiff neck, together with commonly found sore backs and a host of other posturally-induced ailments is adequate testimony of our abyssal lack of real knowledge when it comes to knowing how to best utilize the extraordinarily efficient design of our movement system.

Underlying all our misdirected efforts is an attitude fundamental to all our suffering—attachment to the idea that we need to ‘do’ the correct thing, that there is a ‘correct’ and new object to be found, and when we finally know this object, then all will be well. So we set ourselves off in an endless progression of ‘actions’ to try to ‘correct’ the misaligned and misdirected patterns of movement, and usually find ourselves getting no where. We impose our ideas on the functioning of our system, when the problem is our many erroneous ideas that are already being imposed on the movement of our system.

The essential wrong view here is that we are not an agent in the cause of our problem. Our language is even structured to abrogate our responsibility for our condition. You will hear a person say: ‘I have a bad back’. They have a bad back? Really? What does it look like? Where does it begin and end? How is it that it can function independently of mind to ‘cause’ your problem?

It takes only a short insightful meditation to realize the wrongness of this view, yet this language of cause is universally accepted as a natural way to express of how things are existing in relation to our movements. However, the reality is that nothing, beyond my own actions, is ‘causing’ my neck to be stiff. It is not a result of stress or pressure. It is not a result of ‘people making me do’ things. It is not a result of my being ‘too tired’ or ‘too old’ or ‘too busy’. It is nothing more than my own reaction to whatever cause presents itself. This is familiar territory for a Buddhist—transformation of our state of mind is based on this simple idea. It is a process of changing my reaction to a cause, by recognizing that it is within my power to do so.

2. DOUBT
Student: “I understand what you mean, it’s all because of me. I accept that. So what exercises can I do to make it better?”
Teacher: “There are no exercises.”
S: “What do you mean? How can I practice?”
T: “By becoming aware of what you are doing.”

At this point in the lesson, the student often cocks their head to one side, look suspiciously at the teacher, and wonders if they haven’t wasted their money after all.

Overcoming doubt is a great first problem in the knowing process. And here Alexander evolved an extraordinary solution—he bypassed conceptuality and evolved a means to offer a directly perceived experience of an alternative co-ordination. Direct perception always involves some molecular or particle transaction with phenomena external to our Self, in this case the physical contact of the teachers hands on the various parts of the students body. Through this contact, the teacher is able to impart to the student the experience of a manner of co-ordination more naturally suited to the design of the human structure.

It overcomes doubt very quickly, but it still leaves the student ignorant of how they can bring about this experience on their own. This dichotomy between conceptually knowing and perceptually knowing the experience of good co-ordination is at the heart of widely different teaching pedagogies within the Alexander community.

To know good co-ordination, without having any concept other than the experience, is a wonderful gift to offer any person. In England, the British Medical Journal is about to publish a report on a 10 year, million pound research project into the Alexander Technique and the results, we are assured, are almost beyond belief—it will cause headline news when they are published. I mention this as I believe it constitutes proof that, by directly knowing a thing, we are transformed in ways that knowledge alone can not do.

I have also heard stories of Lamas that can ‘transmit’ some kind of experience to their students which has a transforming effect on their lives. I often wonder what conditions are necessary within the student to be granted such a gift from the Lama? Surely we could all benefit from such a transmission? But that is not the topic of this essay.

Anyway, by far the most effective means of overcoming doubt, is to devise a way that a person can directly experience the fruits of the knowledge that is being imparted. In the absence of being able to do that—what is the choice?

Illustrating Ignorance

To induce knowing without the benefit of experience, it becomes necessary to use logic that can be checked by the person in doubt. In Alexander work, this would include mapping the actual structure of the human body, based a vast body of knowledge that is universally trusted by most people, and comparing that reality with the knowledge that the individual carries around them concerning their own body. The ideas that people can entertain are bizarre—and offering factual knowledge that refutes their current conception is a powerful means of overcoming doubt, or at least nudging it away from the doubt that this is all a lot of new age bunk, to the doubt that maybe there really is something in this…

The same methodology can be applied to everyday movements, comparing a person’s perception of what they are doing, while simultaneously demonstrating—by use or a mirror or video—that the reality does not match their perception of it.

So the work of knowing at this stage involves sweeping away all the clouds of ignorantly held ideas, so there can be a clearing for ushering in new ideas. We could also argue that they are not really new ideas, they were existing all the time. They are like the blue sky which was obscured by the clouds of ignorance. As ignorance is blown away, so is doubt, leaving the clear blue sky and the beginnings of acceptance of how things actually exist, including our way of using ourselves.

3. CORRECTLY ASSUMING
In this phase of knowing Alexander’s work, people often get fanatical—so convinced are they of the efficacy of the work, they want the whole world to know about it. I know, I was one! It is so interesting now to look back and see how my deeply held convictions had no real substance and understanding as understood from my perspective of today.

Correctly assuming a knowledge about co-ordination means that you accept that the information you are being given is correct. Because some of the information is powerful and effective, then all information from teachers is assumed to be correct. This is a grave error. Alexander, and the teachers he directly and indirectly trained, are not possessing knowledge without fault. People can, and do, collect odd ideas and hold these ideas as true.

My intention here is to point out that correctly assumed knowledge, while certainly a step closer to knowing than just having doubt, is still subject to distortion and misapprehension. Often we are taking the information as true on the authority of someone or some group that we respect. We can then regurgitate this knowledge as an ‘authority’ on the subject and become quite convincing in the process, while further distorting it ourselves. So knowledge at this level is unstable, it is subject to distortion and easily lost.

I remember an interesting Zen story that illustrations this stage of ‘knowing’. Many different sects where invited to a ecumenical council to discuss differences of understanding about the cosmological nature of things. In one room were the young monks and priests, all arguing fiercely for their point of view, hungry to prove the other wrong. In another room were the Masters—all silent, quietly knowing the oneness of their common realizations. HH Dalai Lama often talks about his encounter with a meditating priest: how, despite the huge difference in their lineages, he knew at once that the monk had some universal knowledge, common to anyone who has acquired inferential or direct knowledge.

4. INFERENTIAL COGNITION

This is knowledge that you can truly call your own. In my ‘knowing’ of the object of human co-ordination, I can honestly say that I have only, in the last year or two, began to have knowledge that is truly mine. This is after 38 years of studying the subject. By reflecting on how I know this information, I can glimpse the meaning of what it means to know an object through inferential processes.

In my own case, the zeal emptied out of my work, and it become more relaxed and enjoyable. Not that I became quiet, but my inner need to prove others wrong—and convince myself I was right—which was so apparent in the earlier stage of knowing, ceased to be of so much concern to me. I was far more interested in understanding the condition of the other person’s knowing—seeing much more of what is around me, because my inner world became quieter.

I think a relaxed attitude results because the knowledge is truly ‘seen’ as it manifests in the world. It certainly results in a transformation of behaviour in Alexander terms, and I imagine this must also be true of Buddhist practise.

5. DIRECT PERCEPTION
In the Alexander world, this knowledge is imparted through the teacher’s hands right at the beginning of the process. But it is experience without knowledge backing it. It is as though someone has helped you walk through a door, but when you arrive on the other side—there is nothing there! Everything is empty. It is like experiencing the reflection of the moon in the lake—it is not the real thing, but it is close enough to convince us that something special is happening, that you think you know what the moon is really like.

In Alexander’s own case, this was not the case. Alexander could only come to the experience of knowing the object of natural human co-ordination by a long, rigorous process of observation, analysis and experimentation. He has written about this period of discovery, and it is interesting to note that his final obstacle, that for several years blocked his ability to know, was that the experience was so startling and unexpected that his system simply refused to be guided by the knowledge contained within that experience.

Later Alexander said: “We can’t do what we don’t know, if we keep on doing what we do know.” The power of directly knowing an object is that it completely blows away any apprehension that preceded it. (At least—I imagine it is that way.) And yet, before the door can be opened to that new experience, we have to be guided by a 100% trust in our own reasoning processes. We must be convinced, without a shred of doubt, about the conceptual construction we have built from our long hours of listening, reflecting and meditating. So direct perception of an object, Dharakirti surmised, must be built upon a rock solid base of inferential cognition.

There is a lot more I could add, but I am already overdone! Thanks for your patience in seeing it through to the end.

Kyoto, April, 2007

Building an AT Corporation

2007-03-06T21:13:00.000+09:00

Now I am beginning to think about a talk to offer at the next 2008 Congress:

Building An Alexander Teaching Corporation

- what is meant by "corporate'?: working with colleagues within a financially unified legal entity that carries the "identity" of the group and is run corporate style

- history of corporate AT: Ashley Place, ACAT, ATA London, SATA, Bloomsbury Centre, Walter's CTC, other examples - Alexander family tree useuful here.

- consumer and non-consumer/Professional market: historically, AT mostly sold to non-consumer, professional market; very little thought to consumer market.

- use of brand names: e.g. 1. Art of Swimming 2. EyeBody 3. BodyChance
- 1. & 2. above are brands based on tangents of AT; 3. example of one centered on AT, but marketing a distinctive style of teaching

- pedagogical and marketing issues: style of teaching matches lesson/group; matching teaching method to the market you are aiming

- demographic of audience: using market research to determine distinct demographics, particularly in consumer market - ages; class; etc.

- definitions based on need: people who want to be fixed, people who want to know about body mechanics, people who want to transform;

- budgeting and products: defining your products pedagogically, financially & demographically

- creating products: selling "packages" rather than "lessons" or "groups"

- growing without resources: free publicity, leveraging the AT history and prestige & famous individuals; leveraging client base with events to generate buzz

- developing life long training system based on community building: examples in Japan: tea ceremony, ikibana, martial arts dojos etc.

- BodyChance AT Training System: contemporary example of life long training system

- long term financial stability: using studio property purchases to increase equity, studio/training rental guarantee for mortgage

- resourcing graduates: offering financial, logistical, managerial support (at a cost) to engineer more successful career based AT Teachers

- defining mutually supportive roles of teaching training, studio network, master teacher role models within both the consumer and non-consumer markets.

Perhaps I will use this blog to flesh out each of these headings until something clearer emerges. Stay tuned!

Tablework

2007-02-08T08:21:00.000+09:00

Tablework, I believe, is predicated on the idea that the person must be 'restored', 're-educated' i.e. their sensory appreciation must be brought up to scratch (means become reliable). Now, while I don't doubt that when this can be affected, there will be a tremendous increase in health & vitality, hence mental condition, I do doubt that this step is essential, that it is the ONLY WAY a person can return to a good condition.

The connection between mental health (which for me means a person who is reliably in touch with the realities of this world) and our 'use of self' is undeniable close. But is it a strictly one-way causal relationship in the sense that - improve your use, improve your mind? Alexander's own pedagogy, it seems, is based solely on this assumption. And there is a tremendous amount of evidence that verifies this assumption.

Unfortunately, there is also abundant evidence to counter it. There are many examples of people, who we would classify as having appalling use, who are in great mental health, who definitely show qualities we would normally associate with persons already a long way along the path of 'conscious, constructive control' of their 'self'. The exception seems to point to the fact that a DIFFERENT MECHANISM is at play when it comes to the question of becoming more in touch with reality.

How did they do that without ever having had an Alexander lesson? Or a table turn? And with such terrible use!

Fred Lacy AT Video

2006-12-22T11:07:00.000+09:00

I just watch the video produced by Frederick Lacy - he has done a nice job. It is nappy, professionally done, with nice touches of humour and, most suprising for me, full of my friends! Check it out when you can - I don't think it is out, but google the name "The Alexander Technique by Frederick Lacy" will get a hit when it does.

Alexander Technique: FM's MSI 6 Point Sitting Plan Revisited

2006-10-25T05:43:00.000+09:00

Alexander Technique: FM's MSI 6 Point Sitting Plan Revisited: "http://dialoguers.livejournal.comhttp://franis.blogspot.com"

I choose "re-decide" based on Alexander's 5 point plan in UOS Chapter 1 "Evolution of a Technique" where he uses the word "decision" and "reconsider" when describing how he used his plan to overcome his habitual response. I guess "re-decide" comes from combining those two!

This is the passage:

" (4) while still continuing to project the directions for the new use I would stop and consciously reconsider my first decision, and ask myself "Shall I after all go on to gain the end I have decided upon and speak the sentence? Or shall I not? Or shall I go on to gain some other end altogether?" -- and then and there make a fresh decision..."

FM's MSI 6 Point Sitting Plan Revisited

2006-10-19T09:48:00.000+09:00

FM's 6 Point Plan for Sitting In A Chair (MSI Part 2 Chapter 7)

"20. These same rules are equally applicable in principle to the acts of sitting and of rising from a sitting position. Very few people have the right mental conception of the ”means whereby” of these acts or of the correct use of the parts which should be employed in their performance, and this despite the fact that we are performing these acts continually, and with such apparent ease from our own point of view. If you ask any of your friends to sit down, you will notice, if you observe their actions closely, that in nearly all cases there is undue increase of muscular tension in the body and lower limbs; in many cases the arms are actually employed. As a rule, however, the most striking action is the alteration in the position of the head, which is thrown back, whilst the neck is stiffened and shortened. Now I will describe the correct method, but it must be borne in mind that it is useless to give what I here call ”orders” to the muscular mechanism, until the original habit and the principle of mental conception connected with this action have been eradicated. If, for instance, before giving any of the ”orders” which follow, the experimenter has already fixed in his mind that he is to go through the performance of sitting down, as that performance is known to him, this suggestion will at once call into play all the old vicious co-ordinations, and the new orders will never influence the mechanisms to which they are directed, because those mechanisms will already be imperfectly employed, and will be held in their old routine by the force of the familiar suggestion.
Firstly, then, rid the mind of the idea of sitting down, and consider the exercise and each order independently of the final consequence they entail. In other words, study the "means,” not the "end.”
Secondly, stand in the position already described as the correct standing position, with the back of the legs almost touching the seat of the chair. Thirdly, order the neck to relax, and at the same time order the head forward and up. (Note that to ”order” the muscles of the neck to relax does not mean ”allow the head to fall forward on the chest.” The order suggested is merely a mental preventive to the erroneous preconceived idea.)
Fourthly, keep clearly in the mind the general idea of the lengthening of the body which is a direct consequence of the third series of orders. And
fifthly, order simultaneously the hips to move backwards and the knees to bend, the knees and hip-joints acting as hinges. During this act a mental order must be given to widen the back. When this order is fulfilled, the experimenter will find himself sitting in the chair. But he is not yet upright, for the body will be inclined forward, unless he frustrates the whole performance at this point by giving his old orders to come to an upright position.
Sixthly, then — and this is of great importance — pause for an instant in the position in which you will fall into the chair if the earlier instructions have been correctly followed, and then, after ordering the neck to relax and the head forward and up, the spine to lengthen, and the back to widen, come back into the chair and to an upright position by using the hips as a hinge, and without shortening the back, stiffening the neck or throwing up the head."

***

Jeremy's Simplified Generic Version
1. Clarify your intention
2. Unify your Field of Attention (i.e. your self, your surroundings, your intention)
3/4. Ask for your co-ordination
5. Move from the leading edges of the movement while letting your arms go on a holiday
6. Re-decide - clarify leading edge - move.

Marketing AT

2006-07-04T10:28:00.000+09:00

These are some comments I made recently on the Alextech mailing list on the subject of why AT is not faring so well these days. If you want to read other people's comments, please go to this URL - http://groups.google.com/group/alextech

1st Post
I do think AT is living in a dinosaur era when it comes to marketing - we get too precious about not giving the wrong message to people, that there is no message getting out at all! Sometimes I think we are writing our marketing messages for each other, not the public. It has to be 'so right' and not 'misrepresent' the work.

In Japan I have decided to drop the name "Alexander Technique" and begin marketing it under a new name, currently applying for a trade mark. This is easy to do because this is a foreign culture, nobody ever heard of AT anyway, so why translate a rather difficult name for marketing purposes? Why not just invent a new name that resonates with consumers? Of course we are NOT inventing a new technique. As people get past the trumpets, the dear old AT will still be there in it's pure form. It's great work, but people need a handle on it BEFORE they come.

The cringe factor has set us all back I think - oh, you can't say it's about posture (for example). Well why not? That's what people first understand, that's how they think. In my teaching practise I begin where people's thinking is, not expect them to be already thinking as I want them to be BEFORE they even had a lesson!

People want "to do" something. OK - let's give them a "to do" something in the marketing. And of course you are clever - you never actually lie about what you are doing. You just use a language that makes more sense to people.

So when they come, IF THEY COME, that's the time to begin the lesson. I admit this approach will fail with many - when they get there and find out there is no "to do" in the way they understand it, they will leave disappointed. "Where are the exercises?" But there are also who come with that idea, become surprised to discover it is nothing of the kind, and eventually have their lives deeply enriched by coming into contact with the work.

2nd Post
One distinction that is important when you are talking about the market, is to know WHICH market.

I think most AT teachers market themselves towards what I would call "non-consumer" market. This includes musicians, educators, other therapists, professionals in their own field - generally the kind of people who want a lot of detailed information, who don't mind complicated explanations, who want to read a book or two before coming. This is a very tough market, but the one in which Alexander himself succeeded very well. And, as we seem to do with most things, we still copy FM and try to continue to marketing ourselves towards this group.

Alexander, from the anecdotal evidence, rarely seem to come into contact with the ordinary, everyday consumer. They couldn't afford his lessons for a start, let alone understand all the talk of non-doing, learning nothing and you-already-have-it but-lost-it talk. I have been a past-time offender when it comes to this.

But this group - the consumer group - that the likes of yoga, pilates etc. have been so successful at cultivating, is where AT has failed so dismally. I wonder how Alexander's vision of the resurrection of humanity can be achieved by basically ignoring the largest group of people around?

Even within the consumer market, there are groups - and the language, approach, message will differ depending on which group you are communicating towards. In Japan, we have decided to specifically aim our marketing efforts towards single, working woman between the ages of 25~40. They are affluent, have some interest in "improving" themselves, and have time to pursue their interests. They have money to spend on a massage, a nail manicure, a film and dinner, a reflexology session and, hopefully, a coaching session in "TBA" at the "TBA" studio. They are hotly contested, so unless you utilize professionals to show you the techniques and principles that have been developed over many years to reach these people, you haven't got a hope.

My analysis is that the people who want to train to be teachers very rarely have the skill set to also set up a business and market themselves. These skills are themselves another career! So my idea is to build a company in Japan that employs AT teachers, and pay people who have marketing skills to do what they are good at, so the AT teachers can do what THEY are good at. This is why other groups have succeeded where we have not - they have banded together to make a business which then has the economic muscle to contest within the market place. AT is such an individualist culture, that this has tended not to happen. Actually - can anyone name me a Alexander teaching based corporation?

I want to create a culture in Japan that becoming an AT teacher is a viable career. I think there are many people in the West who might want to become AT teachers, but if they have a young family and financial responsibilites, the model they are presented is not very promising. AT teachers seem to fare as well as actors these days. Who can seriously entertain an idea of becoming an AT teacher and managing to raise a family at the same time?

Until we change the culture of AT, and demonstrate that it is a viable career (as well as a calling - it is OK for it to be BOTH, right?), our training schools will continue diminishing as anecdotal evidence seems to suggest is happening.

Running with a 6 year old

2005-10-05T22:10:00.000+09:00

It says Alexander Technique, but actually I want to talk about my little girl Angelica. She is 6 and passionately interested in running. So she asks me for Alexander lessons "Daddy, can you show me how to run faster?" "Sure darling, let's go". The problem is, no matter what the instruction, her passion is so great she "does" the instruction, resulting in more tension that she had to begin with. I then work on us runing together, my hand on her head/shoulders and guiding her to speeds she had not acheived on her own, and in the process experiencing the loss of effort that her previous wish to go "faster" generated in her system. We just had our second lesson the other day. More to come I hope.

Her rival at Kindergaten, Mizuko (we live in Japan), discovered that Angelica was coaching her team for the relay race this week. That's right - Angelica takes the information I give her and "trains" her team to run faster. So Mizuko demands that Angelica show her how to run faster. "Sure I will," says Angelica "once the race is over."

My First Enry

2004-11-04T12:10:00.000+09:00

To-day is the day Bush just one a second term and I am sad about that, sad and anxious about the further damage to human relations that man might acheive, beyond what he has already caused. In the New York Times Editorial today, it was written: "Right now, we are in the peculiar position of suffering political paralysis, despite the fact that there is a clear consensus on most questions of policy." How true!

This Blog is going to be about the Alexander Technique, but to-day this is the single fact affecting the co-ordination of myself!