Sept 26th
Maybe the old way doesn’t seem right anymore, but the new way is not so easy to find and you are in this stuck place. Take courage. It’s so rare to be stuck, to be lost, to not have the answer. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Sept 25th
Sometimes just witnessing your own breathing is joy enough. It is like the sea with big waves and little waves and never still.
Sept 24th
Autumn and Spring are very Alexandrian seasons full of change, letting go of old leaves, albeit beautiful flame coloured leaves, and readying the tree and plants for new growth, brilliant greens and yellows. Which season do you perceive yourself to be in? Perhaps you are having a day of winter when nothing seems to happening, waiting for the moment to arrive. Maybe a day of summer when the fruits of your labours are shining for all to see and you can languidly inhabit some new place as if you have known it all along.
Sept 23rd
Which part of the elephant are you in relationship with today? Are you practising monkey by bending the knees first or letting the head lead and tilting at the hips first? Are you emphasising direction or playing more with inhibition? It does not matter which. It is still the same beast.
Sept 22nd
Let us have an awareness of the Earth day, your connection with the ground. From time to time notice the contact with you feet, and notice your contact with the sitting bones. Or the back, if you are leaning. Or your arm. Or your thigh. Or your hand. Whatever you are in contact with, with whichever part of you, is a contact with the Earth. You are contacting the Earth when you are in touch with someone else.
Sept 21st
As we begin to react, over 600 muscles prepare to take action. Quite a programme to inhibit and re-organise.
Sept 20th
It takes a lot of courage to change. Be kind to yourself today. Take courage.
Sept 19th
We are creatures primed for predicting movement. When someone serves a tennis ball the receiver has no time to keep her eye one the ball. It’s simply too fast for our brain to process. But she can predict where it might go, reading her opponent’s body movements and based on past experience.
So our living in the now is predicated on our ability to predict futures from past experience. And it flows seamlessly. If we are concentrating on our future, then we miss the present. The future exists for us in the moment. As does the past. A memory of the past comes into the now. Our habit is often to leave the experience of now to dig around in the past. It can be pleasant to root around in our personal history of course, re-live happy times. But this thinking is happening in the present. But we don’t need to stay in the past, or make it our habit. Inhibit this and the past will come to you.
Sept 18th
Can you inhibit your worry thoughts? It’s wonderful if you can, if only for a few moments .
Sept 17th
Sometimes we feel that yet again we are in our world of habit and we react by feeling bad about it. Don’t worry, this will pass. It is part of the process. Our awareness has grown, not our habit. Our habit is the feeling bad about it. The light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train but actually the end of the tunnel.
Sept 16th
Sometimes this work will generate nice feelings. Sometimes it is OK to bask in them.
Sept 15th
It takes the time it takes to find the path, and we get lost on the way. Hurray! How refreshing! It is very difficult to get lost these days.
Sept 14th
Sometimes there is nothing to say. Alexander was heard to say near the end of his life when questioned, “Read my books, it’s all in there.”
Sometimes I would ask questions to which my teachers didn’t answer. They gave me plenty of words, but didn’t directly answer. That’s because it wasn’t the right question, they would say. I was beside myself with rage and wondered at their apparent smugness.
Of course now I understand their answer and they were right. It wasn’t the right question.
Sept 13th
The amount of relief we feel as we let go, is on a ratio as to the amount of unnecessary tension we were holding. Perhaps when we first start out on our Alexander journey we are wooed by this feeling of floating, ease, bliss that we get sometimes when we are coming up and experiencing doing nothing. We are duped into craving this blissed out state and seek out the feeling. We stumble on it again as a teacher puts their hands on, but the feeling is secondary to the reasoning and letting go that is required. The feeling is a consequence of our non-doing. Sometimes. We could not exist in the world in such a state constantly. Like the euphoria we can have on stage performing perhaps. All we can do is keep sticking to principle, inhibit, direct, be present, rearrange our primary control.
Sept 12th
It is such a joy to notice when we are holding or pulling ourselves down. Because in that moment we can let go of it, if only for a moment.
Sept 11th
Don’t let Alexander lead you to a sense of perfection. It doesn’t exist. We are not trying to be perfect, just use ourselves as well as we can in the given circumstances. It’s all a little rock and roll. Everything changes. What seems right one day may not be the next and on it goes. Allow yourself to be imperfect today.
Sept 10th
‘Sleep is the last refuge of habit.’ Walter Carrington.
So you won’t change your sleeping habits directly. And semi supine is not primarily a sleeping position.
Sept 9th
When you free the arms, you are no longer trapping the ribs and breathing will also become freer.
Sept 8th
Take your arms out to the side and back again, and clock the effort. Stand in a doorway and try to raise your arms as your hands press into the frame for 15 seconds. Then step away from the door and raise your arms again. It is likely they will float effortlessly upwards. As they return to your side think again to raise them, but pause and ask them to float as before. Your brain can remember what it did to move them effortlessly and it will happen again.
Sept 7th
Time to surrender again.
Sept 6th
When we move effortlessly it can seem we are going slower. Faulty sensory perception. It’s just we’ve taken the rush out of everything. Often we are moving quicker.
Sept 5th
What are you paying attention to today? Whatever it is, is it possible to ensure that your are attending in a wide focus? We are habituated to narrowing our attention. Perhaps sometimes we need this concentration, but not as our default. Make the widened field of attention your default today.
Sept 4th
Just decide to be tall as is possible today, not by stretching up but by being aware of up.
Sept 3rd
The myth of core stability: core muscles. They used to be called abdominal muscles. They are mostly used for keeping our innards inside, for defecating, for vomiting, for flexing the spine. They are not attached to the spine. They are attached to the ribs and the pelvis. Electrodes were placed on the abdominal muscles to measure their activity whilst someone was simply standing. Movements were so slight nothing registered on the equipment. No measurement was recorded. You don’t need the abdominal muscles to be strong or pulled in or tightened for you to be able to stand effectively. They have very little to do with it. If you have a habit of holding your tummy in as you stand, let it go today.
Sept 2nd
When you straighten your arm and place your fingertips against a wall, then slightly bend the elbow you will notice that the fingertips are still in contact with the wall. The arm has not shortened, the muscles have got longer A straight arm is a contracted arm. The same is true for the legs. So if you notice your knees locked back today, release them. Your legs will be longer.
Sept 1st
Are you sitting or standing in ‘monkey’ ? What is ‘monkey’? Alexander called it the position of mechanical advantage. But how deep or shallow is the ‘monkey’? It is according to the need. When we are standing we are in monkey. The angles of the hip knee and ankle are not so acute, that’s all. When we are sitting it is ‘monkey’, but the support is from the sitting bones as well as the feet. Today may you always be in a place of mechanical advantage.
Aug 31st
The act of letting go is easy. It is everything leading up to the point of letting go that is the difficulty.
Aug 30th
We may not know how change occurs but if we open ourselves to it, it can happen seamlessly.
Aug 29th
We cannot control what stimuli the world challenges us with. We can only control our response.
Aug 28th
Find space for yourself before the usual day begins. Then you can wear the day like a garment, something you chose to put on. Like William Worsdworth’s poem below.
Aug 27th
Do you have a schedule today? Or will the day unfold as it will? If it is a busy day ahead, look at the gaps between appointments, albeit small ones like looking at the gaps between these words. These are the moments to rest and give some space for yourself. To sharpen the saw.
Aug 26th
Not always easy to let go of old habit. It is familiar like an old coat. It is almost all we have ever known and is comfortable to us in some ways. But there comes a time when the old coat will no longer service us. Time to take it off and hang it in the wardrobe or take it to the charity shop. And if we still need a coat of habit, then you have opened yourself to wear a better one, more serviceable, that gives you freedom to move , that looks fabulous!
Aug 25th
How is your internal space? Probably working quite well. Our attention is often drawn inward, narrowed to some part of us or a discomfort, physical or emotional, regret or worry for the future. But it is our own world and we are at that moment cut off from what is going on around us. One of the best medicines is to pay attention to the world around you right here, right now, the space above behind, on either side, the space in front the connection to the earth….. But careful you don’t space out! It’s another form of narrowing when we focus on just the space and not the details.
Aug 24th
Why did we collapse? Why did we as a child get into the habit of blocking the world out, looking down, dropping the neck? Maybe we didn’t like the world very much. Maybe we were feeling sad or put upon. Maybe our only way of coping was to ignore the real world, get into the world of the internet, or our own head, taking us away from the unpleasantness around. Or maybe we were simply copying someone else and wanted to emulate them. Before we knew it, whatever the reason in the first place, we have a habit. How we got it, we may never know, but now we are liberated, now we can consciously come out of it. Hurray! If we want.
Aug 23rd
Sometimes we have been contracting our psoas and lower back muscles to pull the chest up to make us feel upright. When we let go of these, we come into a slump, the head and chest dropped down. This collapse was probably the first ‘doing’. The second doing was puling ourselves up to please someone. To get rid of the first doing, we have to rid ourselves first of the second doing. So don’t hold yourself up today. Stay ‘down’, and then gently let your eyes look up and around, the head following, the spine following the head and you will find yourself up without tightening the lower back or pulling the chest up. If it feels down to you still, check it out in the mirror. Maybe it is, but maybe it isn’t.
Aug 22nd
Think of how you eat today. We often end-gain our food. Think of bringing the food to your mouth rather than dropping your neck and taking your head to the food. It isn’t so easy when it’s a bowl of soup or noodles of course. If you are at home, pick the bowl up with your hand so it gets closer to your mouth, so your spoon or fork doesn’t have to travel such a long way. When you eat are you thinking of other things? How about staying present with your eating. Be in the moment of your eating. Bring awareness to your eating.
Aug 21st
If you place your hands on your head for about 15 seconds and take them off again, you may feel how the head rises and the spine lengthens all by itself. We are often pulling our head into the spine and are not aware of it. We become aware of it only when the weight has been taken off. The spine is a lengthening device. Let your head rise and take the weight off the spine.
Aug 20th
When we lie down in semi-supine it’s not just the body that untangles itself, but the minds also, all those thoughts become ordered and sometimes that busy mind comes to rest. Experiment: when you have a knotty problem, lie down and see the knots untying. Maybe the solution will come to you.
Aug 19th
What have you learned today, or what will you learn today? Maybe that the price of butter has gone up in the supermarket, maybe you will have discovered how the universe was formed, to forgive a deep hurt against you. They are all moments of learning. We are inherently learning creatures. It is difficult not to learn.
Aug 18th
Think of the top of the spine pointing to the sky. Useful thought if you suffer with ‘tech neck’ , dropping the neck from the 7th vertebra. It stops it.
Aug 17th
As you walk watching something come towards you, when it arrives in a moment it is gone and something else on the horizon presents itself, coming towards you. So it goes on.
Aug 16th
Walking. Are you walking tall today, allowing your legs to lengthen, your head reaching up to the sky? Earth below, sky above, and we lengthen between the two .
Aug 15th
Not doing anything: bliss. Find some time to do absolutely nothing.
Aug 14th
‘I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering up its things, packing up and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night’
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
There are moments of epiphany in the Alexander work, but mostly through gentle persistence, we discover something has shifted, disappeared, left us.
Aug 13th
‘She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.’
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
I think in AT we are given the tools to help us cast aside the fictitious self.
Aug 12th
‘Every single act must be approached as though we have never done it before. Then we can find things out.’
FM Alexander
Aug 11th
It’s OK sometimes to be completely wrong about something. To misjudge something, to make a terrible mistake. We won’t know it’s wrong until we get a new perception, new knowledge. This can be quite liberating and offer us a fresh approach. Acknowledge the milk is spilt, then let the cat lick it up and get another carton from the fridge. or have your tea black for a change. Thank god we don’t have to be right all the time!!
Aug 10th
Got any fixed ideas? Best free them up. They may be completely wrong.
Aug 9th
When prompted to speak, wait patiently to know that the time is right.’
From Advice and Queries, Quaker Faith and Practice.
Aug 8th
‘In ordinary teaching, pupils and teachers are quite convinced that if some part of the organism is too tense, they can relax it – that is do the relaxing by direct means. This is a delusion on their part, but it is difficult to convince them of it. In the first place if they do chance to get rid of the specific tension it will be by a partial collapse of the parts concerned, or of other parts, possibly even by a general collapse of the whole organism. In the second place it is obvious that if some part of the organism is unduly tensed, it is because the pupil is attempting to do with it the work of some other parts or parts, often work for which it is quite unsuited.’ FM Alexander , Constructive Control of the Individual.
Aug 7th
Sometimes learning happens without us knowing it. Later from one hour of experience and instruction, we can have amazing repercussions throughout the week, throughout our lives. How come I have remembered that? How come that thought is popping up into my brain as I walk along? How come I am walking differently, effortlessly? Ah, that’s the magic of being human.
Aug 6th
Sometimes we don’t feel we have learnt anything. It is too easy, too obvious, too simple. ‘I’m not doing anything!’ ….Surprise!
Aug 5th
Think of what’s beneath your feet. The planet. The crust of the earth, the magna at the centre.
Aug 4th
Remember to look up the stars today, and if you cannot see them, a star blind sky, then remember that they are there.
Aug 3rd
‘You make my arm feel like a cloud’. Can you make your arm feel like a cloud? Without substance, floating, free. Give yourself that instruction today and perhaps you will find that and continue to include all of you, so all of you feels like a cloud.
Aug 2nd
How are your eyes? Are you resting them as you read this or tightening them? Have a wider vision, relax the muscles around the eyes. Pay attention to the eyes today. They receive a lot of light.
Aug 1st
When you think of your knees releasing forward it may switch off that huge contraction we often give ourselves in the quads. Imagine -we are trying to move and hold ourselves at the same time. No wonder it’s all a bit of an effort.
July 31st
If you stand with your feet together, then play with standing with your feet wider apart. If you stand with your feet wide apart, stand with them together. This way you can play with something other than your habit. If you think you stand with neither together or wide apart then try one or the other. Which feels most normal? It may be you have a faulty sensory appreciation.
July 30th
If you have a pain in your shoulder, it may be the tightness in your legs that is causing it.
July 29
We learn through unconscious imitation as a child. Now as an adult we can learn through conscious imitation. Think of someone you admire in how they move through the world and from time to time imagine you are them. Model them. You may feel yourself coming ‘up’. Make sure you are not ‘doing’ them which could lead to un-necessary tension, just become them.
July 28th
‘I must neither push my thought nor let or drift. I must simply make an internal gesture of standing back and watching. For it was a state in which my will played policeman to the crowd of my thoughts, its business being to stand there and watch that the road might be free for whatever was coming. Why had no-one told me that the function of will might be to stand back, to wait and not to push?’
From A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner (Joanna Field) 1936
July 27th
Substitute ‘must, got to, ought, should,’ for ‘I wish’. FM said that ‘I must but I can’t’ were two impostors to be released when we changed it to volition. It puts us into conflict. A wish or desire is wholesome, we are no longer divided. I was once in a traffic jam on my way to work. How could I want to be there? Because there was no other way if I wanted to get to work, which I did….
July 26th
Another way of walking is to imagine the destination coming towards you. You can watch the trees and walls go by, as if you are not doing anything but being carried along on a travellator, the event, the destination coming towards you. Try it out. It stops the rush. The future is coming. The end of this piece of writing will arrive without my having to do anything.
July 25th
If you have a young child at home you have a readymade Alexander teacher to observe and play with. They have empty hands and are learning through experimenting, keeping their attention out on you or their activity or their environment…or sleeping, at rest. Of course their neural pathways that join the pre-frontal lobes to the amygdala, the emotional centre of our brain have not connected yet, so they are also gusts of emotion, life and death needs and wants.
July 24th
‘The theory doesn’t matter as much as the practice itself does’….Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way. ‘What you are doing is creating pathways in your consciousness through which the creative forces can operate.’ Hmmm suspiciously Alexandrian…..
July 23rd
We want to inhabit a SEA of consciousness: Self Environment Activity. Often we cherry pick, thinking of only one or the other, but when we come to a unified field of attention as Frank Pearce Jones calls it, then we are aware of all these three. And life becomes sweeter.
July 22nd
Which is best, to live in ugliness and see the beauty beyond or to live in beauty and see the ugliness beyond?
July 21st
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet Act 2 , scene 2.
One of FM’s favourite pieces.
July 20th
Connection not correction
July 19th
We don’t have to ‘do’ learning. We are naturally learning creatures. We learn through experience. Just show up and be there and we will learn something.
July 18th
‘Functional freedom awakens feeling and when this happens it is not necessary to “put” feeling into anything. It is there.’
Cornelius L. Reid
July 17th
‘Seek freedom and beauty will arrive of its own. If you seek beauty directly you risk loising freedom and its attendant beauty’
Pedro de Alcantara
July 16th
‘Nothing ultimately makes any sense. You can be as purposeful as you like, as efficient as possible. It doesn’t matter how much you achieve. One day the game will be over. Then only one question will be asked. It won’t be “How much did you earn?” or “Did you pay the rent?” Nor will it be “Did you obey all the rules?” or “Did you understand what was going on?” It will be “Did you appreciate the magic and then did what you could to help others appreciate it too?”
Jonathan Cainer April 2011
July 15th
‘The really efficient labourer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure’ Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 62) Journal 1841
July 14th
It all started because FM had a problem with his voice. He changed this indirectly by not working directly on his vocal production but on ensuring he was standing well with good use and allowing the air to travel freely out of his lungs. How’s your voice today? Have you included it as part of yourself?
July 13th
We can apply Alexander to anything we do. Have a think about today – what did you apply it to or what will you apply it to? Sometimes it is useful to attach it to something unusual or specific. Like I will inhibit and direct every time I get up or sit down from the seat on the bus – easier and more possible than deciding to do it EVERY time you stand and sit. Eventually that association with the bus seat will occur for every bus journey and filter through to other sittings and standings
July 12th
We can always choose to say no to something. It will have consequences of course.
July 11th
Have a generous voice. Make it easy for people to hear. If we are shy and afraid and speak softly people may lean in towards us to hear what we say, concentrating, narrowing their attention to catch the quiet sounds. We may not know we are speaking softly of course – we may have a faulty sensory appreciation of the volume and clarity of our voice. After all, we can hear our voice OK! How can we check this out? Trust people when they let you know they can’t hear. Notice if they are leaning in, asking you to repeat it a lot, that when you raise your voice it feels an effort. These are good indications. Record your voice with some others, equal distance from the microphone and compare. It won’t sound like you, but it will give you a sense of the volume and clarity.
July 10th
If your habit is to procrastinate challenge that immediately! But remember to pause first to allow the action to take place freely and effortlessly. Procrastination is like keeping the hand brake on. Take the hand brake off and the car will roll down the hill easily.
July 9th
We can see the sun rise, or we can see the earth dipping to allow the sun to come up.
July 8th
Yesterday I noticed blackbirds hopping on the ground for food. What extraordinary creatures birds are – they fly! It was as if I had seen them for the first time, almost taking surprise at their flight. One of the delightful side effects of changing ourselves is that the world changes .
July 7th
Slow down a bit. Take a rest from speed. Often the feeling of speed is the rushing. Which is mental effort.
July 6th
Suppose just for today we don’t try hard, hurry up, be strong, be perfect or please others. Wonderful!
July 5th
Other people could be much more confused, shy and mixed up than you. And they don’t know all the answers either.
July 4th
One of the greatest things about and Alexander lesson is the meeting of peoples.
July 3rd
Another quality associated with Alexander is gentleness. In Laban terms we often glide as Alexander teachers, smooth direct unhurried. And whilst some teachers’ hands are firmer than others, most are very gentle. We are asked gently to change, invited through the door to the unknown gently. Be gentle with yourself today, teacher or student. Be gentle with others you are in contact with. Gently does it.
July 2nd
By the time you have finished reading this sentence, the future will have arrived and become the present. The past is the beginning of the sentence. We don’t ever have to chase the future. Or end-gain. The end will arrive. Stay in the process.
July 1st
Find some quiet time today. Just for yourself. Sit in a chair and wait expectantly. Something will happen. I can’t say what. Everyone experiences something different.
June 30th
What are you wearing? Here’s a great game- choose to wear clothes you wouldn’t normally wear. Not your usual habit, your style. If you wear your hair up, wear it down. If you wear make-up leave it off, and vice versa. If you wear greens and browns, try reds and blues, plain colours, try patterns. And wear them for the day. It can change your life! You may discover something suits you really well. Or you may find that you walk differently, feel more or less confident……amazing how changing our clothes can affect us so much.
June 29th
Sometimes wearing a hat can make us crouch down, under the brim. Wear your titfer with pride today and remember to think of the space, the ‘up’ beyond the hat.
June 28th
Turn ‘must, ought, should, got to, have to’ into ‘I want’ or ‘I wish’ and have a nice day
June 27th
Sometimes when you are all tensed up thinking about a terrible thing that might happen it’s rather useful to take your mind to the directions. When we ask our neck to be free and our head rise up to allow the back to lengthen and widen everything seems to fall into place and the worry thoughts leave you – for a while at least. How nice that worry thoughts can be solves by controlling our physical response to fear.
June 26th
‘It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.’
And the Mountain Echoed …Khaled Hosseini
June 25th
‘I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap. Probably not even real.’
– House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielweski)
June 24th
‘Leave yourself alone.’
FM
June 23rd
‘You get away from all your pre-conceived ideas because you are getting away from your old habits” FM
June 22nd
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
WB Yeats
June 21st
What are you doing right now? Reading this of course! Today talk through what you are doing as you do it, to keep your mind from wandering.
June 20th
Stand in a door frame and press your hands into the frame as though trying to fly. After 15 seconds stop, move away from the door and let them rise up magically with no effort. Every time you go to pick up a glass of water today or a cup of tea, pause and remember that sensation and see if it doesn’t happen again, so you can pick up your cup of tea gently and effortlessly.
June 19th
Blow an invisible feather’
“Ffffforget shopping list, social calendar, thwarted ambitions, presidents and politics, cholesterol score, football scores, hair-loss, weight gain, sunshine, wet rain, tax bill, over-the-hill….and feel the earth come up to meet your insignificant but creaking body.” Martyn Potts trainee in Alexander Technique
June 18th
The Door
Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.
Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.
Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.
Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.
At least
there’ll be
a draught.
Miroslav Holub
June 17th
Alexander is often considered a body discipline. Ah -ah. It is a psycho –physical discipline. When you notice today your brain yakking on its usual stream of suggestion and daydream, it is very Alexandrian to inhibit this. Inhibit and inhabit a quieter place, the outside world.
June 16th
When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of the wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
Of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free
Wendell Berry
June 15th
‘The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.’
Derek Walcott
June 14th
“I must neither push my thought nor let or drift. I must simply make an internal gesture of standing back and watching. For it was a state in which my will played policeman to the crowd of my thoughts, its business being to stand there and watch that the road might be free for whatever was coming. Why had no-one told me that the function of will might be to stand back, to wait and not to push?” (From A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner)
June 13th
The traditional verbal directions of Alexander – to allow the neck to be free to let the head go forward and up; to let the back to lengthen and widen, and the knees to go forward and away – are rather like a recipe for a cake. They have to be in the right order or we won’t rise!
June 12th
‘Let us meet and talk of things inconsequential’ says Mr.San, a character from a play called Bone Harvest I was once involved with. To idle to have dalliance. It is good for the spirit sometimes. After all, nothing is THAT important……is it?
June 11th
Always good to pause before clicking on ‘send’ . Maybe sleeping on it may be a wiser choice. Inhibition in action.
June 10th
If the world is a challenging place today maybe it’s ok to wrap yourself into a little ball for a while. Then we’re in a psycho-physical unity and not one part forcing another part to smile bravely. However smiling bravely can sometimes turn into a genuine smile and equally begin to return us to a psycho-physical unity without conflict. It takes courage to stay responsive to the world when we have been knocked for 6. But it is possible to take the blow, acknowledge it, recover and return to full standing, perhaps a little wiser with our sorrow.
June 9th
Here’s a tip: if your shoulders are slightly held up, think of your elbows dropping or lengthening away from the shoulders and it often sends the shoulder blades back home.
June 8th
‘You can’t do something you don’t know if you keep on doing what you do know’ FM Alexander’s Articles and Lectures p 196
June 7th
‘As soon as people come with the idea of unlearning instead of learning, you have them in the frame of mind you want’. FM Alexander ‘Articles and Lectures’ p 198
June 6th
How are your legs? Be-kind-to-legs day. Often without realizing we are bracing them, locking the knees and using an immense amount of force to push the Earth away. I was teaching someone who had this problem to the extent that when he walked away he left indents in my carpet. I experimented in bracing and pushing my legs into the floor till I too had created an indentation. Wow that was a lot of effort! Not only my legs but all of me was quite locked up. Any apparent freedom in my waist and ribs was only at the expense of everything else locking up – including my neck. So, not just legs, but be-kind-to-yourself day. Free the knees. Remember you have ankles and hip joints too and allow the up direction throughout, so nothing is having to push. In a pushing competition between us and the planet, guess who is going to win? Best not even go there.
June 5th
What would you do today if you weren’t doing what you have got planned? Planning is useful essential…and habitual. I worked with a guy once who never had a spare piece of unplanned time in his day. Even when walking he would have to be listening to language programmes on his headphones. Maybe you could plan a day of being unplanned. Hang out and discover what happens. Oh-oh. This could be dangerous, the unexpected might occur.
June 4th
Make sure you don’t try too hard today! And make sure you don’t try too hard to not try hard…..
June 3rd
‘Joking is undignified, that is why it is good for the soul’ G.K.Chesterton
It is also good for a whispered ‘ah’. Here’s the menu:
1. Be in the here and now conscious Alexandrian state of direction
2. Ensure the tip of the tongue is resting on the back of the bottom front teeth
3. Think of something funny
4. As the smile arrives on the face, open the jaw
5. Let the air out on a ‘whispered ah’
6. Close the jaw and let the air rush in through the nose.
It’s ever so easy and by having the funny thought we sweep away the dark thoughts that may have been cluttering our mind, so we are already in a state of renewal. By having the funny thought we are opening the false vocal folds allowing the airway to remain unhindered. Except for the true folds that will half open, allowing the whispered sound. Keeping the tongue stuck to the teeth at the front there ensures that the tongue gets a good stretch and isn’t held at the back, impinging on the space at the back of the throat, allowing for better resonance, and if the jaw likes to go from side to side as it opens, it often is a help to guide the jaw on its journey, so the jaw drops straight forward and down. I have seen this performed many times by acting students, all goes well until the moment, the jaw begins to move and then they concentrate and look glum, taking it all far too seriously. The smile needs to continue throughout and the whole exercise be taken lightly. And that wonderful whoosh of air that arrives through the nose is so uplifting it’s impossible not to smile with delight.
June 2nd
Are you doing what you want to do? If not, it might be time to change.
June 1st
My line manager in a drama school was designing the course for the year and I read the packed schedule with interest. I loved he had timetabled in ‘time for dreaming’ . Influenced by him, I wrote in my schedule for the Alexander lessons ‘Time for the unexpected.’ I love the unexpected! May the unexpected arrive in your life today. Not all unexpected things are nice of course. But I hope today the unexpected is beauteous for you.
May 30th
Today let there be peace in your life. Just a small piece of peace if that’s all that’s available. A moment between the shelling.
May 29th
When you’re feeling fraught, distracted and generally discombobulated that’s the BEST time to practice inhibition. Maybe you don’t have to feel all those things. Just give up for a moment the need to do any of it, the need to feel any of that. And as you return to the fray, maybe you can decide to enjoy the busy -ness you are experiencing.
May 28th
‘Why don’t you come up on the porch and idle with us a while.’ So says Grandpa in the Waltons to a neighbour…….find some time for idling today! Maybe with a friend.
May 27th
Pausing before taking action is not dithering or being undecided. It’s being more committed. If you find yourself dithering, make a choice one way or the other. It will lead you to somewhere.
May 26
Stop….take in the world around you. As you read this allow your eyes to relax and let the words come to you. Practice this all day whenever you are reading anything, on a screen, in a book, on an advertising board. Let your eyes soften and be aware of the periphery. You will still be able to read, I promise.
May 25th
Stop pulling down. Then the up will be revealed. It’s already there, waiting for you.
May 24th
Are you ‘on line’ ? Responding, listening, learning and communicating? Or are you off line living only from memory and habit? We can’t be ‘on line’ all the time, but often our habit is to be off line, in our own world in the truth of our own perceptions, rather stuck. Maybe it’s worth practising being on line.
May 23rd
Habits are ok, we are creatures of habit, after all. But we know them so well, we don’t have to practice them. Think of one you know of, and practice NOT practising it today.
May 22nd
Once we’ve cracked not pulling our head back, then we can apply that method to anything. The method? Your own experiment of course but you may find Alexander’s way of inhibition and direction rather useful.
May 21st
Is it OK to daydream? Of course it is! Just ensure it’s where you choose to be, not where your mind takes you. It is an enchanted fairy path that can be very pleasurable, but also treacherous. It is where dreams and new theories and plays and artworks lurk, but any artist will tell you it also requires fierce attention to manifest these fantasies. You may not want to make it a habit.
May 20th
How are your shoulders today? Where are they? Are they ‘home’? When I ask you about your shoulders what are you thinking about? The blade, the bones shoulder girdle, the trapezius muscles which aches, the shoulder joints ? And what happens to the rest of you as you think of them?
May 19th
There is more lung tissue behind your centre line than in front. Whisper an ‘ah’ as you come into monkey slightly tipping forward from the hip joints, and stay there as you allow the air to enter. You may feel the ribs at the back working more, the effect of the diaphragm at the back…then allow yourself to breathe in as you come back up to upright standing.
May 18th
Do yourself a favour: now and then check you are not bracing your legs. You don’t want to be bending them, another sort of ‘doing’ – just don’t lock them . This will release the lower back and the diaphragm so you can stand and breathe more easily. As well as taking the pressure away from your knee joints. Of course we may know all this and still find ourselves doing it, so dedicate today to gently observe yourself releasing not bracing.
May 17th
Thought for the day: where does it come from?
May 16th
Two guys were taking part in a competition to see who could saw a tree down the fastest. They were using hand saws. As they puffed their way through the trunk their saws became blunt and it was becoming harder and harder to saw through the wood. One guy stopped and sharpened his saw. The other guy just continued to use his brute strength, not wanting to waste his time. Guess who won the competition?
Nice story to remind us of our habitual end-gaining. Stop and sharpen the saw today!
May 15th
We are always so busy busy busy…..life has become a busyness! Schedule in a meeting with yourself. Timetable moments of rest.
May 14th
Think of the inside of the back of the pelvis, think of the inside of the back of your ribs. This may help you to come into your back.
May 13th
Just refuse to collapse today, just refuse. Do not give consent. Stay with the ‘up’.
May 12th
In the journey between holding the shoulders up and pushing the shoulders down, there is their home. So much thought on shoulders: too held up, too pulled back, too collapsed forward. Leave them alone, and they will come home, blades, collar bones and all.
May 11th
Another image for Primary Control:
The Silken Tent
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
Robert Frost
May 10th
‘I need to stop thinking and then I can let go.’ Revelation from a student on the table.
There are a lot of types of thinking. The analytical thinking , intuitive thinking, meditative thinking , trying hard concentrated thinking, mind wandering, day dream, fearful thinking, imaginative thinking open responsive thinking…… the last sort is very Alexandrian. It’s allowing the interface between outside and inside worlds. The thought being triggered from the outside newness perhaps, rather than the internal memory based stimulus.
May 9th
Is Alexander an art form or a science?
May 8th
If we accept ourselves in the moment, there is no need to change. That is the change. Further change will occur all by itself.
May 7th
Make a fist and notice the tension and the emotional association with this act. Then undo the fist. On the other hand allow your finger tips to gently curl down and touch the palm of your hand. Bring your thumb gently across so that the tip rests between the middle and ring finger. You will have created the shape of a fist without the tension, a different ‘means whereby’ . If you needed to have a strong fist to bash someone then of course you could tighten it up again. Often we are approaching life like a fist. Let us inhibit past associations and curl our fingers instead.
May 6th
Go with the flow…but it is also possible to tack against the wind to go forward. Look to where the wind is blowing a nd use it with your wise sails to take you where you want. Use our free will to walk our own path not just follow like lemmings the one to the cliff.
Wait for the opportunity to take action, but prepare yourself to take advantage of the opportunity. Be vigilant, not switched off. Or you’ll miss it.
May 5th
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks on a marrow-bone’
WB Yeats ( A prayer for old age)
May 4th
‘The body is always part of the world. I sit on this chair; the chair is on a floor in this building; and the
Building in turn rets on the mountain of stone that is Manahattan Island. Whenever I walk, my body is interrelated with the world in which and on which I take my steps. This presupposes some harmony between body and world. We know from physics that the earth rises infinitesimally to meet my step, as any two bodies attract each other. The balance essential in walking is one that is not soley in my body; it can be understood only as a relationship of my body to the ground on which it stands and walks. The earth is there to meet each foot as it falls, and the rhythm of my walking depends on my faith that the earth will be there.’ Rollo May, The Courage to Create
May 3rd
Under the cherry blossoms
None are
Utter strangers.
Issa
Thinking she was someone I knew, I once greeted someone very enthusiastically, although they were a stranger curiously walking down my garden steps thinking it was a public path. I made her feel welcome. And she responded with smiles and pleasantries. I realised quickly I didn’t know her but didn’t admit my early error. I kept up my enthusiastic welcome until she wandered off on her own adventure. I decided I could respond like this to everyone who wandered into my life, and enjoy together the cherry blossoms.
May 2nd
Half way down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn’t any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I’m not at the bottom
I’m not at the top
So this is the stair
Where
I always
Stop
Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up
And isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery
It isn’t in the town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head
‘It isn’t really
Anywhere
It’s somewhere else instead!’
A.A. Milne
…..an Alexander place to be.
May 1st
We can apply Alexander to anything
April 30th
If we leave ourselves alone, the world, our system, our acting, organises itself. But I think we need some free will that allows us to stop interfering and allow things to unfold naturally.
April 29th
Take the plank out of your own eye before trying to take the speck out of your brother’s. Put on your own oxygen mask before putting on your child’s.
April 28th
Perhaps I am wrong. I do not have to be right. What I think of as right may be wrong. Maybe I am wrong. Stop doing the wrong thing and the right will do itself.
April 27th
Habits of thought: if you look for weeds you will find them, but if you look for flowers you will find them. Today let us look for flowers. The weeds will come to our attention if needed.
April 26th
Sometimes when we think we‘ve made a free choice, actually it’s a habitual choice…Here’s ‘two roads diverging in a yellow wood, which shall I take? – that one, it looks less trodden…oh -ho, no it’s not- it’s very trodden…..’ There is a faulty perception of what is really new and out of habit sometimes.
April 25th
My interpretation of the outer territory is a map, not the territory itself. Let me always be open to changing the map as I explore the territory.
April 24th
‘When we set out to do a thing, getting it done is not really the important thing. Rather, what is, above all, important is to pay attention to what we are doing to ourselves while in the process of doing that which we set out to do’ FM
April 23rd
Are you scared of losing what you have?
April 22nd
Look up the Master Ichu Zen story, between master and disciple.
Attention
Attention
Attention.
April 21st
What would freedom from habit sound like?
April 20th
If you were to draw your habits, what would they look like?
April 19th
Where would you most like to be if you were not where you are now?
April 18th
Is where you are where you want to be?
April 17th
Can habits be separated out, or are they all part of the whole psycho-physical system?
April 16th
Which habit would you most like to be rid of?
April 15th
Is habit the same thing as routine?
April 14th
Where do your thoughts come from? A habitual place?
April 13th
After the dark of winter, all is springing up, sap riseth and ‘In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.’ (Alfred Lord Tennyson )
Spring is the season for Alexander thoughts too – up up up! Let us hitch a ride on what is happening around us, the up direction of the earth itself . Let us be like a plant raising its head toward the sky, such a force that the weed can force a way through the pavement. Like us insisting on coming up through the concrete of our habits.
April 12th
Ankles are wonderful things. They help keep us upright. If your ankle suddenly gives way…..ouch! They need to be flexible and supportive. The ligaments wrap round the joints like a support bandage. When we come into monkey it is the ankle that first follows the head – imagine a fine golden chain hanging from your finger and you lower it onto the palm of your other hand, it is the lower links that fold first. So as we lower ourselves through space it is the ankle knee and hip that respond so our lower links, our legs can fold. A nice up direction with that order – ankle knee hip.
April 11th
Where is your attention as you read this? Our eyes see a postage stamp, the size of the moon, all else is made up from past and predictive future. Think of widening your vision: these words will still be here, the words will come to you from the page. Be aware of the gap between the words. There is nothing we have to do to read, once we have learned this skill. It is very difficult to inhibit the brain from making sense of these black marks on the page in clusters. So even the intellectual pursuit of reading can be a non-doing exercise.
If you have difficulty reading, then thinking from the Magic Lemon might help. Or cross left leg over right knee and place your right had on your left leg. This also can magically make the words appear clearer.
April 10th
Go up, not down, come into your back, not the front, be rather than do, and have a good laugh. My recipe for a nice day – particularly the last item.
April 9th
Apparently we always live in the past. Our eyes see things a tenth of a second after the event has occurred. And the brain predicts what we will see. So tennis players never really have their eye on the ball – it’s moving too fast. Have a nice day living in the 10 seconds ago present!
April 8th.
Change can sometimes be sudden, dramatic, violent and extreme. In Alexander it happens much more gently and only when we are ready for it. May you experience some gentle change in your life today that is uplifting, non-doing, and unfamiliar.
April 7th
‘Between the stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is the power to choose our response. In that response lies our growth and our freedom.’ Victor Frankl
April 6th
Inhibit your reaction to discomfort by trying to change. Accept the moment right here right now, for better for worse, give up trying, and that IS the change.
April 5th
A lot of people have written a lot of things about the Alexander Technique, very eloquently. They would all say that in the end it is something to experience not read about. How can one describe the taste of a peach to someone who has never eaten one? If you want to learn to ride a bike you need to get on a bike and practice. You won’t do it by reading a manual.
April 4th
‘What I noticed was the absence of sensations that normally accompanied the movement. The tension and effort which I had taken for granted as a necessary part of getting up weren’t there. It was like the noise of a factory which you are not aware of until it stops. I couldn’t find words to describe the absence of a sensation.’ Frank Pearce Jones
April 3rd
‘You can never win a fight with yourself. One of you is going to lose and it’s always going to be you!’ David Gorman
April 2nd
‘The attempt to bring about change involving growth, development and progressive improvement in the use and functioning of the human organism, calls necessarily for the acceptance, yes, the welcoming of the unknown in sensory experience, and this ‘unknown’ cannot be associated with the sensory experiences that have hitherto ‘felt right’.’ FM Alexander
April 1st
‘You cannot change and yet remain the same, though this is what most people want.’ Patrick MacDonald
March 31st
Have you looked at rooftops recently? A great way of attending to the up direction. Be mindful of how you look up of course . If you are already in a state of here and now the eyes will easily lead your head to tip a little, maintaining a length through the front and not collapsing the neck. Look at the rooftops, look at the sky. We so often are looking down or in front, thinking of the horizontal plane. Let’s take in the vertical again. The up goes on forever. So maybe the ancients were right to think of the gods being above us.
March 30th
Watching a crowd of people walking to work in the city this morning, I noticed how they were all going up and down as they walked, pushing the world away and collapsing to it. It would be very strange if they were all gliding to work with a smile on their face. If you have the opportunity, take a look at others as they walk today. Do they too go up and down? Do you? Is it possible to maintain the same height whilst walking?
March 29th
When the neck is free, the head rising up, the back lengthening and widening, our limbs long and easy, we are at our most excellent best. And we can find that state in a moment. Do it now. Let go of whatever is holding you back, pulling you down, come back to this moment right here right now where the ‘up’ exists. Ping!
March 28th
Up is a direction, it is a state, it is a movement. It is an energy. Give yourself this gift today .
March 27th
As we get old some things wear out, like knicker elastic. When we use ourselves well we find new ways of keeping our knickers up!
March 26th
The pause before action, this magic gap between stimulus and response when it has come to consciousness what we are about to do, and we can choose to continue or not do it….it’s enormous! Ii is a split second and yet it is timeless . Like Dr Who’s tardis, that looks smaller on the outside but enormous on the inside, so is this inhibition moment, barely noticeable to outsiders, but to us a huge moment of space and time where we reorganise.
March 25th
When you want something, let your mind come to a resting state, the blue sky between the clouds, the gap between the words and in that space put out your intention, wish, desire. Then let go of the result. Don’t end-gain. Come back to now. Let the intention be carried out. Perhaps your desire is to get up from a chair, pause, let the mind come to now, and allow the system to organise itself….. Inhibit, direct. And you will rise up.
March 24th
How can I get that effect from your touch for myself? You can’t. When we touch someone, there are two nervous systems working together. Takes two to tango. But you can work on your thinking.
March 23rd
We are born with half a brain. We develop our cognitive skills by interacting and learning from the outside world. This learning never stops. It goes on throughout our lives.
March 22nd
We can only know ourselves in reference to the outside world.
March 21st
The Back
Let’s think of the back today. Just have it in mind as you get on with the rest of your day. What is the back? It includes the spine, the shoulder blades, the ribs, the pelvis, the hip joints. It includes the muscles of the spine, muscles of the upper limb, the glutes, the quadratus lumborum…..But the spine goes up through the neck, the glutes are part of the lower limb….suddenly the back become a meeting place for the limbs , an area of breathing, manipulation, walking….. So let us picture the back from behind, tune into the back as we feel our way through the day, and celebrate this extraordinary area of the Self.
March 20th
When we look at an animal, we usually look at its back – anything four legged – hamster, cat, dog, cow, goat, deer, – it rarely presents its underbelly, soft and vulnerable. As a two legged creature we constantly expose the front, our soft vulnerable space. Let’s not stretch it up or out today, let it hang gracefully from our back.
March 19th
Freeing the neck. What is neck? Are you thinking of the front and sides as well as the back? What is the width of your spine within the neck? It is a bridge between the head and the back. Where does the neck end and the shoulders begin? Do we include the shoulders into that area we call neck? Muscles of the neck are connected to the spine, the head, the shoulder blades, the ribs, the sternum, the jaw and the collar bone – one connects the larynx to the shoulder blade. One continues half way down the back. Then there’s the connective tissue, blood vessels, nerves, fatty tissue, the wind pipe, the oesophagus…. This bridge is crowded with traffic! Best keep it free so all runs smoothly. Enjoy thinking of your neck today in a light, gentle manner. Concentration might clog it up.
March 18th
Eyes. Let’s soften our eyes today. Let’s see from the back of our eyes, let them widen away from each other, away from the narrowed frown.
March 17th
Turning with the eyes. We hear something, an event, a change , become aware of something, a fragrance, a flicker, we sense someone behind us, the light shifting, and we turn to investigate further. Today if you turn to the right let your left eye lead. If you want to turn to the left, let your right eye lead. See how it goes.
March 16th
Jaw. Let’s play with the releasing the jaw today. Enough with clenching and stretching the lips.
March 15th
Let’s be aware of our feet today. Extraordinary arched events at the end of our legs, much maligned , much abused, shoved into tight fitting coverings with an added heel, as though our own is not good enough. Feet are flexible and robust. They put up with hard surfaces , sinking surfaces, they interface with the planet, they bear a lot of weight, support and move at they same time. 27 bones in one foot. Wow. Let’s not take them for granted today. A day in praise of feet. Heel, ball, toe, ankle, arch, instep…. Love them all, let them exist.
March 14th
As you walk around today, imagine you are taking your brain for a walk.
March 13th
How lucky we are to have come across Alexander Technique! How did we get here? By chance? Because someone told us about miraculous pain relief, a burst of confidence, a kind touch? Or an advertisement for a workshop, our own curiosity to find something unheard of? Whatever the spur, it was us, our own choice that walked through door of the teacher for our first lesson. We made the step, the leap of faith. We took action.
March 12th
Come into your back. Don’t go looking for your back, wait patiently for it to come to you. Like a mountain in the mist it will suddenly reveal itself to you, its proximity, vastness and strength.
March 11th
Illness
Alexander is not a panacea is for all illness and difficulties. There are viruses and disease that will get you no matter what. What we can do is use ourselves as well as we can whilst this illness takes its course. There are many words that suggest we are at war with the illness. We have to fight it, combat it, are attacked by it, or surrender to it. We separate the part that is hurting us, ‘my back is killing me’ for example. If we accept we are in this state, hopefully temporarily, then we are no longer in conflict, but are whole again. The sky is still there, the earth supporting us, space around us. And there are great medics, medicines, family and friends to help us through.
March 10th
Space. There is a white bare antechamber at L’Orangerie designed specifically by Monet to help people clear the mind of the hubbub and busy ness of the world, to prepare for the stillness of the Water Lilies. If our dwelling is big enough it is good to have a room free of ornament and clutter to sit quietly in. Our own temple. Or we can create such a space in a corner of a room, on a shelf…some physical space that is a clear, quiet space. The external quiet space then becomes symbiotic with the quiet space in the mind. A place to inhibit our habit of rushing about and being busy.
March 9th
Touch. When were touch someone else our system picks up and reads the other person’s use, consciously or unconsciously. We can tell if that person is tense, held or floppy, exhausted, excited , present, balanced, energised, up, collapsed, worried, happy, guarded, open…all sorts of things. Alexander teachers are practiced at receiving this information and in looking after their own use patterns, and invite the other person to join them in this. It’s an invitation, not a demand.
March 8th
Change could be dangerous. Our system goes onto alert mode when something changes, when we encounter the Unknown. Brilliant how we look after ourselves this way. We need just the right amount of change – so it becomes wonderful, exciting, not too much that it becomes fearful. Alexander is brilliant at this. We get the change we can cope with at any one time.
March 7th
What keeps human beings upright? The spine? Muscular effort? The weight of the head? Gravity, the Contact Force? Our legs?
None of these – it is our wakefulness. We tend to fall over when we are asleep.
March 6th
I like the thought that we give ‘up’ when we let go and surrender. We surrender our weight to the earth and the earth gives us that ‘up’ direction.
March 5th
‘Trying is only emphasing the thing we know already ‘ F.M. Alexander.
‘No! Try not! Do or do not. There is no try.’ Yoda, Star Wars.
March 4th
‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ Yogi Baird , eying a parting of the ways
‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it’ Yogi Bear, picking a fork up for his picnic basket.
March 3rd
Give up trying for Lent. (Sweeties also a good thing to give up!)
March 2nd
Alexander technique is revolutionary. It’s anarchic, it asks us to think for ourselves. It changes our thinking. And it turns us into quite nice people.
March 1st
Sing a little, dance a little, have a laugh….can’t be such a bad thing. Once a day. It’s very human. And we can do this privately for ourselves . Might change the life.
Feb 28th
Always expect the unexpected. Even if nothing unexpected obviously happens. There is the potential for it.
Feb 27th
Great teachers will come when we call them. They are already there just waiting for our invitation.
Feb 26th
The moment we change it is easy. It was everything leading up to that moment that was difficult.
Feb 25th
When we are unhappy very often we are in our own world. We may go through something upsetting and want to ‘process it’, to analyse and chew over what happened, and wonder at our own or others behaviour. During these moments the outside world takes second place, our habits will take over, looking after us so we don’t fall over for example. But sometimes it may be that the desire to process may be the very habit we need to address. As we take our attention to the outside world we can live presently and the disturbing event begins to dissipate, have less hold on us. We can acknowledge its importance of course and respect our reaction to it, and then come out into the present space and time that has been waiting to greet us and continue our adventure in living.
Feb 24th
When we are very sad or grieving we may think we need to put on a brave face, try to feel better. Best not perhaps. Best accept that profound feeling, acknowledge the hurt and emotional pain. Then engage with the world and it may be that the world can offer some respite and the heart will smile again, and joy begin, in its own time, organically to sprout.
Feb 23rd
Is it easy to change a habit? When we stand up from a chair our mind associates this with all the millions of times we have done this before. So we do it the same way. Even if we pause and direct ourselves it may be we still do it the same way, despite our best endeavours. We need to remember from all those millions of times the moments we rose from the chair with our teacher a non habitual way and begin to associate that with our standing. Consciously. We cannot do this by hoping to re-experience the feeling. We need to give up hope for that lovely feeling and simply remember the thinking, the plan of action that went into it. Then we might get that nice feeling again.
Feb 22nd
It is easier to learn something that is unusual. If I want to learn monkey, to think of this every time I pick something up throughout the day, is unrealistic. If I think of it in the privacy of my own bathroom and attach it to cleaning my teeth, twice a day, I am much more able to remember and experiment with this and there will gradually be a knock-on effect on other activities. We build up an alternative muscle memory. Slowly, slowly.
Feb 21st
Having an Alexander lesson is like updating the system. Or defragmenting it. Defragmenting clears all the clutter from the computer so it can work more efficiently. Good to de-clutter the system. Let’s do that today, let go of past tangles, live cleanly in this moment. Then we won’t be fragmented but living as a whole.
Feb 20th
‘Must, got to, have to, should, ought…..’ O dear, such trying words. Transform them into our desires. ‘I want’ or ‘I wish’.
‘If we follow our bliss then we are on a path that was there for us all the time’….Joseph Campbell
Feb 19th
We are falling upwards into a state of relaxation that is there waiting for us.
Feb 18th
‘Keeping his back perfectly still he loses all consciousness of his body.’
From Hexagram 52 of the I Ching as translated by Alfred Douglas.
I have had this experience. Everything is working so easily with me, I’m in such balance that I lose the usual kinaesthetic habitual sense of my body. My usual kinaesthesia is picking up the discomfort and excessive tensions. When all is in balance no signals need alert my brain to such things, so it is as though I have become invisible. I discovered though I was still very physical and There. I may have felt invisble and insubstantial but the wall was still very solid and all my wizardry has not allowed me to walk through it.. …yet.
Feb 17th
Stillness. Mountain stillness. The mountain is teeming with life – birds and animals and insects, trees, plants -things growing and in constant movement. Even the rocks are moving but in such a long slow time frame we cannot see it. The dust soaking into the hillside from the rain, a stone rumbling down the hillside. The hillside I look at from Carthage over the waters towards the Sharik Peninsula is the same landscape as Elissa – or Dido – looked at centuries before. So we can perhaps be still like a mountain. There is movement – fluids pulsing, heart beating, the movement of the breath, the muscles gently releasing and contracting in our inherent top-heavy instability; our ‘up’ direction through the spine, the upward direction of the out breath, the upward direction of the diaphragm and the heart as the air rises. But as we step back and look at the mountain it appears to be still. So we too can find that stillness, solid as a rock, connected to the earth, the mind stilling.
Feb 16th
Passive + active = neutral. The balance of the two forces brings us to the neutral, the unknown , the potential. Resistance to a force forward will take us up. Resistance to a force down will take us up. As the hand comes forward come into the back. As the head goes forward and up, the back stays back.
Feb 15th
When two people meet and touch each other something else happens. Each meeting can be a sacred act. We are affecting each other, responding to each other. Our balance shifts, our brain takes in the other person as ourselves, we share the same moment, the same space.
Feb 14th
If there is no beloved in your life right now, perhaps you can think s/he is waiting for you in your future. If you do have a beloved in your life right now, cherish them.
Feb 13th
Does our intention come out of our habit? If we stop our habit, our habit of narrowing , goal making, end-gaining, then perhaps our intention will come out of some unknown place and be quite surprising
Feb 12th
‘People will think I am teaching them to get in and out of chairs. It is nothing of the sort. I am teaching them to inhibit a reaction to a stimulus that always puts them wrong and learn how to deal with it.’ FM Alexander
Feb 11th
What is this life if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
William Henry Davies
Feb 10th
Waiting. What are we waiting for? If we live in the moment then there is nothing to wait for, it’s all happening now.
Feb 9th
Magical mistakes.
The guy who invented post it notes was trying out ideas for a new superglue….
Feb 8th
Think of something funny! FM said (along with many others I am sure) that ‘the work is too serious to be taken seriously.’ We need to cultivate the twinkle in the eye. When I got up in the morning I found an aeroplane outside my bedroom door – than I remembered I had left the landing lights on….
It is good to have a little store of things that make you smile for the whispered ah. Bring yourself to a directed state, think of something funny, as the smile emerges on your face, allow the jaw to drop and breathe out on a whispered or unvoiced Ahhhh. Close the jaw and let the air in through the nose. The genuine smile opens the false folds of the larynx to keep the throat wide and free.
If you can’t think of something funny, think of something naughty…..that often works!
Feb 7th
Bringing awareness to your breathing is a wonderful thing. Count 10 in breaths, count 10 outbreaths, count 10 whole breaths, cease counting but focus on your breathing apparatus. Focus on the entrance and exit of the breath, whether it is the nose or the mouth that is your chosen portal between the outside and inside world. To focus on breathing and not interfere with the breathing pattern is not so easy. Those meditating thus and being mindful suggest keeping the spine aligned, the head balancing on top and the eyes closed, or cast down. But it isn’t always easy. Sitting on a chair or using a kneeling stool helps, unless one is easily able to sit in lotus on the floor. We can apply inhibition to stop interfering, and direction to keep ourselves ‘up’ to help maintain a healthy head neck back relationship. An excellent activity to practise our Alexander principles.
Feb 6th
Bring awareness to yourself right now. How are you reading this? Don’t try to change anything, just become aware and as you allow this awareness in, the change has already happened and it may be that you want to move to re-organise yourself, or stay exactly as you are. It is your choice. Chuck out those two impostors ‘I must but I can’t’ and invite in volition – I want, I wish, I desire…..
Feb 5th
Change. It refreshes. Allow yourself to change something. Maybe clean your teeth with the non-dominant hand. Drive or walk down a street you never have before. Fold your arms the other way round. Just for the hell of it. Unstick your brain.
Feb 4th
Wild geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
Feb 3rd
I saw an Amazon walking from the station today. So tall and striding and not dropping herself down into the rest of us. It was a joy to behold. Looking at other people is always interesting, to observe their choreography how they move through life. The movement and stature is so memorable. When we go to see a play how often do we remember the words? But we remember the story, the plot and the spectacle. Let our walking be a joy to behold! Live adventurously and walk cheerfully as the Quakers say.
Feb 2nd
Sometimes we will not know what happens during an Alexander lesson. It is a mystery. It is beyond words. We may feel nothing and later in the night or the next day experience something extraordinary. Or we may experience something extraordinary in the lesson itself but are rendered speechless as we feel our lungs moving , situated differently, or a balance and shape our brain cannot comprehend. The need to verbally express what we are going through becomes irrelevant . Sometimes tears are released , as some profound truth is realised, or an old memory brought to the surface , or it’s a release that has no memory to it but has sparked a feeling of sorrow, regret, compassion, relief.
And sometimes the lesson will be run of the mill, oh now I feel more relaxed, a little taller, lighter, heavier and we go way happy. Sometimes it may be annoying: I didn’t learn anything much from that! Where is the change I was seeking, where is the nicer feeling?
Each lesson is different. And unpredictable. If we come with an open mind, we will always learn something.
Feb 1st
When it’s cold, we often shrink ourselves to keep warm. Let’s decide not to do that. And if it raining, let us not pull down away from the rain to avoid it. Let us accept the weather we have been given today, inhibit our reaction and live freely, whatever the stimulus.
Jan 31st
Today we could think about how we use ourselves when drinking a cup of tea. (Or another beverage you like to drink.) When you reach out for the tea, is it your shoulder that is leading you? Suppose instead you pause, think of the space round you, ‘direct yourself’ to reassert or continue a beneficial primary control and allow the hand to lead. As you take the cup to your mouth does your head tilt back unnecessarily? Are you thinking about how you drink a cup of tea, savouring the pleasure of the warm liquid passing through your mouth? Or does tea generally accompany another task, writing, watching TV, chatting. If the latter is true, then experiment with widening the attention so you can give some thought to the action of drinking tea.
Jan 30th
‘Stop doing the wrong thing and the right will do itself.’ F.M. Alexander. What could be the wrong thing? Collapsing ourselves, bracing ourselves, trying hard to get things right, narrowing our attention, concerning ourselves only with result, not process. Stop doing our old habits and something will take their place. And it may. Be quite. Surprising. The Unknown.
Jan 29th
Sleep is the last refuge of our habit. We are unconscious and our old ways will return. Lying down in semi supine before we go to bed may assuage the tensions so we sleep better . A pillow lain against our back may stop us turning if needed.
A question I ask my students is what keeps you upright? Some may say muscles, or legs, or even gravity. Or if they are mature students of Alexander, “The way my head balances on the spine.”
My answer is consciousness. When we lose consciousness we fall over.
So if we want to stand up right let us explore our consciousness, our wakefulness.
Jan 28th
When people practice Chi Kung or Tai Chi, there is a sense of energy between the hands, or rising up through body. I wonder if this is the contact force of the earth that is being felt?
As you stand, pay attention to how everything is hanging, suspended. Spine from head, breastbone from head, shoulder girdle from head, arms from shoulder girdle, ribs from the spine and the breast bone, pelvis from ribs and the spine, legs from pelvis. The feet do not hang but interface with the earth. And instead of falling through the earth’s surface, the natural oppositional force to gravity flows up through our very bones through the top of our head. To stand thus is to stand without effort.
Jan 27th
When will I not have to think of this anymore? When will I gain a new more constructive habit so I don’t have to think about it? Not thinking is the habit. When you have woken up why do you want to slip back to an unconscious life?
Jan 26th
The spine has 7 vertebrae in the neck. The same as a giraffe. They are just bigger in a giraffe. A giraffe has the biggest heart in land animals. I like the giraffe, extraordinary creatures. They don’t know they are extraordinary, they are just busy being a giraffe. I like that too.
Jan 25th
When I take a lesson for myself in Alexander, I still find it mysterious, and miraculous. This week my lungs felt like they were being rearranged, where they sat in my thorax; my spine untangled, and oh the joy of having my head held. Finding a way for my arm to move without effort, without pulling or pushing, so nearly there, but the old symptoms of mis-use arriving. They too are a stimulus to which I can inhibit reaction to, allow myself to learn by not doing what I normally do. To not understand with the logical brain but trust my intuitive brain will learn and lead me. A cloud of unknowing.
Jan 24th
I was getting my students to play with feeling grounded and coming into their back as they were reading poetry aloud today. The reciter stood to read the poem, standing back to back with another, another knelt at the feet and placed her hands on her feet. Someone fed her the lines of the poem. Beautiful verse flowed out with strong confident voices. I thought this is poetry, this work is poetry.
Getting to the heart of things. This is one we played with, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost. A poem of inhibition. The gap between stimulus and response.
Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep
Jan 23rd
We cannot control the stimuli that the world throws at us but we can control our reaction to it. Stay present today, create a gap between the stimulus and response, it is our strength, a portal to something other than what we know.
Jan 22nd
I am out of pain
I did not take pills
Nor stretch myself to unusual shapes
Nor heave great weights in the air
Nor lay sacrificial on an altar to my spine
Nor pray to
an unknown god
Nor hypnotise it all away
I simply used my own free will
To consciously change my ways
And learned to walk
Long-limbed in grace
To stand head rising
Rooted in the earth
To sit gently
Fully breathing
In the presence of the world.
Jan 21st
How many Alexander teachers does it take to change a light bulb? 5 . One to change the light bulb and the other four to say that’s not how we did it in our training…..hahaha!! Maybe we don’t need to change the lightbulb? We could pause, say no, think back and up, up up, and wait till someone else changes it, or decide to enjoy the natural light, do it later and instead have a cup tea, go for a walk, chose an eco light instead of replacing with tungsten bulb, or not change it until the neck is free enough that the head rises up as it also tips back to see what you are doing, and stop again and redirect so that wrists lengthen away from the fingers, your elbows can lengthen away from the wrists, the shoulders away from elbows, the back away from the shoulders or ……shoulders away from the back, elbows away from the shoulders, wrists away from the elbows, fingers away from the wrists lightbulb away from the fingers…crash! Oops.
At a dinner party I was introduced as an Alexander teacher. One of the young men told me he’d had lessons at drama school but had stopped rating it when he was crossing the road with his teacher. His teacher had dropped his wallet and had spent so long picking it up he had nearly got run over.
But sometimes it is nice to sit in a room watching the natural light from the window change the shadows
Jan 20th
Space
When I ask you to think of the distance between the front of your eyes and the back of the head, the distance between the top of your head and the roof of your mouth and the distance between the left ear and the right ear ( via the final frontier!) and suggest it may be possible to think of the whole volume of your head, I am asking your to pay attention to the space that is there. We usually pay attention to matter but the distance between atomic particles is in ratio the distance between planets. There is more space than matter. We don’t usually think in this quantum way, we certainly don’t perceive the quantum universe, but experience the more Newtonian vision. But as we do focus on space, on nothing, our brains start to calm down, use the alpha wave, the state of relaxed alertness we need for optimum learning, the place beloved of our system. So add a bit of space to your life. Even if you feel you are stuck in a broom cupboard.
Jan 19th
We adjust ourselves to a habitual space. I had a musical theatre student once who was very tall. We were working together in a very small room at the college. I didn’t seem to have much luck getting him going up. The ceiling wasn’t very far from his head. Inspiration came from somewhere or maybe it was Fate. It was a beautiful sunny day and I didn’t want to be stuck in a tiny room as the birds sang and the meagre herb garden for the kitchen perked up. So I took Olly outside. And he miraculously expanded into the space.
So we can think of the distance between our head and the ceiling, or we can think of the distance between the top of the head and ‘the blind stars’ in the sky beyond the ceiling and the roof of a building. We can think of the distance between the back of us and the wall or the space beyond the wall, the distance between the left side of us and the wall to the left, or the space beyond the wall, the right side of us and the wall or further space beyond the wall to the right, and the distance between us and the wall in front, or the garden beyond the wall. And let the feet spread out onto the floor directed into the foundations of the building, the crust of the earth to the boiling centre of our planet. Imagining beyond the usual limit will take us to the limit. Ask to think of 5 funny things and maybe you will manage 3 things. Asked to think of 3 things maybe you will think of 2…..
Jan 18th
Being tall.
I looked at myself in a new mirror I had bought. It was much taller. I looked a midget. I filled the glass before. And I realised I had got into a habit of looking slightly down to see myself. Now with this tall mirror I can look straight ahead. My tall students will be happy. When I first meet a tall student who is drooping to accommodate my height I often get a low stool and stand on it so I become taller than them briefly. Then I droop towards them. There is an ‘aha’ moment when they realise what it is they are doing and the effect it has. Usually they are doing this to be kind to us shorties. When they stop shrinking and come up to their full height they realise they give us shorter beings space in which to grow, no longer overshadowed by a looming giant. Changing the belief system, changes the use. And we can all go up together.
Jan 17th
It is nice to stop and look at the world around. A hiccup, a train is cancelled and I can sit at the cafe with some Rock music from the 50’s playing and eat a sweet potato donut with a filter coffee and gaze out of the window, watching on the concourse people flowing up and down the escalators and with some anxiety looking at the train times, or talking on their mobiles or standing guarding suitcases staring into space in their own world. It is like a rest in musical notation. My journey is halted for a short while. Instead of fretting, I can have a rest. Fretting can’t change a thing. Sometimes it’s nice to fret and feel that annoyance and feel justified in muttering ‘Bloody trains!’ It’s being human. But how marvellous that we can begin to choose our reaction and not be totally bound by them. Freedom!!!
Jan 16th
Rubenstein was asked why he was still practising the piano at the age of 94. ‘I think I might be getting somewhere’ he replied. So continue the Alexander practice. If you damage something from exercising too rigorously, from running like a hare, come back to the practice, allow the back to heal, the ankle to strengthen. Rest, become a tortoise for a while, and when all is well, have another go, but run like the wind with plenty of inhibition and direction this time! Stay in the moment – the finishing post, the future, is hurtling towards you!
Keep practising!
Jan 15th
‘Waiting for the lift – will it never come,
waiting for the lift – sitting on my bum,
waiting for the lift – think I’ll phone my mum
Why? Cos it rhymes …’
The lyrics from a community theatre show touring East London in 1980’s.
Waiting. Waiting for Godot.Waiting for a train. Often we are rushing forward and won’t wait. We miss the bus, and all fired up from running, we decide to run to the next stop for the next one ….and miss that one too. More exciting and adrenalin- fired than just waiting. More endorphins. And there’s always the chance we might catch it…I always had a lot of sympathy for the hare in Aesops fairy tale. I know it’s very Alexandrian to stop, wait and allow the bus to arrive. Rushing for a bus and missing it is not sensible, not considering the means whereby, not grown up.,,,very habitual, end gaining. But let’s all choose to be hares today, dancing and rushing about for the fun of it, to hell with the consequences…..come and see me tomorrow if your back is sore and be happy. For one day you chose to run like a hare! And maybe that too is out of habit.
January 14th
It takes time and space for someone to understand Alexander. We all find our own pace with it, our own journey. It cannot be rushed. Here is an extract from a piece on ‘Working with Actors’
‘Another student, a very good young actor, uses too much effort and tension, and we experimented with him doing less, but still keeping the truth and driving intention. His confusion was that the physical theatre teacher expects him to take on different shapes to accentuate character, and then he has Alexander and singing and voice classes that are teaching him his ‘neutral’, balanced state…how can both be right?
He felt so relieved when I said he could take on any shape at all that’s appropriate for the character, as long as it’s a conscious choice and done with direction. ‘Doesn’t that become untruthful?’ ‘It’s a technique – you have to apparently cheat it- make a fist, now keep the same shape but release some of the tension….’ Then we experimented with this on his Coward character who is frightfully angry at one point. The first time he was making his voice crack with the tension, then he played with keeping the truth but ‘doing’ less – o my goodness, his voice powered out! He broke into a big smile and understood how FM he speak truth. So pleased – I had been aware of his tying himself up in knots for a while, and so good at last for him to express his beliefs and to have his own realisations.’
January 13th
Today I had a wonderful sensation of letting myself find the ground through the suspension system, I directed myself to let go any holding, and went through everything hanging off everything else – the face dropping forward from the spine, jaw hanging from the head, the spine hanging from the head, the shoulder blades hanging from the collar bones which are hanging from the breast bone which is hanging for the back of the head, the upper arm hanging from the shoulder blade, the lower arm from the upper arm, the hands from the lower arm, the ribs from the spine and from the rib above, the pelvis from the ribs and from the spine, the upper leg from the pelvis, the lower leg from the upper leg, the foot not hanging, but interfacing with the earth from which comes the opposing force to gravity that leads us up.
Until I thought this, I had no idea I had been holding myself up. In letting go to the ground, I was using gravity not trying to oppose it. I have no need to oppose gravity. The earth has that job. The opposing force that ensures I do not sink into the earth. Exactly equal to the force of gravity, is this up direction, a contact force that rises up through our bones. Normal force. We don’t often pay attention to this. We think of gravity attracting us ‘down’ and forget about the Normal Force. Let’s remember it and maybe we will never have to hold ourselves up again!
January 12th
Resting is really important. And sleep. Space to dream.
January 11th
What we believe to be true may not be. We believe we are standing up straight and then look in the mirror and find we are tipping forward, or we are pulling backwards, sticking our chest up and arching our lower back. An Alexander teacher may reorganise our standing and it feels like we are crouching forward, like a monkey. But we look in the mirror and find we are perfectly upright. Faulty sensory perception Alexander called it.
So don’t assume because you think something is true, that it is. Self righteousness is the worst. If I feel that way, I best not take any action, let it pass, until I have a cooler outlook and can perceive things from a different perspective. Not always so easy to inhibit. But in my experience essential.
January 10th
Paying attention. It behoves us to pay attention. We then live presently and can respond fully in the moment to what the world offers us. Our mind likes to chatter away and so often we pay attention to that. Staring back at my thoughts I began to notice how repetitive it is, the same clouds of thought I get involved in – something about work, plans for the future, the journey I am about to make, worry about my sister’s health…..To inhibit that attention, that attention to the chatter is freeing. Our sanctuary from such repetitive thinking is to pay attention to the world outside, to consciously receive the world whatever it is offering. There is something new, there is something fresh, there is something to learn from. I am on-line. I am connected. Joy in my heart. Refuge from the relentless churning, my brain’s way of ordering thoughts and memory. I don’t have to be conscious of that. I choose instead to be conscious of the light, the sounds, the touch and the fragrances around me.
Today I was rewarded with the sight of two men holding a giant gong over a homeless man who was begging on the street. The latter happily sat there whilst they played the gong, allowing the gong’s vibrations to resonate in his being….. When we keep our eyes open and receive the world, it is often surprising what we find, and not what we expected!
January 9th
Walking deliberately slowly in a City is unusual. It is not idling, meandering, strolling, spending time looking in shop windows, a distracted sort of walk. No, it’s having a clear intention and going there, but going at a slow pace. It gives time and space to the action. Time for the muscles to lengthen, to release, for the heart rate to slow, the breath to slow. Try it out – if you happen to be in a city. Do not be influenced by others rushing by!
January 8th
On the train I heard a young woman on her phone. She had left the speaker phone on without realising so her whole conversation was laid bare. She was laid bare. Her father was in hospital and she was going down to see him. She had cried last night. This morning he had texted her to say he had got up and had some breakfast. But she told her friend life will never be the same. He can’t walk – maybe a step or two. Her brother was going to meet her near Worthing and they were going straight to their Nan’s house and take stock, and see what there was to do. Her friend was supportive and sympathetic. Later I heard her again on the replacement bus service. ‘Tom can you pick me up from Brighton, I am on a bus and it isn’t going to Worthing.’ There was panic there, and I thought how public events like disrupted train services crash in on personal events like death and illness. And I knew there was nothing I could do except witness this young woman’s distress. It reminded me of my travelling down to see my mother who had almost died from septicaemia one Easter. I was 20 and experienced a curious separation of living what was happening, the dread of it, and observing what was happening at the same time. Witnessing without interfering. Like I do with my habits. Oh there am I doing that again. Acceptance and not trying to change anything. That’s the beginning of the change.
I silently wished the young woman and her father well.
January 7th
Want to walk upstairs more easily? It is very simple: Find a cardboard box or two – or you could use plastic wash basins – something that is easy to step into. Walk around stepping in and out of the cardboard boxes, thinking your directions, and keeping your balance best you can. It is easy, if a strange Monty Python thing to do. Then you go the flight of stairs and as you go to place your foot onto the step and lever yourself up, inhibit! And imagine instead you are stepping INTO it, just as you did when stepping into the boxes. You will find that in comparison to your usual heaving of body upstairs, you will tread lightly and easily, the emphasis of support being on the back leg, rather than the front. It’s like marching on the spot, except you are travelling up.
January 6th
Epiphany. I asked an esteemed colleague what his take was on Inhibition and he thought a lot about this before he said. ‘Seeing. A lot of people think it is a doing. Or it is suppression. But it’s nothing of the sort……It takes a long time to understand inhibition and it isn’t understood through the intellect.’ Of course that is a very short piece of the answer. But that is the gist of what I remember. I have lessons myself. I go to a master teacher and lie on the table and sit on the chair and enjoy the Mystery of it all. I enjoy the journey to the teaching space – the tube journey, the walk to the house, knowing it is a journey to the Self, and our encounter together, is an encounter with the absolute. Beyond the pleasantries. I am taught things and I don’t remember it all. I sense my physical body being taken to a new place. My head tilt disappears for a moment, the left hip joint is rotated which has an effect up the spine to my neck…all these kinaesthetic observations.
And I have no idea how this is happening. Why is my shoulder being tapped? How pleasant to have my head held. I feel I know less and less about the work. I am taken off the table and I stand in front of the chair. Tiny precise monkey ensures, ‘Not the legs pushing, but knees forward and let head lead you up.’ I inhibit something. I hope my wish to obey these instructions will happen but I have no idea if it will and whether I am going about this the best way. I think of my own spatial direction, the shape of the air changing to stop me doing anything. Is this ego-less? Or am I wanting to please the teacher, to get it right to be a star student? I feel well oiled. Not tall or light but easier, that left hip moving more easily and I feel at peace. ‘Practice monkey! as I step put of the door. This new easy movement stays with me as I journey home. I am tired. I eat some lunch, I prepare my talk for the 6 people coming over tonight. It’s on inhibition. It goes well.
January 5th
I learnt about the Magic Lemon from Paul Hobbs in a Quantum Reading workshop I attended way back in 1990’s. He asked us where we were thinking from. Some of us pointed to behind our eyes, or our temples; I was one of those who pointed to our heart. He then asked us to imagine we were holding a lemon cupped in our hands. We imagined the colour, the texture, the smell of the lemon zest, and then to take it up and place it on the crown of our head, end-on, where a wizard’s cap would be. It was stuck to the top of our heads with magic superglue, so we could take our arms down and it would stay there. The next step was to let our personal thinking space rise up to the lemon. Wow! It certainly produced an effect of seeing the world from a different perspective and improved our reading skills. But as an Alexander Teacher the thing I noticed was how everyone’s alignment had improved – their head neck and back were in a good dynamic and all were sitting up. (Maybe that was an added reason as to why we were able to read more clearly…?) I have been teaching this to good effect with my students ever since. It’s particularly helpful for actors and artists – those who are kinesthetic and visual thinkers. Alexander’s traditional directions to let the neck be free to let the head rise, to let the back lengthen and widen and the knees go forward and away are not so easy for these thinkers. They are verbal, auditory commands. Often people will try to do these directions pushing the head up from their spine. When we are thinking from the lemon, we are already up. There is no ‘up’ to go to and no strain. Instead of a puppet with an imaginary string pulling us up, we have become the puppet master, looking down on ourselves and the world from a higher consciousness.
January 4th
To me Rothko’s paintings are a portal to the Other, the human potential, before action is made manifest. The Unknown, the Mystery, devoid of the human ego. When we inhibit our reaction to a stimulus we create this portal for ourselves, the gap between actions, between stimulus and response, timeless and immense, a momentary pause before taking up the neural pathways again, re-clothing ourselves again with the garments of our known self, hopefully allowing new neural pathways to guide us down a different road, the unfamiliar. And in that gap perhaps the goal our aim or intention is changed, the first no longer important, the ambition gone, so we can raise our arm or not, or speak instead clearly and strongly. That’s all Alexander wanted – to speak without losing his voice. He discovered in this simple way of inhibiting his reaction to speaking, a deep philosophy of consciousness, of touching the unmanifest, the unconstructed self.
January 3rd
Nothing. Sometimes it is good to do nothing. To take no action.
January 2nd
Watching an actress this evening I noticed however excellent her performance, and no matter her character, her neck stuck out from her shoulders, misaligned with the rest of her spine. I wanted to write to her and offer her lessons in the Technique. It is a body map I too had. My neck ended just above my shoulder blades and then there was this thing called the head and neck that were stuck together. I dropped neck to look down. Sometimes I sense this old body map returning. I remember the joint between my ears, the atlanto-occipital joint where my skull rests on the first vertebrae. I look up to the ceiling or the sky from that joint thinking of the length up my spine up from the sacrum and allow my jaw to open. I allow the top and back of my head to rise up and over to meet the jaw. I come to my full height and find the unity of my spine . And my head sits easily on my spine again. Have a go yourself.
January 1st
Lie down in semi supine everyday for 10 -20 minutes. It’s easy. It becomes a pattern, a pleasure and it doesn’t stop the rest of your life, but perhaps enhances it. Lie down, refresh, restore. If you are a musician you probably play your instrument every day, and it feels weird if you don’t. The same thing can happen with the regular practice of semi-supine. So lie down everyday and have a meeting with yourself. Practice paying attention to the Self. It doesn’t hurt. It helps the spine. It will change your life. If you haven’t lain down every day, then lying down is a change of life. It’s not so easy to do this when travelling, or in hotel rooms that aren’t very big. It does need some space. But not a huge amount.
So there’s a resolution for you at the beginning of the year, lie down every day.
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Dec 31st
“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”
Evelyn Waugh from Brideshead Revisited.
In Alexander we always have time for the present, the Work pushes back the past and the future, so we can stretch our limbs out, widen ourselves , grow tall in this glorious gap between the future and the past. After all, that is all there is.. The rest is conjecture or memory.
Let’s resolve to walk cheerfully and live adventurously. Advice from the Quakers, but how very Alexandrian!
Dec 30th
There is no end to it. Once we start on the path, it continues.
“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say”
JRR Tolkien
Dec 29th
Of course Alexander will change your posture. It is a side effect of something much greater.
Alexander is less likely to change your posture if that is all you want.
Dec 28th
‘If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive
do you think
ghosts will do it after?’
Kabir
Dec 27th
‘In the song sparrow’s nest the nestlings,
those who would sing eventually, must listen
carefully to the father bird as he sings
And make their own song in imitation of his.
I don’t know if any other bird does this (in
nature’s way has to do this). But I know a
child doesn’t have to. Doesn’t have to.
Doesn’t have to. And I didn’t.’
Extract from the poem ‘To be human is to sing your own song’ by Mary Oliver
Dec 26th
One of FM’s favourite quotes from Hamlet his favourite Shakespeare play was
‘….for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’
Dec 25th
There are a lot of family habits that we have picked up. Habits of gender, habits from the social and physical environment, the time we have been brought up in. There is our genetic code. All these things outside of our control that we cannot change. But we can inhibit our reaction to these stimuli. There is a sliver of free will when we acknowledge and say no to all those influences, and for a moment choose another way. That is our power. If we have not been living with our birth family for a while, when we return it is sometimes not so easy to maintain our free will. Sometimes it is almost impossible not to slip back into the old ways of standing walking and talking – and how often does it happen that someone will say, ‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ – after all that work we have done on ourselves too! But of course, we can acknowledge all this and laugh and wait and later when we return to our own life, re-organise ourselves easily back into the Alexander Way. Nothing is lost.
Dec 24th
Alexander is such a gift. It has come into our lives and we have received it and we can return the favour, pass it on to someone else, simply by living it.
Dec 23rd
What are you waiting for? It depends…for the right moment to come along, for the stillness to make a choice, for the ‘up’ direction to re-emerge…..there are a lot of good things to wait for, that will only come by pausing and waiting. But the waiting is present, responsive, with expectation…not a waiting that is distracted and bored.
If you are not sure what to do, or how to respond, wait for a moment in such a way that the answer will come to you. However, if after a while nothing happens, then do something, take an action. Whatever happens you will learn from Dec 24thit and be moving onward in a direction, and not stuck dithering at the crossroads. After all, you don’t have to make the right decision.
Dec 22nd
Alexander is a kind of magical thinking: meditative, practical, life changing……pretty special really.
Dec 21st
Imagine your Alexander teacher is touching you. Imagine their hands on your neck, your shoulders, the head, the chest and back, the lower back and the hip joint, the knee, the foot -wherever you remember the teacher putting their hands, let the memory of them place the hands where they would. Are you coming up? Has something changed in you? It’s a great way of honouring our particular teacher and their skill in taking us out of the old habits. It’s a good anchor for you to use to change. Have a go in semi-supine – imagine they are giving you a table turn…wow!
Dec 20th
How quickly will you read this I wonder? What consciousness have you brought to bear in this moment? Are you sitting well? Standing tall? Lying long and wide? Have you spent as long receiving this as I did composing this? It’s a secret message between us, a moment of connection. I wrote about what happened to me as I sat wondering what to write. Became aware if the space the sitting bones on the chair, the lengthening that started a deeply experienced up. It just shows also, if we wait, something will happen, the answer will come find us. We don’t have to try to seek it out, if we are open and ready to receive. Will be in touch again tomorrow. Have a nice day.
Dec 19th
We may want to drink a pint of beer or a pint of milk fairly quickly and think it’s not possible without pulling our head back and down . But if you think of lengthening up the front of you and the back of you, the action of tipping the head back loses the ‘down’ direction. And there’s nothing wrong with looking up. Remember it’s just we don’t want the wind to change and get stuck there!
Dec 18th
‘You ask me how to get to Holland Park underground station. I say, ‘go down the stairs and out of the front door , through the gate , turn left , walk to the main road and the station will be there right in front of you.’ Now you’ll probably me get me to repeat the whole thing to make sure you’ve got it in your head. Then the time comes for you to go out and you do your best to remember the directions and carry them out…..you don’t go out endlessly muttering and repeating the words to yourself. Not at all. The words are only necessary to fix the sequence in your brain. And it’s certainly not repeating the words that will get you to the right place – instead it’s remembering and actually carrying out the directions. Now that’s what Alexander meant by direction – you want to go up to your full height and these are the directions; this is how you do it. ‘
Walter Carrington, from ‘Explaining the Alexander Technique ‘ in conversation with Sean Carey.
Dec 17th
A little bit of mystery. Nice to have some of that still. No-one knows what consciousness is. It’s a mystery.
Dec 16th
Though the world has changed, the deeper longings of us human creatures have not changed. Alexander sometimes answers those deeper longings. It’s a way to find something other than what we thought was right or had been brought up to believe. As you know, if you are reading this.
Dec 15th
Sometimes there is a big pit opens up in the road in front of us. Others seem to jump over all right, but we just sink into the pit and crawl back up, and have another go at jumping and again find ourselves in the pit and crawl back up, ad infinitum. At a certain point we will notice that instead of trying to jump over, we could walk round the edge of the pit and continue along our way.
Dec 14th
There does come a time when we stop banging our head against the wall. Maybe we are hoping to get through the wall that way and if we take this paracetamol we can ignore the pain and continue as before. But as we stop and look up we will see that there is a gate just ‘round the corner which we can open and walk in easily.
Dec 13th
‘In lessons FM attached enormous importance to the eyes; he was watching all the time to see if the pupil was going into a trance or a dream. He’d say to people, ‘You’re not looking out; you’re not seeing something.’
Walter Carrington from ‘Explaining the Alexander Technique’ in conversation with Sean Carey
Dec 12th
Are we thinking of it all the time? No, but more and more our attention is called when we do things in a way that harm us. Our thinking is like little droplets throughout the day that get more and more frequent and sometimes join up, a string of pearls, a treasure that accompanies our days.
Dec 11th
It’s like having a secret. No-one else knows you’re inhibiting and directing. ‘You’ve changed’ friends might say. But they are not quite sure what has changed. ‘Have you cut your hair?’ As you do the washing up, suddenly you notice the cramped collapsed way you are going about it and easily effortlessly shift out of that.
Dec 10th
What is at the heart of Alexander Technique? Is it to solve problems? To embrace the unknown? To change neural pathways? To free ourselves? To release and connect muscles? To bring awareness to ourselves? To connect with the outside world? All of that is true. But at the heart of it all dwells compassion.
Dec 9th
‘Cast away the works of darkness and armour yourself in light.’ Or let go your habits that pull you down and direct yourself up and out into the world. When we let go of our habits sometimes we can feel very vulnerable. But instead of armour and fixity, we have responsiveness, direction, movement that will serve us much better.
Dec 8th
Be aware of your touch today – who is touching you? And who are you touching? You don’t have to be an Alexander teacher to bring awareness to the very special nature of touch and how vital and life affirming it can be, a reference point for our balance, a physical contact with another human being. Maybe it is a day without human touch. But you are still in touch with things, even perhaps with an animal. Touch affects us.
Whatever or whoever you are touching, being touched by, be aware of it, notice your response to it.
Dec 7th
We can use our own brain, our own conscious constructive control to relinquish our habits – to inhibit, to direct, to make different choices, to perceive in the mirror or in filming ourselves what we want to change and observe this process. But o how lovely it is to have a guide! How heart-warming to have a compassionate teacher who will gently place their hands on us and use their nervous system to contact ours, so we can be in rapport and come into the space they are inviting us into.
Dec 6th
Coming home. Although our habits feel familiar, sometimes they are blocking a sense of our true self. When we give up our habits, when we let go of trying hard to be right, end-gaining, holding ourselves back and down, and instead allow ourselves to inhabit the space that’s there for us, right here and now, then it can feel like coming home.
Dec 5th
Stand in front of a mirror in profile. Look at the top of your head and where it is in space. Balance yourself by finding the support at the back of the foot. Ensure the hip comes back at the same time, and the torso gently pivot slightly forward. What has happened to your height? You may find you have got a little taller. Practice this rebalancing act throughout the day when you find yourself standing still.
Dec 4th
As you carry out any activity, imagine it is the first time you have ever done this. Beginner’s mind.
Dec 3rd
Alexander is a retraining of the brain for effortless movement. Sit in a chair and imagine yourself to be very very heavy. Think of how solid you are, the weight of bone and flesh. Let go entirely so everything is dropping to the ground. Keep this thought going as you stand up, take a walk and return to the chair. Now, think the opposite. Imagine yourself to be light and airy. Think of all the space inside you, that you are filled with helium, and everything is expanding up and out. Stand up and walk with that kind of thinking and return to the chair. Different? The choice is yours.
Dec 2nd
Be generous with your voice. Direct it so others hear you easily. Whisper an ah three times enjoying the freedom of your jaw to smile and open widely. Sing a note from way down the bottom of your range and slide it up to the top and back. Hum quietly to yourself and imagine the hum radiating from your throat and mouth to the top of your head, filling your head. Keep humming and direct the sound all the way down to your feet. Fill your whole body with your quiet humming.
Dec 1st
Laurence Olivier apparently worked out in a gym in 1960’s before it was The thing to do. When asked why he was doing this, he answered ‘Because the body is sovereign to the voice.’
How is your voice today?
Nov 30th
Enjoy the unknown territory today. Let go the habit. Find yourself in a beautiful garden to explore with unknown paths, hidden delights, a secret place. Are you exploring in trepidation and excitement? Wonder? ‘I wonder what is going to happen…’ Perhaps next time you pause and walk through the portal the garden will be different again….a new land.
Nov 29th
Such deep bliss when we stop trying to get things right.
Nov 28th
Is it possible to find a twinkle in your eye, a grin spreading throughout yourself? O the joy in hearing natural joyful laughter amid a grim silent troop of city dwellers trying to get things right, trying to arrive on time! It isn’t always easy if we are feeling sad or cross to genuinely laugh joyfully. Maybe we can manage if we respond to something outside of ourselves. Or maybe we can inhibit the gloomy thought for a huddle of jokes we store up somewhere in our brain for times like this. Or have a quick dance. It might work to encourage those endorphins.
Nov 27th
Have a thought of one of your happiest moments. Remember where you were, tune in to the sounds, see the colours of the environment clearly, the temperature, the fragrance of the room or outside place, re-experience that happiness and bring that happy moment, that happiness back to now. Enjoy your day, best you can.
Nov 26th
‘Thinking does not require muscular contraction. Unfortunately many of us have taken to contracting muscles as we think. ‘ Cathy Madden from Integrative Alexander Technique for Performing Artists
Nov 25th
‘The Alexander Technique is initiated by a wish.’ Cathy Madden from Integrative Alexander Technique for Performing Artists
Doesn’t that sound magical? Bring the magic back to your life: wish your neck to be free so that your head floats freely on top of the spine, in such a way that the back lengthens and widens, and your ankles knees and hips free up.
Nov 24th
The head leads and the body follows.
Nov 23rd
‘Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle ant the life if the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared’ Gautama Siddharta 563-483 BC
Nov 18th
When you’ve got lots to do, find the gap between things. Take momentary pauses. Find the space. Then the neck will free and the head rise and the back lengthen and widen and the limbs release.
Nov 17th
Is it better to be dwelling in an ugly place and perceive the beauty over there, or be in the beautiful place and perceive the ugliness over there? Perhaps neither. Perhaps be in beauty and perceive beauty all around us.
Nov 16th
Each moment is precious and fleeting. We walk along the road and see a lamp-post coming towards us, a tree, some point on our travels, and as we continue to walk, the lamp-post has disappeared, gone and some other piece of street furniture is in our vision, some other horizon. Constantly on the move. Unless we choose to wait for a while, take in the perspective from that point. But the lamppost is no longer part of the vision, we are inhabiting it.
Nov 15th
We are a balancing act. A ‘tottering biped’ as someone once said. We are always about to fall over and our system reorganizes us to return fleetingly to some base line. We balance our work life with social life with family life. We balance our minds between the outside world and the inner realm. When we take on the Alexander work as a way of easing back pain or improving our posture, it is not surprising it has life-changing consequences.
Nov 14th
‘Stick to principle and it will all open up like a giant cauliflower’ AR Alexander
Nov 13th
Holding, fixing, co-contraction, effort, heavy, down, narrowed, inside, serious, hard work, trying hard, reacting….
Freeing, releasing, co-ordinated, easy, light, up, widened, outside, fun, energised, experimenting , responding….
I know which world of experience I prefer.
Nov 12th
Don’t narrow your vision today. Keep it wide. Keep your attention out. It will unfix your joints, release co-contraction and make life easier.
Nov 11th
When we remember something we often hold ourselves in automatic patterns as we relive a moment or think deeply and go inside. Its as if we abandon ourselves to think, abandon this moment to go back in time. If instead we bring the memory to us in the present moment, we can still consciously take in our surrounds and be responsive. Having deep reverie is fine. I imagine Wordsworth did this on his couch ‘when oft in pensive mood I lie’ as he thought of a crowd of daffodils.
Maybe today we think of armed conflict about the world and its consequences to us and our family. Bring the memory to this moment.
Nov 10th
Is inhibition a direction?
Nov 9th
How aware are you of what you are doing to your face. Is it frozen, inscrutable, held, is it moveable, expressive, over anxious? Be in your face today! (Haha)
Nov 8th
Which habits will you inhibit today? Sitting and standing? Walking?
Nov 7th
As a child we learn to walk mostly through crawling. To reorganise your walking you can get a lot of things going by crawling again as an adult. Have a go to day. If your wrists hurt then you can always go up on your fists like a gorilla. If that’s still painful or you have problems with the knees, lie in semi supine and bring both knees up to the chest. Take your left hand to your right knee and your right hand to your left knee. Keeping that contact, move one knee down toward the floor a couple of inches, and as you bring it back, do the same with the other knee and continue this movement for a while. You will be exercising the right – left brain cross over and getting the diagonals working, similar to the crawling work. It releases tension in the upper back too. You can then take the left hand off the right knee and if it was under the other arm place it over the other arm or vice versa, and replace it on the same knee again. Repeat the movement of the knees. This may fox you for a while! Enjoy the feeling of incompetence while it lasts.
Nov 6th
We can be sceptical of an explanation, without being sceptical of the phenomenon.
Nov 5th
Our feedback system isn’t very efficient on its own. Imagine playing ‘hunt the thimble’ and the participants shout ‘Warm, you’re getting warmer!’ 10 seconds after the searcher was there. Not very fast feedback. We also have a feedforward system to anticipate or guess what might happen according to past experience. A good tennis player is predicting where the tennis ball will land. It’s when these two systems get out of balance so we are constantly in the feedforward place of end gaining without taking in the current feedback, that we get into difficulties. Stay present and use both. Perhaps that is why it seems so slow when we start Alexander? We are starting to take time to receive feedback and slightly inhibiting our feedforward system.
Nov 4th
We may not know where we are going, but if we stick to the path we’ll get somewhere. In Greece there is a saying that it is best to follow a mule track rather than a goat track. The latter will take you to the edge of a cliff, the mule track to a taverna. May your Alexander path always lead you to the taverna! Sometimes it feels like we are on a cliff edge as we move into a place of change. However with Alexander we can always choose to step back, to wait. Perhaps to turn back.
Nov 3rd
Children are not efficient in their walking. We can be though.
Nov 2nd
No-one knows quite how the Alexander Technique works. There are a lot of myths mixed in with truth. If a voice teacher suggests that someone thinks of the breath ‘sinking into the belly’ and it has the desired effect of creating a bigger intake of breath and relaxing the shoulders for example, then although the breath doesn’t actually do that, and the gas exchange still goes on in the lungs up there in the rib cage, it doesn’t hurt, does it? (Well it may create a strange body map which later could be tricky…) If I say imagine the spine lengthening as you breathe out, it may not actually lengthen but the thought may have ensured that the spine isn’t being unduly shortened.
FM wanted it to be considered a science but perhaps we could think of it as an art. Whatever the scientific truths of AT – and there are some – it seems to produce amazing results anyway.
Nov 1st
Remember the head leads and the rest follows. As visual creatures for the most part, maybe it is the eyes that lead and the head follows, and the rest follows. If you place your finger tips flat on the top of the neck at the back and move your eye from left to right you will pick up a response in the neck muscles, readying themselves to turn the head in the direction of the eyes.
Oct 31st
Take your spine for a walk today
Oct 30th
‘FM used to say that it was important to get to the point where the whole body is informed by thought’ Marjorie Barlow,
from Sean Carey’s Think More, Do Less.
Oct 29th
‘The body is always part of the world. I sit on this chair; the chair is on a floor in this building; and the building in turn rests on the mountain of stone that is Manhattan Island Whenever I walk, my body is interrelated with the world in which and on which I take my steps. This presupposes some harmony between body and world. We know from physics that the earth rises infinitesimally to meet my step, as any two bodies attract each other. The balance essential is walking is one that is not soley in my body; it can be understood only as a relationship of my body to the ground on which it stands and walks. The earth is there to meet each foot as it falls, and the rhythm of my walking depends on my faith that the earth will be there.’
Rollo May, The Courage to Create.
Oct 28th
So, you have freed your neck, your head has risen forward and up, the back has lengthened and widened, and the knees released forward and away. Now what?
Oct 27th
We are an ocean wave crashing onto the sand. The wave has a back and the crest is coming over, and it is extremely powerful and moving forward . We come into our back and get a tremendous surge of ‘up’ and the top of us, our head, is beginning to drop, up and over, forward and up.
Oct 26th
‘The difficulty for all of us is to take up a new way of life in which we must apply principles instead of the haphazard end-gaining methods of the past.’ FM
Oct 25th
‘You want to feel out whether you are right or not. I am giving you a conception to eradicate that. I don’t want you to care a damn if you’re right or not. Directly you don’t care if you’re right or not, the impeding obstacle is gone.’ FM
Oct 24th
‘When an investigation comes to be made, it will be found that every single thing we are doing in the work is exactly what is being done in Nature when the conditions are right, hte difference being that we are learning to do it consciously.’ FM
Oct 23rd
‘As soon as people come with the ideas of unlearning instead of learning, you have them in the frame of mind you want.’ FM
Oct 22nd
‘The things that don’t exist are the things most difficult to get rid of.’ FM
Oct 21st
Check – can you see, can you move, can you breathe? If all of these are true you are sending nice calming messages to your brain. Imagine chewing a large piece of delicious food in your mouth – you get to choose what it is. As you chew you will find yourself salivating. Another calming signal to the brain. Life stops being an emergency.
Oct 20th
Change the habits and the routine may change.
Oct 19th
There is more lung tissue at the back than at the front. Astonishing.
Oct 18th
Sometimes learning happens very fast, sometimes very slowly. In Alexander it takes the time it takes.
Oct 17th
It’s quite fun sometimes to go up on your toes – without pushing the pelvis forward- and then gently lower the heels whilst still maintaining that ‘up’, as though the head is staying in the say place and not sinking floorwards.
Oct 16th
Learning is fun, isn’t it?
Oct 15th
‘No-one wants to learn the Alexander Technique, they just want to be better performers, athletes or have the pain go away, or feel good.’ True or false?
I think some do want to learn Alexander Technique for its own sake because it is apparently magical and they are curious. What is this process that makes me experience my movement in the world so differently? How does it work? How, when someone trained in the work touches me, does it produce this effect of lightness and ease? We brush up against the mystery of life.
Oct 14th
Sometimes habits are good and are worth cultivating.
Oct 13th
We cannot change what challenges life throws at us, but we can change our response to them. Therein lies our power.
Oct 12th
‘Seek freedom and beauty will arrive of its own. If you seek beauty directly you risk losing freedom and its attendant beauty.’ Pedro del Alcantara
Oct 11th
‘Functional freedom awakens feeling, and when this happens it is not necessary to ‘put’ feeling into anything. It is there. ‘ Cornelius L. Reid
Oct 10th
‘Play with a cold head and a warm heart’. Not sure who this is attributed to, but thought it Alexandrian. There is a disassociation when we pause and make a choice that may appear cold or feel hard, but it is tempered by the enormous compassion that Alexander brings. A very warm heart indeed. I wish this to you most today.
Oct 9th
‘Force may subdue, but Love gains; and one that forgives first, wins the laurel.’ William Penn 1693
FM wasn’t a spiritual man and AT is not an overtly spiritual practice, but many find a spiritual dimension to their lives in studying Alexander. The Quakers helped FM a lot in the States during the wars when he taught there.
Oct 8th
Eric Baker, a conscientious objector, a Quaker, in 1941:
‘I felt very excited and worked up so when the chairman asked me the leading question Why do you object to civil defence, I asked to be allowed to sit for a few minutes in quietness while I gathered myself. When I felt ready I told them simply….They listened very quietly….Their decision was to register me unconditionally on the register of COs. All over in 20 minutes.’
Alexander in action.
Oct 7th
‘FM used to say that it was important to get to the point where the whole body is informed by thought’
Marjory Barolw
Oct 6th
‘I’ve realised that the habits I once thought were personal are actually internalized narratives for the culture we live in. Therefore I believe that inner transformation and social awakening are one.’ Michael Stone.
People don’t always realise how revolutionary Alexander is. It is so subtle and changes things we thought were set in stone.
Oct 5th
‘Just say know’ Ram Dass
Oct 4th
The Many Gifts
The gifts keep arriving
They don’t need three Wise Men
They don’t need Bethlehems.
They come from the lips of people
And the touch that lifts
the black burden from bowed shoulders
Even in the sad lands of gaols and torture
the people sing. They dance
in the middle of desolation.
Hands must close on the strange gifts
Even those that bring tears
to eyes that have been longing to weep.
They wash ashore
From the sea that seems empty.
They emerge from the inner and the outer darkness.
Norman MacCaig
Oct 3rd
The Quakers meet in silence and wait for spirit to move them to speak. Sometimes no-one speaks. Sometimes someone speaks and the attention of the meeting enfolds them, listening without reacting. Very Alexandrian. Practice listening today. Speak less, without being impolite.
Oct 2nd
What is it to be fit? To have a strong cardio-vascular system maybe. Sometimes in the Alexander world we can get addicted to the floaty flexible sensations of good use and not challenge ourselves to strengthening exercise. What sort? Walking is the safest and along with Alexander lessons is a wonderful way of helping out lower back pain. If you are not already in an exercise programme consider it. Half hour fast walking every day does wonders and exercise is a brilliant activity to apply our Alexander principles to since it is of itself and not end-gaining. After all you cannot play an hour’s worth of tennis in half an hour.
Oct 1st
Fear is sometimes governed by end-gaining, the principle of imagining the worst. Imagine instead the best and let go the outcome. This brings happiness, tranquillity, bliss.
Sept 30th
You should lose the shoulds from your day. Haha!
Sept 29th
Mercy. Have mercy on yourself. Be kind to yourself. Forgive yourself. Judges ask God to have mercy on our soul. We can ask ourselves to have mercy. Be discerning but not judgemental.
Sept 28th
Although we cannot change our habits in sleep, we can change our habits OF sleep. As we have a calmer day, no longer end gaining or pulling down, we reach the sleeping port in an easier way and the sleep becomes easy. Give yourself the joy of 8 hours. It is essential for our well being. Before you sleep, go through your directions, your spatial directions, be aware of your breathing and the bliss of sleep will arrive all on its own.
Sept 27th
When we are most skilled at something, it is the most difficult to let go of and find another way. But here’s the joy: you can always go back to your old skilled ways at any time you want.
Sept 26th
Maybe the old way doesn’t seem right anymore, but the new way is not so easy to find and you are in this stuck place. Take courage. It’s so rare to be stuck, to be lost, to not have the answer. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Sept 25th
Sometimes just witnessing your own breathing is joy enough. It is like the sea with big waves and little waves and never still.
Sept 24th
Autumn and Spring are very Alexandrian seasons full of change, letting go of old leaves, albeit beautiful flame coloured leaves, and readying the tree and plants for new growth, brilliant greens and yellows. Which season do you perceive yourself to be in? Perhaps you are having a day of winter when nothing seems to happening, waiting for the moment to arrive. Maybe a day of summer when the fruits of your labours are shining for all to see and you can languidly inhabit some new place as if you have known it all along.
Sept 23rd
Which part of the elephant are you in relationship with today? Are you practising monkey by bending the knees first or letting the head lead and tilting at the hips first? Are you emphasising direction or playing more with inhibition? It does not matter which. It is still the same beast.
Sept 22nd
Let us have an awareness of the Earth day, your connection with the ground. From time to time notice the contact with you feet, and notice your contact with the sitting bones. Or the back, if you are leaning. Or your arm. Or your thigh. Or your hand. Whatever you are in contact with, with whichever part of you, is a contact with the Earth. You are contacting the Earth when you are in touch with someone else.
Sept 21st
As we begin to react, over 600 muscles prepare to take action. Quite a programme to inhibit and re-organise.
Sept 20th
It takes a lot of courage to change. Be kind to yourself today. Take courage.
Sept 19th
We are creatures primed for predicting movement. When someone serves a tennis ball the receiver has no time to keep her eye one the ball. It’s simply too fast for our brain to process. But she can predict where it might go, reading her opponent’s body movements and based on past experience.
So our living in the now is predicated on our ability to predict futures from past experience. And it flows seamlessly. If we are concentrating on our future, then we miss the present. The future exists for us in the moment. As does the past. A memory of the past comes into the now. Our habit is often to leave the experience of now to dig around in the past. It can be pleasant to root around in our personal history of course, re-live happy times. But this thinking is happening in the present. But we don’t need to stay in the past, or make it our habit. Inhibit this and the past will come to you.
Sept 18th
Can you inhibit your worry thoughts? It’s wonderful if you can, if only for a few moments .
Sept 17th
Sometimes we feel that yet again we are in our world of habit and we react by feeling bad about it. Don’t worry, this will pass. It is part of the process. Our awareness has grown, not our habit. Our habit is the feeling bad about it. The light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train but actually the end of the tunnel.
Sept 16th
Sometimes this work will generate nice feelings. Sometimes it is OK to bask in them.
Sept 15th
It takes the time it takes to find the path, and we get lost on the way. Hurray! How refreshing! It is very difficult to get lost these days.
Sept 14th
Sometimes there is nothing to say. Alexander was heard to say near the end of his life when questioned, “Read my books, it’s all in there.”
Sometimes I would ask questions to which my teachers didn’t answer. They gave me plenty of words, but didn’t directly answer. That’s because it wasn’t the right question, they would say. I was beside myself with rage and wondered at their apparent smugness.
Of course now I understand their answer and they were right. It wasn’t the right question.
Sept 13th
The amount of relief we feel as we let go, is on a ratio as to the amount of unnecessary tension we were holding. Perhaps when we first start out on our Alexander journey we are wooed by this feeling of floating, ease, bliss that we get sometimes when we are coming up and experiencing doing nothing. We are duped into craving this blissed out state and seek out the feeling. We stumble on it again as a teacher puts their hands on, but the feeling is secondary to the reasoning and letting go that is required. The feeling is a consequence of our non-doing. Sometimes. We could not exist in the world in such a state constantly. Like the euphoria we can have on stage performing perhaps. All we can do is keep sticking to principle, inhibit, direct, be present, rearrange our primary control.
Sept 12th
It is such a joy to notice when we are holding or pulling ourselves down. Because in that moment we can let go of it, if only for a moment.
Sept 11th
Don’t let Alexander lead you to a sense of perfection. It doesn’t exist. We are not trying to be perfect, just use ourselves as well as we can in the given circumstances. It’s all a little rock and roll. Everything changes. What seems right one day may not be the next and on it goes. Allow yourself to be imperfect today.
Sept 10th
‘Sleep is the last refuge of habit.’ Walter Carrington.
So you won’t change your sleeping habits directly. And semi supine is not primarily a sleeping position.
Sept 9th
When you free the arms, you are no longer trapping the ribs and breathing will also become freer.
Sept 8th
Take your arms out to the side and back again, and clock the effort. Stand in a doorway and try to raise your arms as your hands press into the frame for 15 seconds. Then step away from the door and raise your arms again. It is likely they will float effortlessly upwards. As they return to your side think again to raise them, but pause and ask them to float as before. Your brain can remember what it did to move them effortlessly and it will happen again.
Sept 7th
Time to surrender again.
Sept 6th
When we move effortlessly it can seem we are going slower. Faulty sensory perception. It’s just we’ve taken the rush out of everything. Often we are moving quicker.
Sept 5th
What are you paying attention to today? Whatever it is, is it possible to ensure that your are attending in a wide focus? We are habituated to narrowing our attention. Perhaps sometimes we need this concentration, but not as our default. Make the widened field of attention your default today.
Sept 4th
Just decide to be tall as is possible today, not by stretching up but by being aware of up.
Sept 3rd
The myth of core stability: core muscles. They used to be called abdominal muscles. They are mostly used for keeping our innards inside, for defecating, for vomiting, for flexing the spine. They are not attached to the spine. They are attached to the ribs and the pelvis. Electrodes were placed on the abdominal muscles to measure their activity whilst someone was simply standing. Movements were so slight nothing registered on the equipment. No measurement was recorded. You don’t need the abdominal muscles to be strong or pulled in or tightened for you to be able to stand effectively. They have very little to do with it. If you have a habit of holding your tummy in as you stand, let it go today.
Sept 2nd
When you straighten your arm and place your fingertips against a wall, then slightly bend the elbow you will notice that the fingertips are still in contact with the wall. The arm has not shortened, the muscles have got longer A straight arm is a contracted arm. The same is true for the legs. So if you notice your knees locked back today, release them. Your legs will be longer.
Sept 1st
Are you sitting or standing in ‘monkey’ ? What is ‘monkey’? Alexander called it the position of mechanical advantage. But how deep or shallow is the ‘monkey’? It is according to the need. When we are standing we are in monkey. The angles of the hip knee and ankle are not so acute, that’s all. When we are sitting it is ‘monkey’, but the support is from the sitting bones as well as the feet. Today may you always be in a place of mechanical advantage.
Aug 31st
The act of letting go is easy. It is everything leading up to the point of letting go that is the difficulty.
Aug 30th
We may not know how change occurs but if we open ourselves to it, it can happen seamlessly.
Aug 29th
We cannot control what stimuli the world challenges us with. We can only control our response.
Aug 28th
Find space for yourself before the usual day begins. Then you can wear the day like a garment, something you chose to put on.
Aug 27th
Do you have a schedule today? Or will the day unfold as it will? If it is a busy day ahead, look at the gaps between appointments, albeit small ones like looking at the gaps between these words. These are the moments to rest and give some space for yourself. To sharpen the saw.
Aug 26th
Not always easy to let go of old habit. It is familiar like an old coat. It is almost all we have ever known and is comfortable to us in some ways. But there comes a time when the old coat will no longer service us. Time to take it off and hang it in the wardrobe or take it to the charity shop. And if we still need a coat of habit, then you have opened yourself to wear a better one, more serviceable, that gives you freedom to move , that looks fabulous!
Aug 25th
How is your internal space? Probably working quite well. Our attention is often drawn inward, narrowed to some part of us or a discomfort, physical or emotional, regret or worry for the future. But it is our own world and we are at that moment cut off from what is going on around us. One of the best medicines is to pay attention to the world around you right here, right now, the space above behind, on either side, the space in front the connection to the earth….. But careful you don’t space out! It’s another form of narrowing when we focus on just the space and not the details.
Aug 24th
Why did we collapse? Why did we as a child get into the habit of blocking the world out, looking down, dropping the neck? Maybe we didn’t like the world very much. Maybe we were feeling sad or put upon. Maybe our only way of coping was to ignore the real world, get into the world of the internet, or our own head, taking us away from the unpleasantness around. Or maybe we were simply copying someone else and wanted to emulate them. Before we knew it, whatever the reason in the first place, we have a habit. How we got it, we may never know, but now we are liberated, now we can consciously come out of it. Hurray! If we want.
Aug 23rd
Sometimes we have been contracting our psoas and lower back muscles to pull the chest up to make us feel upright. When we let go of these, we come into a slump, the head and chest dropped down. This collapse was probably the first doing. The second doing was pulling ourselves up to please someone. To get rid of the first doing, we have to rid ourselves first of the second doing. So don’t hold yourself up today. Stay down, and then gently let your eyes look up and around, the head following, the spine following the head and you will find yourself up without tightening the lower back or pulling the chest up. If it feels down to you still, check it out in the mirror. Maybe it is, but maybe it isn’t.
Aug 22nd
Think of how you eat today. We often end-gain our food. Think of bringing the food to your mouth rather than dropping your neck and taking your head to the food. It isn’t so easy when it’s a bowl of soup or noodles of course. If you are at home, pick the bowl up so it is closer to the mouth, so the spoon or fork doesn’t have to travel such a long way. When you eat are you thinking of other things? Stay present as you eat. Be in the moment of your eating. Bring awareness to your eating. Enjoy!
Aug 21st
If you place your hands on your head for about 15 seconds and take them off again, you may feel how the head rises and the spine lengthens all by itself. We are often pulling our head into the spine and are not aware of it. We become aware if it only when the weight has been taken off. The spine is a lengthening device. Let your head rise and take the weight off the spine.
Aug 20th
When we lie down in semi-supine it’s not just the body that untangles itself, but the minds also, all those thoughts become ordered and sometimes that busy mind comes to rest.
Experiment: when you have a knotty problem, lie down and see the knots untying. Maybe the solution will come to you.
Aug 19th
What have you learned today, or what will you learn today? Maybe that the price of butter has gone up in the supermarket, maybe you will have discovered how the universe was formed, or to forgive a deep hurt against you. They are all moments of learning. We are inherently learning creatures. It is difficult not to learn.
Aug 18th
Think of the top of the spine pointing to the sky. Useful thought if you suffer with ‘tech neck’ , dropping the neck from the 7th vertebra. It stops it.
Aug 17th
As you walk watching something come towards you, when it arrives in a moment it is gone and something else on the horizon presents itself, coming towards you. So it goes on.
Aug 16th
Walking. Are you walking tall today, allowing your legs to lengthen, your head reaching up to the sky? Earth below, sky above, and we lengthen between the two .
Aug 15th
Not doing anything: bliss. Find some time to do absolutely nothing.
Aug 14th
‘I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering up its things, packing up and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night’
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
There are moments of epiphany in the Alexander work, but mostly through gentle persistence, we discover something has shifted, disappeared, left us.
Aug 13th
‘She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.’
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
I think in AT we are given the tools to help us cast aside the fictitious self.
Aug 12th
‘Every single act must be approached as though we have never done it before. Then we can find things out.’
FM Alexander
Aug 11th
Its OK sometimes to be completely wrong about something. To misjudge something, to make a terrible mistake. We won’t know its wrong until we get a new perception, new knowledge. This can be quite liberating and offer us a fresh approach. Acknowledge the milk is spilt, then let the cat lick it up and get another carton from the fridge. or have your tea black for a change. Thank god we don’t have to be right all the time!!
Aug 10th
Got any fixed ideas? Best free them up. They may be completely wrong.
Aug 9th
‘When prompted to speak, wait patiently to know that the time is right.’ from Advice and Queries, Quaker Faith and Practice.
Aug 8th
‘In ordinary teaching, pupils and teachers are quite convinced that if some part of the organism is too tense, they can relax it – that is do the relaxing by direct means. This is a delusion on their part, but it is difficult to convince them of it. In the first place if they do chance to get rid of the specific tension it will be by a partial collapse of the parts concerned, or of other parts, possibly even by a general collapse of the whole organism. In the second place it is obvious that if some part of the organism is unduly tensed, it is because the pupil is attempting to do with it the work of some other parts or parts, often work for which it is quite unsuited.’
FM Alexander , Constructive Control of the Individual.
Aug 7th
Sometimes learning happens without us knowing it. Later from one hour of experience and instruction, we can have amazing repercussions throughout the week, throughout our lives. How come I have remembered that? How come that thought is popping up into my brain as I walk along? How come I am walking differently, effortlessly? Ah, that’s the magic of being human.
Aug 6th
Sometimes we don’t feel we have learnt anything. It is too easy, too obvious, too simple, ‘I’m not doing anything!’ . Quite!
Aug 5th
Think of what’s beneath your feet. The planet. The crust of the earth, the magna at the centre.
Aug 4th
Remember to look up the stars today, and if you cannot see them, a star blind sky, then remember that they are there.
Aug 3rd
‘You make my arm feel like a cloud’. Can you make your arm feel like a cloud? Without substance, floating, free. Give yourself that instruction today and perhaps you will find that too. Continue the direction to include all of you, so all of you feels like a cloud.
Aug 2nd
How are your eyes? Are you resting them as you read this or tightening them? Have a wider vision, relax the muscles around the eyes. Pay attention to the eyes today. They receive a lot of light.
Aug 1st
When you think of your knees releasing forward it may switch off that huge contraction we often give ourselves in the quads. Imagine -we are trying to move and hold ourselves at the same time! No wonder it’s all a bit of an effort.
July 31st
If you stand with your feet together, then play with standing with your feet wider apart. If you stand with your feet wide apart, stand with them together. This way you can play with something other than your habit. If you think you stand with neither together or wide apart then try one or the other. Which feels most normal? It may be you have a faulty sensory appreciation.
July 30th
If you have a pain in your shoulder, it may be the tightness in your legs that is causing it.
July 29
We learn through unconscious imitation as a child. Now as an adult we can learn through conscious imitation. Think of someone you admire in how they move through the world and from time to time imagine you are them. Model them. You may feel yourself coming ‘up’. Make sure you are not ‘doing’ them which could lead to un-necessary tension, just become them.
July 28th
‘I must neither push my thought nor let or drift. I must simply make an internal gesture of standing back and watching. For it was a state in which my will played policeman to the crowd of my thoughts, its business being to stand there and watch that the road might be free for whatever was coming. Why had no-one told me that the function of will might be to stand back, to wait and not to push?’ From A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner (Joanna Field) 1936
July 27th
Substitute ‘must, got to, ought, should,’ for ‘I wish’. FM said that ‘I must but I can’t’ were two impostors to be released when we changed it to volition. It puts us into conflict. A wish or desire is wholesome, we are no longer divided. I was once in a traffic jam on my way to work. How could I want to be there? Because I was there, and no other way if I wanted to get to work, which I did
July 3rd
Another quality associated with Alexander is gentleness. In Laban terms we often glide as Alexander teachers, smooth direct unhurried. And whilst some teachers’ hands are firmer than others, most are very gentle. We are asked gently to change, invited through the door to the unknown gently. Be gentle with yourself today, teacher or student. Be gentle with others you are in contact with. Gently does it.
July 2nd
By the time you have finished reading this sentence, the future will have arrived and become the present. The past is the beginning of the sentence. We don’t ever have to chase the future. Or end-gain. The end will arrive. Stay in the process.
July 1st
Find some quiet time today. Just for yourself. Sit in a chair and wait expectantly. Something will happen. I can’t say what. Everyone experiences something different.
June 30th
What are you wearing? Here’s a great game- choose to wear clothes you wouldn’t normally wear. Not your usual habit, your style. If you wear your hair up, wear it down. If you wear make-up leave it off, and vice versa. If you wear greens and browns, try reds and blues, plain colours, try patterns. And wear them for the day. It can change your life! You may discover something suits you really well. Or you may find that you walk differently, feel more or less confident……amazing how changing our clothes can affect us so much.
June 29th
Sometimes wearing a hat can make us crouch down, under the brim. Wear your titfer with pride today and remember to think of the space, the ‘up’ beyond the hat.
June 28th
Turn ‘must, ought, should, got to, have to’ into ‘I want’ or ‘I wish’ and have a nice day :-)
June 27th
Sometimes when you are all tensed up thinking about a terrible thing that might happen it’s rather useful to take your mind to the directions. When we ask our neck to be free and our head rise up to allow the back to lengthen and widen everything seems to fall into place and the worry thoughts leave you – for a while at least. How nice that worry thoughts can be solves by controlling our physical response to fear.
June 26th
‘It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.’
And the Mountain Echoed …Khaled Hosseini
June 25th
‘I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap. Probably not even real.’
– House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielweski)
June 24th
‘Leave yourself alone.’
FM
June 23rd
‘You get away from all your pre-conceived ideas because you are getting away from your old habits” FM
June 22nd
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
WB Yeats
June 21st
What are you doing right now? Reading this of course! Today talk through what you are doing as you do it, to keep your mind from wandering.
June 20th
Stand in a door frame and press your hands into the frame as though trying to fly. After 15 seconds stop, move away from the door and let them rise up magically with no effort. Every time you go to pick up a glass of water today or a cup of tea, pause and remember that sensation and see if it doesn’t happen again, so you can pick up your cup of tea gently and effortlesslyl
June 19th
Blow an invisible feather
“37. Ffffforget shopping list, social calendar, thwarted ambitions, presidents and politics, cholesterol score, football scores, hair-loss, weight gain, sunshine, wet rain, tax bill, over-the-hill….and feel the earth come up to meet your insignificant but creaking body.”
An extract from ‘A to do list for Alexander Technique’ by Martyn Potts, trainee in Alexander Technique
June 18th
The Door
Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.
Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.
Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.
Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.
At least
there’ll be
a draught.
Miroslav Holub
June 17th
Alexander is often considered a body discipline. Ah -ah. It is a psycho –physical discipline. When you notice today your brain yakking on its usual stream of suggestion and daydream, it is very Alexandrian to inhibit this. Inhibit and inhabit a quieter place, the outside world.
June 16th
Another experience of semi-supine:
When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of the wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
Of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free
Wendell Berry
June 15th
‘The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self.’
Derek Walcott
June 14th
“I must neither push my thought nor let or drift. I must simply make an internal gesture of standing back and watching. For it was a state in which my will played policeman to the crowd of my thoughts, its business being to stand there and watch that the road might be free for whatever was coming. Why had no-one told me that the function of will might be to stand back, to wait and not to push?” (From A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner)
June 13th
The traditional verbal directions of Alexander – to allow the neck to be free; to let the head go forward and up; to let the back to lengthen and widen, and the knees to go forward and away – are rather like a recipe for a cake. They have to be in the right order or we won’t rise!
June 12th
‘Let us meet and talk of things inconsequential’ says Mr.San, a character from a play called Bone Harvest I was once involved in. To idle, to have dalliance sometimes is refreshing to the spirit. Nothing is THAT important ……is it?
June 11th
Always good to pause before clicking on ‘send’ . Maybe sleeping on it may be a wiser choice. Inhibition in action.
June 10th
If the world is a challenging place today maybe it’s ok to wrap yourself into a little ball for a while. Then we’re in a psycho-physical unity and not one part forcing another part to smile bravely. However smiling bravely can sometimes turn into a genuine smile and equally begin to return us to a psycho-physical unity without conflict. It takes courage to stay responsive to the world when we have been knocked for 6. But it is possible to take the blow, acknowledge it , recover and return to full standing, perhaps a little wiser.
June 9th
Here’s a tip: if your shoulders are slightly held up, think of your elbows dropping or lengthening away from the shoulders and it often sends the shoulder blades back home. And it takes away your obsession with shoulders.
June 8th
‘You can’t do something you don’t know if you keep on doing what you do know’ FM Alexander’s Articles and Lectures p 196
June 7th
‘As soon as people come with the idea of unlearning instead of learning ,you have them in the frame of mind you want’. FM Alexander ‘Articles and Lectures’ p 198
June 6th
How are your legs? Be-kind-to-legs day. Often without realizing we are bracing them, locking the knees and using an immense amount of force to push the Earth away. I was teaching someone who had this problem to the extent that when he walked away he left indents in my carpet. I experimented in bracing and pushing my legs into the floor till I too had created an indentation. Wow that was a lot of effort! Not only my legs but all of me was quite locked up. Any apparent freedom in my waist and ribs was only at the expense of everything else locking up – including my neck. So, not just legs, but be-kind-to-yourself day. Free the knees. Remember you have ankles and hip joints too and allow the up direction throughout, so nothing is having to push. In a pushing competition between us and the planet, guess who is going to win? Best not even go there.
June 5th
What would you do today if you weren’t doing what you have got planned? Planning is useful essential…and habitual. I worked with a guy once who never had a spare piece of unplanned time in his day. Even when walking he would have to be listening to language programmes on his headphones. Maybe you could plan a day of being unplanned. Hang out and discover what happens. Oh-oh. This could be dangerous, the unexpected might occur.
June 4th
Make sure you don’t try too hard today! And make sure you don’t try too hard to not try hard…..
June 3rd
‘Joking is undignified, that is why it is good for the soul’ G.K.Chesterton
It is also good for a whispered ‘ah’. Here’s the menu:
1. Be in the here and now conscious Alexandrian state of direction
2. Ensure the tip of the tongue is resting on the back of the bottom front teeth
3. Think of something funny
4. As the smile arrives on the face, open the jaw
5. Let the air out on a whispered ‘ah’
6. Close the jaw and let the air rush in through the nose
It’s ever so easy and by having the funny thought we sweep away the dark thoughts that may have been cluttering our mind, so we are already in a state of renewal. By having the funny thought we are opening the false vocal folds allowing the airway to remain unhindered. – except for the true folds that will half open, allowing the whispered sound. Keeping the tongue stuck to the teeth at the front there ensures that the tongue gets a good stretch and isn’t held at the back, impinging on the space at the back of the throat, allowing for better resonance, and if the jaw likes to go from side to side as it opens, it often is a help to guide the jaw on its journey, so the jaw drops straight forward and down. IT is brilliant for releasing the tight muscles of the jaw and the belief we should not open our mouths too. It seperates clearly the action of the jaw from the head. I have seen this performed many times by acting students, all goes well until the moment the jaw begins to move and then they concentrate and look glum, taking it all far too seriously. The smile needs to continue throughout and the whole exercise be taken lightly.
And that wonderful whoosh of air that arrives through the nose is so uplifting it’s impossible not to smile with delight.
June 2nd
Are you doing what you want to do? If not, it might be time to change.
June 1st
My line manager in a drama school was designing the course for the year and I read the packed schedule with interest. I loved he had timetabled in ‘time for dreaming’ . Influenced by him, I wrote in my schedule for the Alexander lessons ‘Time for the unexpected.’ I love the unexpected! May the unexpected arrive in your life today. Not all unexpected things are nice of course. But I hope today the unexpected is beauteous for you.
May 30th
Today let there be peace in your life. Just a small piece of peace if that’s all that’s available. A moment between the shelling.
May 29th
When you re feeling fraught distracted and generally discombobulated that’s the BEST time to practice inhibition. Maybe you don’t have to feel all those things. Just give up for a moment the need to do any of it, the need to feel any of that. And as you return to the fray, maybe you can decide to enjoy the busy -ness you are experiencing.
May 28th
‘Why don’t you come up on the porch and idle with us a while.’ So says Grandpa in the Waltons to a neighbour…….find some time for idling today! Maybe with a friend.
May 27th
Pausing before taking action is not dithering or being undecided. It’s being more committed. If you find yourself dithering, make a choice one way or the other. It will lead you to somewhere.
May 26
Stop….take in the world around you. As you read this allow your eyes to relax and let the words come to you. Practice this all day whenever you are reading anything, on a screen, in a book, on an advertising board. Let your eyes soften and be aware of the periphery. You will still be able to read, I promise.
May 25th
Stop pulling down. Then the up will be revealed. It’s already there, waiting for you.
May 24th
Are you ‘on line’ ? Responding, listening, learning and communicating? Or are you off line living only from memory and habit? We can’t be ‘on line’ all the time, but often our habit is to be off line, in our own world in the truth of our own perceptions, rather stuck. Maybe it’s worth practising being on line.
May 23rd
Habits are ok, we are creatures of habit, after all. But we know them so well, we don’t have to practice them. Think of one you know of, and practice NOT practising it today.
May 22nd
Once we’ve cracked not pulling our head back, then we can apply that method to anything. The method? Your own experiment of course but you may find Alexander’s way of inhibition and direction rather useful.
May 21st
Is it OK to daydream? Of course it is! Just ensure it’s where you choose to be, not where your mind takes you. It is an enchanted fairy path that can be very pleasurable, but also treacherous. It is where dreams and new theories and plays and artworks lurk, but any artist will tell you it also requires fierce attention to manifest these fantasies. You may not want to make it a habit.
May 20th
How are your shoulders today? Where are they? Are they ‘home’? When I ask you about your shoulders what are you thinking about? The blade, the bones shoulder girdle, the trapezius muscles which aches, the shoulder joints ? And what happens to the rest of you as you think of them?
May 19th
There is more lung tissue behind your centre line than in front. Whisper an ‘ah’ as you come into monkey slightly tipping forward from the hip joints, and stay there as you allow the air to enter. You may feel the ribs at the back working more, the effect of the diaphragm at the back…then allow yourself to breathe in as you come back up to upright standing.
May 18th
Do yourself a favour: now and then check you are not bracing your legs. You don’t want to be bending them, another sort of ‘doing’ , just don’t lock them . This will release the lower back and the diaphragm so you can stand and breathe more easily. As well as taking the pressure away from your knee joints. Of course we may know all this and still find ourself doing it, so dedicate today to gently observe yourself releasing not bracing.
May 17th
Thought for the day: where does it come from?
May 16th
Two guys were taking part in a competition to see who could saw a tree down the fastest. They were using hand saws. As they puffed their way through the trunk their saws became blunt and it was becoming harder and harder to saw through the wood. One guy stopped and sharpened his saw. The other guy just continued to use his brute strength, not wanting to waste his time. Guess who won the competition?
Nice story to remind us of our habitual end-gaining. Stop and sharpen the saw today!
May 15th
We are always so busy busy busy…..life has become a busyness! Schedule in a meeting with yourself. Timetable moments of rest.
May 14th
Think of the inside of the back of the pelvis, think of the inside of the back of your ribs. This may help you to come into your back.
May 13th
Just refuse to collapse today, just refuse. Do not give consent. Stay with the ‘up’.
May 12th
In the journey between holding the shoulders up and pushing the shoulders down, there is their home. So much thought on shoulders: too held up, too pulled back, too collapsed forward. Leave them alone, and they will come home, blades, collar bones and all.
May 11th
Another image for Primary Control:
The Silken Tent
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
Robert Frost
May 10th
‘I need to stop thinking and then I can let go.’ Revelation from a student on the table.
There are a lot of types of thinking. The analytical thinking , intuitive thinking, meditative thinking , trying hard concentrated thinking, mind wandering, day dream, fearful thinking, imaginative thinking open responsive thinking…… the last sort is very Alexandrian. It’s allowing the interface between outside and inside worlds. The thought being triggered from the outside newness perhaps, rather than the internal memory based stimulus.
May 9th
Is Alexander an art form or a science?
May 8th
If we accept ourselves in the moment, there is no need to change. That is the change. Further change will occur all by itself.
May 7th
Make a fist and notice the tension and the emotional association with this act. Then undo the fist. On the other hand allow your finger tips to gently curl down and touch the palm of your hand. Bring your thumb gently across so that the tip rests between the middle and ring finger. You will have created the shape of a fist without the tension, a different ‘means whereby’ . If you needed to have a strong fist to bash someone then of course you could tighten it up again. Often we are approaching life like a fist. Let us inhibit past associations and curl our fingers instead.
May 6th
Go with the flow…but it is also possible to tack against the wind to go forward. Look to where the wind is blowing a nd use it with your wise sails to take you where you want. Use our free will to walk our own path not just follow like lemmings the one to the cliff.
Wait for the opportunity to take action, but prepare yourself to take advantage of the opportunity. Be vigilant, not switched off. Or you’ll miss it.
May 5th
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone’
WB Yeats ( A prayer for old age)
May 4th
‘The body is always part of the world. I sit on this chair; the chair is on a floor in this building; and the building in turn restson the mountain of stone that is Manahattan Island. Whenever I walk, my body is interrelated with the world in which and on which I take my steps. This presupposes some harmony between body and world. We know from physics that the earth rises infinitesimally to meet my step, as any two bodies attract each other. The balance essential in walking is one that is not soley in my body; it can be understood only as a relationship of my body to the ground on which it stands and walks. The earth is there to meet each foot as it falls, and the rhythm of my walking depends on my faith that the earth will be there.’ Rollo May, The Courage to Create
May 3rd
Under the cherry blossoms
None are
Utter strangers.
Issa
Thinking she was someone I knew, I once greeted someone very enthusiastically, although they were a stranger curiously walking down my garden steps thinking it was a public path. I made her feel welcome. And she responded with smiles and pleasantries. I realised quickly I didn’t know her but didn’t admit my early error. I kept up my enthusiastic welcome until she wandered off on her own adventure. I decided I could respond like this to everyone who wandered into my life, and enjoy together the cherry blossoms.
May 2nd
Half way down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn’t any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I’m not at the bottom
I’m not at the top
So this is the stair
Where
I always
Stop
Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up
And isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery
It isn’t in the town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head
‘It isn’t really
Anywhere
It’s somewhere else instead!’
A.A. Milne
…..an Alexander place to be.
May 1st
We can apply Alexander to anything
April 30th
If we leave ourselves alone, the world, our system, our acting, organises itself. But maybe we need some free will that allows us to stop interfering and allow things to unfold naturally.
April 29th
Take the plank out of your own eye before trying to take the speck out of your brother’s. Put on your own oxygen mask before putting on your child’s.
April 28th
Perhaps I am wrong. I do not have to be right. What I think of as right may be wrong. Maybe I am wrong. Wrong! Stop doing the wrong thing and the right will do itself.
April 27th
Habits of thought: if you look for weeds you will find them, but if you look for flowers you will find them. Today let us look for flowers.
April 26th
Sometimes when we think we‘ve made a free choice, actually it’s a habitual choice…Here’s ‘two roads diverging in a yellow wood, which shall I take? – that one, it looks less trodden…oh -ho, no it’s not- it’s very trodden…..’ There is a faulty perception of what is really new and out of habit sometimes.
April 25th
My interpretation of the outer territory is a map, not the territory itself.
Let me always be open to changing the map as I explore the territory.
April 24th
‘When we set out to do a thing, getting it done is not really the important thing. Rather, what is, above all, important is to pay attention to what we are doing to ourselves while in the process of doing that which we set out to do’ FM Alexander
April 23rd
Are you frightened of losing your habit? Maybe it’s spare luggage we don’t need.We are not our habits. Sometimes people get concerned they will stop being themselves. As we let go of our baggage, in my experience, we become more ourselves.
April 22nd
Look up the Master Ichu Zen story, between master and disciple.
Attention
Attention
Attention.
April 21st
What would freedom from habit sound like?
April 20th
If you were to draw your habits, what would they look like?
April 19th
Where would you most like to be if you were not where you are now?
April 18th
Is where you are where you want to be?
April 17th
Can habits be separated out, or are they all part of the whole psycho-physical system?
April 16th
Which habit would you most like to be rid of?
April 15th
Is habit the same thing as routine?
April 14th
Where do your thoughts come from? A habitual place?
April 13th
After the dark of winter, all is springing up, sap riseth and ‘In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.’ (Alfred Lord Tennyson)
Spring is the season for Alexander thoughts too – up up up! Let us hitch a ride on what is happening around us, the up direction of the earth itself . Let us be like a plant raising its head toward the sky, such a force that the weed can force a way through the pavement. We too can rise through the concrete of our habits.
April 12th
Ankles are wonderful things. They help keep us upright. If your ankle suddenly gives way…..ouch! They need to be flexible and supportive. The ligaments wrap round the joints like a support bandage. When we come into monkey it is the ankle that first follows the head – imagine a fine golden chain hanging from your finger and you lower it onto the palm of your other hand, it is the lower links that fold first. So as we lower ourselves through space it is the ankle knee and hip that respond so our lower links, our legs can fold. A nice up direction with that order – ankle knee hip.
April 11th
Where is your attention as you read this? Our eyes see a postage stamp, the size of the moon, all else is made up from past and predictive future. Think of widening your vision: these words will still be here, the words will come to you from the page. Be aware of the gap between the words. There is nothing we have to do to read, once we have learn this skill. It is very difficult to inhibit the brain from making sense of these black marks on the page in clusters. So even the intellectual pursuit of reading can be a non-doing exercise.
If you have difficulty reading, then thinking from the Magic Lemon might help. Or cross left leg over right knee and place your right had on your left leg. This also can magically make the words appear clearer.
April 10th
Go up not down, come into your back, not the front, be rather than do, and have a good laugh.
My recipe for a nice day – particularly 
the last item.
April 9th
Apparently we always live in the past. Our eyes see things a tenth of a second after the event has occurred. And the brain predicts what we will see. So tennis players never really have their eye on the ball – it’s moving too fast. Have a nice day living in the 10 seconds ago present!
April 8th
Change can sometimes be sudden, dramatic, violent and extreme.
In Alexander it happens much more gently and only when we are ready for it.
May you experience some gentle change in your life today that is uplifting, non-doing, and unfamiliar.
It can happen in a moment.
April 7th
‘Between the stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is the power to choose our response.
In that response lies our growth and our freedom.’ Viktor Frankl.
April 6th
Inhibit your reaction to discomfort by trying to change. Accept the moment right here right now, for better for worse, give up trying, and that IS the change.
April 5th
A lot of people have written a lot of things about the Alexander Technique, very eloquently. They would all say that in the end it is something to experience not read about. How can one describe the taste of a peach to someone who has never eaten one? If you want to learn to ride a bike you need to get on a bike and practice. You can’t do it by reading a manual.
April 4th
‘What I noticed was the absence of sensations that normally accompanied the movement.
The tension and effort which I had taken for granted as a necessary part of getting up weren’t there.
It was like the noise of a factory which you are not aware of until it stops.
I couldn’t find words to describe the absence of a sensation’
Frank Pearce Jones
April 3rd
‘You can never win a fight with yourself. One of you is going to lose and it’s always going to be you!’ David Gorman
April 2nd
The attempt to bring about change involving growth, development and progressive improvement in the use and functioning of the human organism, calls necessarily for the acceptance, yes, the welcoming of the unknown in sensory experience, and this ‘unknown’ cannot be associated with the sensory experiences that have hitherto ‘felt right’.
FM Alexander
April 1st
‘You cannot change and yet remain the same, though this is what most people want.’ Patrick MacDonald
March 31st
Have you looked at rooftops recently? A great way of attending to the up direction. Be mindful of how you look up of course. If you are already in a state of here and now the eyes will easily lead your head to tip a little, maintaining a length through the front and not collapsing the neck. Look at the rooftops, look at the sky. We so often are looking down or in front, thinking of the horizontal plane. Let’s take in the vertical again. The up goes on forever. So maybe the ancients were right to think of the gods being above us.
March 30th
Watching a crowd of people walking to work in the city this morning I noticed how they were all going up and down as they walked, pushing the world away and collapsing to it. It would be very strange if they were all gliding to work with a smile on their face. If you have the opportunity, take a look at others as they walk today. Do they too go up and down? Do you? Is it possible to maintain the same height whilst walking?
March 29th
When the neck is free , the head rising up, the back lengthening and widening, our limbs long and easy, we are at our most excellent best. And we can find that state n a moment. Do it now. Let go of whatever is holding you back, pulling you down, come back to this moment right here right now where the up exists. Ping!
March 28th
Up is a direction, it is a state, it is a movement. It is an energy. Give yourself this gift today .
March 27th
As we get old some things wear out, like knicker elastic. When we use ourselves well we find new ways of keeping our knickers up!
March 26th
The pause before action, this magic gap between stimulus and response when it has come to consciousness what we are about to do, and we can choose to continue or not do it….it’s enormous!
It is a split second and yet it is timeless . Like Dr Who’s tardis, that looks smaller on the outside but enormous on the inside, so is this inhibition moment, barely noticeable to outsiders, but to us a huge moment of space and time where we reorganise.
March 25th
When you want something, let your mind come to a resting state, the blue sky between the clouds, the gap between the words and in that space put out your intention, wish, desire. Then let go of the result. Don’t end-gain. Come back to now. Let the intention be carried out. Perhaps your desire is to get up from a chair, pause, let the mind come to now, and allow the system to organise itself….. Inhibit, direct. And you will rise up.
March 24th
How can I get that effect from your touch for myself? You can’t. When we touch someone, there are two nervous systems working together. Takes two to tango. But you can work on your thinking.
March 23rd
We are born with half a brain. We develop our cognitive skills by interacting and learning from the outside world. This learning never stops. It goes on throughout our lives.
March 22nd
We can only know ourselves in reference to the outside world.
March 21st
The Back
Let’s think of the back today. Just have it in mind as you get on with the rest of your 
What is the back? It includes the spine, the shoulder blades, the ribs, the pelvis, the hip joints. It includes the muscles of the spine, muscles of the upper limb, the glutes, the quadratus lumborum…..But the spine goes up through the neck, the glutes are part of the lower limb….suddenly the back become a meeting place for the limbs , an area of breathing, manipulation, walking….. So let us picture the back from behind, tune into the back as we feel our way through the day, and celebrate this extraordinary area of the Self.
March 20th
When we look at an animal, we usually look at its back – anything four legged – hamster, cat, dog, cow, goat, deer, – it rarely presents its underbelly, soft and vulnerable. As a two legged creature we constantly expose the front, our soft vulnerable space. Let’s not stretch it up or out today, let it hang gracefully from our back.
March 19th
Freeing the neck. What is neck?
Are you thinking of the front and sides as well as the back? What is the width of your spine within the neck? A bridge between the head and the back. Where does the neck end and the shoulders begin? Do we include the shoulders into that area we call neck? Muscles of the neck are connected to the spine, the head, the shoulder blades, the ribs, the sternum, the jaw and the collar bone – one connects the larynx to the shoulder blade. One continues half way down the back. Then there’s the connective tissue, blood vessels, nerves, fatty tissue, the wind pipe, the oesophagus…. This bridge is crowded with traffic! Best keep it free so all runs smoothly. Enjoy thinking of your neck today in a light gentle manner. Concentration might clog it up.
March 18th
Eyes. Let’s soften our eyes today. Let’s see from the back of our eyes, let them widen away from each other, away from the narrowed frown.
March 17th
Turning with the eyes. We hear something, an event, a change , become aware of something, a fragrance, a flicker, we sense someone behind us, the light shifting, and we turn to investigate further. Today if you turn to the right let your left eye lead. If you want to turn to the left, let your right eye lead. See how it goes.
March 16th
Jaw. Let’s play with the releasing the jaw today. Enough with clenching and stretching the lips.
March 15th
Let’s be aware of our feet today. Extraordinary arched events at the end of our legs, much maligned , much abused, shoved into tight fitting coverings with an added heel, as though our own is not good enough. Feet are flexible and robust. They put up with hard surfaces , sinking surfaces, they interface with the planet, they bear a lot of weight, support and move at they same time. 27 bones in one foot. Wow. Let’s not take them for granted today. A day in praise of feet. Heel, ball, toe, ankle, arch, instep, the space between our toes…. Love them all, let them exist.
March 14th
As you walk around today, imagine you are taking your brain for a walk.
March 13th
How lucky we are to have come across Alexander Technique! How did we get here? By chance? Because someone told us about miraculous pain relief, a burst of confidence, a kind tou
ch? Or an advertisement for a workshop, our own curiosity to find something unheard of? Whatever the spur, it was us, our own choice that walked through door of the teacher for our first lesson. We made the step, the leap of faith. We took action.
March 12th
Come into your back. Don’t go looking for your back, wait patiently for it to come to you. Like a mountain in the mist it will suddenly reveal itself to you, its proximity, vastness and strength.
March 11th
Illness. Alexander is not a panacea is for all illness and difficulties. There are viruses and disease that will get you no matter what. What we can do is use ourselves as well as we can whilst this illness takes its course. There are many words that suggest we are at war with the illness. We have to ‘fight it, combat it, are attacked by it’, or ‘surrender to it.’ We separate the part that is hurting us, ‘my back is killing me’ for example. If we accept we are in this state, hopefully temporarily, then we are no longer in conflict, but are whole again. The sky is still there, the earth supporting us, space around us. And great medics, medicines, family, friends and our own spirit to help us through.
March 10th
Space. There is a white bare antechamber at L’Orangerie designed specifically by Monet to help people clear the mind of the hubbub and busy ness of the world, to prepare for the stillness of the Water Lilies.
If our dwelling is big enough it is good to have a room free of ornament and clutter to sit quietly in. Our own temple. Or we can create such a space in a corner of a room, on a shelf…some physical space that is a clear, quiet space. The external quiet space then becomes symbiotic with the quiet space in the mind. A place to inhibit our habit of rushing about and being busy.
March 9th
Touch. When were touch someone else our system picks up and reads the other pers
on’s use, consciously or unconsciously. We can tell if that person is tense, held or floppy, exhausted, excited , present, balanced, energised, up, collapsed, worried, happy, guarded, open…all sorts of things. Alexander teachers are practiced at receiving this information and in looking after their own use patterns, invites the other person to join them in this. It’s an invitation, not a demand.
March 8th
Change could be dangerous. Our system goes onto alert mode when something changes, when we encounter the Unknown. Brilliant how we look after ourselves this way. We need just the right amount of change – so it becomes wonderful, exciting, not too much that it becomes fearful. Alexander is brilliant at this. We get the change we can cope with at any one time.
March 7th
What keeps human beings upright? The spine? Muscular effort? The weight of the head? Gravity, the Contact Force? Our legs?
None of these – it is our wakefulness. We tend to fall over when we fall asleep.
March 6th
I like the thought that we give ‘up’ when we let go and surrender.
We surrender our weight to the earth and the earth gives us that ‘up’ direction.
March 5th
‘Trying is only emphasising the thing we know already ‘ F.M. Alexander.
‘No! Try not! Do or do not. There is no try.’
Yoda, Star Wars.
March 4th
‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ Yogi Berra
‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it’ Yogi Bear.
March 3rd
Give up trying for Lent. Sweeties may also be a good thing! But whatever you do don’t try to give up….
March 2nd
Alexander Technique is revolutionary. It’s anarchic, it asks us to think for ourselves. It changes our thinking. And it turns us into quite nice people.
March 1st
Sing a little, dance a little, have a laugh….can’t be such a bad thing.
Once a day. It’s very human.
And we can do this privately for ourselves .
Might change the life.
Feb 28th
Always expect the unexpected. Even if nothing unexpected obviously happens. There is the potential for it.
Feb 27th
Great teachers will come when we call them. They are there already there just waiting for our invitation.
Feb 26th
The moment we change it is easy. It was everything leading up to that moment that was difficult.
Feb 25th
When we are unhappy very often we are in our own world. We may go through something upsetting and want to ‘process it’, to analyse and chew over what happened, and wonder at our own or others behaviour. During these moments the outside world takes second place, our habits will take over, looking after us so we don’t fall over for example. But sometimes it may be that the desire to process may be the very habit we need to address.
As we take our attention to the outside world we can live presently and the disturbing event begins to dissipate, have less hold on us. We can acknowledge its importance of course and respect our reaction to it, and then come out into the present space and time that has been waiting to greet us and continue our adventure in living.
Feb 24th
When we are very sad or grieving we may think we need to put on a brave face, try to feel better. Best not perhaps. Best accept that profound feeling, acknowledge the hurt and emotional pain. Then engage with the world and it may be that the world can offer some respite and the heart will smile again, and joy begin in its own time organically to sprout.
Feb 23rd
Is it easy to change a habit? When we stand up from a chair our mind associates this with all the millions of times we have done this before. So we do it the same way. Even if we pause and direct ourselves it may be we still do it the same way despite our best endeavours. We need to remember from all those millions of times the moments we rose from the chair with our teacher a non habitual way and begin to associate that with our standing. Consciously. We cannot do this by hoping to re experience the feeling. We need to give up hope for that lovely feeling and simply remember the thinking, the plan of action that went into it. Then we might get that nice feeling again.
Feb 22nd
It is easier to learn something that is unusual. If I want to learn ‘monkey’ to think of this every time I pick something up throughout the day is unrealistic. If I think of it in the privacy of my own bathroom and attach it to cleaning my teeth, I am much more able to remember and experiment with this and there will gradually be a knock on effect in the other activities. We build up an alternative muscle memory. Slowly slowly.
Feb 21st
Having an Alexander lesson is like updating the system. Or defragmenting it. Defragmenting clears all the clutter from the computer so it can work more efficiently. Good to de clutter the system. Let’s do that today, let go of past tangles, live cleanly in this moment. Then we won’t be fragmented but living as a whole.
Feb 20th
Must, got to, have to, should, ought……o dear , such trying words. Transform them into desires . I want.
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.…”
Joseph Campbell
Feb 19th
We are falling upwards into a state of relaxation that is there waiting for us.
Feb 18th
‘Keeping his back perfectly still he loses all consciousness of his body.’
From Hexagram 52 of the I Ching as translated by Alfred Douglas.
I h
ave had this experience. Everything is working so easily with me, I’m in such balance that I lose the usual kinaesthetic habitual sense of my body. My usual kinaesthesia is picking up the discomfort and excessive tensions. When all is in balance no signals need alert my brain to such things, so it is as though I have become invisible. I discovered though I was still very physical and There. I may have felt invisible and insubstantial but the wall was still very solid and all my wizardry has not allowed me to walk through it.. …yet.
Feb 17th
Stillness. Mountain stillness. The mountain is teeming with life – birds and animals and insects, trees, plants -things growing and in constant movement. Even the rocks are moving but in such a long slow time frame we cannot see it. The dust soaking into the hillside from the rain, a stone rumbling down the hillside. The hillside I look at from Carthage over the waters towards the Sharik Peninsula is the same landscape as Elissa – or Dido – looked at centuries before. So we can perhaps be still like a mountain. There is movement – fluids pulsing, heart beating, the movement of the breath, the muscles gently releasing and contracting in our inherent top-heavy instability; our ‘up’ direction through the spine, the upward direction of the out breath, the upward direction of the diaphragm and the heart as the air rises. But as we step back and look at the mountain it appears to be still. So we too can find that stillness, solid as a rock, connected to the earth, the mind stilling.
Feb 16th
Passive + active = neutral. The balance of the two forces brings us to the neutral, the unknown , the potential. Res
istance to a force forward will take us up. Resistance to a force down will take us up. As the hand comes forward come into the back. As the head goes forward and up , the back stays back.
Feb 15th
When two people meet and touch each other something else happens. Each meeting can be a sacred act. We are affecting each other, responding to each other. Our balance shifts, our brain takes in the other person as ourselves, we share the same moment, the same space.
Staying in the moment
Feb 14th
If there is no beloved in your life right now, perhaps you can think s/he is waiting for you in your future.
Feb 13th
Does our intention come out of our habit? If we stop our habit, our habit of narrowing , goal making, end-gaining, then perhaps our intention will come out of some unknown place and be quite surprising
Feb 12th
FM Alexander teaching
‘People will think I am teaching them to get in and out of chairs. It is nothing of the sort.. I am teaching them to inhibit a reaction to a stimulus that always puts them wrong and learn how to deal with it.’
FM Alexander
Feb 11th
What is this life if full of care ….
We have no time to stand and stare
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
(William Henry Davies)
Feb 10th
Waiting. What are we waiting for? If we live in the moment then there is nothing to wait for, it’s all happening now.
Feb 9th
Magical mistakes.
The guy who invented post-it notes was trying out ideas for a new superglue….
Feb 8th
Think of something funny! FM said (along with many others I am sure) that ‘the work is too serious to be taken seriously.’ We need to cultivate the twinkle in the eye. When I got up in the morning I found an aeroplane outside my bedroom door – than I remembered I had left the landing lights on….
It is good to have a little store of things that make you smile for the whispered ah. Bring yourself to a directed state, think of something funny, as the smile emerges on your face, allow the jaw to drop and breathe out on a whispered or unvoiced Ahhhh. Close the jaw and let the air in through the nose. The genuine smile opens the false folds of the larynx to keep the throat wide and free.
If you can’t think of something funny think of something naughty…..that often works!
Feb 7th
Bringing awareness to your breathing is a wonderful thing. Count 10 inbreaths, count 10 outbreaths, count 10 whole breaths, cease counting but focus on your breathing apparatus. Focus on the entrance and exit of the breath, whether it is the nose or the mouth that is your chosen portal between the outside and inside world. To focus on breathing and not interfere with the breathing pattern is not so easy. Those meditating thus and being mindful suggest keeping the spine aligned, the head balancing on top and the eyes closed, or cast down. But it isn’t always easy. Sitting on a chair or using a kneeling stool helps, unless one is easily able to sit in lotus on the floor. We can apply inhibition to stop interfering, and direction to keep ourselves ‘up’ to help maintain a healthy head neck back relationship. An excellent activity to practise our Alexander principles.
Feb 6th
Bring awareness to yourself right now. How are you reading this? Don’t try to change anything, just become aware and as you allow this awareness in, the change has already happened and it may be that you want to move to re-organise yourself, or stay exactly as you are. It is your choice. Chuck out those two impostors ‘I must but I can’t’ and invite in volition – I want, I wish, I desire…..
Feb 5th
Change. It refreshes. Allow yourself to change something. Maybe clean your teeth with the less used hand. Drive or walk down a street you never have before. Fold your arms the other way round. Just for the hell of it. Unstick your brain.
Feb 4th
Wild geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Feb 3rd
I saw an Amazon walking from the station today. So tall and striding and not dropping herself down into the rest of us. It was a joy to behold. Looking at other people is always interesting, to observe their choreography how they move through life. The movement and stature is so memorable. When we go to see a play how often do we remember the words? But we remember the story, the plot and the spectacle. Let our walking be a joy to behold! Live adventurously and walk cheerfully as the Quakers say.
Feb 2nd
Sometimes we will not know what happens during an Alexander lesson. It is a mystery. It is beyond words. We may feel nothing and later in the night or the next day experience something extraordinary. Or we way experience something extraordinary in the lesson itself but are rendered speechless as we feel our lungs moving , situated differently, or a balance and shape our brain cannot comprehend. The need to verbally express what we are going through becomes irrelevant . Sometimes tears are released , as some profound truth is realised, or an old memory brought to the surface , or it’s a release that has no memory to it but has sparked a feeling of sorrow, regret, compassion, relief.
And sometimes the lesson will be run of the mill, oh now I feel more relaxed, a little taller, lighter, heavier and we go way happy. Sometimes it may be annoying: I didn’t learn anything much from that! Where is the change I was seeking, where is the nicer feeling?
Each lesson is different. And unpredictable. If we come with an open mind, we will always learn something.
Feb 1st
When it’s cold, we often shrink ourselves to keep warm. Let’s decide not to do that. And if it is raining let us not pull down away from the rain to avoid it. Let us accept the weather we have been given today, inhibit our reaction and live freely whatever the stimulus.
Jan 31st
Today we could think about how we use ourselves when drinking a cup of tea. (Or other beverage you like to drink) When you reach out for the tea, is it your shoulder that is leading you? Suppose instead you pause, think of the space round you, ‘direct yourself’ to reassert or continue a beneficial primary control and allow the hand to lead. As you take the cup to your mouth does your head tilt back unnecessarily? Are you thinking about how you drink a cup of tea, savouring the pleasure of the warm liquid passing through your mouth? Or does tea generally accompany another task, writing, watching TV, chatting. If the latter is true, then experiment with widening the attention so you can give some thought to the action of drinking tea.
Jan 30th
‘Stop doing the wrong thing and the right will do itself.’ F.M. Alexander. What could be the wrong thing? Collapsing ourselves, bracing ourselves, trying hard to get things right, narrowing our attention, concerning ourselves only with result, not process. Stop doing our old habits and something will take their place. And it may be quite surprising. The Unknown.
Jan 29th
Sleep is the last refuge of our habit. We are unconscious and our old ways will return. Lying down in semi supine before we go to bed may assuage the tensions so we sleep better . A pillow lain against our back may stop us turning if needed.
A question I ask my students is what keeps you upright? Some may say muscles, or legs, or even gravity. Or if they are mature students of Alexander, “The way my head balances on the spine.”
My answer is consciousness. When we faint, when we fall asleep, if we are standing up, we fall over.
So if we want to stand up right let us explore our consciousness, our wakefulness.
Jan 28th
When people practice Chi Kung or Tai Chi, there is a sense of energy between the hands, or rising up through body. I wonder if this is the contact force of the earth that is being felt?
As you stand, pay attention to how everything is hanging, suspended. Spine from head, breastbone from head, shoulder girdle from head, arms from shoulder girdle, ribs from the spine and the breast bone, pelvis from ribs and the spine, legs from pelvis. The feet do not hang but interface with the earth. And instead of falling through the earth’s surface, the natural oppositional force to gravity flows up through our very bones through the top of our head. To stand thus is to stand without effort.
Jan 27th
When will I not have to think of this anymore? When will I gain a new more constructive habit so I don’t have to think about it? Not thinking is the habit. When you have woken up why do you want to slip back to an unconscious life?
Jan 26th
The spine has 7 vertebrae in the neck. The same as a giraffe. They are just bigger in a giraffe. A giraffe has the biggest heart in land animals. I like the giraffe, extraordinary creatures. They don’t know they are extraordinary, they are just busy being a giraffe. I like that too.
Jan 25th
When I take a lesson for myself in Alexander, I still find it mysterious, and miraculous. This week my lungs felt like they were being rearranged, where they sat in my thorax; my spine untangled, and oh the joy of having my head held. Finding a way for my arm to move without effort, without pulling or pushing, so nearly there, but the old symptoms of mis-use arriving. They too are a stimulus to which I can inhibit reaction to, allow myself to learn by not doing what I normally do. To not understand with the logical brain but trust my intuitive brain will learn and lead me. A cloud of unknowing.
Rivka Cohen and Elizabeth Walker working together
Arthur Rubenstein tinkling the ivories in his early 90’s was asked ‘why do you still keep practising?’ ‘I think I may be getting somewhere’ he replied.
Jan 24th
I was getting my students to play with feeling grounded and coming into their back as they were reading poetry aloud today. The reciter stood to read the poem, standing back to back with another, another knelt at the feet and placed her hands on her feet. Someone fed her the lines of the poem. Beautiful verse flowed out with strong confident voices. I thought this is poetry, this work is poetry. Getting to the heart of things.
This is one we played with, A poem of inhibition. The gap between stimulus and response.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.
Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep
Jan 23rd
We cannot control the stimuli that the world throws at us but we can control our reaction to it. Stay present today, create a gap between the stimulus and response, it is our strength, a portal to something other than what we know.
Jan 22nd
I am out of pain
I did not take pills
Nor stretch myself to unusual shapes
Nor heave great weights in the air
Nor lay sacrificial on an altar to my spine
Nor pray to an unknown god
Nor hypnotise it all away
I simply used my own free will
To consciously change my ways
And learned to walk
Long-limbed in grace
To stand head rising
Rooted in the earth
To sit gently
Fully breathing
In the presence of the world.
Jan 21st
How many Alexander teachers does it take to change a light bulb? 5 . One to change the light bulb and the other four to say that’s not how we did it in our training…..hahaha!! Maybe we don’t need to change the lightbulb we could pause, say no, think back and up, up, up, and wait till someone else changes it, or decide to enjoy the natural light, do it later and instead have a cup tea, go for a walk, chose an eco light instead of replacing with tungsten bulb, or nit change it until the neck is free enough that the head rises up as it also tips back to see what you are doing, and stop again and redirect so Wrists lengthen away from the fingers, your elbows can lengthen away from the wrists, the shoulders away from elbows, the back away from the shoulders or ……shoulders away from the back, elbows away from the shoulders, wrists away from the elbows, fingers away from the wrists lightbulb away from the fingers…oops!
At a dinner party I was introduced as an Alexander teacher. One if the young men told me he d had lessons at drama school but had stopped rating it when he was crossing the road with his teacher. His teacher had dropped his wallet and had spent so long picking it up he had nearly got run over. But sometimes it is nice to sit in a room watching the natural light from the window change the shadows .
Jan 20th
Space
When I ask you to think of he distance between the front of your eyes and the back of the head, the distance between the top if your head sad the roof of your mouth and the distance between the left ear and the right ear ( via the final frontier!) and suggest it may be possible to think of the whole volume of your head, I am asking you to pay attention to the space that is there. We usually pay attention to matter but the distance between atomic particles is in ratio the distance between planets. There is more space than matter. We don’t usually think in this quantum way, we certainly don’t perceive the quantum universe, but experience the more Newtonian vision. But as we do focus on space, on nothing, our brains start to calm down, become closer to the alpha wave, the state of relaxed alertness we need for optimum learning, the place beloved of our system. So add a bit of space to your life. Even if you feel you are stuck in a broom cupboard.
Jan 19th
We adjust ourselves to a habitual space. I had a musical theatre student once who was very tall. We were working together in a very small room at the college. I didn’t seem to have much luck getting him going up. The ceiling wasn’t very far from his head. Inspiration came from somewhere or maybe it was Fate. It was a beautiful sunny day and I didn’t want to be stuck in a tiny room as the birds sang and the meagre herb garden for the kitchen perked up. So I took Olly outside…..and it was magical.. I put my hand on his neck and he expanded up up into the blue yonder, no longer unconsciously ducking, or trying to make himself small, his head rose skywards, he breathed fully and came to his full stature. IT was as though he had been trying to fit into a doll’s house.
So we can think of the distance between our head and the ceiling, or we can think of the distance between the top of the head and the blind stars in the sky beyond the ceiling and the roof of a building. We can think of the distance between the back of us and the wall or the space beyond the wall, the distance between the left side of us and the wall to the left, or the space beyond the wall……..the right side of us and the wall or further space beyond the wall to the right, and the distance between us and the wall in front, or the garden beyond the wall. And let the feet spread out onto the floor directed into the foundations of the building, the crust of the earth to the boiling centre of our planet. Imagining beyond the usual limit will take us to the limit. Asked to think of 5 funny things and maybe we will manage 3 things. Asked to think of 3 things maybe we will think of 2…..
Jan 18th
Being tall.
I looked at myself in a new mirror I had bought. It was much taller. I looked a midget. I filled the glass before. And I realised that I had got into a habit of looking slightly down to see myself. With this tall mirror I can look straight ahead and stay well up. My tall students will be happy. When I first meet a tall student who is drooping to accommodate my height I often get a low stool and stand on it so I become taller than them briefly. Then I droop towards them. There is an ‘aha’ moment when they realise what it is they are doing and the effect it has. Usually they are doing this to be kind to us shorties. When they stop shrinking and come up to their full height they realise they give us shorter beings space in which to grow, no longer overshadowed by a looming giant. Changing the belief system, changes the use. And we can all go up together.
Jan 17th
It is nice to stop and look at the world around. A hiccup, a train is cancelled and I can sit at the cafe with some Rock music from the 50’s playing and eat a sweet potato donut with a filter coffee and out of the window take in the concourse of people flowing up and down the escalators and with some anxiety looking at the train times , or talking on their mobiles or standing guarding suitcases staring into space in their own world. It is like a rest in musical notation. My journey is halted for a short while. Instead of fretting, I can have a rest. Fretting can’t change a thing. but sometimes it’s nice to fret and feel that annoyance and be justified and mutter ‘bloody trains!’ It’s being human. But how marvellous that we can begin to choose our reactions and not be totally bound by them. Freedom!!!
Jan 16th
So there it was, I had hurt my spine doing some stretchy exercise too vigourously after my run on the treadmill. Oh, deary, deary me. Surely not. After all these years ! I lie down in semi-supine, I rest, I am mindful of my movement , keeping my attention out….and slowly the back heals again. Then I go for a power walk , to save the back, but can’t resist breaking into a run now and then. ‘if I use my Alexander directions I will be fine’….Back was fine. Knee hurts. Oh dear. Back to the drawing board. Inhibit! Allow. Give the tortoise some space, honour the tortoise!
Jan 15th
“Waiting for the lift, will it never come?
waiting for the lift , sitting on my bum
waiting for the lift ,think I’ll phone my mum,
why? ………Cos it rhymes “
The lyrics from a community theatre show touring East London in 1980’s.
Waiting. Waiting for Godot
Waiting for a train.
Often we are rushing forward and won’t wait. We miss the bus, and all fired up from running, we decide to run to the next stop for the next one ….and miss that one too. More exciting and adrenalin fired than just waiting. Calmly. More endorphins. And there’s always the chance we might catch it…I always had a lot of sympathy for the hare in Aesops fables. I know it’s very Alexandrian to stop, wait and allow the bus to arrive. Rushing for a bus and missing it is not sensible, not considering the means whereby, not grown up.,,,very habitual, end gaining and slightly smug. Let’s all be hares today dancing and rushing about for the fun of it, to hell with the consequences…..come and see me tomorrow if your back is sore and be happy . For one day you chose to run like a hare! And maybe that too is being out of habit.
January 14th
It takes time and space for someone to understand Alexander. We all find our own pace with it, our own journey. It cannot be rushed. Here is an extract from a piece on ‘Working with Actors’
‘Another student, a very good young actor, uses too much effort and tension, and we experimented with him doing less, but still keeping the truth and driving intention. His confusion was that the physical theatre teacher expects him to take on different shapes to accentuate character, and then he has Alexander and singing and voice classes that are teaching him his ‘neutral’, balanced state…how can both be right?
He felt so relieved when I said he could take on any shape at all that’s appropriate for the character, as lo
ng as it’s a conscious choice and done with direction. ‘Doesn’t that become untruthful?’ ‘It’s a technique – you have to apparently cheat it- make a fist, now keep the same shape but release some of the tension….’ Then we experimented with this on his Coward character who is frightfully angry at one point. The first time he was making his voice crack with the tension, then he played with keeping the truth but ‘doing’ less – o my goodness, his voice powered out! He broke into a big smile and understood how FM he speak truth. So pleased – I had been aware of his tying himself up in knots for a while, and so good at last for him to express his beliefs and to have his own realisations.’
January 13
Today the moon is full, pulling a tide out east, so people are evacuating their homes. There is cold and rain and a light spattering of snow.
I had a wonderful sensation of letting myself find the ground through the suspension system, I directed myself to let go any holding, and went through everything hanging off everything else – the faced dropping forward from the spine, jaw hanging from the head, the spine hanging from the head, the shoulder blades hanging from the collar bones which are hanging from the breast bone which is hanging for the back of the head, the upper arm hanging from the shoulder blade, the lower arm from the upper arm, the hands from the lower arm, the ribs from the spine and from the rib above, the pelvis from the ribs and from the spine, the upper leg from the pelvis, the lower leg from the upper leg, the foot not hanging, but interfacing with the earth from which comes the opposing force to gravity that leads us up.
Until I thought this, I had no idea I had been holding myself up. In letting go to the ground, I was using gravity not trying to oppose it. I have no need to oppose gravity. The earth has that job. The opposing force that ensures I do not sink into the earth. Exactly equal to the force of gravity, is this up direction , a contact force that rises up through our bones. Normal force. We don’t often pay attention to this. We think of gravity attracting us ‘down’ and forget about the Normal Force. Let’s remember it and maybe we will never have to hold ourselves up again!
January 12th
Resting is really important. And sleep. Space to dream.
January 11th
What we believe to be true may not be. We believe we are standing up straight and then look in the mirror and find we are tipping forward, or we pulling backwards, sticking our chest up and arching our lower back. An Alexander teacher may reorganise our standing and it feels like we are crouching forward, like a monkey. But we look in the mirror and find we are perfectly upright. Faulty sensory perception Alexander called it.
So don’t assume because you think it is true that it is. Self-righteous anger is the worst. I am always alert to that one. If I feel that way, I best not take any action, let it pass, until I have a cooler outlook and can perceive things from a different perspective. Not always so easy to inhibit. But in my experience essential.
January 10th
Paying attention. It behoves us to pay attention. We then live presently and can respond fully in the moment to what he world offers us. Our mind likes to chatter away and so often we pay attention to that. Staring back at my thoughts I began to notice how repetitive it is, the same clouds of thought I get involved in – something about work, plans for the future, the journey I am about to make, worry about my husband’s health, my sister’s health, my own health…..To inhibit that attention, that attention to the chatter is freeing. Our sanctuary from such repetitive thinking is to pay attention to the world outside, to consciously receive the world whatever it is offering. There is something new, there is something fresh, there is something to learn from. I am on-line. I am connected. Joy in my heart. Refuge from the relentless churning, my brain’s way of ordering thoughts and memory. I don’t have to be conscious of that. I choose instead to be aware of the light the sounds, the touch and the smells around me. I allow my eyes to sparkle.
Today I noticed two people with a giant gong. They had just finished gonging a homeless man who has been beggng on Old Street for some weeks, mostly lying propped up in a sleeping bag. One was taking photos. He waved them away and they were moving off as I came by. When we keep our eyes open and receive the world it is often surprising what we find, and not what we expected!
January 9th
Walking deliberately slowly in a City is unusual. It is not idling, meandering, strolling, spending time looking in shop windows, a distracted sort of walk. No, it’s having a clear intention and going there, but going at a slow pace. It gives time and space to the action. Time for the muscles to lengthen, to release, for the heart rate to slow, the breath to slow. To be aware of the action of walking. Have fun. Try it out.
Another way of walking is to imagine the destination coming towards you. You can watch the trees and walls go by, as if you are not doing anything but being carried along on a travellator, the event, the destination coming towards you. Try it out. It stops the rush. The future is coming. The end of this piece of writing will arrive without my having to do anything. My corridor outside my front door is good to practice this in. I call it a space time continuum. My nod to Star Trek TNG.
January 8th
On the train I heard a young woman on her phone. She had left the speaker phone on without realising so her whole conversation was laid bare. She was laid bare. Her father was in hospital and she was going down to see him. She had cried last night. This morning he had texted her to say he had got up and had some breakfast. But she told her friend life will never be the same. He can’t walk – maybe a step or two. Her brother was going to meet her near Worthing and they were going straight to their Nan’s house and take stock, and see what there was to do. Her friend was supportive and sympathetic. Later I heard her again on the replacement bus service. ‘Tom can you pick me up from Brighton, I am on a bus and it isn’t going to Worthing.’ There was panic there, and I thought how public events like disrupted train services crash in on personal events like death and illness. And I knew there was nothing I could do except witness this young woman’s distress. 
It reminded me of my travelling down to see my mother who had almost died from septicaemia one Easter. I was 20 and experienced a curious separation of living what was happening, the dread of it, and observing what was happening at the same time. Witnessing without interfering. Like I do with my habits. Oh there am I doing that again. Acceptance and not trying to change anything. That’s the beginning of the change.
I silently wished the young woman and her father well.
January 7th
Sometimes things don’t work. Last night a burger bar nearby was on fire. It affected al the electricity supply to our block of flats so the lights started dipping until everything was off. There was nothing to do without the electricity. So we went to bed. Today the lifts were still not working. Going down is not so bad –I remembered to think of the space above me and that it was the stairs that were going down, not me. Going up is not so easy. This was a great time for me to put in my ‘stepping into cardboard boxes’ trick. I used to teach this to my drama students. I think along with the magic lemon it is the thing they remember most about Alexander lessons and still use years after I taught them.
It is very simple: Find a cardboard box or two – or you could use plastic wash basins – something that is easy to step into. And you walk around stepping in and out of the cardboard boxes, thinking your directions, and keeping your balance best you can. It is easy, if a strange Monty Python thing to do. Then you go the flight of stairs and as you go to place your foot onto the step and lever yourself up, inhibit! And imagine instead you are stepping INTO it, just as you did when stepping into the boxes. You will find that in comparison to your usual heaving of self up stairs, you will tread lightly and easily, the emphasis of support being on the back leg, rather than the front. Its like marching on the spot, except you are travelling up.
I managed my 19 flights of stairs in relative comfort.
January 6th 2017
Epiphany. I asked an esteemed colleague this morning what his take was on Inhibition and he thought a lot about this before he said. ‘Seeing, A lot of people think it is a doing. Or it is suppression. But it’s nothing of the sort……It takes a long time to understand inhibition and it isn’t understood through the intellect. .‘ Of course that is a very short piece of his answer. But that is the gist of what I remember. I have lessons myself. I go to a master teacher and lie on his table and sit on his chair and enjoy the Mystery of it all. I enjoy the journey to his teaching space – the tube journey, the walk to his house, knowing it is a journey to the Self, And our encounter together, is an encounter with the absolute. Beyond the pleasantries. He teaches me things and I don’t remember it all. I sense my physical body being taken to a new place. My head tilt disappears for a moment, The left hip joint is rotated which has an effect up the spine to my neck…all these kinaesthetic observations.
And I have no idea how this is happening. Why is he tapping my shoulder? How pleasant to have my head held. I feel I know less and less about the work. He takes me off the table and I stand in front of the chair. Tiny precise monkey ensures, ‘Not the legs pushing, but knees forward and let head lead you up.’ I inhibit something. I hope my wish to obey these instructions will happen but I have no idea if it will and whether I am going about this the best way. I think of my own spatial direction , the shape of the air changing to stop me doing anything. Is this ego-less. Or am I wanting to please the teacher, to get it right to be a star student? I feel well oiled. Not tall or light but easier, that left hip moving more easily and I feel at peace. Practice monkey he says. This new easy movement stays with me as I journey home. I am tired. I eat some lunch, I prepare my talk for the 6 people coming over tonight for a talk on inhibition. It goes well.
January 5th 2017
The Magic Lemon.
I learnt about the Magic Lemon from Paul Hobbs in a Quantum Reading workshop I attended way back in 1990’s. He asked us where we were thinking from. Some of us pointed to behind our eyes, or our temples; I was one of those who pointed to our heart. He then asked us to imagine we were holding a lemon cupped in our hands. We imagined the colour, the texture, the smell of the lemon zest, and then he asked us to take it up and place it on the crown of our head, end-on, where a wizard’s cap would be. It was stuck to the top of our heads with magic superglue, so we could take our arms down and it would stay there. The next step was to let our personal thinking space rise up to the lemon. Wow! It certainly produced an effect of seeing the world from a different perspective and improved our reading skills. But as an Alexander Teacher the thing I noticed most was how everyone’s alignment had improved – their head neck and back were in a good dynamic and all were sitting up. (Maybe that was an added reason as to why we were able to read more clearly…?)
I have been teaching this to good effect with my students ever since. It’s particularly helpful for actors and artists – those who are kinesthetic and visual thinkers. Alexander’s traditional directions to let the neck be free to let the head rise, to let the back lengthen and widen and the knees go forward and away are not so easy for these thinkers. They are verbal, auditory commands. Often people will try to do these directions pushing the head up from their spine. When we are thinking from the lemon, we are already up. There is no ‘up’ to go to and no strain. Instead of a puppet, we have become the puppet master, moving and thinking from a higher consciousness, looking down on ourselves and the world.
January 4th 2017
To me Rothko’s paintings are a portal to the Other, the human potential, before action is made manifest. the Unknown, the Mystery, devoid of the human ego. When we inhibit our reaction to a stimulus we create this portal for ourselves, the gap between actions, between stimulus and response, timeless and immense, a momentary pause before taking up the neural pathways again , reclothing ourselves again with the garments of our known self, hopefully allowing new neural pathways to guide us down a different road, the unfamiliar. And in that gap perhaps the goal our aim or intention is changed , the first no longer important , the ambition gone, so we can raise our arm or not, or speak instead clearly and strongly. That’s all Alexander wanted – to speak without losing his voice. He discovered in this simple way of inhibiting his reaction to speaking, a deep philosophy of consciousness, of touching the unmanifest, the unconstructed self.
January 3rd 2017
Nothing. Sometimes it is good to do nothing. To take no action.
January 2nd 2017
Watching an actress this evening I noticed however excellent her performance, and no matter her character, her neck stuck out from her shoulders, misaligned with the rest of her spine. I wanted to write to her and offer her lessons in the Technique. It is a body map I too had. My neck ended just above my shoulder blades and then there was this thing called the head and neck that were stuck together. I dropped neck to look down. Sometimes I sense this old body map returning. I remember the joint between my ears, the atlanto-occipital joint where my skull rests on the first vertebrae. I look up to the ceiling or the sky from that joint thinking of the length up my spine up from the sacrum and allow my jaw to open. It’s so opening . I get taller. I allow the top and back of my head to rise up and over to meet the jaw. I come to my full height and find the unity of my spine .
January 1st 2017
Lie down in semi supine everyday for 10 -20 minutes. It’s easy. Like some people need to watch East Enders or listen to the Archers every day, it become s a pattern, a pleasure and it doesn’t stop the rest of your life, but perhaps enhances it. It’s certainly more useful that EastEnders in my opinion. Maybe not The Archers….it’s what I was thinking about today. Lie down, refresh, restore. Lie if you’re a musician you play your instrument every day, and it feels weird if yo don’t. Something like that. So we can lie down everyday and have a meeting with ourselves. Practice playing ourselves. Paying attention to the Self. It doesn’t hurt. It helps the spine. It will change your life. If you haven’t lain down every day, then lying down is a change of life. Its not so easy to do this when travelling, or in hotel rooms that aren’t very big. It does need some space. But not a huge amount.
So there’s a resolution for you at the beginning of the year, lie down.
semi supine at sunset