Author: Tanz

It´s one thing to practice non-doing when in a meditation session, a moment of relaxation, or in the (relative!) comfort of your own home.

The real challenge comes, when we enter into relationship, with the things and people around us.

With the dishes that need doing, the weeds in the garden, or with a partner, parent, children.

What does “non-doing” mean then?

It means refusing habit. Discovering it, and refusing it. Whether habit is to avoid, put walls up, grit ones teeth and push through…

Our positive relationships can also be mired in habit… the comfort blanket that dulls, the excitement that leaves us exhausted and overwhlemed rather than energised…

Choosing non-doing means saying no to the familiar response, to all that I know, staying open and grounded. And it is a choice, not a

Alexander described it as a clear eyed state of readiness.

“… I think we do better to study fairy tales than to study anatomy and physiology. Fairy tales really do get to the serious business much more cogently altogether because in fairy tales we are considering wishing and willing and the consequences thereof. When you look at fairy tales, it must strike you that one thing that nobody ever worries about at all is how the wish is going to be carried out. You never get the good fairy or even the witch saying ” I´ll grant you three wishes, but do make them reasonably easy because I´m not terribly good at this sort of thing.”

People imagine their bodies are disobedient and unreliable in carrying out their wishes, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Our bodies get terribly confused because of the conflicting demands that we make of them all the time in our muddled, confused, contradictory wishes. And that is certainly what this technique is really about: if you are going to wish, you´ve got to have pause for thought, because if you just rush in to wishing without thought, without inhibition, you´ll get into all the trouble – dragons, moats, and the lot – that the characters in the fairy stories always get into. “

From Thinking Aloud by Walter Carrington (1st generation Alexander Technique teacher)

The word intention seems to work better for me at the moment than direction. Maybe the term is too loaded for us alexander teachers. After all, having a direction is only knowing where you want to go. Not trying to get there, and certainly not forcing it. But lately a certain pushiness with myself has crept in. Or it was always there, and I am only just noticing.

So I am experimenting with having a clear intention, and noticing what my response is. An intention for my actions to arise out of a place of resting and nourishment. For joy and honesty in communication. For gentleness with myself and with others.

The most nourishing thing I am doing at the moment is making compost. The smell of the earth, the physical work of turning the heap, transferring the halfrotted material onto the garden beds grounds me, keeps me centred in a way nothing else does right now.

It is a symbol for returning other things to the earth – all that I don´t need or cannot use. Learning to let go – laying to rest the half finished projects, the long buried to-do lists. Everything resurfaces, gets sifted and resettles. Becoming nourishment for new life.

Witnessing the miracle of living earth being recreated from “waste”, reminds me to trust that nothing is lost, and that hanging on just slows the recycling process down. New life is waiting to happen.

Entering into a cathedral, how am I called to move? Soft footfalls, whispered exchanges, a gaze invited upwards?

In the woods, in the garden, in a busy street… each is an invitation to explore the effect of my environment on my walking, my breathing, my being…

And if I come to rest somewhere, sensing what this particular place offers me, receiving the atmosphere as a gift, perhaps I can also sense how my body can participate? How I can allow the movements to emerge… movements that are also a contribution to the space, an invitation?