Author: Tanz

What kind of rooms make it possible for me to do my work? Inner space and attitudes are as relevant as walls and floors. “Home office” just about works, but home practice room? And I do dream about the right kind of floors…

Wooden sprung dance floors, tatami mats for rolling and falling on, warm floors for body work…

Why? To gradually explore the transition from lying to upright as if for the first time – to relearn that coordination anew. To experience support from the ground as if it goes without saying – “selbstverständlich” as the Germans say. To allow myself to be a child again…

Thanks to an invitation to participate in an online cultural event in Paderborn, I discover:

My body is stiff from not moving, everything hurts. Improvising alone, I keep losing the thread. Watching myself on film is uncomfortably revealing.

Connecting with my support network – partner, friends and  colleagues – make the impossible possible. My first dance film!

A two minute film will be streamed live as part of Kulturheimspiel on Wednesday 14th April.

If you want things to change, you have to be willing to be in the uncomfortable places.

“Verbinde deinen Vorhaben mit den vorhandenen Kraft.”

Due to my state of health, I am challenged more than usual to “stay in myself” – Staying connected to my current goal, no matter how overwhelming or trivial AND at the same time to the energy / strength currently available helps me not to “overdo” it,  nor to collapse.

 

making a space that fits.

Being and seeing. so that I can start to create. So I can make sense of what I need, want, wish for, for me and for those around me…

Letting someone else sweep the floor so that I can write these words.

Finding a corner for the unspoken, unaknowledged  to  find out what it can become.

My chi gong practice, long neglected, the movements familiar, but the flow between the movements missing. My head so full of ideas to be realised that I am not here, in my  moving body, It stops, for lack of direction, not knowing where to go…

I notice I feel most inspired to write when a new insight or sense of achievement strikes me –

Am I willing to share frustration, stuckness, doubts?? Aren’t they my learning too? Isn’t that why am I writing this any way? To share my  learning journey in the hope it may support, encourage,  challenge …

Am I willing to make mistakes?  Not very,  but increasingly…

Today I notice I am typing faster than usual without trying, that I am having trouble with peoples names, that I feel overwhelmed in new social situations,  that I am holding myself back by not planning ahead…

Alexander would say “Use of the Self”.

 

 

 

Last week I fell, and have been in enormous pain with a trapped nerve. I have been forced to return to the basics.

Sometimes I experience in my everyday household jobs (I am not naturally houseproud and do them mostly with a certain resentment) a connectedness that I associate with my chi gong or aikido practice.  The chi gong exercises often have names that connect them with activities (rowing the boat, the monk serves the food).

I have been practicing the chi gong of hanging up the washing, wiping the breakfast table, and the aikido of connecting and engaging with my boisterous children without making my symptoms worse.

When I have the time and the space to do this, I feel stronger for it. As soon as I disregard my own rythm, (also know as end gaining) I disconnect the activity in my hands and feet from the support of the centre, and interrupt the healing process.

More than this, the accident itself resulted because of an imbalance in my system,  which has been a chronic strain on my system. and drain of my energy over the last years. The pain is a wake up call to me to finally address some unfinished business.

 

To all the pupils who ask me, how can I keep it?

What is it – a feeling? a state? a quality?

I quote from Krishnamurti:

Questioner. “But how can I maintain it?”

Krishnamurti. “The wanting to maintain it is the noise, and therefore the losing of it.”

The Urgency of Change – Krishnamurti 1970

To fall

can be to be caught. To allow myself to be held.

Trust in what is. There isn’t anything else.

The Alexander Technique is often called the art of getting out of ones own way. This means actually to give up controlling, in order to come to a place where I notice I have more choice, where more is achieved with less trying.  Being lived rather than doing the living.

It does not mean to give up wanting something. I connect with what I want, and allow the movement. When I notice myself trying to control the process, let go of the control, allow the movement. Over and over.  Instead of pretending I didn’t want it in the first place.

This is true on all levels, by the way.