Author: Tanz

Touch something ordinary – the wall,  your desk, your keyboard, your knee – as though you had never touched it before.

Actually, you (that is the you that you are today – here and  now) never have.

How does your body-mind respond?

Today I have a day off from family, parenting. I have a large house and garden all to myself.  I allow myself this space, and a part of me sighs with relief. Something in me begins to open up.  This a place I can just be. How rare that is. And how simple.

Listening to a concert recently I was struck by the sense that the music is a gift from the musicians. I would not want or be able to put a price on it. How do we value art, creativity, healing? Or the work of a parent or carer day in day out? The time of a teacher or therapist?

How can we create spaces that nurture and make possible the kind of work we don t want to put a price on? How should or could such spaces be funded?

 

 

The words of a trainer of an NLP Workshop I once attended (I had not yet started the Alexander training) still sometimes go through my head. “The problem I have with the Alexander technique, is that it presupposes that there is a “right” way”.

i realised today, that the bit that bugs me is not so much the  “right” in that sentence,  as the ” right way”.  I do  trust that there is an innate “rightness” that will hold the pieces together if I let go of what I thought I knew was the “way”.  It will inform my movement if I let it.  It informs my choices if I let it.  This “rightness”  is that knowing that knows how to make my heart beat and my cells regenerate. It is beyond “right” and therefore also “wrong”.

I  let go of my knowing how it feels to move freely, and discover new freedoms. I direct my pupil,  not knowing what a directed pupil looks and feels like, and my pupil moves differently than I expect, twists or curves. I inhibit my “knowing” and continue to direct. Release happens.

How is it possible for the brain to get out of its own way? Reading Missy Vinyards thought experiments in “How you stand, how you move, how you live”, I feel as though I am mentally tying myself in knots. Sometimes I get a glimpse of a possible letting go,  in order to let some other aspect of me coordinate my movement.

She claims it is possible for the higher cortex do nothing except give the instruction and the direction. It feels like being out of control. Can I really trust this other part of me to move me safely?

It correlates with the idea of creative manifestation – use your conscious mind to be absolutely clear about what you want to happen, give up your ideas of how it will happen. Be open to all possibilities. This approach to life feels too simple and at the same time similarly  scary.

I am a facilitator rather than a teacher. Change wants to happen, all we need are the right conditions. What is my responsibility in this role? To provide the conditions, to offer space, to offer my presence. How can we value this, make spaces for this? How can we be learn to be facilitators for one another?