Intergalactic network

A skill for life

2010-11-22T21:43:00.000+11:00

In less than two week I will attend my graduation celebration, one week before I'm officially graduated, and definitely while I'm still walking on crutches. The 'smart' goal I set myself, however, seems more and more unachievable. The lack of reason and compassion in man-made laws in this underpopulated corner of the planet means that I might be escorted on crutches to the plane outside the country, but maybe I'll have some magical-mystical recovery until then.

I don't regret to the slightest my decision to become a teacher for Alexander Technique. I learned many things about myself and the human form in general, and how to stay more conscious in a variety of constellations. However, I'm yet skilled enough to handle the uncertainty I'm facing in my immediate future with poise, ease and grace.

Migration belongs to human life since mankind left Africa about 60.000 years ago. Only isolation, either geographically, physically or politically, interferes with the continuation, inspiration and enrichment that comes with human traffic. Looking for a better environment to improve one's life seems like a natural instinct, and, ironically, the country I want to live is founded by migrants. I can't find solace in the fact that almost all 'nations' now thoroughly prevent man's wanderlust. Most goods sold on the global market can commute much more easily than the humans that provide them. GM seeds were allowed to have a lasting impact on the entire Australian biosphere, while a boatful of asylum seekers causes a media panic, 'national security' is in danger.

Of course, I don't claim that migrants have been a welcomed lot throughout history. Yet nowadays the ill effects of incest on our genetic make-up is well established. Diversity contributes to survival, isolation leads mostly to degeneration. Although the fair-skinned mutants within the human race claim superiority,
their survival requires an unsustainable amount of resources. If a joy-ride on a boat goes wrong, depending on the arbitrary place of birth you will either be rescued by heroes, or captured by the military 'defending national borders'.

So taking the advice to redefine my goal makes only little sense to me. Alexander's dream to bring his principles into general education remains far away as long as his profession isn't even particularly recognised by the authorities of his country of birth. When it comes to at least corporate acceptance, the UK seems much further, although I doubt that AT teachers can be trained by self-study via the internet. Australia is a sufficiently small society to create and sustain some drive to improve society, although it will certainly take at least a handful committed people to bring a better use and direction into our society.

Communication and travel allows us to experience this planet as a whole, creating a truly global consciousness. Laws and customs of society evolved much slower than technology progressed, a conundrum imposed on every 'civilisation' throughout history. The selection process for laws ignores evolutionary ideas completely, and therefor reflects neither what's needed nor what's desired for more overall happiness.

From an evolutionary perspective, the diversity of laws throughout different societies provides plenty of survival strategies. The fascist idea of "One law for all" translates more or less into evolutionary suicide. Most legal system base on fear, instead of being motivated by organising respectful interactions between responsible beings. Knowledge of and adherence to the dominating rule set replaces responsibility in submissive societies, which honor ideas like war heroism and revenge.

As an anarchist, I don't like lawlessness. If this sounds contradictory to you, you might be just ill-informed about the concept of no government. If laws make sense, enforcement is hardly needed, self-regulation provides conformity. And allows for easy adaption to changed circumstances. Organised crime organisations and secret societies operate on a limited yet accepted rule set and survived much longer than most official state-like entity (with maybe the exception of the City of London) or 'nations'.

The attempt to create uniform legal circumstances for corporate operations creates environmental and civil rights nightmares. The lack of transparency hides the corrupt connections between governments and corporations, and in case this anti-social activities become known, the structure of the systems that empowered and instill these behaviours remains unchanged. Intransparent bureaucracy breeds irresponsibility, ignorance and violence. The illusion of democracy in the Western World prevents evolution as mankind as a whole, and just maintains global injustice in unknown dimensions.

While a lot of people have at least sympathy for my desire to live in this country, they seem surprised about how difficult it can be to migrate to their country. I feel owned by the passport assigned to me by my place of birth, a slave to the nation, chained by taxes and laws restricting personal freedom. I have trouble maintaining my self-esteem when I get reminded that I'm not deemed worthy living in this country. While I have acquired enough local knowledge to devise strategies how to start my teaching here or in another big Australian city, I face the dire perspective to start all over again.

End-gaining

2010-10-26T21:24:00.000+11:00

When it comes to a typical 'wrong-doing', end-gaining is the catch-all phrase in the Alexandrian world. 'The ends justify the means' is a commonly used adage and unfortunately often the attitude towards political and societal affairs. Luckily, at least while putting hands on other people, I learned a lot about my end gaining habits. I learned so much that I'm convinced that I can find more end-gaining habits of mine until the day I die.

When Marjorie Fern visited our school, she brought one of my favorite toys with her. It's balls made of hundred of rubbery strings, in bright colours, easy to catch and interesting to feel. I played many games illustrating some of Alexander's ideas, and I like the playful atmosphere created by simple games. When David told me about the workshop with 35 high school kids I immediately thought of using these funny balls.

I went on an internet search after coming home, and the some iterations in my search (from soft and fluffy via stringy to Koosh) I found some Australian online shops offering Koosh balls. Amazingly, these balls were sold as stress reliever, as toys and in a shop for camping gear. The adventure supply shop had the best offer, and so I thought: I want them, I order them. 75mm sounded a bit small to me, but still acceptable, so I typed an order round about $100 in and diligently supplied my credit card details.

I gained my end, the rush of the online shopping experience still exhilarating me a bit. I checked postage and shopping condition, whether encryption was used, but not the actual catalogue of the shop. I compromised already enough, I ignored a better prize offshore, or waiting for sold-out supplies to be restocked. Then I decided to browse the site where I ordered again, finding my way through the idiosyncracies in a mixed bag of online shop.

The choice of products of this camping/hiking/adventure supply outlet surprised me a lot. Only in juggling stores I might have come across the category of 'throwables', and I was stunned by the amount of items listed. Besides Koosh balls, they offer a lot fun things to throw and catch. I caught the item I ordered at the end of the first list, and checked the second page.

OMG, OMFG! Sets of 6! Okay, calm down, let's see what else they offer. 90mm Koosh balls. Oops. Sets of 6. A set of 20 in its own bag. Hmpf. Like in a lot of good shops, if the quantity goes up the prize goes down. A quick calculation makes it obvious to me that I would have ordered totally different if I had checked the range of merchandise first. Bloody end-gainer!

I worked in the computer industry, and know about the finality of electronic transactions. It'll take hours to write an email explaining that something went wrong, to sort out this situation with an better outcome for me by the means of the internet. I think Amazon let's you change orders before they ship them, yet smaller shops even let you order (and pay for) out-of-stock items. A 1-300 number prominently shows on top of the screen, so I inhibit my self-pity about my end-gaining and call their number.

So I explained my stuff-up to Damien, and asked him whether I could change my order. I guess that he pulled up my order on his computer while we were talking. He seemed relieved when I indicated that I happily still order for the same amount, and promised to take care of this within 15 minutes after our call. We chatted for about 10 minutes, and I realised that my end-gained order transformed into another encounter of random friendliness by strangers.

It didn't even take 15 minutes for the email with the changed order, and instead of two dozens Koosh balls I'll now get 30, and some bags to put them in as well. I still have no idea whether the delivery will arrive in time before the workshop, though I'm quite confident. Anyway, I enjoyed the great service this little call brought with it, and gained some interesting and fun insights.

Work in front of computer screens contributed a great deal to my patterns of mis-use, and I still need to remind myself often of my directions not to study my old habits. I researched for at least two hours on the web for this funny thing, interrupted by a unicycle ride to check local stores for something to pick up straight away. Like a hungry hunter I went for the first prey in sight. I fell for my end-gaining habit, but it didn't hurt. I noticed what I did, and so liberated myself from falling for my 'end-gaining has failed' habits as well.

Instead, I reevaluated the situation to improve the outcome. End-gaining often leads to undesirable results, but life goes on anyway. The sooner you detect an end-gaining stuff up, the more chance you've got do less and achieve more. In retrospect, the little unnoticed bits of forgetting my means made me try harder instead of acting smarter. Choosing a different reaction unveiled bits of my personal patterns, and probably made me one percent less end-gaining than before.

Non-doing

2010-10-21T18:33:00.000+11:00

My last term at school has started, and David invited Bob Britton to teach for some days in Fitzroy. Like so often, the process of learning brings some strange topsy-turvy encounters with it.

Quite some fellow teacher trainees extended their stay in Beechworth after the AUSTAT conference, so that the school seemed quite empty. On monday, Bob helped us exploring our feet anew, using group exercises (wrong word here, don't know any better right now), images and the skeleton. Without giving any 'fixed' idea about the right place to balance, he led us through exploring different configurations, many obviously less mechanical advantageous than our design allows.

Two things stood out for me on the first day. Going with awareness through 'odd' movements provides plenty of information, and opens up more choices. Especially when the movements very distinctly involve 'too much' and 'too little'. Only balance allows movement in any direction, and balance happens very dynamically. I also noticed the precision and animation in Bob's demonstrations. His eyes moved a lot, without seeming hectic at all, and he embodied the ways to move he was talking about.

I'm not too sure how often I heard and talk about the 'triangle under the foot'. I still crave to talk to Jack and Alysha about some details I gave them incorrect information about. I'm not too sure whether they incorporated this faulty bit of information into their movements, or whether Bob's workshops managed to help them to a more reliable body map. I like triangles, triangulation provide minimal stability for my delicately balanced tensegrity sculptures, but until yesterday my idea about the triangle under the foot didn't make use of the complex structure of our foot.

If we use the heel and the two sesamoid bones under the big toe (distal end of the medial metatarsal to be precise) we balance 'naturally'. The wide base of the heel 'receives' the body weight first, and the transverse arch, build by the bones posterior to the metatarsals, directs the weight towards the big toe. Flat feet often come together with slightly x-shaped legs, that's too much on the inside, too little on the outside. My legs rather tend to an o-shape, too much weight goes to the little toe, too little to the big one.

Although the way my feet touch the ground changed noticeably, I still find myself often 'stuck' to the ground - not too surprising, as I attempt to spread the weight in my foot quite equally towards the big and little toe. Another example that directions allow us to do the 'wrong thing' more efficiently. Incorporating some consolidated information gives me more confidence to experiment more with what happens at the same time in legs and hips.

Todays topic fitted in nicely, having another take on the separation and connection of legs and torso. Bob kept the group engaged and moving, using an iPad to show us some amazing anatomical drawings. The infectious upness carried on into student clinic.

Sanity and dis-ease, Part 2

2010-09-06T17:58:00.002+10:00

Simple acts can become insurmountable obstacles when the down habit visits me. Even writing about it surprises me, as I got distracted from the perspective I planned to take for part of sanity and disease. While I have yet to consider whether describing my down habit manages to attenuate it or rather reinforces it, I'll take a step back for a bigger picture.

The distinction between 'mental' and 'physical' health doesn't help overall sanity much. The link between lifestyle and 'physical' ailments has been thoroughly researched, and physical therapies often accompany the treatment of 'mental' diseases. 'Mental' health still carries a stigma with it, Australia seems to train much less 'mental' health professionals than needed to deal with depression, suicide, mass trauma after bushfires, PTSD in returning soldiers and victims of abuse. During immigration you have to report on 'mental illnesses' of yourself and your family, and in one case the DOI wanted to withdraw the visit of doctors because his son has Down syndrome.

Modern psychology does not use any model of sanity, instead diagnoses according to a list of subjectively perceived symptoms. After re-discovering Alexander's set of skills, guided by many helping hands, I trust my instinct to dismiss any approach based on the faithful assumption of Descarte's error.

Commonly used language to name mental diseases sounds rather foul: retarded, stupid, crazy, imbecile.... as if it was more intelligent to override postural mechanisms so persistently to suffer from 'physical' pain. In either case, habits have shaped the entire structure, and the dis-ease of the organism restricts its functionality. If our minds had control over the self, it would simply take a decision to change behaviour.

The embodied memory of unprocessed emotional events remains, with our minds as reactive force to patterns of kinesthetic and chemical stimuli. Once these patterns are released, some narrative explaining the history of this restriction might emerge. Our memory, however, offers less precision than most people assume, and therefore doesn't suit well as tool to change behaviour.

It seems like my journey into the present needs some future involvement of releasing embodied patterns of the past.

Sanity and dis-ease

2010-09-02T17:36:00.003+10:00

Jane, who works in a community centre with 'mentally' ill people, gave a series of presentations about the state of art in dealing with this spectrum of dis-ease. At the beginning of the presentation I asked her about modalities that approach 'mental illness' from a holistic perspective, yet my question remains unanswered.

With a lifetime prevalence of 20% depression describes a collection of symptoms that affects or will affect at least four people in the room Jane held her presentation. I remember from my psychology lectures that a success rate of 30% suffices to claim it's worth applying a given therapeutic concept, and I still feel highly confused that electro-convulsive therapy is practiced in the 21st century.

Categorising depression as disease of the mind neglects some very tangible aspects of this phenomenon. The list of symptoms describes mainly subjectively perceived internal states and leaves the structural hallmarks out. An experienced and empathic therapeut most likely uses this snapshot information (of overall posture and movement) for his diagnosis, which fosters the healing process probably more than the methods in the arsenal of modern psychology.

So I followed Alexander's footsteps by ignoring conventional 'wisdom' and explored the 'down' habit in my life. Revisiting episodes from my personal history made me aware that I carry the blues in me already for a long time. And a part of myself certainly accepted this pattern and arranged life situations to 'cure' this condition, maybe even different parts simultaneously with differing choices.

Once I realised that I attempted a variety of strategies as remedy, I could start comparing the efficiency and side effects of my until lately unconscious self cure approaches. Meaningful activity attenuates the sensitivity of the emotional triggers that start the depression train. My desire for interactive activity, however, clashes with the automatic response to certain arousal states.

I lack self-esteem almost entirely when the blues plays, and when I started observing this habit as habit, understanding the pattern in it, I beat myself up even more. My rational faculty can tell me as often as it wants that I neither desire or deserve these highly unproductive downtimes, a cognitive re-appraisal of my situation does hardly release any pattern of habitual tension.

The description Begley and Schwartz gave about one of their OCD patients resonated with me a lot. The down habit of mine acts rather like a vortex than like a simple loop, a highly complex neuro-physiological algorithm with multiple entry points. My sensory amnesia makes progress towards more uptime challenging. Mindfulness only slowly weakens the patterns of the down habit, a part of my whole self demands more attention than available for a healthy balance.

Physical activity like increasing my unicycling and juggling skills, or building sculptures helps at the moment to accept the embodied pattern that interferes with my movement. But how do I transform this debilitating vortex of disconnection?

Hitting the wall

2010-08-25T14:35:00.004+10:00

Everything we do changes the environment, with or without consciousness. Everything we think changes ourself, with or without consciousness. Change happens anyway, anytime, albeit our perception of life might ignore this simple truth. Every breath we take slightly shift the balance between oxygen and CO2 in our immediate proximity, simultaneously the same chemical balance within our organism changes.

Once we start observing life from the perspective of permanent change, we can develop a better sense for the quality and direction of change. And we can develop an understanding that 'stable' patterns in our life often indicate obstacles rather than solace.

The direction of change subscribed to by the application of Alexander's principle's has a definite, yet fuzzy direction: Forward and up. If our habit pointed into a different direction, experiencing forward and up literally shifts our perspective. We apply Alexander's principle when we organise activity of our organism in accordance with the evolutionary mechanisms we inherited.

We can find forward and up approximately here and now. When we stay present with what happens within us and around us while we interact with our environment, we move forward and up. Although we are born with the ability to go forward and up, we need to learn to widen our attention to unify intention and action, internal and external sensations.

Whether we like it or not, the relation between head and trunk reflects our embodied attitude in life. A tense neck interferes with incorporating the procedural intelligence embedded in our structure, which means our decision making process uses less information than the total amount the system provides.

When I began learning the Alexander Technique, my attitude in and towards life looked worst than I thought, or would have confessed to. My structure reflected the tension I produced by swinging between defensive and aggressive patterns. Like a slave to my habits and living memory of untransformed trauma of my past I stumbled through my life, skilled in many ways yet without any clear direction.

The observer influences the experiment, states Heisenberg, and once we start to observe our self, we inevitably change our perceptions and consequently our interactions. During my twens, when I innocently moved forward and up, conscious yet with limited knowledge, I experimented systematically with ideas to 'blow my mind'. I learned to use my self as laboratory, and enjoyed most results of serendipitous interactions with other people.

I understood somehow the pattern character of human behaviour and thinking, yet only in a disconnected, disembodied way. Scrutinising, analysing, dis- and reassembling, discarding, creating my own thinking patterns became for some months or even years a hobby of mine.

As I understand it now, this strategy helped me dealing with the unresolved trauma I carried with me. It didn't resolve it, nor did it prevent the inevitable side effects of an embodied flight, fight or freeze response. It made me a 'functional' member of society, financially relatively independent yet somehow unhappy.

I didn't care too much about the pattern of unhappiness that evolved over the years. I consider it as part of the up and downs in life, and stopped wondering about the weeks of my life I felt unable to do more than absolutely necessary, waiting to wake up again in anticipation instead of dread. Which so far, always happened.

At some point, I started observing this pattern more closely, and noticed its detrimental influence of my use. At its heart, the habits connected to my depressed states fulfil the desire to escape from the present moment, using my life energy to keep a trauma vortex active.

Knowing more about the nature of the depressive phases of my life doesn't make them go away yet. It became easier to step back to become observer, and to stop judging myself. I felt a bit shocked when I went through the self diagnosis for depression and anxiety some month ago for the second time, and noticed how my answer had changed. I don't take a self diagnosis too serious, mainly because these tests ignore mostly the wholeness of our existence and experience.

We have identified the enemy, and it is us. I gave up the fight, and accepted the current co-existence of self-destructive and self-healing patterns. Now I need to find a way to get the embodied pattern that harm me transformed. A small step for a quantum, a leap for the ego.

Little things with big impact

2010-08-03T14:39:00.004+10:00

Every environment you visit on a regular basis becomes co-creator of habits. Even before I started learning Alexander Technique, I had developed a kind of sense for the new (and some of the typical) ways of interaction in serendipitous situations.

Going to school certainly fosters new habits, and usually you will encounter a schedule or timetables as frame to attach various new behaviour patterns to. Luckily, David's school for Alexander Studies prevents 'over-habitualisation' by inviting one or two 'master teachers' per term, interrupting the routine and offering fresh perspectives.

Cathy Madden visits our school at the moment, for the third time while I study there. I still remember some of her observation from prior visits. She reminded me to use my clavicles when I move my arm, she encouraged me to investigate my speech patterns by switching between German and English, and besides that provided a great example of applying AT when she worked with our group.

I felt quite elated and 'ready for action' after both days of Cathy's weekend workshop, although I didn't seem to have advanced much. However, just by attending the workshop I surrounded myself by a nurturing, positive environment with the opportunity to learn more about a different approach to teach the technique.

Cathy knows well the typical Alexander lingo, yet she doesn't bring up such terms unless requested to. Her language keeps simple, and with questions gentler than a lot of AT teachers hand she elicits useful information from the student.

She picked up on my habit of stating a lot of things in directly and indirectly negative ways, by noticing a shortening when airing bits of negativity. I had a great learning moment when I observed this pattern in another student, and Cathy's elegant way to reframe the students desire in positive terms. Even without Cathy's explicit reminder my understanding of this pattern grew, and confirmed the usefulness of simply observing a good teacher in action.

I missed the opportunity to ask her to help me teaching until today, and still needed to convince myself that I wanted to get up and do it. I had a positive intent how to approach the situation, but noticed that I lost my coordination pretty fast. More precisely, when I wanted to speak more activity than needed happened. Cathy stopped me and put her hands on, while I had my next go in talking to my student.

I could not figure out what I did in this critical moment, and Cathy went on to explain bits about the mechanics of voice production. She noticed that I pulled my tongue back to produce sounds, so she simply asked me first to hum, and then to speak trusting that I don't need to do this.

I guess I must have looked quite surprised when I played around with a new pathway to make some noise. All of a sudden, the tiny movement my tongue made stood out sufficiently to allow me to let go of it, to reorganise myself so that I have a new plan I can follow when I want to speak.

I wonder what else I do with my tongue, yet it seems blindingly obvious that additional tension in my tongue affects my neck, and therefore my entire coordination. Playing around with speaking still feels odd. Allowing my tongue to do less seems to reactivate saliva production, and sometimes I get the impression that my speech gets a bit slurry.

The tiny bit of information about me pulling my tongue back to 'prepare' for sound production took an entire mountain off my chest. At some point of my journey of learning the technique I came across the fact that I did something extra to speak. Not knowing what but noticing that 'I did it again' became a relatively steady source of frustration, and contributed to the diffuse perception of my social awkwardness.

Besides observance, guidance with our hands, verbal explanations we teach AT by applying its principles, using subconscious mechanisms to model freedom in activity. My concern about dis-coordinating myself while speaking slowly dissolves, and I look forward using my voice in a new way.

Walking down memory lane

2010-07-15T20:37:00.008+10:00

People have a variety of reasons to 'go on holiday'. They go to relax from their often stressful jobs, to see areas they have an interest in, they might get dragged along by their partners or sometimes just travel to impress their neighbours, friends and acquaintances.

I decided to fly halfway around the globe when I heard that my niece gave birth to a new member of the family. However, as I don't go Germany too frequently, I included visits to other relatives and friends in my itinerary.

Now, at the end of my 'holiday', I realised how tired I feel after cruising around, catching up in person with a lot of people I haven't seen for at least two years. Even more, as I embarked on a path of change with my Alexander Technique teacher trainer, this five weeks abroad turned into a sometimes bewildering experience.

Our habits build up quite randomly unless we learn to become aware of them, so obviously family and friends that surrounded us for a long time have a big part in shaping the ways we react to our environment. Before I started learning the technique, I slowly extended my comfort zone by changing the places I worked and lived in, challenging myself to adapt to new environments and forging new friendships.

Even before the trip into my personal history, I realised how much of a pattern this moving from place to place looked like. I was searching for something, without knowing for what, and getting used to become quite unhappy in the process. Nevertheless, I always found glimpses of happiness where ever I went. I also carried some old habits with me around the world, and picked up new ones where ever I stayed for a longer period of time.

This time, I noticed some distinct periods of my personal development, linked to the people and places I spend my time with. I revisited my unhappiness with big business while staying with friends who gave me the strength and motivation to survive in the pool of sharks called Frankfurt. I became son again when staying with my mother, loving and caring uncle for my niece, desperate yet hopeful brother, nerd, anarchist, rebel, lunatic, ex-lover or friend for others.

I could see more clearly how I acted and behaved in my past, and how much this past shaped the ways I encountered friends and family when I saw them again. By reliving some past habits, I detected some of the patterns in it, and could let them go.

I got myself deliberately into the grip of my past, but with a lot more presence than before.

Besides enjoying seeing a fresh human being, my niece's baby, I wanted to find some more direction for my future. I had some vague ideas what I wanted to do after my training, and had the desire to gain clarity what I can and want to do. Amazingly, with little effort, I managed to find what I was looking for, although it still means to continue working a lot towards my next target.

If you have ever experienced wholeness, even a tiny glimpse of it, freedom of movement changes its meaning radically. Yes, muscle tension indicates the restriction we impose unto ourselves, and physiological and psychological knowledge hints at the places where these restriction hide. Yet, we move continuously, either on the trodden path of our habits or on new paths. What we have done or do often disguises how we do things, whether we move from dead end to dead end or choose a direction at another crossroad. At the end, every road leads to Rome, anyway.

When in Rome, act like Romans. While I spend my time on this journey into my past, I knew suddenly how many Romans I met already, and how few of them seem to inhabit this planet. Rome wasn't build in one day, which makes it easy to spot the looney, sorry, spot the Romans among us.

Enough of proverbial wizdom for now. Freedom in thought and action certainly fits better into narratives than into the dominating binary, black and white thinking, which seems overly popular in our times. In the past, when something or someone (mostly my ego) brought me down, I tried to get comfortable with it. Now, forward and up brings me back to the path, and opens perspectives I never imagined.

The unknown remains unknown. But without wanting to build my future, I can only get caught in the prisons others built for me. Golden cages failed to make my ego happy, while my self gained happiness even in failure. The simplicity of life amazes me more and more.

grey autumn day

2010-05-25T15:32:00.005+10:00

learning to walk again,

learning to talk again,

feeling old and unknown pain,

always rewiring my brain.

a moment cannot be captured,

but you can open up to it.

if the connection is ruptured,

you can still open up to it.

with leaving behind certainty,

i can only win more clarity,

and with tender loving care

receive what's really there.

destruction, nurture and creation

keep the wheel of life in motion.

Research and development

2010-05-10T17:39:00.004+10:00

Exhibiting my tensegrity sculptures on the Arts Market in Fitzroy turned into an interesting experience, another opportunity to learn to fail with grace. Christian placed me between a woman selling rings and pendants made of molten glass and a soon to be physiotherapist who enjoys designing his own apparel.

My car was packed with masses of sculptures lying on each other, I was surprised that nothing got entangled and only two towers disintegrated beyond immediate repair. After I met with Christian, I carried the display boxes to my little square, and started carrying a selection of my sculptures over.

My first stall appeared in a rather raw style - I want to cover the boxes the next time, and without any price tags the commercial availability wasn't too apparent. All in all, the display was a bit overloaded as well, not too mention the fact that the wind toppled some of the towers over in regular intervals.

There weren't too many visitors on this Mother's day, so I had plenty of opportunities to chat with my neighbours. I hope that a little bit more investment to display my tensegrities better is needed, and I think I just found my entry level product - a collapsible icosahedron.

A name can help as well - Alexander Tensegrities, Can touch this!, Lenny Golightly... Would be good to find a muse to come up with a name.

Challenges

2010-04-28T13:40:00.003+10:00

Without David, and with one teacher less than planned for, the day started a bit disorganised. Libby got a bit upset, which luckily didn't affect the quality of her hands while giving me a turn. Using AT, she regained her calm, and prevented getting overwhelmed by the challenge to improvise the daily program.

During the presentation of Frank Pierce Jones research I had the opportunity to stay directed, although I wanted to react a lot to one students disruptive behaviour during the start of my part. I slowed down, refocused on my notes, yet had no idea about my use for the rest of my presentation.

However, when Martin asked me about my plans after graduation, I noticed how much this topic can discoordinate myself. Applying the technique to my tendency to get the blues has changed me, yet it's hard to call this an improvement. I noticed how much effort it takes to ignore depressive episodes, and how well established the neural pathways to pull me down are. From the perspective of 'befriending myself' this is valuable, yet not pleasant information. Developing a sense of self-worth in a life situation where I'm not 'worthy' enough to stay in the country of my liking, challenges me maybe above my capacity.

If anything, I learned that not putting hands on today made it tougher to stay directed. I recognise more triggers of my habits, yet I'm rather craving for more 'uptime' than material to analyse.

Change in routine

2010-04-27T15:36:00.002+10:00

David informed me via email that I had to go to the Body-Mind Centre instead of the school in Fitzroy, so I took the opportunity for an adrenaline-laden unicycle ride to the CBD. Although I walked most of the last part, Jenny noticed at the start of my turn that my legs were still pedalling. It seems like quite a habit to pull myself down in a lot of interactions, especially in talking. It's still difficult to remind myself of the directions before acting, and feels a bit odd. Nevertheless, I manage much better my habitual response to 'feeling wrong', and allowing myself to integrate certain levels of discomfort without actively ignoring them.

I noticed as well that my hands work more in a 'teaching' way, yet only while I take of myself to a decent degree. I got more patient with myself, and when no movement happens, I rather renew my directions and explicitly release arms and shoulders a bit more. I worked a lot with Stephen today. It was great to experiment a lot, both of us knowing to expect little and helping each other to stay present.

We discussed the chapter of CCCI in which FM describes the procedure to put hands on the back of the chair, perfectly suited to go through this as practical part of our group work. One of the pseudo-hinges along my spine became very discomforted during the process. I wonder whether I was trying too hard, or activated some underused part of muscles around and of the trapezius. It seems to be the part from which I pull my shoulders in place, and potentially bend the spine back (or even to one side) at the same time.

While during some earlier table turns 'non-local' effects (release happening far away from a teacher's hands) provided me with a rather distracting stimulus, I integrate more of the whole body into this kind of sensations now. While Sharon gave me a turn, I noticed a lot of up coming from my feet. Her hands prevented me from pulling down to 'feel out' what was happening, instead I stayed with the nice sensation in my legs and Sharons hands on my head. My limbs can still connect a bit better into this awareness. At least I know now much better what I'm doing with parts of my body, without 'sinking' into them at the same time.

I'd still call my whole-body-image quite hazy, yet it is definitely less fragmented and gets more familiar. I got now a better idea when I'm grounded. I'm sure some experiences on the unicycle had a 'skyhooked' quality. The next step will be to become more centered / aware of my center, connecting heaven and earth. Or so.

A sculpture per day keeps the blues away

2010-04-18T18:54:00.002+10:00

Since I managed to have sufficient amounts of building material around, I feel a daily urge to build something new. During the Easter break I explored a variety of spherical shapes, after successfully constructing a bucky-ball out of 90 struts. I spend some time to paint 30 of them black, they now point to the 12 pentagons of the structure.

I realised that most spheres can be constructed by chiral twisting of all edges ending in each vertex, thereby stellating it. The cube's eight vertices nicely triangulate, the stellated octahedron opens into squares. Let's go through the shapes I build so far. Tensul, x-module, stellated tetrahedron, icosahedron, prism, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron as sphere and as 10 strut tensegrity, vector equilibrium, truncated icosahedron (the bucky ball with 90 struts), icosahedral sphere (frequ.

So I went through all five Platonic 'solids' which as tensegrity unveil their spacious, airy qualities. I still try to get my head around the fact that the dodecahedron is the dual of the icosahedron, and what kind of truncation of the icosahedron constitutes the typical 30 strut sphere. Yet the actual geometry is still of second concern, although I notice how much embodied knowledge of this archetypal geometrical shapes I acquired.

The increasing size of projects made the craft aspect of this infatuation of mine more apparent. Preparing struts and strings usually takes much more time than actual assembly, and precision simplifies it, while lack of it might make assembly impossible. And while I at first started off very end-gaining, concerned about spectacular results, I begin to enjoy the sensual aspect much more. Finding more efficient ways to process individual yet similar pieces of bamboo, cutting it to length, smoothening the cut marks and sawing small groove with similar depth, cutting and knotting strings or elastic cord to similar length, became an opportunity to observe myself in activity.

When I succeeded more often in having a feel for the construction of structures, my focus shifted towards the use of colours. Besides the transparent elastic cords I have three colours for the nylon available. However, with the abundance of structures being mainly bamboo or oak coloured, with sprinkles of pink, orange or yellow string, I got a bit bored. After finishing the 90strut sphere, I noticed that 30 struts could be coloured to make the pentagons stand out more.

Using a sharpie to blacken the strut took some time, it turned into an interesting challenge. Bits of the bamboo structure remain, and it has a matte finish. It's not a deep, consistent black, but I'm quite happy with the combination of the variety of bright bamboo struts and blackish ones.

The next go on colour happened when the stellated cube collapsed after falling from the sky. I had non-toxic red paint and some brushes picked up in a $2 shop. I thought threading the struts between two strings could make painting easier, but the struts kept slipping out, and I had to roll them around a lot to cover all parts.

Painting the struts with a brush probably takes even longer than with the sharpie, and I left out the tips which wasn't a good idea. I tried string to hold the struts together again for applying spray paint, with similar messy results. My favorite method for now is cutting some rubber band as connecting string - it worked quite well, though I still have to take care to go all over the struts to avoid blank spots.

The spray paint leaves a quite glossy finish, and thus very slippery grooves. When recycling one of the first failed attempts to build an octahedron, about four build attempts slipped out of my fingers before making the last two connections. When I finally made it to the last connection, I had to find out the hard way that the tendons were about 5mm too short - one strut split due to too much tension.

I want to use more than one strut colour to bring out more of the structural aspects. The octahedron can be build with two colours in varying patterns, I still have to find out whether I need three or five colour for icosahedral shapes. Colour requires more planning, at least when drying time is involved. From imitating shapes I saw on pictures, I developed to a stage where I can start combining the various shapes in organic ways, and easily build regular polyhedra. I still have some far reaching ideas about materials I want to use, yet colour introduces already another dimension.

I still wonder how healthy and wholesome my artistic ventures are. So far I manage to lay down in semi-supine when I lost focus or noticed pain during the repetitive bits. I certainly spend less hours idling on the internet while working on sculptures. and it's much easier to observe my use in this new activity. A lot of thoughts and internet activities now focus on materials for the next generation of sculptures, while human anatomy still seems far away.

The satisfaction about finished objects and the process of getting there became a sort of meditative pleasure. I failed often, yet each failure offered just a chance the reconsider the means of the creation process. Without any 'dead line', and the knowledge that I have more than enough material for the upcoming market stall, waiting a day or two before an idea is materialised doesn't matter anymore.

After getting proficient at some of the necessary hands-on skills, my curiosity can drive the exploration into colour, shape and movement. Colour enhances the aesthetic value a great deal, transforms the natural aspect of bamboo into something virtual. RGB will look great on models that map into three colours, as might black, red and yellow do.

Explosion of shapes

2010-04-03T22:23:00.013+11:00

Showing the photos around to have a selection for the arts market application motivated me to build some more. And I noticed how useful especially the repetitive parts of the building process turn out for my Alexander study.

I found my preferred strut material for now, and got plenty of this as well as variations, so whenever I feel like working a new shape out I can go ahead. Well, I avoid the noisy bits during night time, that's when I can sit back, explore the different aches in various parts of my body, and reflect my experiences.

42 unfinished

I built my first structures using an online 3d animation for tensegrity objects, and there were still some objects that challenged me to handle with my own hands. I watched the animation of an octahedron unfolding into a tensegrity structure over and over, planning the stages of construction for an object with 12 struts.

Cutting the cord to length and knotting into loops and tendons posed the monotonous challenge before getting the octahedron together. I started ambitiously using elastic cord at first, but after some accidents changed over to nylon. An octahedron has six corners, which open into squares for the tensegrity. 12 tendons pull along the original vertexes. A zigzag line of force connects the opposing corners of opposing squares; all the squares show the same chirality.

Seeing a 3d animation on a two-dimensional monitor helps a lot, but it doesn't prevent me from mixing up left and right. It took me hours to develop a decent build strategy that worked without additional hands (i used some small clamps, thinking about some improvement of these little helpers).

The puzzle consists of 12 struts, 12 strings with knots at their ends as tendons, 6 strings knotted into a loop for the corner squares. Starting with the 'bottom' square, four struts connects in a clockwise (or counter-clockwise, if you wish so) to all squares but the opposing square. The struts coming from the 'bottom' and from the 'top' make up the 'left' and 'right' corners of the 'middle' row of squares, which are laterally connected with struts coming from 'bottom' of one square to the top of the adjacent square. All struts join their square with the same chirality. Simple, innit?

42 unfinished lying

Although I don't plan to rebuild '42' at any later stage, I salvaged this accidental creation later with some additional tendons. I guess my difficulties to build this structure at all might relate to the 'technical' error in its construction. 42 has 4 clockwise squares and 2 two counterclockwise squares. When pushed on the left turning corners, the structure nicely compresses, but there's little resistance when other corners get pushed in, all in all it resembles rather an egg than any Platonian Solid.

It took me late into the night to have the sculpture together, and I needed to re-attach some of the tendon to prevent struts from touching. Still, when no strut touched each other anymore, it still looked and behaved somehow wrong. The next day I noticed the mixed chirality, and yet another day later four stabilising tendons gave it its final shape.

I had the puzzle nearly finished, just a minor mixup in chirality, so it shouldn't be a problem to do it again, or so I thought. I tried to remember the successful build strategy from the night before to do a proper octahedron, yet it felt more like I repeated some of the typical mistakes of the day before. Usually sawing the grooves is the most unpleasant part of this projects, with familiar tensegrity objects I have figured working build strategies, but this time finding the right sequence took considerable time.

WIth a lot of breaks in between I finished the next miss in building an octahedron. It's not even a tensegrity, some of the struts touch, and its easy to tune into a floppy shape. I wonder whether to keep it, or to reuse the material for the 'real' thing.

Twisted X's

WIth the current abundance of material for struts, I started preparing 20-30 at the same time, 24 were gone now for the octahedron attempts, so I prepared the next bunch. Another chance to experiment with the easiest movements for my repetitive task, and to look out for body feedback during a new task. Precision makes life so much easier- although it's not too difficult to replace a strut in a larger model, in the build phase a failed component usually means back to the start.

At least I still I had an idea how to build this structure now, had analysed some of my prior mishaps, and started to understand more of the dynamics of the octahedron. I found a sequence for connecting struts and strings that needs only little external support and can take a bit of handling without disintegrating, cutting and knotting strings to well-known length happened nearly by itself.

Anti-Octa (counterclockwise stellated octahedron)

The third object with 12 struts, 12 tendons and 6 loops finally turned out as octahedron. Strike! Like with my first attempts with the x-module, I persisted through a series of failures until found a decent way of building. Connecting the tendons the right way meant as well that the structure started stabilizing itself to a certain degree before it was finished. Now I've got another model that can do with rough handling, the symmetry distributes impact easily, as an accidental 2 metre drop proved.

Once I connected struts and strings in the way I wanted to in order to build an octahedron, I had a better understanding about the difficulties of this process. The right sequence provided relative ease, so I wanted to do it again. I checked the clock before I prepared the strings, I still had enough struts, carefully studied Anti-Octa to build the clockwise turning equivalent.

Counterclockwise and clockwise stellated octahedrons

After 50 minutes without great difficulties the sculpture was finished. Another beast tamed. Left and right turning octa's connect nicely in the triangles created by three parallel struts. When I get bored I might be tempted to build a high-riser, although I surely need some extra tendons for vertical stability.

Different turning octahedron joined at a triangular face

I felt ready for the next challenge, using the experiences gained to tackle the cube. I had a first go just after I finished 42, but settled for building a real octahedron first before moving to the next structure. The cube has eight corner, that span into triangles for the tensegrity, and 12 connecting tendons. The model needed a bit of tuning, but this time I succeeded with the first attempt.

Even as tensegrity the inherent instability of the cubic shape becomes apparent. I might be able to balance it on one corner, which is much easier with an octahedron. However, it offers ample space in its center and looks very airy even when sitting on four corners.

Slice o'Dice (Stellated Cube)

12 struts seemed no longer a challenge, two new shapes belong now to my tensegrity alphabet, So why not have a go at the trigonal prism? Six triangular loops connecting nine strut and 9 tendons. I solved this puzzle as well on the first go. I averaged a bit the tendon length. The model doesn't balance on all corners, yet provides a wide basis when placed on three corners (for a beam). Now I need to make up my mind whether to go metal or bigger, hanging some of the structures on a string provides some good stability test and maybe some durabilty test as well.

69 (Trigonal prism, balanced on one corner)

intermezzo

2010-03-29T23:34:00.007+11:00

As it feels like a bit of SAD is looming, I started considering marketing my tensegrity hobby a bit more, got myself busy building more models and taking some photos. First step will be to get accepted for a stall at an arts market, and then I hope hours of haggling will follow. Naming the sculptures provided quite some fun, let's see what happens next.

Concept X (Simple X-module)

Scarab (Icosahedron with two two tensuls)

Scarab

Crossed Over

North Tower (Three tensuls)

South Tower (Three tensuls)

Evil Twins (Two joined stellated tetrahedrons)

Spherical Hysterical (Thirty strut frequency 2 sphere)

Hope (stellated tetrahedron)

Amarita (stellated tetrahedron)

Victory

Peghead (Tensul joined with icosahedron)

(

21st Century (stellated tetrahedron with kite frame joined)

Monsternsegrity (5 X-modules held up by two tensuls)

Tough call

2010-03-24T13:35:00.005+11:00

I distracted myself from the more and more 'official' uncertainty of my future by working on contact juggling with Matt. Actually, I hardly touched the ball in the turn with him, but instead scrutinized the way I move my arms to play with the ball. As long as I don't get lazy and complacent, juggling and unicycling offer awesome opportunities to improve my use, and get more into the idea of the 'unified field of attention'.

I hardly managed to find someone to work with in the rest of the turn time, somehow I managed to start working with those students who just were about to have a turn with Kaz, first Sharon, then Briar. I noticed some familiar pattern of thought arising while idling, luckily Rossi asked me to help her a bit while she gave a table turn to Amanda.

Libby's writing and research session turned into a bit of Kindergarten. Tony and Ana stopped Libby nearly after each sentence, often just to ask about the exact things that she just said, or wanting to know pretty much unknowable things. The continuous interruptions stretched our sessions out a lot, so that there was no time for some practical work left.

Back home, I notice much I need more debriefing and exchange about our work - frustration and aggression rear their ugly heads again, and I can hardly concentrate on more constructive thoughts. I don't like the idea of organising another intercontinental move, and I have no inspiration where to go after my time in Australia, and how to organise setting up a practise in an entirely new environment. I was aware that making a living as AT teacher won't be a piece of cake, starting over somewhere else looks at the moment like an insurmountable task.

Yet all that desperation won't help to tackle this task, nevertheless I realise how familiar the Don Quixote role seems to me, triggering lots of habitual unproductive coping patterns. Striving for sanity in a mad world doesn't feel like getting into the flow of life, but rather like swimming against the stream. Especially as I don't have any reliable support here, or any positive outlet for all the (self) destructive thoughts whirling through my mind. Well, I gotta keep breathing.

Taking it slow

2010-03-23T20:53:00.002+11:00

I had a chance to jump the queue for our turns, and opted for a table turn with Jenny. I guess I'm tempted at the moment to try hard, so I used the opportunity to slow down and observe. Jenny helped me to release my shoulders quite thoroughly, and I noticed in better detail the connection of my arms into my torso, as well as some habits I acquired while lying on the table. My eyes were fixed a lot of the time, and I pushed my head a tad into the books. When I started observing Jenny, I managed to inhibit this tendencies, and rather started wondering about where she was looking while working with me.

By staying aware of the things I just found out, I learned as well about my tendency to fix my legs on the table. Once I allowed them to slightly balance, I could extend my observation a bit more to my whole body. Instead of wallowing in the release for a longer time on the table, I asked Jenny to lift me off the table, and was surprised about the ease in this movement.

I played a bit with my CJ ball, but then asked Briar, who was next to me in semi-supine, whether I could work with her. Table work on the floor is very challenging, but I was tempted to play with John Appleton's alligator imagery. I don't know whether asking student to imagine things works by distraction, it certainly helps for a more light-hearted approach. I hardly zoned out, and rather stayed with the idea of a good contact with my hands.

The book session got me a bit over-active, yet I managed to stay directed during most of my comments. However, I want to reduce my input a bit - I still get carried away sometimes, especially when we're talking about FM's sociological ideas.

The hands-on group with Jenny challenged me a lot, taking heads from the back of a chair. Having both thumbs directing through the skull and the fingers lightly under the jaw suits group sessions well, and seems less intrusive than one hand unders the jaw and one on the back of the head.

In the second group we explored the changes in tonus of the torso when thinking about different weight distribution in the feet. There's certainly the danger of internalizing while becoming aware of our feet, however, seeing an x-ray showing the relation between calcaneus, patella, tibia and fibula reminded me that our weight arrives in front of the heel and can spread over the entire foot.

More tensegrity

2010-03-15T20:13:00.015+11:00

Before I muster the task to relate tensegrity to AT, I continue with some experiences I made while building this airy structures. Iron hooks on dowels offer plenty of constructive freedom, as well as the opportunity to install additional tendons in tower structures easily, however, with strut lengths between 15 and 30 cm they seem like an overkill.

To cut down on material costs, and for aesthetic reasons, I switched to grooved bamboo skewers. It's possible to saw a groove even in 3mm skewers, however, it seems like 10 to 15 cm is the maximal length to build solid models. Otherwise the tendons can easier tear the groove apart, or bend the skewer.

Building an icosahedron with 6 struts comes relatively easy, at least with elastic cord which isn't too tense. The stellated tetrahedron (or Snelson tetrahedron) is a bit more challenging. The photo above shows my first approach, fixing three strut ends with a rubber band into their corner of the tetrahedron, attaching the corner triangles, the connecting tendons, and finally, cutting the rubber bands to 'explode' the structure into shape.

The photo above shows a stellated tetrahedron (secured with tape instead of rubber bands), just before it gets liberated from struts forced into touching. Although I deployed this method plenty of times, it felt a bit cumbersome and wasteful to me (tape needs to be really tight to withstand the increasing (over) tension of the model, and many rubber bands were cut and later found in unexpected places).

While playing with different tower constellations, I noticed the nice compatibility between the triangular faces of the stellated tetrahedron and tensuls (minimal tensegrity structures). The 6-level tower I used for my presentation uses stellated tetras as base and top, connected by four tensuls in line. In a Snelson tetrahedron, each corner has the same chirality, I'm quite sure though that I managed to build stable structures with at least one corner out of sync. The corner fixing method does not prevent having the beams meet in the wrong order, elastic cord saved me from starting over from scratch many times.

What if I started with a skewed tensul (small base, large top loop) and extended it to a stellated tetrahedron?

I used nylon (orange) for the surplus connections, and elastic cord for the final structure. Placed on one tip, three struts touch the ground, and three float freely. The end of each ground-touching strut is part of the remaining three corner triangles, so I threaded the elastic cord underneath the nylon cord that secured the temporary tensul. The choice of materials made my life easier - the elastic cords wedged nicely into the grooves without slipping out by themselves (or gravity, or clumsiness on my side).

The tensul provided enough stability to connect the floating beams easily. I had ample opportunity to check that all corners had the same chirality, and then decided to turn the structure around to attach the final tendons. I had to unhook the tensul tendons, which turned out quite easy. The final three tendons had to go underneath the tensul tendons and top triangle. This was a bit more fiddly, yet I encountered no total collapse with the need to start over.

Inspired by the ease of constructing a formerly hard to tackle structure I prepared more struts for the same structure with opposite chirality throughout. Sawing six skewers to size and cutting twelve grooves is the 'mind-numbing' aspect, a great opportunity to stay directed. Precision is a key to tensegrity structures, although there is also a bit room for improvisation. The small diameter makes precision inevitable - having a structure collapse due to a badly crafted groove is not on my list of goals.

I made a game out of the 'boring' part, asking for a 'creamy' quality of the hand guiding the Dremel tool. Although I still appreciate having spare material around, I seem to mess up less and less material. I begin to trust more the inherent qualities of tensegrity models. For one thing, tossing them around accidentally hardly ever decomposed them, and it's straight forward to replace single tendons after the build is complete.

I decided to make my two stellated bamboo tetrahedrons a combination of nylon and elastic cord. Not only do they have opposing chirality, one has elastic triangles, the other elastic tendons, and nylon for the other tension element.

Building this models felt fast and simple, yet there might be a further improvement: If tendons and tension loops have different colours, it's easy to pre-thread all connections underneath the temporary tensul tendons, which then can be simply lifted off once everything is in place.

I didn't stop there, though. With enough material, time and obsession at my hands I started researching the web and came across Snelsons X-module. The photos provided me with an idea how to construct this structure, and another remarkable site offers a java applet that helps finding the lengths for all the tendons.

The Snelson model has only one central tendon (which certainly works with fixed tendon lengths and heavy struts), yet two tendons offer more stability when moved around, and don't depend on gravity and the ground to provide a second tension vector.

Colour the different cord lengths made the assembly a piece of cake, checking the cord lengths after knotting them was my quality assurance measure. The need for a second central tendon was already apparent when I built the above model. Depending on the relation of cord lengths and the viewing angle, the name 'x-module' becomes very obvious.

After finishing the first x-module, I noticed to my surprise that I rebuild a structure that puzzled me for some days when I built it first. On of the 'ugliest' model still remaining in my collection is a 4 strut tensegrity, and I rather kept it as 3d model if I ever wanted to recreate it than for any spectator value. When I started building the X-module, I had no idea that I would end up with something familiar, another indication how confusing it sometimes is to imagine all aspects of a 3d tensegrity structure from photos.

The second surprise belongs to the structural category. You have, more or less, two pairs of x-shaped beams perpendicular to each other. WIth only the tendon shown in the photos for Snelson's structure, my model stayed quite flat. Attaching the second tendon moved the entire structure perpendicular to this tendon. I wonder how this affects a series of connected x-modules, I found some plans for a tower, yet I haven't managed to decode the cord lengths info I need.

After exploring different 'base' moduls - tensuls, stellated tetrahedron, x-module, icosahedron - I get more curious about towers. Craig still recalls my visual demonstration of 'any part affects/reverberates throughout the entire structure', and I want to have some more video of tensegrities in motion. Building a x-module tower looks like an interesting challenge, I hope my trustworthy bamboo won't break under the load.

Surprise

2010-03-02T19:12:00.003+11:00

I had a great turn with Jane, who gave me the opportunity to put hand on her. By doing less, I managed to get her easily in and out of the chair, although I had to inhibit my surprise over the ways we were moving. All that ease remains hard to grasp, yet I could clearly notice the change in thinking when working with her.

Before I had a chance to catch with the reading for today, David asked me to give Jeanine a table turn. She's looking for a school to become AT teacher, a graduated contact juggler and circus skill teacher expanding her toolkit. I managed to lengthen her a bit on the table, and her rotary cuffs released a bit, yet her use looks impressive already, and her observation skills stunned me as well.

I had little clue about her background while working with her, when she had a look at my CJing she came up straight away with real useful tips and observations.

So much I'd like to write more, my computer reacts currently much slower than a serially connected real VT100 terminal. So kann ich net arbeite! Time to order new hardware, before the wait drives me mad.

A restart alleviated the tardy behaviour, yet the order is out, in a day or two I have my new hardware. I hope the increased working speed will allow me to balance my screen work with building more tensegrity models. Rossi asked me whether she could buy one of the models from my workshop. I think I will raise the prize from today's offer to a coffee with company, it's still a fair deal.

Tensegrity

2010-03-01T12:07:00.007+11:00

David offered me the opportunity to do my tensegrity workshop during our school's residential. This meant that my car was heavily loaded with plenty of light objects, sensory overload by having a variety of models was part of my plan.

I got so much used to have tensegrity models in my lounge that I nearly forgot the awe they inspire quite often on first sight. Martin hardly couldn't keep his hands off them while driving to Maitripa, and I knew that the strategy of using them as attention grabber would make the presentation part much easier.

I arranged plenty of the smaller and simpler models on the table next to the stage area, the tower and the larger sphere standing next to me. The mind map I made half a year ago laid on a table close by as well, yet I think I used it only a couple of times.

I wasn't tempted to rehearse the presentation, yet I took the chance to work in front of the group with Michael Shellshear on my nervousness about it. He helped me defining a clear goal, and suggested to have a clear beginning, middle part and end for the presentation. Finding a SMART goal wasn't easy, tensegrity offers so many ideas and connections to the work, and of course, eagerly end-gaining as I can be, I wanted to put a lot information into the workshop.

My idea was it to give the participants a more embodied understanding of tensegrity, and to learn more about the qualities of such systems in general. Yet Michael steered me into finding a single quality as focus - bounciness. I'm pretty sure he set some anchors when working with me, although I couldn't consciously describe them.

I started off with a short explanation of the origin of the term, letting my admiration for Buckminster Fuller shining through. I used the metaphor 'island of compression in a sea of tension' to describe the discontinuity of compression (we're no stack of bricks, although some people's thinking is sometimes as flexible as one).

I used to model with a similar structure, but with different tension material (rubber, ie very flexible and nylon ie very tense) to give the participants the first opportunity to play. The models nicely demonstrate expansion and contraction in all dimensions, and squeezing and pulling made the difference in mobility depending on the pretension level (golgi, I hear ya calling) obvious.

I felt quite calm and collected, the adrenaline didn't throw me off but kept me moving confidently. Before I could lose the interest of my audience by the technicalities of the minimal tensegrity system (tensul), making pauses in the verbal part allowed questions, so I could navigate along the mindmap in response to my audience.

The fun started for me when I explained the teamwork task, the 'middle' part of the workshop. I demonstrated the total collapse of a tensul from a box shape into a hodge podge of strings and sticks, and asked the participants to do the same with the models I handed them before.

I had no idea how long it would take the groups to get the models back together, I still consider even a tensul quite a challenging 3d puzzle. I could kick back a bit, observe the attempts of rebuilding with plenty of space to offer help and answer questions. The first team to succeed were Rossi and Jenny, proudly claiming to have won this friendly 'competition'. Yet, instead of simply bragging about this victory they continued to explore kinestically their little toys, while the other teams by and by caught up.

In the two presentations I held no team failed in the end, although some needed to start over a couple of times (you can connect the materials I gave them to a boxy shape which isn't a real tensul). The task kept the participants engaged and interested, and the success yielded many smiles of accomplishment.

This made it easy to get to end part of the workshop. Playing with the tensuls brought up some questions, and offered me the chance to relate the tensegrity idea to anatomy and AT work. Well, I might have stressed the similarities I suspect a bit more, but I guess I will do this workshop again. The questions were interesting, and especially the demonstrations with the shroom-tower model seems to work very well.

I took Carina's suggestion to ask everyone for a single bit they learned in that workshop, and noticed that I achieved my goal - transforming the term 'tensegrity' from a learned-sounding expression to a more lively concept.

However, in retrospect areas for improvement become more apparent. Bounciness, the initial goal, was left out a bit. I realised at home that some of models can be thrown around quite a bit without falling apart, I might use a sphere model for some contact juggling like acts, with some deliberate drops to show the bounce. Now I need to find a good backdrop to shoot some videos of models in movement (the hall I held the workshop with its beautiful Buddha statue would have been ace for that).

Luckily Ana took the photos you can see here, pictures can often tell so much more than words.

Awareness

2010-02-18T17:29:00.003+11:00

We had three two hours of anatomy this week, and I noticed how tiring the traditional frontal teaching format is. Luckily Mick Gleeson presented the material in an interesting and light-hearted way, deepening my knowledge about anatomy in a productive way.

Even today the school routine didn't kick back in, half of the students explored swimming with Penny. Ria and Jenny were our teachers for the performance day, having plenty of time for each of us. I worked with Ria on maintaining my directions while talking to a student, which worked out well in many dimensions.

Not that I don't like having hands on me, but Rias communicative approach improved a bit my self-esteem. And as we both maintained our use, the quality of the conversation, even with many interruption, reached a lot of mutual understanding.

We explored the role of the jaw in sound production as group activity, after exploring each others torso during breathing, monkey and whispered aaah. The more I allow all of the sensory information to come together, the easier it gets to get an idea what's happening in another person.

During the performance session, Ria picked up on my extra breathing when singing. After my first attempt, she used her hands to remind me to inhibit this habit, then she just cued me verbally in time. I was surprised that my performance looked like I was thinking less, as I was acutely aware of the diversity of intentions I was juggling with while singing.

Fun friday

2010-02-12T20:56:00.004+11:00

Yesterdays storms flooded the Merri Creek Path in a few spots and left some muddy stretches and some puddles behind. I manage to keep the unicycle under me while driving through the slippery bike path, I didn't want to bath my new Fivefinger shoes on the first day I was wearing them.

I worked with Matt on the vision dance, a movement sequence I learned at Peter Grunwalds workshop. I do it usually on my way to school on a patch of lawn next to the bike path, it offers me a great opportunity to observe myself in motion. Matt suggested some minor changes for synchronization of the movements, and picked up less directed part of it.

I spend some time with Sharon, talking about the 'zone' and showing her a way to take a student's legs while sitting. When she applied this technique to me (simply putting the leg on the thigh while kneeling in front of the student), something strange happened to my left ankle. I noticed some release on the inside of it, and Sharon remarked it was as if something in my ankle had woken up. The sensation brought up the memory of the injury I had there 24 years ago, running around on crutches, and not using my left leg for weeks as a consequence.

Matt started the group experimenting with ideas about our 'inner talk'. He asked us to write different things, later to use a different voice for this inner dialogue. A nice way to wrap some quite complex stimulus into a fun group activity. When he guided each of us through a chosen activity, he encouraged us to wait until he inhibited everything we noticed. I was quite inspired by the way he ran the lesson today, which makes me wonder whether his teaching style has improved, my perception has changed, or whether a mixture of both happened.

Learning the technique seems to engage most of my fellows students so much that there seems little room left to learn about new technology. My attempts to spread the word about the Twitter Project haven't yielded much success so far, and I haven't advertised too much my interview with Robert Rickover. Hmmm... is this negative self-talk?

Working in front of the computer still activates a lot of old habits, but it's easier for me now to notice strain, have pauses in semi-supine and remember my directions more often. As I'm using really old equipment, I had plenty of chances to study some old habits in detail, yet I enjoyed building the start of the Tweet Factory and the AlexTech Blog feed.

Strong stimuli

2010-02-09T15:47:00.003+11:00

During my turn with Margaret I discovered an interesting detail of my faulty sensory appreciation. I was convinced that I moved my shoulders back in certain situations, while I was in fact arching backwards from the thoracic spine. I felt an inner fight starting when I inhibited this movement, and humbled by the discovery of this blind spot in my body map.

I did a bit of chair work with Amanda, looking for more sensitivity in my hands. I get a better idea which parts are moving and which are held, although still fuzzy. It's hard to distinguish who is doing the holding, just being present still happens only for some short moments.

The discussion of this weeks reading with Vivien turned into pure pleasure. Although FM's writings are far from easy, she embodied an amazingly subtle understanding of his words, and guided us through some important aspects of the text.

Vivien then went with the large groups through spirals and hands on the back of the chair, another pleasure to observe.

Back home, another stimulus was waiting for me - preparing the kit for a skype interview. Just after I send Robert Rickover an email to negotiate a time for it, the disk of my laptop stalled (and hasn't been accessible since). I had already tested the bluetooth headset, and even with 64k the sound quality was okay.

A lot of anger about faulty technology surfaced temporarily, yet I inhibited going on a ride with them, and started thinking about alternatives. I can go online with my MiniMac and even with my phone, there must be another way...

I decided to upgrade Skype first, and then connect the head set. But even five tries to connect to skype failed - wrong network settings. I found a symbian version of skype and gave that a go. However, although I have a keyboard on the phone, I couldn't access the underscore character (_), so I had no chance of typing in my user name...

There's luckily the option to sign up for an account in the skype client, so I simply created a new account and, voila, I connected without problem. I checked all the gear with a call to the 'echo' facility, the sound isn't too good unfortunately. Anyway, that's at least one working solution, although probably not really suitable for recording.

I guess it takes some computing power to digitize voice, wrap it into nice packets, send it over the network, all the while receiving data and decoding it. I remembered using the old version of skype, so I downgraded and indeed, I could log on again. I don't remember what I used as microphone, so I went ahead and connected the head set.

Optimistically, I made a test call, and was shocked to hear the external speakers. I checked the settings, and chose the headset for in- and output. I spoke after the beep, but on the replay I just heard the lovely voice explaining the test. Bummer. My MiniMac hasn't got built-in bluetooth... which provides me with another option: getting a new blue-tooth dongle. Although I can see the device and receive data, it simply ignores all input, maybe, after all, my bluetooth keyboard isn't broken.

So instead of spending maybe 15 minutes to get skype up and running in good quality, I spend about three hours fiddling around with suboptimal solutions. Even though I got a fallback solution, I notice how much the stimulus 'fixing a computer problem' reactivates the habits I cultivated as IT specialist. What a prize to pay for the bit of flow when finding solutions provided a pleasurable challenge.

Right now, while I can't even reset the headset to be used with the phone, I can observe a lot of useless mental chatters from similar situations in the past. At least, I added some more time (and money) to remove potential blue tooth errors - and had another nice unicycle trip instead of cursing technology.

On the other hand, I notice how much I got back into the habit of surfing while watching telly. Maybe it's good to separate these time killers again, especially as there's lots of 'habitual' programming with most TV content. Another aspect of not using the laptop is the climate - the study heats up a lot. Back to basics, back to books.

An interesting week

2010-02-05T18:58:00.003+11:00

After an exciting and exhausting week fridays offer less stimuli and a more intimate atmosphere. Libby did all the turns and the group work. She spend quite some time talking me through the directions. I'm working again to get rid of my sensory amnesia, which might make me forget my directions.

We didn't do any debriefing for Vivien Mackie's visit in the school yet, most likely because Vivien will stay a bit longer in school. Like always, the performance session turned out to be entertaining and enlightening, and I'm glad that I got up to perform.

Libby went with us through some essential body mapping, with the idea of a plumb line from the A-O joint though shoulder, hips, knees, ankles (or rather, symmetrically around this line). Feeling the curvature of the spine on each other offered a great opportunity to explore the uniqueness and differences of the human body.

It seemed like all of us enjoyed the task of talking each other through semi-supine. We had quite different approaches. Sharon and I focused on the 'wholeness' of semi-supine, renewing directions several times before lying down, and exploring movement (a bit like dart procedures). Ana, Carsten and Stephen focused more on imagery to help release of tension.

Sensory appreciation

2010-02-02T17:24:00.004+11:00

Before I had a turn with Jenny, Carina worked for 10 minutes on the table with me. I noticed some holding in front of my hip joints, connected to my idea of 'free neck'. It might be part of the pattern to 'park' myself in positions. Jenny's hands helped a lot to find out about some aspects of my faulty sensory appreciation.

I wanted to do some chair work with Carsten, but after a few tries we ended up talking. I asked him to feel his weight and describe where it goes, and he insisted that FM didn't want us to feel. Of course, FM subscribes not to trust our sensory appreciation. Restoring reliable sensory appreciation as an end is certainly not FM's idea either, yet I think it's indispensable for a prospective teacher to overcome sensory amnesia to a large degree.

I wonder if I did this in a similar manner like Duncan in some of my private lessons. Carsten seemed to want the hands-on part, but I didn't to manage to prevent him from going internal. During our conversation his mind still engaged a lot, yet he seemed a bit more present.

In a way, I explored already the topic for the reading: the evolutionary influence of sensory appreciation. I think the of concept of 'sensory amnesia' (borrowed from somatics) offers a better accessable term to introduce the sad state of skewed perception. Alexander's language seems out of time, however, maybe the strange terminology encourages inquiry.

Briar, who just started this term, stumbled over the classic 'means-whereby'. I tried to explain the difference with the difference between 'what' and 'how'. AT doesn't care too much about the 'what', Chyna's as AT high heel guru exemplifies this convincingly. Inhibition allows us to choose the 'how', one of the core skills taught to bring more consciousness into our daily life.

We looked at writing in Matt's group. I was surprised how tense my wrists felt when writing. I have faint, kind of unpleasant memories of learning to write, and I never really had a 'nice' hand writing. Awesome area to explore some of the older habits I acquired.

In Jenny's group I became more aware of the influence of speaking while putting hands on. It became a less big stimulus for me to put hands on, now I can get back to organise my intent beforehand.

Back to school

2010-02-01T23:35:00.005+11:00

The unicycling training paid out, I arrived quite relaxed at school. I enjoyed Margarets hands during my first turn, being happily wrong again yet more precise in my directions. I had about 10 minutes semi-supine before, just enough to get settled back into school again.

I'm going to experiment with Philip Pawley's idea for semi-supine quickies: Just a few minutes, yet with some extra awareness of the whole process and directing from getting down to the floor until standing again. I wanted to get my hands on again, so I skipped this good resolve today.

While working with Carina I noticed some of my bad habits flashing in front of my inner eye in moments of inhibition. Although my arms feel much better connected than ever, I still can easily forget my hands (not really a useful thing while putting hands-on).

I could pick up some of her movement habits, and helped her releasing some extra tension. Jack volunteered for the next session, and I got more confident with my hands. However, I need to order a bit more what I'm doing when putting hands on, I tend to forget about my left arm.

That's the good thing about the group classes. Jenny has an amazing way to work with us while putting hands on, very precisely pointing out the extra bits we don't need. And of course, directing us the same time.

2010-01-30T16:48:00.002+11:00

Evolving Meme

When our habits have grown strong,
changing them just feels really wrong.
somehow, we reached our end -
is there any need to mend?

If only pain keeps us alive,
existence becomes a strife,
we have fallen from grace,
caught in the daily rat race.

All it needs is the penny to drop,
learning gradually to say stop.
The new ways will be unknown,
it's good to have them shown.

And with a little bit more connection
we can shape this planet's resurrection.

Proof of concept

2009-12-09T19:46:00.004+11:00

If I had to earn money with some of my leisure time projects, I certainly would need to learn to do better estimates of the time involved. About a week after I prepared all the struts needed for my first geodesic dome, I dared to attempt another proof of concept.

I spend about two hours to make sure that each and every strut retains in the connector, gaffer taping the ends to prevent slipping. I hoped that as long as the structure remained connected, I could assemble it entirely. To my surprise, it worked out well, just the idea to document the build failed.

Next time, I rather trust that I hardly notice the camera working on a minute interval. After 14 minutes I wondered whether the camera worked as desired, and stopped the sequence incidentally... however, it took me somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes to get the structure up, and about 20 minutes to deconstruct the frame again.

Although the hose connectors don't stabilise the structure much during assembly, once everything is in place it feels quite sturdy. I could carry the structure around easily, but I certainly have to skip the idea of decent door opening. If it becomes a shelter, I rather climb through a lower triangle than endangering structural integrity.

Pegging down, probably already at a very early state, might be a good idea as well. I wish a had a tarp around, or better some house wrap, to test the integrity with a bit of wind and a skin. The surface area doesn't seem to big, though I want to have quite a snug cover, repeating the shape of the frame. I can't really say whether I want to trust it even with skin as a shelter, but I'm more than curious to cover it decently.

While I managed to do my directions in some of the various dull stages of this project, I happily forgot about directing today. Yet all the crawling around, squatting and bending has left no pain, the only thing I notice is more exposure to midday sun. Any dome project will offer plenty of opportunity to apply the technique - heaps of repetitive tasks, most of them unfamiliar, so there's heap of opportunity to stop and reason about the means-whereby.

That doesn't in any way mean that I spend much time thinking about the means. It's hard to tell how much end-gaining was involved - I remember being calm and collected most of the time, having time for a chat with a curious passer-by. I felt primed for success, with the absence of real set-backs (two rods slipped out before during the assembly of the final pentagon) not too much exhilaration did express.

I enjoyed some minutes sitting in the shade of the tree in the middle of some sacred geometry I materialised in my neighborhood. Without a skin, a dome provides a space that seems sheltered and open at the same time. an amazing experience.

I couldn't really stand up in it, the apex was about 165 cms (rough estimation, not measured), which means that in 2v dome the radius approximates the height quite well. So as long as I don't tackle the stability problem (or the strut length), it's rather a personal shelter than a communal space.

The next challenge is finding some clever material for the skin and testing the stability under wind... Still haven't found a shop that sells Tyvek, and shelling out $90 for some other house wrap doesn't tempt me yet. I need about 30 sqm's for the skin and ground cloth, with about 10% waste included.

It has been an amazing adventure so far. From building smaller models to go large-scale, dealing with all the set-backs on the way, finding flaws and eliminating them. I know it's still a long way into my own dome home, yet it's feasible.

Free serving

2009-12-02T14:17:00.003+11:00

I managed to forget setting my alarm, without breakfast and a bit of a haste I arrived about half an hour late in school. Although 'being late' used to be one my personal no-nos, I still did the few things I wanted to do, and laid down on a table for semi-supine, instead of being worried and apologetic about my mishap.

Jen's student didn't arrive in time, and so she asked to work with me. Her hands helped me release a lot excess tension in my legs, and connect me a bit more from head to toe. I returned to the table soon, and then Carina worked with my shoulders and head, while first Ria and then David gave her a bit more up. What a great start into the day.

The turn with Bronwyn gave me the opportunity to experience a more consistent up in walking, although I had a hard time inhibiting my desire to feel out the ease I noticed. Without embodying ideas they literally cannot make sense, and a good amount of continuity and repetition is usually needed to achieve this.

Ann's anatomy class had some sad undertone, it was her last visit as regular anatomy teacher. We studied gait again, playing around with different ideas of bad use while walking. Entertaining and enlightening at the same time.

Stop thinking?

2009-11-26T14:50:00.003+11:00

Yesterday I ran into an interesting controversy about thinking. There is a definite desire in some people to 'stop thinking', but I suggested that you will have to be dead to achieve this. Luckily, we moved onto a different topic instead of getting into a senseless debate.

I define 'thought' as specific, repeatable nervous system pattern that accompanies muscular movement. In this way I presume that the activity of the autonomous nervous system is 'thinking' as well. This very technical definition allows me to avoid consciousness for a moment, and it also implies the peaceful coexistence of simultaneous thoughts. Ornamental decorations in mosques can give you an idea of the complexity of thinking in any given moment, a variety of interwoven patterns creating a whole. To make this analogy closer to experiental reality, you will have to animate the ornament.

Fractal imagery suits also well to represent the intrinsic combination of order and chaos. We don't need to be aware of our life-preserving patterns like heart beat or breathing, yet we don't gain any advantage by labelling those processes 'non-thought'.

In terms of Alexander Technique, meddling with breathing or heart beat would have been most likely called 'interference' by the master himself, and in most cases rightly so. People do all sort of things when you ask them 'to take a deep breath', imposing 'conscious' thoughts how to take a deep breath over the 'unconscious' thought deriving from the carbon monoxide level in the blood.

I admit, this extensive definition of 'thinking' contradicts the cultural habit to link 'consciousness' or 'awareness' to thought. Usually the verbalizing part of the neuronal fireworks is considered 'thinking'. Following this idea strictly, music and other art forms would be thoughtless.

Experience always exceeds any verbal description of it. The words I type here are not only shaped by the verbalizing faculty of my brain, but at the same time i have to breath, keep myself upright and move my fingers over the keyboard. The quality of the last three 'thoughts' influences immediately the quality of the 'verbal output' or consciously verbalizing thinking.

Stopping to think from this perspective means death. Stopping the internal dialogue is how I understand the desire to 'stop to think', and from my experiences as not too persistent meditator I can easily empathize with this desire. As much as I can consciously release the tension in my neck, I can consciously release the tension created by holding onto thoughts I become aware of, but those skills need to be learned.

This might sound like pure semantics. This broad definition of thinking would require additional considerations about the level of awareness/consciousness involved in different thoughts, however, it still would make 'stopping to think' equal to sudden death. Inhibition might not be the best suited word to decribe how not to get caught in habitual loops of our verbalizing faculty, it works for me as long as I haven't found a better one.

Taming the beast

2009-11-19T17:26:00.003+11:00

One peculiar thing about Alexander Technique you cannot 'do' it. Do whatever you like. When you observe yourself in doing, apply the means-whereby while doing, you're using the skills Alexander Technique teaches.

However, having an excellent MacDonald style teacher in the school can look a bit like one can 'do the technique'. Nili's directions are precise and efficient, and we went through a lot of 'traditional' approaches like chair work, table work, hands on the back of a chair, monkey, lunge and finally the whispered aah.

Just watching Nili made it easy to give myself directions and keep myself up, the increased amount of 'uptime' might have led to the bit of discomfort between my shoulder blades. Or maybe just my bad use while taming a beast, namely a biggish tensegrity sphere.

I found in a cheap shop decorative bamboo struts with a nice dark red colour, together with some Sisal garden string. I build a lot of 6-strut symmetrical tensegrities lately, with a variety of connection methods and tension elements, so I started off with 50 cm rods and about 120 cm string. Sawing the grooves with the Dremel becomes more and more routine, although I find myself often crouched over the work piece.

I experimented with tying the strings to the rod, and making loops with knots to slide the ends through. This would save me sawing 60 grooves into the 30 elements, for the prize of 120 knots. A lot of repetitive activity, a great challenge to consider how to do it easiest. I was eager enough to prepare all elements before the assembly, a strategy I changed soon.

Some of the loops were too big, there wasn't enough tension on the strings, and the ends could slide around. The beautiful idea of easy reusability didn't work out. Back to grooves. The next attempt used sisal strings, but as some of it ripped too easy under tension I went back to nylon line.

I cut the strings so that they had nearly no slack - this might work with more elastic strings, but after about 15 struts it became obvious that it rather break than bend into a sphere. As there is no way of lengthening too short strings, the next set of strings needed preparing. To break the monotony of preparing everything at once, I prepared 5 struts at a time (there's six building stages requiring each time 5 struts).

The first two attempts were still too long, and I waited a day without doing anything before I went with the final approach. The water balloons I used to prevent the strings from sliding were easier to attach than the rubber ring wrapping I used most of time. Unfortunately, they came as easily of again.

The youtube video that inspired me in first place shows an assembly within about five minutes. I spend already the third afternoon and still wasn't sure if everything would fall into place. As the waterballoon failed as security, I looped the string once around the strut before using a rubber band wrapper. I must have started building a sphere at least a dozen times, I know now how to connect the elements with maybe referring to one of the models. I wouldn't be surprised to rediscover the build pattern as weaving pattern.

The skewer model gained stability after stage 4, it get itself balanced on five struts as dome. I got fairly confident when I managed to move the model from its gymball 'mould' onto its own feet. The sculpture rolled in elliptical shape on the floor, I leaned with my body against it to attach the remaining struts. I assembled the final five struts as a pentagon, and carefully slid it into the still wobbly dome.

The pentagon needed 10 connections, after attaching half of them I could turn the model around and do the last connections. I even dared to leave them unsecured. The model flattened still a bit, so I removed some of rubber wrappers and looped previously unlooped connections, decreasing the overall string length slightly thus increasing the tension.

I wouldn't roll it downhill now, but it hangs nicely on a single hook on the wall. Tuning was fairly easy, so I might remove the remaining security rubbers for an overall fine tuning. For now, I rather keep it untouched for some time to see whether it tends to undo itself.

That's it, that's it!

2009-11-09T15:07:00.003+11:00

For the next two weeks Nili Bassan visits our school, but I had a good chance to apply the technique even before then. Last night my world map fell off the wall, taking down no less than five tensegrity sculptures with it. Naturally, or so it seems, my latest project, a 30-strut sphere, unfolded again.

So I exercised patience, delayed my desire for a quick fix, and went to school. The turn with Jenny eased me a lot, and her idea to feel amused rather than irrated by the asymmetrical way of using my body helped with this a lot.

The hands-on group with Jenny offered more interesting experiences. I worked with Alysha, and surprised myself by a mixture of old doing habits and some surprisingly effective directing.

In Nili's group I partnered up with Jane Azul, continuing basically where we left off with Jenny. I got quite nervous when Nili came to work with us, however, I picked up some valuable information of some of the 'extra' I put in when putting hands on.

Spherical hysterical

2009-11-07T17:14:00.007+11:00

The transformation from sticks and strings into three dimensional structures still stuns me. And provides me with ample opportunity to learn about my end-gaining tendencies.

Producing the elements required to build this airy structures meant that I had to some repetitive activities with a specific target in mind: precision. I noticed that especially the flexibility of the tension elements provides some leeway for the measurements, having quite uniform elements simply eases construction.

With a closer look you can see rubber band along the compression elements, I used those to prevent the nylon string from slipping out of the grooves. The model was quite sturdy yet bouncy, and I decided to take the 'safety rubber' off. At some point my ambitions backfired, and sphere flattened into a sheet. Bummer.

The construction of the sphere was quite straight forward, but I realised that not all the grooves were narrow enough to hold the string in place, I delayed the next construction attempt until better tools arrived.

It took only a week until a set of diamond blades arrived, and instead of using 6mm wooden dowels I took some large bamboo skewers. Again, I had to manufacture more than 30 identical elements to build my sphere, this time using transparent elastic string as tension element.

It took two or three attempts, and a bowl to provide some initial curvature to build this model, and this time it remained stable after removing any rubber band used to prevent slipping. It even survived inserting a balloon on the inside, to provide some more photographic attraction.

The balloon decided its fate. I build a small tensegrity base for the sphere, and took some photos on the outside, utilizing sunlight.

Slight gusts were sufficient to get the sphere rolling off its base, and I when placed the sculpure in front of the next backdrop a gust dropped it to the pavement, where it collapsed. Well, I got it together once, and I already have the next idea how to tackle my string slipping out of groove problem can be handled. At least, I got into the habit of taking photos of the finishing stages of my tensegrity before I do further experiments or 'improvements' with them.

Rubberband man

2009-10-26T15:30:00.003+11:00

Nearly 5 metres of wooden dowel were waiting to be transformed, for weeks. I wanted to build to tensegrity sphere, as precursor for a model of an eye. I found a great demonstration how to do this, yet it meant a departure from my prior ways of attaching the tension elements.

Many small models made of units that combine a tensile and compressive element, which basically offers a bit more flexibility than the 'tension loops' I used before. The loops, on the other hands, reflect some of the 'Great circles' created by rotation.

Like so often, I departed a bit from the original measurements, using thicker dowels makes the sphere less 'airy' than the model in the youtube video. The biggest challenge was precision this time, I had to saw a groove to hold the string at both ends of the dowels.

Using my new Dremel, I went through some cutting blades, luckily wearing goggles that saved me from the first violently disintegrating blade. I still haven't got the proper gizmo for wood cutting, and the different blades I used produced different wide and deep grooves. Also, I didn't glue the strings to the dowels, so some became easily undone.

My first attempts to assemble the sphere failed badly. Most grooves were so wide that the strings slipped out easily, so after some frustrating trials I called it a day. I had made 32 elements (the sphere needs 30), and wondered if I could use them for something, at the same time thinking about simple solutions to overcome the slipperyness.

Again, rubber bands saved my day. The models I build with them deteriorate quite fast, but as temporary solution they worked wonders. I secured each connection between the units with a rubber band, and, voila, I could follow the demonstration video nearly step by step to success. Unfortunately, this went much faster than my camera batteries recharged. Before I'm brave enough to see whether the sphere will survive without any rubber bands, I'll wait to document the first bouncy bit.

Moderated

2009-10-19T13:44:00.003+11:00

Another week of change of routine, the AUSTAT moderator visits our school. I had a turn with Penelope Carr, in the privacy of the back room, and it felt a bit like the first private lessons I had. I liked her gentle and kind approach, and the idea of just "one percent more". I could inhibit some of my habits while putting hands on her, and got a better idea about how long I should keep them on. The end-gainer in me probably wanted to see a result from my activity, it's so easy to forget that caring about my own use comes first.

In the group we shared some experiences of our own process, and I picked up - surprisingly - some habits of others in the group that fell under the radar so far. It seems like my blurry vision provides sufficient input (at least on short distance) about movement, so there's one thing less to worry about.

The yoga session worked out nicely, it's getting easier to stay aware of my movements, instead of going from position A to B.

Speaking

2009-10-15T14:00:00.002+11:00

I had a good turn with Jenny, working on my habit of 'checking in' or 'feeling out'. It seems like I start conceptualising when I become aware of new sensations, instead of continuing to inhibit and direct my movement. Somehow, Ann's idea of the freedom of the neck as gauge, got stuck in my thinking.

We explored the 'whispered ahhh' in prone. When I'm close enough to a student, the 'non-moving' parts become salient even without any optical clarity. My hands picked up a lot of Tristans movements, and I could see how much of his neck was involved in raising the head.

Bronwyn changed the performation session a bit, and experimented with voice projection. No chance to premier my new song, heaps of interesting new information nevertheless. I was surprised about the amount of pre-tension I build up to enter the stage... hmm do I associate a certain head position or jaw tension as 'right feeling' for starting to speak?

I still need to investigate different strategies for habits arising from imprints, conditioning and learning. I wonder whether trauma applies to all three layers, most likely.

The stutterer

2009-10-13T15:20:00.002+11:00

I managed to detect some of my student habits in my turn with Libby. I thought somehow the 'right way' of sitting down links to feeling out what's happening. Instead of 'checking the quality' of my movement I added a direction for my front, extending ease from the initiation of the movement until close to its end. I learned a lot of movement this way: Achieving my end by feeling the right conditions to start, and staying with a sequence of feelings that hone into the targeted movement.

Being wrong in social situations poses still a high stimulus to me, yet I enjoy it more and more. I paired up with Jane in Matt's hands-on group, well, it rather happened by the seating arrangement. I might have looked a bit unhappy, she re-assured me by stating not to repeat our last group work mishap, and we started with a friendly laugh. The session worked out really well, I found some more ways to stay out of my way while putting hands on, and pleasantly surprised by the precision of Jane's observation and verbal guidance when she put hands on.

After a coffee-free coffee break we had the book session, with me running Jenny's group with Ana, Alysha and Martin. I managed to use the mindmap I made to keep the summary quite concise. I could feel some sort of excitement every now and then, but looking around the group, and actively listening helped me to get through all key points and questions in a way that involved the entire group. I forgot an essential question though, whether there was anything left to add. It's an elegant way to indicate the nearing end of the session, and gives anyone not heard 'enough' the chance for a last word.

Yoga

2009-10-12T15:44:00.002+11:00

I had my first turn with David after the holidays, I experienced more of my asymmetric use, and some of my 'Alexander student' habits. I think I will dedicate this week to observe my habits at school, being banned from coffee during the Aurum experiment can certainly help.

Observing without glasses, however, still feels quite odd. I could pick up some patterns while we worked in Lailani's group on walking, but then, the average use certainly improved already a lot.

I can still get into my old yoga habits, I certainly often 'stare' when doing asanas. Layer by layer by layer. The shift from reaching a position to observe the movement doesn't come easy, yet becomes more and more enjoyable.

Complex habits

2009-09-08T13:27:00.002+10:00

Thinking in movement does not come easy, it takes quite some work to undo old habits. Our (western) culture promotes many ideas that seem to contradict FM's ideas - for example, being 'right'.

Everyone wants to be right, but no one stops to consider if their idea of right is right.

I want to start with a little criticism of the master himself, setting a dubious example in using universal quantifiers like 'everybody' and 'no one'. Let's develop this statement, even if this process might take away the ease and poignancy of FM's words.
'People wanting to be right (which there are many of) rarely stop to consider if their idea of right is right.'

For me, this is just another quote warning about end gaining. If we just 'do it right', victory is ours as well, that's one of the promises of the training to be an endgainer (also known as education system). Wanting to be right produces in social interaction quite typical strategies, mainly based on violence, aggression and emotional game play. The twin sister, not wanting to be wrong, deploys more passive strategies like defense and withdrawal. Their father, Aristotelian logic, has died long ago, yet its ghost still haunts many. Thinking about right and wrong often leads to the fallacy of categorizing nearly everything into this mutual exclusive terms, ignoring anything that fails to fit definetely into one of those boxes.

The opposite of wrong is in many cases just as wrong. We certainly gain new experiences when we push our shoulders forward instead of pulling them back, our overall use most likely doesn't improve. Too easy, one might think, AT is all about changing habits, I relocated my discomfort from one area to another. Strike!

Maybe it helps to assume that we never do it right. If we stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing can happen. Doing one thing to 'counteract' another produces a change of habit, and if we stay clear from thinking that this was the 'right' change, we slowly improve our use as well. As long as we view the world through the black and white filter of right and wrong the view of details remains obstructed.

But isn't there something 'right' to 'do' in life? The mystical answers to this question founded religions, I wouldn't yet dare to answer this for anyone else but myself. Life is self-propagating and self-aware (at least in the human form). The 'right' thing as such is survival of the individual and the species. From this evolutionary perspective we did nothing gravely wrong - otherwise I couldn't carve these words with electronic ink into the global memepool.

Although I spend quite some time finding the right way to get in and out of a chair, when I undid this tense idea I gained much more information out of it. Once the inner judge became more quiet, I had a better chance to integrate the somatic knowledge I received. Good judgement is a desirable skill, but many situations in life work out easier without it.

Especially when observing oneself the right-wrong filter prevents (or delays) accepting undesirable habits. Just accepting that right and wrong have no relevance for the here and now seems to contradict the tenets of our culture. The skill for life changes oneself radically, unless one clings too much on specific symbol sets.

Observations

2009-09-03T17:08:00.003+10:00

Self-awareness includes self-observation, a very complex and interesting process. Not every 'voice in your head' belongs to an impartial observer, most of the time other parts of yourself play conductor of re-activity. I started reintegrating my reptilian 'voice', listening more closely especially to the need of food. Low blood sugar levels activate a lot of unwanted 'emergency circuits', and give the pre-frontal cortex not too much energy to be heard in the chatterbox brain.

It's not too healthy to spend much time in the 4f domains of the reptilian brain. Fight, flight, food and fornication can integrate with our behaviour without allowing them to be the 'decider'. A friend of mine compared his collection of inner voices with the parliament, commited to follow the Prime Minister's decisions. He shared with me his way of organising his inner struggle between his wants, needs and social norms, an insight into his private decision making process, based on an advanced form of self-reflection and inner dialogue. Thanks, Dave.

I prefer other mapping models to improve the quality of my self-observation. The triune brain models offers a good start, or Leary's 8 circuit model of consciousness. The map is not the territory. With one of my maps I can name the reptile, monkey, man and sentinel in myself.

Monkey oversimplifies the mammalian brain, mammals developed emotions to organise their communities. Nevertheless, even in 21st century successful emotional game strategies, found in many other mammals as well, still dominate the political arena of humanity.

The 'reasonable' or 'rational' or 'conceptualising' part of our being happens mainly from the cortical areas of the brain. We might ruminate here why something appears beautiful to us, and find the labels to verbalise our experience. It's easy to place the 'observer' here, as we might already have the habit to conceptualise and contextualise our experience, listening to the 'voice of reason' in our head.

In as much we can mistakingly feel torn apart between body and mind, we can mistakingly feel an inner fight of reason and emotion. The 'voice of reason' happily claims to be impartial observer, which leaves the 'voice of the heart' quite sulky, being left out of the game. But the voice of reason is not the sentinel.

Our emotions allow us to connect to other people, and our reason helps us to find meaningful ways to share this connection. Okay, that's prophecy or even gibberish. Or just an example for the challenge. As soon as we phrase observations in a way that assumes some objective reality we have 'diagnosed'. The perception of isness leads to a host of undesirable side effects, and prevents acceptance and the potential for change.

No matter how many voices talk to you, which map or concept you use, don't fight yourself. The voices get so much easier to understand when they communicate non-violently. The trying ends with the fighting, surrendering allows the sentinel to observe, direct, act and re-act.

Of course, I dare to be totally wrong here.

Bucky

2009-09-01T17:17:00.004+10:00

Fulleresque

Don't you think that body and mind
are really two of a kind.
With some body-mind connection
you can expand in any direction.

One and one adds up to four,
don't let that knock you to the floor,
Up, wide, forward and now
let's you ride the holy cow.

The path is long, it never ends,
it has so many twists and bends.
You stumble and you fall,
So do we all.

Don't look ahead, don't look back,
just be here and you're on track.

Special treatment

2009-08-31T13:38:00.003+10:00

I had a turn with David, mostly to ask him about some legal aspects of being a 'travelling AT teacher'. In this highly restricted world it seem still advantageous to have multiple passports, but then, I still have some time before I'm probably forced to leave the country. I managed to keep directed while talking to him, and at the same time discovered new parts of my patterns while doing chair work.

I gave Alysha a table turn, and it seemed to work out quite well. It wasn't too easy to stay with myself, and the background noise in the downstairs area made it partly very difficult to combine verbal and tactile instructions.

We had a short debriefing of Jean Clark's visit, and then everyone besides the friday group went through the Dart procedures. Steven, Craig and me worked with Marigold, which turned out to intensive, informative and fun. After getting to know parts of myself better, I can now start to integrate these areas better into a whole, and Marigolds work especially around the pelvic floor offered plenty of new experiences.

I was quite amazed that her hands guided me through movements I deemed impossible, and I realised that letting go of my kneecaps involves a lot of different areas. Bending over and coming up through the front allowed me to sense my spine in new ways, and the work on the saddle helped me to redefine torso and legs.

Middle of a short week

2009-08-24T16:09:00.001+10:00

My turn with Penny gave me an amazing amount of information. I felt a lot of pattern reverbarating through myself (or aspects of a single patterns in different stages), a release starting with the thumb, affecting the scapula, hips, legs and feet in tiny yet noticable ways. I still want to integrate my arms better, when Penny moved one around I could feel some parts 'wanting' to get involved. Following the movement with my eyes helped keeping them connected, albeit lots of inhibition was required to go through this unfamiliar sensations.

Feeling quite elated I offered Craig a table turn, and managed quite well to stay calm and with myself while talking him through the idea of spatial thinking. It's still not easy to 'stand aside' while using my hands, but intending his release as invitation liberated me from end-gaining, and I could curiously observe the changes that happened. Margaret joined this session after a while, and helped me with gentle touch to continue a nice session. Although I think I used myself quite okay, I felt a bit exhausted after a while, and stopped before I got into too much doing.

Jenny introduced us to some experiments she picked up on the conference, using different ideas for breathing, like 'abdominal breathing', breathing in the back, breathing to the sides, breathing from the feet up. The changes I noticed in myself and in my partner seemed very obvious, yet I noticed to my dismay how some ideas dramatically restricted the flow of breath. It seems like most ideas about 'proper breathing' just produce interference.

The next task for partner work addressed locked knees, using hands and words to get a student out of this. I got quite doey when working with Cal, and didn't notice too much happening. I realised that although we work in an 'indirect' way, asking the student for release in specific areas is sometimes very necessary. Nothing but my own intention to unlock my knees worked when I acted oblivious to Cal's verbal and tactile suggestions, an interesting experience.

I like the performance part more and more, instead of seeing it as an embarassing moment I rather try to embody the text than to just recapitulate it. Sarah's feedback helped a lot to set up an intention that allowed the text speaking through me, instead of me speaking it. I still have a lot of room for improvement, using more 'empty space' and staying lively, though it's getting more enjoyable than I thought possible.

Brainbox

2009-08-18T13:40:00.002+10:00

I managed to turn up early enough to have a turn with Jean, which provided me with lots of new information. Jean spotted a misconception in my body map for my head, and helped me getting more aware of the real dimensions of my 'brainbox'. Although she works (as a student of Walter Carrington) quite traditional (chair and table) she stressed the teaching part of the technique - changing the thinking with new ideas and information.

I especially like the idea for swivelling back and forth on a chair: a sphere rotating along its central axis uphill (or downhill on the way back). The motion in this mental image prevents a bit the giving directions and feeling them out part that happens easily while doing chair work. I feel my ankles freeing up more, yet they still seem quite stiff.

When Jean demonstrated one of Dart's flipper exercises with me (laying sideways on the table), I became aware of the lack of ideas about the mobility of my feet. Again, being taken out of the habit (table work in semi supine) offered an interesting new perspective about the location of my joints, forward and up in a different orientation of the forward and up relative to gravity.

Four directions

2009-08-17T16:10:00.003+10:00

Although Jean Clark visits the school this week, the turn times in the morning make it seem like a 'regular' week in school. I had turn with Libby, which felt more like a debrief. I realised that I had some kind of idea what to work on when coming to school, I should take my time to inhibit more my preconceived ideas and have a go at simply tuning in.

I worked a bit with Sharon before the group started, going through a variation of hoboc (hands on the back of a chair). Jean wants to through Alexanders four directions, we started with 'freeing the neck'. Instead of moving the head on top of the top, we kept the head (with the help of a partner) still, and moved the body underneath. It doesn't sound too different, but it allowed for interesting observations.

Jean demonstrated hoboc with Cal, and I was surprised how slowly she took it. I like the idea of this radical slowdown, it's so much against the habit that it allows students to observe themselves in a new way.

Primary control

2009-08-11T13:20:00.004+10:00

My turn with Jenny worked well, also there is only a slight difference in my perception of directing with primary control and without. I don't know whether I managed to maintain my idea of non-violent communication, I certainly want to improve my listening skills.

While waiting for the book group, Sharon helped me with contact juggling, with amazing results. Moving my left arm freely seemed virtually impossible, having it moved by Sharon felt incredibly 'wrong'. Wriggling along the wall helped losening my shoulder blades, but allowing my arm more movement feels still quite alien.

The second chapter of 'Use of the Self' picked up on faulty sensory appreciation, the process of improving use by replacing harmful habit by primary control, and of course psycho-physical unity.

In the second group I had another misunderstanding with Jenny. I wanted to tell Jim that I was planning to listen with my hands, and not actively directing. I started off with explaining that I'm not going to try to direct him into the chair, when Jenny stopped me cold, assuming limiting thinking on my side. I had a good chance to observe my emotional reaction, but my verbal reaction made Jenny move on quite immediately. I surely want to improve our verbal communication efficiency and mutual understanding, yet I still wonder whether it's appropriate to take the first step.

Yoga

2009-08-10T16:34:00.003+10:00

I started the week with a table turn with Margaret. I wonder whether the weekend or the trip to school in the car tensed me that much, it took me while to get grounded. I still react strongly on the weather.

In Jenny's group we continued with the idea to change the thinking while putting hands on. I guess the efficiency depends a lot on the stage a pupil is in, I still want to train my hands much more.

We debriefed Cathy's visit in the large group, looks like she left some confusion behind. Some complaint about the format, 3 days with 4 hours sessions, and therefor a limited amount of work that she spend working on individual people. I still cherish the memory of her presence in school, the way she used herself to demonstrate visibly what she explained set a real good example, .

Her art to point out 'tensional ideas' without making the student feeling bad about his 'wrong' idea needs a lot of practise. Especially when students notice these kind of thinking in teachers, which made her example of making and pointing out her own mistakes so valuable.

The yoga session tired me a bit, dog and warrior pose en masse. It seems to slowly get back in touch with my spine.

Performance

2009-08-06T13:47:00.003+10:00

I had an amazing turn with Penny, working on contact juggling again. Now, as I recall the session, more ideas pop up how to play with the information I gathered today. Although my shoulder girdle has gone through various states of alignment, the process of freeing it up gets more and more refined. We experimented with just lifting the arm (to put the CJ ball on it). With Pennys hand on me I noticed a swing to the side initiated the movement, and going into a straight line seemed 'impossible' at first. It was fun to notice some impulse in my arm while it moved with much less interference than usual.

I even managed to enjoy working on the whispered aaah. Jenny asked us to observe a partner (first Jack, then Rossi) and experiment with changing the intent while whispering. It was great to see that some ideas worked well, and even without the use of hands change happened. Observing a pattern and changing it indirectly (just by adding a different intent to the primary control) felt exhilarating, and stressed again how important the student's intent is for the process.

The performance session with David brought a lot of valuable information as well. Although my observation was affected by the loss of one of my contact lenses, I noticed more the fluidity (or lack) of movement. I think I might have rather tried to observe something 'static' (posture?), instead of staying more with the observation of movement. It looks like an AT teacher just opens up a different direction for the student to move into.

Reciting my own poetry for the third time produced a sufficiently high stimuli to investigate some deep seated habits. I took a 'deep' breath before starting, probably just like FM, pulling my head back and tensing my torso. Going the process of 'exposing' myself in front of an audience again offered many insights, especially the loss of coordination after the performance.

Trusting the process

2009-08-05T13:35:00.003+10:00

I focussed a bit more on observation today, last chance to see Cathy in action. She mentioned that it's easier to pick up patterns by trusting the guidance of teachers, yet even without some of her hints I noticed a lot of movement patterns, and of course changes in the people she worked with.

I like especially Cathy's use of language. Her description of the process, wanting, recognising, gathering information, deciding on a plan, experimenting contains no typical Alexander Technique phrases, yet encompasses the ideas of mindfulness, inhibition and direction. She managed carefully to avoid saying anything that indicated the mind-body split.

We went to the park to work outside for a while, and I had a chance to work on my unicycling. The increased level of free movement meant I needed to readjust my balance, yet it certainly is more fun to work on myself like this then straing at myself in the mirror.

Wholeness

2009-08-04T15:12:00.003+10:00

Cathy did a bit of quick-ease to start today's session, and then demonstrated her way to give an introduction, in this case directed towards IT workers. I really enjoyed watching her in action, as she definately walks her talk. She stressed the importance to relate to her audience, choosing examples that are easy to follow along. Also, she didn't use her hands until the participants started experimenting themselves.

Using a simple movement to demonstrate the difference between a deliberately distorted head-neck relationsship involves the participants, gives the teacher plenty of opportunity to observe pattern, and gives the participants the experience of choosing 'the easier way' themselves, without anything else but a change in thinking.

The getting involved part continued. Split up in groups we had the task to solve a puzzle, putting a spine together. Again, Cathy could observe our use while we did this, but we could enjoy 'playing' with essential knowledge, in this case the structure and curvature of the spine.

After the break I had the pleasure of improving my CJing with Cathy's help. I clearly remembered the observation about my immobile clavicles, and they still don't move too much. I learned CJ with some strong habits, as my shoulder girdle gets freeer I need to clarify my intent. It's a good chance to observe how much time I still waste with feeling/checking it out.

Her answer to Jim's question that reaffirmed the body-mind split stunned me: Whole. Pause. This part of the job seems really tricky, guiding a student's language and thinking towards wholeness, without disregarding their inquiries. A lot of my questions during the process of learning the work evaporated into meaninglessness with the trust in wholeness, yet this paradigm seems quite foreign to many.

Different routine

2009-08-03T13:59:00.002+10:00

Cathy Madden visits our school this week, and presents her way of teaching groups. Although a vivid little girl produced some remarkable background sounds, the group attention kept mainly on Cathy. She took good care to give us some instructions for observing while she works with single people.

I chose again self-written poetry, and the stimulus was much higher than on performance day. However, standing in front of a group seems getting easier, although I felt a bit fading away once I noticed adrenaline rushing. I don't really know what changed when Cathy put her hands on, it felt to me as if the words floated towards the audience, travelling through space while I took my space on stage.

I had a bit of a talk with Martin and Craig after school, about the power of limiting ideas. I'm curious how many changes I can notice tomorrow, so far it looks like the beginning of a fun week.

Tempory transmission

2009-07-30T13:52:00.002+10:00

I had many laughs while having a turn with Jenny today, although I couldn't inhibit reacting on some of her thoughts about thinking. The release we achieved together threw quite off balance, it's still not easy for me to sustain direction/observation when too many new/strange/'wrong' sensations come to awareness. The simple anatomical fact she made me aware of turned out as full on hit. Jenny reminded me that the gluts attach to the lower back (iliac crest). Now as I write this it seems obvious that the forward shift of my hips in the habitual conditions past needed some extra work of the gluteals, and I need to integrate this information the next time I feel 'wobbly'.

During the group work we listened with our hands to different backs while producing sounds. I still wonder whether I will be able to sense another body without conceptualising the information in some visualised way, especially when we are asked to verbalise our observations in some way. I simply need patience to wait will happen after enough repetition.

I went through my self-chosen challenge to present my own poetry, and I'm quite happy that I did. I felt still quite nervous, yet managed not to feel 'stupid' about myself.

Anatomy

2009-07-29T14:40:00.003+10:00

I had a turn with Bronwyn which extended yesterdays play with 'space within the head'. She asked me to direct my face away from the lower bottom of my skull. The perception of sensations in my head and neck area starts to get more subtle, yet I still misinterpret how my head moves in the relation to the body.

My legs feel recently quite often 'twisted', I suspect more flexibility and agility of the muscles in the pelvic bowl links to this faulty sensory appreciation. My legs felt a bit sore as well, I wonder whether this relates to the higher position of the unicycle seat.

We continued the exploration of suboccipital muscles, Michael and Alysha talked us through the larynx and pharynx. I got out the tensegrity toy when Jack had some questions indicating a static, building block idea of the structure of our bodies.

OCD

2009-07-28T14:02:00.004+10:00

I had a turn with David, after some interesting observations in semi-supine. I still tend to react a lot on enviromental stimuli, but it's getting easier get my focus back. I developed the habit of placing my feet in a position that tends to curve the lower back, when placed closer to the bum I can release much easier into the ground.

I wonder whether I managed to maintain my directions during the turn with David. Talking poses currently a big challenge to me, and I want to get back to work on this more. Kaz reminded me of this in the mini-group we did. I think it wasn't too bad during our book discussion, no sinking feeling this time, and hopefully some audible full stops.

I'm glad we're doing more hands-on, and my fingers seem to get more sensitive. I still want to learn to use the whole hands more, palms, fingers and intention working together. Too many memories and thoughts stray around when I put hands on, looks like I could do with less thought and clearer intention.

I worked for 10 minutes with Alisha in the second turn time. I get a better idea about the diversity of bodies and body pattern, but it's still hard to have an inspiration where to start to work. So I got back to a lot of talking, acutely aware how much I challenged Alisha with working and talking. The way talking is integrated in teaching came up when I was working with Andrea. I explained my experimental plan to her. She didn't understand me, and responded quite disencouraging. I realised that this happened to me some times before during lessons, I certainly have to take of how I verbally interact with students.

Jenny suggested in the final group thinking the brain forward from the skull, with some amazing results. How do I 'think' the brain away from the skull? It seems like (conscious) thoughts are either predominantly conceptual or predominantly visual, but our work seems to create a new class of perceptual engram. Or maybe, just brings us back to the state of playful exploration of physicality before speaking.

More Back

2009-07-27T16:31:00.003+10:00

This time I changed my plans myself - when Marigold arrived and had no one to work with, I moved from David to her for my turn. We worked on maintaining the back and using the arms in an integrated way.

I spend most waiting time working with others, first Anne, then Jen and Cal. I like putting my hands on the upper part of the chest. Most 'older' students and teachers move a lot in this area, and tuning into the rhythm of another humans breath satisfy my end-gaining for 'sensation'. I still forget my ordering, however, moving my arms connected gets easier.

We didn't put hands on in the last group, instead we explored crawling. Taking it slow, maintaining an activated back and keeping the weight mainly on the lower limbs allowed nice animal like movement.

Cozy friday

2009-07-24T13:30:00.002+10:00

Only four students came in this friday, making this friday a relaxed and productive day at school. Matt did some chairwork with me, before we played around with moving within a monkey. Now, as I begin to understand what the monkey is about, I don't like thinking about monkey anymore (although I haven't found a new word for attitude connected to a monkey).

The second group dealt with table work, providing the pleasant mix of collecting experience of hands-on work with getting plenty of work done on oneself. I still notice the impulse of 'zoning out', but with Matt's help I managed to maintain my directions much better. I become more aware about different 'classes' of stimuli - the stimulus (and connected habits) of the teacher-student situation, of doing a specific procedure (getting into a monkey, sending the hands away from the back), of having a living human being in front of me, of dealing with the emotions arising with different persons.

Trusting the process becomes more and more important for me, yet it feels like the speed of change has increased this term.

Faith healer

2009-07-23T14:28:00.004+10:00

Without David, timing goes even more out of the window than usual. I'm still figuring out how to stay more in emotionally laden situations, I might simply experiment with asking the teacher 'to push some buttons'. Penny seemed rather confused what I wanted to work on, but still managed to maintain a nice up in me while working together.

O, how much I'd like to ride the wave of gravity,
Currently it feels more like creeping insanity.
I don't blame distraction,
just habitual reaction.
Yet where is the satisfaction
of some successful direction?
By giving up my strive
I get ready to arrive
in this very moment of time,
tuning into the present's chime.

As long as I stay in motion,
allowing each and every emotion,
the moment is mine
and I feel fine.

I didn't do poetry in the performance session (maybe I should?), but instead got into Alex Harvey's 'Faith healer'. The small audience, only Penny, Jane and Sarah, made it easy to get more expressive while singing. However, unless I find some guitar backing I might as well increase the level of stimulus by more exposure of myself.

Unexpected

2009-07-22T13:57:00.002+10:00

AT can teach to react adequately in any situation, much more than getting in and out of a chair, or releasing specific areas while laying in semi-supine. Our reactions are implicitly holistic - although we might only guess as to why a person blushes during a conversation, we can safely assume that the blush is more than a physical phenomenon.

I looked forward to a turn with Ann, but she didn't arrive in time for the quick-ease, and changed the order of turns a bit. I asked her about that, and she offered me a turn either in the break or after school. I reacted a lot when she told me about the change of plans, yet agreed on a later session.

I took me a while to direct my attention away from the change of plans, and towards observing some fellow students while cycling. I had a bit of a table turn with Ferry, so I didn't have to go 'turnless' into the group.

The anatomy session was like so often a mixture between dull facts, nice anecdotes and some group work deepening our topic, muscles of head-neck region. Our group gave examples of misuse while speaking, demonstrating poking the head out to make a point, gasping, and shyly talking towards the ground.

Having a turn after school went against my habits, and it was the first time it happened for me. Ann went with me to the back room, and we spend most time talking in a very insightful way. She reflected on my reactions earlier, and lots of lightbulbs went off in my head. Interactions are driven by intentions. If I manage to keep up my intention while just observing my reaction to emotional stimuli, a 'problematic' situation can have a positive outcome. Brooming emotions under the carpet, or riding blindly their waves just makes matters worse. Like so often, happiness lies in the golden middle.

More tensegrity

2009-07-21T21:52:00.003+10:00

School started again with 15 minutes quick-ease, walking into the hands of teachers and older students to get some up on the fly. I worked with Jenny on staying more present throughout my body, but I still can't easily let go of expectations.

The book discussion veered a bit off, without getting too excited. Each of us has an idiosyncratic understanding of Alexander owns writings, which seem to reflect a bit in which phase of the process we are.

I enjoyed the hands-on sessions a lot, although I still don't register too much with my hands. I stand less in my way, though, and my arms certainly move lots easier than during my first explorations. I noticed in Libby's group how much I got used to a specific relation of my hands, playing around with different ways gave me plenty of new insights.

At home, I stumbled across a new idea for a sculpture, a tensegrity icosahedron. It is symmetrical, and stackable (I will have to try this for myself....). I found different examples on the web, and experimented with different methods to assemble the structure. I started off with rubber bands in a variety of configurations, and lots of them got destroyed in the process. At some point it looked like I succeeded...

I managed to tune the model to give it more depth, and nearly collapsed it in the process. I fixed it, and thought about the right length for nylon cords. I had to take care not too overstretch any rubber, which happened just two or three times.

After experimenting with 40cm and 50cm loops, having models collapsing over and over, I prepared 45cm loops, got some unused rubber rings and started over again. Once all nylon cords were attached, I cut the rubber away, and, hooray!, I had a stable model in my hands!

I wanted to stand the model on only two legs, and used magnetic repulsion to keep it balanced. It can swing a few millimeters, blowing against the struts suffices to get it moving for just under a minute or so.

Back on track

2009-07-20T13:29:00.004+10:00

As I still don't trust my sensory awareness too much, I didn't really know how well I fared without school and without semi supine. All in all, I think unicycling did a good job in advancing me on my way, although I nearly forgot how much more I gain during a turn when I feel less urged to talk.

The turn with Marigold gave me a good idea about working much more subtle, especially when we moved our hands together. Although my visualisation skills feel quite underdeveloped, my attempts to visualise movement/release/extension work out somehow, and seem to prevent extra effort.

Yoga felt okay. It's getting easier for me to let go of end-gaining, and stay with easy movements, instead of going to and through pain to make the postures look good. We worked with movements from the hip joints, and continued doing so in the group work as well. I'm not too sure how much distance (if any) existed in my body map between sitbones and hip joints, but it certainly increased today. Bending forwards towards a ball felt just wrong after I released my hips more, there's still the strong habit of judging movements by specific tension patterns.

Parts of the brain

2009-07-11T00:32:00.001+10:00

A modern genius

2009-07-06T21:27:00.001+10:00

While looking for ideas how to 'animate' sculptures, I came across the experiments of Theo Jansen. Fascinating.

Toying with tensegrity - part 3

2009-06-23T12:55:00.008+10:00

I guess the first time riding a bike on your own felt pretty exhilarating, but this special event just started your bike riding career. Riding in different speeds, stopping exactly where you want to, doing turns with body weight shifts, stopping without blocking wheels, stopping with deliberately blocking back wheel, riding with hands off, etc, all those skills had to be mastered later. And many accidents happened until then, but if you get on the saddle again you could experience more dimensions of bike riding.

As children we understand learning as our 'work'. Improving our skills by relentlessly exercising them provides fun and gains valuable experience. As 'grown-ups' we easily lose this experimental pleasure, in a society where money can buy anything anytime our patience grew thin. I certainly notice a lack of patience in myself, and wanted to change this a bit.

I started building tensegrity models, feel free to read about the very first steps of this exploration in part 1 and part 2. I tested my patience by ordering stretchy cord via ebay. Last friday 100m of translucent beading cord arrived, after being delivered at a wrong address first.

Finally I could go ahead and build a tensegrity tower just like I had seen it in the magazine! Or so I thought. I cut and knotted my cords tensule by tensule, tuned them so that the upper triangle seemed level in both orientations. The tensuls felt rigid, but were still tuneable. I decided to use rubber bands for the 'security triangle' first, but somehow it just collapsed the tower.

I studied the photos from the instructions, and realised how much imagination and spatial thinking I need to transform the visual 2d information into a tactile 3d idea. I managed to tune a 4 story tower to keep it stable, sat back and I wondered why it still had only little resemblance to the tower I wanted to build. I turned the tower a bit and noticed its fragile balance. Instead of a lean pointy thorn I build the leaning tower of Brunswick.

I found the model lying next to the shelf the next morning, disassembled everything and started over. I wanted to figure out how the security triangles worked with only two tensuls, hoping not to collapse and entangle four level of a tower again. The way I attached the security triangle doubled some tension cords, yet all that's needed is a simple single tension line (like the ones that connect upper and lower triangle of a single tensul).

Depending on how much you entangled the different cords, it takes only little time to disassemble a tensegrity model. I reused some longer struts for the first level (and for a different visual effect) and retuned the model with the security tension cords on each level.

Attaching the connecting security cords took me a fair bit of fiddeling. They improve the balance of the tower, although I still hardly know it all works together. I learned to appreciate having rubber bands lying around handy, although I went back in this case to the builders line.

Another project awaited me: The stellated tetrahedron. I gave up when I realised that I needed more stretch than the nylon string offered, not wanting to break the dowels. Now I know that my basic problems lay somewhere else: My misconceptions how to construct the structure.

If you cut away the corners of a (space-filling) tetrahedron, you get four triangular planes instead, the triangular sides transform into a hexagonal plane. Using a cord triangle for the corners seemed obvious, but somehow I thought the remaining connections would run triangular as well.

Finding an easy way to lay out the 6 struts to have 4 corners where 3 of them meet in a specific direction proved a decent puzzle by itself. I used a zome tool model, connected the upper three triangles with stretch cord, secured the resulting mini-tetra with gaffer tape, carefully removed the model from its 'mold', and secured the final corner.

I repeated this step quite often in the last few days, until I found out how connect the for triangles to pop up into a magic tensegrity structure. Depending on how solid the model is fixed at this stage, it still can be folded (or constructed in the folded state and twisted into three dimensions.

After playing around with different ways of connecting four more triangles to my structure I went back to study images and the java applet. The final structure represents a stellated tetrahedron, I simply had to install tensors along its edges.

With a better idea of what I was doing the assembly got easier. I just had to imagine in which direction the triangles rotate, and connected the closest point of these triangles. The model twisted quite a bit while I attached the tension cords, but this time I felt confident that the model would 'emerge'.

Indeed, after cutting away the tape from the first corner the rods twisted away from each other, and I looked forward to see the miracle unfolding. As I can see now, I still got some connections wrong, I fixed the structure with two corners secured. However, I had done it!

After I bit of tuning I could balance the structures on one of the cut-away corners. It does not balance on all the corners, I think the cord triangles vary too much in length. As I used all 'recycled' materials, some of the cords could have gotten a lot of prestretching. More tuning, and fixing the cords parts of the triangles, will be the next step.

I really like the stellated tensegrity tetrahedron, and it could be fun to connect either tensuls or other tetras to it. I want to use colour as well, and/or different strut sizes. Once a structure obtained its shape, I can still tune a lot around, the stretchy cord provides enough flexibility to experiment a bit.

Size matters, in this case. Longer struts make the construction a bit easier, there's more room to cut away the securing tape without getting close to the tension cords. I might run out of display space, it doesn't appear too crowded yet.

Freaky friday

2009-06-12T14:55:00.003+10:00

I managed to make my peace with fridays. I accepted the temporary increase in numbers, and Matt changed his ways of running the friday group. I hesitated a moment when he asked me with whom I wanted a turn, luckily I decided to do (have done?) table work with him.

Enjoying the new freedom in my hips, and more connectedness of limbs and torso, I sat down with a tea to browse a bit through anatomy trains. When Ana came in, I commented 'breakfast time', but she didn't seem to want to talk to me. When I saw her cutting a loaf of bread, I started watching her hands, trying to compare her movements with the memory of the day when she cut her hand.

Then chaos broke loose. 'Stop watching me like this!' I looked at her in surprise, maybe said something like 'What?' 'You always watch people, trying to get eye contact, it's annoying me! And I'm not the only one annoyed...' I noticed her emotional upheaval, as well as my confusion. I mentioned that observing is part of our job as AT teacher, tried to make her aware of the use of the universal quantifier 'always' in her statements, to little effect.

Recalling the situation makes me aware of how well inhibition worked for me in that situation. Her tone, body language, the message itself, the group conformity call especially, all of those used to trigger easily my 'verbal fighting mode'. Yet I stayed relatively calm, I just laughed every now and then, which probably didn't help. However, I had no interest to take the bait to dramatize the situation, which wasn't too easy.

'You always look at people, it annoys me, I feel like invaded, and others too.' Whoa, here we go. Universal quantifier, external locus of control (i'm responsible for her being annoyed) and group conformity enforcer. I asked her whether she expected me not to look at anyone, and she finished our mini drama by promising a better solution.

Unfortunately, Sharon, who witnessed the situation, did not want to comment on it. I'm sure my frustration about her reply shone through, but I had no intent to inhibit my reaction. I found it hard to refocus on the anatomy trains afterwards, but I didn't want to cling to this incident while in school.

I probably learned more than I asked for, and some of my observations were confirmed. Another random group of people thinks talking about an individual instead of talking to them could change their perceptions and improve their interactions. Duncan's idea of using all the time in school to do the work suddenly seems very radical, pretty much unheard of.

Resilience. Mindfulness. I can't tell whether my non-doing contributed much to this complex web of misunderstandings. On the positive side, I might have a chance to inspect my self defence habits, I can imagine triggers coming up.

Old habits

2009-06-04T17:55:00.003+10:00

I still haven't found much opportunity to work constructively on one very old habit, speaking. Today started with quite an amazing turn with Jenny. I did not notice the slow, gradual increase of freedom in my movements. Although I can hardly remember the stiffness in my movement, I got very aware of my availability during Jenny's turn.

More freedom means as well more chances to 'help', or forgetting to remember to inhibit. I hardly noticed a difference in sensation when I changed my thinking, inhibiting my desire to help with the movement Jenny suggested with her hands. However, Jenny allowed me enough time to inhibit and renew my directions when undoing my shoulders, leaving me with a smile and new experiences.

I worked on my speaking habits again during the performance session. Although we were confined in the tea room, the atmosphere seemed to me more cooperative than on my first attempt. I really appreciated Kaz's approach as teacher. His question posed enough of a challenge not to shoot out an answer immediately, although I needed two attempts to answer it.

At first I lost my directions quite typically, and went a bit on a tangent. After some feedback and Kaz's friendly reminder that I didn't really answer, I stunned the group by a concise one-liner. Kaz wanted to know what I learned so far about my speaking habits, and I realised that I usually ignore my (body) awareness while speaking.

Kaz didn't stop here, although he can take pride in guiding me to an interesting revelation about my habit, and allowing me the positive experience of achieving my end by the right means. He noticed that I miss out on the chance to renew my inhibition with every full stop. Instead of telling me what I do wrong, he suggested in a friendly way a different approach, giving me the chance to choose whether to identify with his criticism or not.

Kaz's way of giving feedback certainly fits into the concept of 'indirect procedures'. He doesn't impose the interpretation of his observations to a student, he just offers them. A good example to follow and study.

Ethics

2009-05-27T13:43:00.003+10:00

I'm doing consciously more than needed - our next reading session is about ethics, and I'd rather take some time to express my thoughts explicitly than to keep them creeping fuzzily around in the back of my mind.

1. WC states (Teachers) “are not justified in intruding into (pupils’) emotions, their thoughts, their feelings, their beliefs, their attitudes.” FM says that "Unduly excited fear reflexes, uncontrolled emotions, prejudices and fixed habits, are retarding factors in all human development. They need our serious attention, for they are linked up with all psycho-physical processes employed in growth and development on the subconscious plane." (CCCI – Chapter 6)
Presumably for a person to change their habit of use these factors FM enumerates have to be change. Do you think it is possible to help people change their pattern of use without dealing with people’s emotions, thoughts, feelings and beliefs?

I don't think it's possible to change a person's pattern of use without dealing with emotions, thoughts, feelings and beliefs. Former factors are an integral part of a person's self. Assuming that an AT teacher could help a pupil to change his/her use of the self without dealing with these factors neglects Alexander's core idea of psycho-physical unity.

The key word in WC's statement is in my point of view 'intrude'. A teacher does not intrude a student's body (like maybe physio's or chiropractors do), so a similar 'soft' and 'guiding' approach is required to deal with thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and emotions.

Psychological studies have shown that changes in attitude hardly change behaviour, but changed behaviour affects attitudes. An AT teacher can create the space to explore different ways to behave (act, do), which in turn changes attitudes, beliefs, etc.

2. If the answer is “no” how might we give these “our serious attention” in a way that doesn’t take us out of our range of what we are trained to do as AT teachers?

Basically, an AT teacher should deal with 'mental' pattern in a similar way to physical patterns, by the use of indirect procedures. We would not treat a broken bone with AT, and severe emotional problems belong to a similar category. When making pupils aware of bad use in thinking, we need the same sensitivity we apply with our hands.

3. If the answer is “yes” then what is the process we take people who suffer from these “retarding factors” through to help them to change their use?

Giving pupils new experiences, having a consistent way of teaching the principles of AT and avoiding 'emotional triggers' are essential to help the pupil to gain more freedom.

4. What does Walter suggest and what are your thoughts?

I would summarize Walter's suggestion about ethics to three major points:
1) Mind you own business
2) Teach the technique as hands-on as possible
3) Don't hesitate redirecting pupils to other sources of help, know your competencies

This doesn't prevent you as teacher from providing just what a student needs to release 'mental holding patterns', albeit with indirect procedures. This can be best achieved in a cooperative, subtle manner, confrontation is counterproductive in most but rare cases.

5. In regard to “unduly excited fear reflexes, uncontrolled emotions, prejudices and fixed habits” and “individual errors and delusions” how does FM propose that we approach these “retarding factors”?

FM suggest to rebuild confidence in the pupil by liberating him/her from the idea of doing this 'correctly', and providing sucessful experiences of deploying satisfactory means-whereby. It is also necessary to improve the reliability of sensory appreciation. The student then has to apply the AT principles generally, and not only for specific situations.

6. If you can accept that some types of beliefs are harmful to a persons use and others not harmful pick an example of a harmful and a non-harmful belief.

Harmful believe: There's a quick fix for everything.
Non-harmful believe: There's more between heaven and earth than science can tell us.

7. If a pupil is undertaking a procedure, treatment or doing exercises, which are clearly impacting badly on their use, what is a teacher’s responsibility? If you decide that it is appropriate for a teacher to give advice in such a case how could this be done?

The advice should be given in a careful manner, by making the student aware of the bad impact of his choice.

Toying with tensegrity - part 2

2009-05-25T22:08:00.006+10:00

Please start with first part, in case you missed it.

Even though photos cannot capture the dynamics of a tensegrity model, they simply help illustrating why I got hooked on tensegrity. I managed to find a shot of the very first tensegrity tower I build, using nylon string for all cords. You can see some slack triangles, but the structure proved rigid and balanced enough to hold a juggling ball.

The limited stretch of nylon produces very rigid structures, and tuning can be quite tedious. However, when the cords have good prefabricated length, these models can easily used in groups to explore its dynamics.

The tower itself looked quite different from the model shown with the instructions, the tensuls kept their shapes instead have being shaped by the different loads on the tension elements.

Without elastic cord my tower had interesting qualities, but not the aesthetic appeal and surprising dynamic I expected. I decided to construct a 4 strut tensegrity structure next, which started an amazing learning experience. I estimated the cord length by using figure from a Java applet, and prepared what I needed. I didn't have any visual instruction how to lay out and construct this model, so I just started off, triangulated around and attached cords.

I marked the dowels so I could distiguish them, and had a way to write out the needed connections. The 4 strut model has 4 triangles and two 'diagonals'. On my first attempt to attach the second diagonal, while the model popped into three dimensions, some cord slipped off and the model collapsed into a chaos of rods and strings.

It took me roughly a day to figure out decent length for the final tension cords, and how to lay out the struts to allow them to unfold. I didn't count the amount of times I assembled and disassembled the flurry of strings and dowels, and how often I repeated the same mistakes in the process. Perseverance paid out, and I had a new structure to explore. I won't take it apart too soon, though, I'm still not too confident about rebuilding it again.

I used 30 cm length (instead of 20cm) for the 4 strut model, and used the left over struts for easy task: A simple 3 strut tensul with the same cord length for the main triangles. I had some elastic cord now (still not the right thing), yet combined nylon and stretch cord for the model. The final model appear much taller than the elements of my first tower. I placed the model next to it, and noticed that by adding 50% length to the compression element I gained twice the height.

Finally I found the material suggested for these kind models: Plastic stretch cord used for beading. Well, currently I'm waiting for a delivery of enough supply for extended experimentation. I picked up a similar material in a craft shop, unfortunately with just 0.5 mm diameter. It works okay so far, although the stretch factor does not work as expected yet.

The material makes it difficult to tune the models, and fix the cords to their attachment points. I managed to get three levels together, but the stabilizing triangles permanently flattened the lowest level. I guess I'll take more time for tuning the single tensuls, and fixings the cords more to the attachment.

I fiddled for a while with more securing triangles, and ended up with some entangled cord on one strut. Instead of trying any more to stand the model up, I took two more cords and hung the model up.

Depending on the lighting, the transparent tension cords are virtually invisible, enhancing the floatiness of the model. It reminds me of the idea of being 'skyhooked'. Funny enough, you can move lower parts of the model around without affecting the 'head', but when the head moves, the body follows...

I still have a long way to go if want to skeletal structures as tensegrity models. I wouldn't mind coming across enough model to buy them. Experiencing tensegrity helped me a lot understanding the process I started with learning the Alexander Technique.

Tuning one part of a tensegrity structure affect the tension levels throughout the entire structure. When we release a habitual holding pattern, other tensors (muscles) have to become active. A tensegrity model balances by specific patterns of pretension, more overall tension yields more rigidity. Sounds familiar?

By doing less we retune the tension elements, or rather, develop new patterns of feedback with our muscle spindles. We need to change our habitual reaction to this muscle spindle feedback, inhibiting the impulse to 'hold on' and send our head forward instead. This sounds easy, but many obstacles lurk on that path.

Depending on how one has used him/herself the tensors responsible for balance have weakened. Using them can 'feel wrong', and can cause discomfort and pain. We might not be aware that changes affect more than one area, or underestimate the importance of primary control.

Seeing, building and touching the floating elements of a tensegrity structure changed my conception of my own bones from the semi-solid stack of columns to mere floating compression elements. And I hope it will help my future student's understanding.

Toying with tensegrity

2009-05-21T19:20:00.003+10:00

About half a year of weekly Alexander Technique lessons I doubted a bit about their use. My teacher told me that our body works as a tensegrity system, and I got hooked again. Even more, I decided to get on a teacher training myself - finally I could integrate Buckminster Fuller's ideas actively into what I want to do for a living.

The notion of tensegrity reappeared lately during our anatomy sessions, and I realised that most people seemed to have no idea about tensegrity. I had yet to learn that conceptual knowledge has to be embodied for a full understanding.

I had seen a good instruction for building a tensegrity table, and I wanted to give a shot myself. I decided to start with a proof of concept, using PVC instead of copper, trying to translate the imperial measures into metric, adapting a bit for the conversion.

The first prototype didn't work well, the cord length of the main triangles of the tensules was too long. The second prototype taught me about the importance of prestress for the connecting diagonals, and dampened my hope a bit to soon have a nice self-made coffee table.

So I researched the web a bit to stumble across the building instructions for a tensegrity tower made of wooden dowels and plastic cords, and the next visit in the hardware store was due. I don't consider myself a handy man, but I usually don't shy away from manual tasks. Sawing a dowel, drilling some holes and knotting some strings appeared easy preparations to gain some insights to the dynamics of tensegrity structures.

Working on this model allowed me to work on myself as well - I had no time constraints, no boss, no obligation to finish the project, nothing but my curiosity that motivated me. I felt quite proud after cutting the dowel into twelve pieces of similar lengths (2mm tolerance on 20 cm). surprised about the difficulty finding an easy way to drill the holes and about my patience following the instructions step by step. I prepared everything for four tensuls, again translating from imperial to metric measures and improvising with the chocie of materials.

I didn't find stretchy plastic cord, and used nylon string instead. When I tried to assemble the first tensule, the nylon cords wasn't stretchy enough to put the model together. I realised some frustration about preparing more than 30 pieces of string I couldn't use, but decided to make some bigger loops, this time only enough more one model.

I started off with main triangles, and thought about reusing some of the loops already prepared to see how it works out. The first structure that emerged rigid still looked very crooked, I used different length for the connecting diagonals. But I had entered the third dimension, and now wanted to find out a decent length for this 3d puzzle. I unhooked one diagonal, and due to the tension and flopped over from rigid box shape to a messy bunch of rods and strings. Wow.

I found a good length experimentally and prepared the next set of loops for the remaining tensuls. Fixing the orientation of the rods with rubber strings made the assembly easy and fast, and I had four tensuls ready to be piled on top of each other.

The nylon string didn't stretch easily, and I needed some force to threat the first two tensuls together. Although the lower triangle of the upper tensul hung around without tension, the combined tensuls showed increased rigidity.

Finally, I could tune my first tensegrity tower to balance it out. Stunned by the weird thing I build, I took some photos - unfortunately too blurred to be usable. However, as a picture cannot really capture the surprising qualities of a tensegrity model (unless explicitly designed for artistic purpose), I didn't regret capturing this historic moment for me with a crystal clear digital image. The experience I gained provides me with an embodied memory, and images will accompany the next part of the story.

Elephants and AT

2009-05-05T16:39:00.002+10:00

When thinking about animals that move very gracefully, elephants seem not really like typical examples. Outside the circus elephants hardly ever lift more than one foot off the ground, and it looks rather funny when they run.

Do elephants have a place in the Alexander Technique, although they don't move very gracefully? O yes, because positive and negative imagery can influence our thinking. Some people carry thoughts as heavy as a full-grown elephant with them, and just like an elephant these thoughts will stand even taller when they feel threatened.

Depending on the amount and placement of these 'heavy thoughts' the elephants in our mental landscape doesn't stand out, and might even contribute to some sort of heavily loaded balance. As we tend to lean onto our 'heavy thoughts', we hardly notice the elephant in our back, while it might appear highly salient to anyone around us.

Our mental landscape can encompass the entire planet (and even much, much more), yet even in a city-sized mental landscape elephants are hard to find. Unless we feel threatened, engage in emotional warfare, question reality or social rules most of our elephants remain invisible.

Our mental elephants can only survive as long as we feed them. They might not move as graceful as a wild cat, but they move, allowing change. If one of our elephants has died, it still weighs us down, and limits our perspectives.

One way of getting rid of our dead elephant is by eating it. And here comes the Alexander Technique handy. How do you eat an elephant? Ask yourself, and dare a simple answer. Meanwhile I extend this silly picture a bit more. Of course, if our mental elephant in an unvisited part of our mind it might decay before we even learn of its temporary existence.

If we find the dead elephant in a decomposing state, I certainly wouldn't suggest eating it. You might even think it's impossible to do at all. In my humble opinion, the easiest way of eating an elephant is piece by piece. Please don't expect your Alexander teacher serving you elephant steaks (and please believe me that I never have or wanted to eat elephants outside of metaphors).

Learning a skill for life does usually not come easy or fast, I can't eat the elephant at once. And if I forget why I started eating the elephant, I can easily get distracted, bored or frustrated. While we certainly don't learn to move like an elephant, we should invest enough patience not to try to eat an elephant in one piece.

A bigger picture

2009-04-30T17:35:00.002+10:00

With a bunch of new students the question 'What the hell is this Alexander Technique' arises anew. I forget about my aversion against 'isness' for a second and give you yet another one liner: Alexander Technique is a set of skills to do more with less.

The notion of skill set makes the involvement of a learning process obvious. And this learning process can not be purely intellectual, 'do' points towards activity. If we remember how we acquired some basic (motor) skills like writing, cycling or swimming, we might get an idea about the time involved to acquire a basic skill, and the endless refinement of those skills by application.

'Doing more with less', or epheremalization how Buckminster Fuller called it, happens to students of the Alexander Technique, paradoxically by un-doing. Conventional education does not yet cover teaching of the principles that govern human movement, and typical physical education produces more harm than good. Nevertheless, we developed our idiosyncratic movement patterns to successfully face most challenges of our every day life, especially living with gravity.

Most of our body learning has been unconscious, guided by our curiousity and examples of varying quality. We learned names for body parts and intuitively mapped these words to areas of our body. We use this internal body map, especially when attempting to execute verbally instructed movement. Often enough this map does only a poor job of reflecting the interdependent tensegrity structure of our bodies. In long term, misconceptions about our body can manifest as physical ailments like back, shoulder or neck pain.

For example, if I work in front of a monitor, and want to 'see better', I habitually hunch over (bend the thoracic part of the spine), which effectively reduces the distance between eyes and screen. The idea of reducing this distance got translated by my faulty body map - instead of using tension to pull the levers operating my hip joint, tilting the entire torso forward, I pull my head forward and down, curve my spine and use of lot of tension to maintain this inefficient solution.

Well, I managed to recalibrate this part of my body map, and therefor get up without pain after hours of screen work. Yet I still find myself hunched over every now and then, seduced by a high stimulus to use a familiar way of reacting. I don't know how and why I picked up this habit, and I don't mind too much. I didn't consciously choose an 'expensive' way for a simple movement task. I had no idea about a better way, or even that I produced a lot of discomfort myself.

Our language sometimes leads to the funny idea that our body 'has a life on its own'. Problems with the musculo-skeletal system often relate to this disassociated conception of our self. My shoulders did not tense themselves, I gave unconsciously the necessary instructions to let antagonistic muscles fight each other. Once I accepted responsibility for my discomfort, I could start changing my habit.

Doing less meant not reacting to the impulse to get into a specific feeling state, in my case hunching over. Excess tension seems a typical problem in the western world, and habitual excess tension can initiate a vicious cycle.

Too much tension in muscles reduces the blood flow, which means less exchange of oxygen and metabolic products. The surrounding fascia can lose its flexibility, and overused outer muscles tend to weaken the postural muscles. Knowing my responsibility in this detrimental process came as a bitter revelation, especially as I thought to have maintained a good and healthy level of body awareness.

My experiments with body awareness, following different paths yet without the right kind of teachers, lead me not as far as FM Alexander. I underestimated the importance of touch for re-education of the self, and didn't know which skills to develop to get back in touch with myself. Our habits form a part of our personality, we associate them often with 'normal' or 'feels right'.

Letting go of habits does rarely feel 'right' or 'good'. Although a single event can suffice to ingrain a habit, the process of changing habits takes time. Working on personal development is not a wide-spread phenomena yet. Committing yourself to more self-responsibility clashes not only with personal, but also with cultural habits.

We carry some of our habits, individually and cultural, as a burden. By carefully observing their connections through the entire organism we can determine whether to keep them or not. Although so many useless wars about 'truth' are fought, we tend to fool ourselves most of the time. If you fool yourself, do it at least in an enjoyable way.

Cold

2009-03-25T18:54:00.002+11:00

The week started calm, and the weather prevented me from unicycling to school. I seem to gain so much more insights by just inhibiting when I work with teachers, although the new experiences tend to drag me into 'feeling it out'. I take these slips into feeling more lightly, and get more used to inhibit any reaction to new sensations, at least sometimes.

I dragged myself with a cold to school, which has changed a bit my facial tension. Bronwyn surprised me by continuing ideas from our last session together. My turn with Jenny worked quite well, and it seemed like no bad feelings stood in our way to work together.

AT intro in ctv

2009-03-23T01:31:00.001+11:00

The end of the week

2009-03-20T17:54:00.004+11:00

Only me had a turn with David, and he brought me up after thinking too much about yesterday's conflict. Stephen had an attempt to talk about this beforehand, and managed to turn this talk into something more productive after school.

Then David asked me for a talk, and unsurprisingly mentioned the lack of inhibition during the performance session. I hope I will notice this unproductive behaviour pattern earlier next time, David suggested that I could simply leave when I don't manage to inhibit.

I stayed pretty calm during the group work, where Matt experimented with two and three dimensional thinking. After a short warm-up, we revisited taking an arm during table work, while engaging spatial thinking. Of course, doing this for the first time didn't yield spectacular results, yet I realised how 'flat' I conceptualised the skin contact. The tendency to overuse my shoulder diminished a bit, and I manage better to stay present and more in my body.

Conflicting performance

2009-03-19T18:18:00.002+11:00

I enjoyed the turn with Penny, and learned quite a lot about my different thinking modes. My first attempt to walk backwards felt impossible, like I was glued to the floor. Knowing that I still need to bend my knee helped to get me moving, the sensations differed significantly at each go. I got more aware of the switch between thinking and feeling.

I partnered up with Kaz for the group work, where we explored jaw movement one more time. I don't notice too much what I do in this area, especially when speaking. Taking time to explore this area starts to integrate it into the perception of my 'whole'.

The performance session ended a bit controversial. I taped my performance, unfortunately I ran out of memory before this happened, so it's tough for me to say how my use changed when I clashed a bit with Jenny. When I started to explain that I'm not a musician, she interpreted this as self-imposed limit. This aristotelian interpretation got me upset, and a little emotional turmoil arose. I hope to have a chance to talk with her about our communication problems soon.

Conscious guidance and control

2009-03-17T14:37:00.003+11:00

I realise more and more that progress in our work depends on the willingness to change one's own thinking, or rather thought patterns. I experimented today with some of the ideas from Missy Vineyards excellent book 'How you stand, how you move, how you live'. Her lucid description of inhibition didn't solve any mystery for me, yet advanced my understanding of this vital skill immensely.

Missy's ideas about spatial thinking inspired me massively as well, and using this concept in hands-on work with Andrea worked out quite well. Gaining new experiences of free movement rewards the work we invested, yet we need to integrate this experience in a connected way into our thinking, 'understand' it.

When we discussed the first chapter of Universal Constant of Living the question arose whether the world would change for the better when more people learned the technique. Jenny's reply caused a bit of conflict, she claimed that everybody would need to change to make this happen. I loudly objected again this very absolute statement. I noticed the lack of willingness to change thinking, or to work on each others thinking outside the safe boundaries of a turn.

The disassociation of body and mind looks to me pretty similar to the disassociation between individuals and the communities, and the fragmentation of society. When it comes to solving problems with a foot, an AT teacher would address it indirectly, sorting out the primary control instead of doctoring around in the symptomatic area. In a living organism symptoms are not considered the origin of a problem, they rather indicate specific use, often lacking primary control.

It surprised me that Jenny managed to think about her connection to society in vastly different terms than the connection within her self. As student we have to push 'impossibilities' aside, at least for limited periods of time, and once we took this temporary leap of faith we can experience the connectedness of our selves. This experience transcends the linear thinking of the mind-body dichotomy and allows us to glimpse wholeness.

This remains me of the Flatland story. During an Alexander lesson, we can leave Flatland for a while and experience Spaceland. This gives us a new perspective. In Flatland, body and mind can never come together, merely touch at each other. Let's think of our body as a little square, and the mind as a little circle in flatland. Philosophers of all time have not yet solved the problem of squaring a circle, no matter how hard we try, creating a unity between circle and square (body and mind) in two dimensions is not possible.

There's a lot of variations you can create with the circle and the square: separated, touching at one point, intersecting to varying degrees, the circle embedded in the square, the square embedded in the circle. This represents the varying degrees of wholeness achievable in two dimensions, it cannot be complete.

Now let's move into spaceland. A square is just an intersection of a (2d) plane with a (3d) cuboid, a circle the intersection of a plane with a (3d) sphere. If we extend square and circle into the third dimension, they will meet like legs at the hipjoint. Even if square and circle were disconnected in flatland, their connection (and unity) becomes apparent from the 3rd dimension.

(I need refine this image, as I understand it better).

Ann-atomy

2009-03-04T19:21:00.002+11:00

The day started with a very revealing turn with Ann. She moved me around in a fun way, before she made me bounce with increasing ease on a gym ball. I spend the rest of the turn time with reading, getting aware of the different points of support while doing so.

Jen talked us through the nervous system, quite precisely presented yet getting very lengthy. The distractions from people talking didn't make it easier to stay focused. Stephen and Jim improvised about the respiratory system, and Kaz and Andrea walked us through the circulatory system.

Hearing about the pulsimory and systemic blood flows made my day - I enjoy getting a more detailed picture of intrisicate workings of our bodies.

Additive Thinking

2009-03-03T16:52:00.003+11:00

The morning began with a lazy drive to school, and a good turn with Libby. I get more sensitive for the extra work I'm doing, sometimes it feels like the muscles activate, sometimes just like they want to.

The reading yielded, like often, quite mixed responses. And the topic, I have to admit, seems quite advanced to me. I experimented a little bit at Golden Beach with additive thinking, and although I have an idea about it I still need much more practise. I asked Jenny whether its possible to experience the effect of additive thinking with the help of a teacher. Funny enough, after something that sounded like agreement she insisted finally to disagree.

The groups, with Jenny and then with David, did a lot of hands-on work. We played again with listening hands, and I noticed how much more sensitive my hands become, if I manage to inhibit the overuse of my shoulders while putting hands on. I still have to figure out what I do with my wrists, currently much more gets activated when I think about them.

Off the rail

2009-03-02T20:06:00.003+11:00

I spend quite some time observing the strange loops I happily enter in certain situations. After all, that didn't work too well for me, and I arrived in a bit of a mental chaos at school. The turn with Marigold worked well to get me back in my body, like contact juggling after the turn.

The group work with Marigold had some strange turn to it. Stephen asked me whether I worked with Marigold putting our hands together, and appreciated using a wall for this exercise instead of continuing to work with me.

Luckily we did a bit of yoga to finish the day off. I'm quite glad that some of my habits and attitudes towards yoga have changed, and how I much I used tension as indicator of 'doing the asanas right'. Doing less becomes finally a bit easier.

Anatomy

2009-02-25T17:16:00.002+11:00

Finally I managed to work productively on my speaking. Bronwyn didn't hesitate to point out the areas in my face with too much tension, and made me produce sounds on all fours. As gravity pulled my face down, I clearly noticed my pulling. However, although I liked this exploration I got under the influence of other stimuli.

The short time we spend on revising our description of the monkey paid out well. I surprised myself by reading somebody else's hand-writing fluently, and improvising two or three missing bits. Although we had our bit to present, anatomy makes me a bit immobile. Sitting for hours just receiving information requires lots of discipline, more than I can avail at the moment.

Inhibition

2009-02-24T14:45:00.002+11:00

I had my turn with Libby, easy going and informative like most of the time. Chair work has the certain advantage of a limited set of stimuli, which makes inhibition and direction a bit easier. The chapter for the reading dealt with inhibition as well, and Matt provided us with the opportunity to exercise inhibition. The talks and group work made the distinction between withholding consent and inhibition much clearer, one is non-doing and the other rather the act of doing something.

Jenny's group helped me understanding more how a teacher approaches teaching inhibition, and how important inhibition for the teacher is.

After the intensive

2009-02-23T19:09:00.004+11:00

The spirit of the improvised intensive didn't prevail until today. It took me some time to get into my body in my turn with Jane, still sweaty from the ride to school. We had a short debrief about the residential, with some very mixed feedback. The circumstances certainly tainted a bit the experience, but the fires left only short time to reorganise.

The group work unveiled my impatience. I got a bit upset with Stephen for my perceived lack of cooperation. It seems that my frustration threshold is pretty low at the moment, and I need to observe my reactions to emotional shifts a bit better. The topic shifted from hands-on to monkey, you can never enough monkey around.

I worked with Rossi in Lailani's group. Lailani's feedback made the hands-on session really valuable, doing less becomes easier. Or does the ease come with doing less? Anyway, using my hands seems the best way to stay directed, and motivated.

Performance

2009-02-12T19:03:00.002+11:00

During the turn with Jenny we detected a funny pattern: By releasing my wrists more my shoulders came undone, and my back lengthened. Interesting to find out how complex something like moving wrists can end up to be.

We did a re-briefing of Vivien's visit in the first group, and especially Tony aired his criticism extensively. Maria did her best to defend her, and appreciated the emotional experience Vivien put her through.

I forgot my lyrics sheet, which made performing a difficult task. Nevertheless I made some progress, the sound of my voice changed a lot in my 15 minutes of fame/shame. I have to remember to bring my camera with me,

Speaking

2009-02-11T18:24:00.002+11:00

I had the first turn with David after the break. My use has improved, although my habits during speaking still go strong. The waiting time passed pleasantly with a bit of hands-on with David, then in the groups with Bronwyn and Libby.

We put our hands on the lower side of the ribcage during chair work. I found it hard just to place my hands with opposing thumbs on, I have to improve the flexibility of my wrists a lot to confidently use my hands. And like so often, less turned to be more.

In Libby's group we played with moving a head around. I worked together with Anne, and enjoyed the experience.

David announced the alternative residential program, we will travel between a yoga school in Thornsbury and our school.

Bad news

2009-02-10T17:53:00.003+11:00

The day started with the pleasant surprise of another turn with Vivien. Her subtle hands moved around my shoulders to encourage more release, yet I still need to increase my sensitivity in this area. I know that my sensory feedback is unreliable, yet I have some trouble to let unknown feeling states happen.

Discussing the reading in the big group didn't allow to in-depth insights, yet worked out very peaceful, unlike the group work with Matt. He claimed that inhibition weakens the habitual pattern, thereby focusing on the 'wrong-doing', while I argued that it rather creates and strengthens the inhibition circuits.

I got tense and frustrated when he ignored/refuted my comment with "That's just semantic". I get the impression that many people in school don't want to deal with the thinking/language aspect of the work, unaware of their communication/interaction habits.

The group with Jenny worked out much better, taking heads and shoulders on the table. I can easier sync with Jenny's instruction, they seem better timed and very concise. My use while putting hands on improved a lot, although I still don't notice too much with my hands. Doing less will certainly help.

The bush fires around Melbourne interfere with our plans for the residential, which means it loses much of its attraction. I hardly can handle setbacks outside school at the moment, this change of plans affects me more than I want to.

Last day

2009-02-06T17:29:00.003+11:00

Matt took care of turns and teaching, as only Sharon, Stephen, Rossi, Ana and me came to school. I had a table turn with Matt, and noticed how I lost my directions often when talking. Sharon and I worked on monkeys, with some amazing results. With my hands on the back of the chair, I managed to straighten out my thoracic spine, and Sharon mentioned that I got taller in the process.

We explored then the relation between eye and head movement. I got aware of the different approaches to moving/turning right and left, and that I haven't done any vision work lately.

Performance

2009-02-05T16:53:00.002+11:00

I still huff and puff after some unicycling, it feels like getting less though. I like Vivien's gentle ways while I had a turn with her, and felt significantly more up afterwards. We spend the remaining time with Vivien and performance work, an interesting thing to participate.

David asked Alysha to start, so she did some arabian drumming. Rossi improvised a story, vivid and funny. Will's guitar playing got enlivened by walking around, which gave him less chance to poke his hips forward. Tony recited a sonett, and looked like too exposed when he aborted the stage. Maria tried her introduction speech again, which led to some critiscism from my side. I don't know whether I went too far, yet Vivien confirmed my observations, and Maria went trhough an emotional roller coaster.

Finally, I dared to give the Galaxy Song a first go, much to the amusement of my fellow student, especially once I tried (yep) to do heaps of things at the same time.

Anatomy,

2009-02-04T22:29:00.002+11:00

I discovered the connection between my shoulders and my knees during the turn with Ria. My attention slowly encompasses more and more of my body, yet I still need a lot of verbalized directions.

I did a bit of CJ, and happily joined a group during turn time working with David. I changed the way I put hands on, my arms move more freely and I tend less to fall into the body I'm touching.

Anatomy brought some surprising insights into group dynamics. We needed some time to agree what the task consisted of, yet got something together in the end. Rossi noticed my old pattern, although weaker than last year.

We described primary control, monkey and hands on the back of a chair in anatomical terms, revisiting our presentation the next week.

More hands-on

2009-02-03T20:08:00.002+11:00

I arrived less exhausted today, and cooled down in semi-supine before I had a great turn with Jenny. Her idea of perceiving the activity of thinking a free neck as gateway to sense the entire body makes more and more sense to me. This indirect procedure accomplished more freedom, without thinking about ankles, knees and hips these joints moved easily.

I played a bit with Anne on the table, taking her head, arms and legs. I get aware that the situation affects my use still a lot, although I get better in using another body as stimulus to direct myself.

The group with Vivien favored Steven a lot, although we could learn heaps by observation. We did some more hands-on with Jenny, after she asked us to inhibit the most typical hick-ups in putting on hands.

Back to school

2009-02-02T13:57:00.002+11:00

Things change at the school: Four new students started this term, Robert came in as teacher, the school has a new website. I had a friendly chat with Alysha and Bell, before having a very productive turn with Lailani. I notice my tendency to poke my head forward more and more, and the little collapse in the front that goes with it. She suggested to think about keeping the distance between cheekbones and hip, which worked well for me (as long as I remembered thinking it).

The new student got their hello in the first meeting, and we got a quick intro to the new website, before we finally got into groups and did some hands-on work. With Marigold we played around with listening hands, and I noticed again the importance of taking care of myself. Lailani tried to go through some of Vivien's ideas, unfortunately just little time was left.

I hope for a bit cooler weather, I was sweating like a pig when I arrived at school after unicycling there. Well, I'll do it again tomorrow (unless its raining in the morning).

BMJ Study

2009-01-13T01:20:00.001+11:00

Overambitious

2008-12-20T19:55:00.004+11:00

After lazing out for most of the holidays so far, I wanted to test out my unicycling progress with an ambitious target: Cycling to school and back. Luckily there was hardly any traffic on Victoria Street, and I could enjoy a long, uninterrupted straight stretch of road.

The freemounts in between worked out quite well, not really instantly, as I got into the bad habit of looking at the pedal when mounting. Only as long as I didn't inhibit this habit :) I was surprised that the terrain hardly caused me trouble, even the inclines and declines went smoothly. Passing others still made me nervous, and sometimes I unmounted to pass.

I tried one of the side roads that lead to St Georges Road, the steep incline made mounting really tricky. The little reserve has a lonely bench that invited me to a break. I didn't check the time required to get there, but certainly felt good about the easy ride.

I still don't know whether I found a good position on the seat, it felt sometimes like only the right sitbone connected to it. The ride tired me a lot, although the inclines felt easy. Just before getting back on the road, in sight of a Japanese family on the playground, I wiped out big time. I went to fast, and jumped off the uni. My tired legs didn't come up to the speed, so I chose to roll over my shoulder towards the lawn. Both knees and my left foot got scratched on the concrete, looks quite bloody.

A short break later, thinking about the fact that I need to strengthen my cardio-vascular system a bit, I continued the way home. I needed to take the pavement this time, and the little stone wall of the park wiped me out again, this time hitting my left calf in the process.

All in all, an interesting mix of end-gaining, inhibition, and some successful directing in between.

Some video

2008-12-13T10:46:00.002+11:00

The stutterer

2008-11-25T17:15:00.003+11:00

I had half a turn with David and a full one with Bronwyn, both quite informative. I got into a little conversation about using / not using language manifesting the body-mind diassociation. I did a bit of hands-on work with Christine, our visiting teacher for a week, and again noticed how important persistence and repetition are.

We discussed the chapter about the stutterer in our reading session, highlighting the ideas of faulty sensory perception, indirect procedure as well as specific directions.

Mixed

2008-11-21T18:58:00.002+11:00

This term seems so different from the first three, and I get infected by the chaos around me. I made some good progress this week, found out more about the holding patterns around my hips, and had my first longer ride on my unicycle.

But I still feel like mutating, and it doesn't feel pleasant all the time. Discipline might help.

More feet

2008-11-14T17:38:00.003+11:00

I had another turn with Margaret, learning more about feet and my habits in standing. I want to get back to give my directions in Peter's wording, something soon to come. We did bits of hands-on work, taking Robert's head.

We finished with some Yoga, and the first stretch undid parts of my hip holding pattern, at least that was my impression we I noticed unstoppable trembling in this area.

Mobbed

2008-11-12T13:52:00.003+11:00

Sometimes, wishes come true. I didn't have too many turns with Ann, so I felt quite lucky that I had a chance today. I managed to increase a bit the awareness for the whole body, noticing my body from head to feet without zoning out. The turn helped me to maintain my up a bit more, yet in a way it helped increasing my confusion as well.

I made it to the coffee shop first, sitting in the empty front room, when Robert and Cal decided to rather sit in the back, leaving me alone. This brought up some unpleasant memories from the past, and the problems I have in dealing with conformity enforcement.

The anatomy session with Ann deepened my understanding of neural processes, although the mechanics tell only a part of the story of what happens in living systems. Yet we don't deal with the interactive part yet, or rather just in terms of movement. This means I have to find a way to observe the differences in me when trying to direct myself alone or in varying social situations. I wonder whether The Global Brain or Celestine Prophecies holds more clues concerning group phenomena that I could apply to my current situation.

Systematic

2008-11-11T19:07:00.002+11:00

This term offered many surprises, the lack of any predictable structure among them. This way I can excuse my own lazyness of keeping track of the work. I seem to be able to maintain more uptime outside school, something brings me down there. Strange.

The turn with Libby offered some more insight of the activation pattern for holding in the front, while I exercised restraint during Razia's C&C session.

I realised today that my former job offered similar challenges. Systems own a specific structure, which offers a certain functionality. The use of the system feeds back to its structure and functionality. As system administrator I analyzed networks in order to increase their efficiency and often functionality. I had to test any change before implementing it, a bit like chairwork. And like with the current work, I rather aimed for long-term solutions taking the use into account than looking for a quick fix.

Feet

2008-11-05T21:30:00.002+11:00

Today started in an unusual way, we find a presentation by a podiatrist. I wasn't too surprised that still a lot of people turned up late, including some teachers. Jason didn't know too much about AT, yet he unknowningly incorporated some of its ideas into his presentation. I liked his professional attitude, his presence and the way he integrated any feedback into his time in front of an unusual audience.

We did the turns afterwards, and I had another one with Matt. I challenged him by working on juggling, and he made me aware of my 'fixation' while standing and performing. I noticed myself how much I shortened myself in my shoulder during the 'warm-up' routine, and the pattern of locking my knees while standing is worth exploring some more.

I spend some time before we re-visited Jason's little check-up on feet and balance playing around with Ana. However, I still wonder why I have so much more problems to maintain my 'up' in school, while it gets easier in most other situations. Especially with unicycling I feel like making big advances when I had a go to cycle around the little oval in the neighborhood.

Friday

2008-10-31T17:19:00.002+11:00

The turn with Matt gave me some more insights about what I do with my legs, and how I maintain my balance. However, I still felt quite wrecked after the turn, and fought hard to keep awake.

Like often on fridays, we did a lot of hands-on work. We did another round of guessing blind-folded whose hands resp. bodies we got in contact with, as well as some chair-work. I really liked this opportunity to sensitize my hands, and especially Ana's hands surprised me a lot.

Bright side

2008-10-30T21:41:00.002+11:00

I had the first turn with Loukia, and enjoyed the new experiences she offered me. I discovered the fine line between the sensation of movement caused by movement of outer muscles and the movement caused by the anti-gravity reflex, or rather, I caught a glimpse of it.

In our group work we experimented with sliding tunes while sitting back to back, I had Garth and Michael as stimulus while doing this. Like always, attention and intention were the keys to notice anything, and those two backs I leaned on offered so much different information.

The performance session with Ria worked amazingly well. She hardly used her hands, but managed to give us some ideas which changed our performance to the better. Getting prepared (and directed) before entering the actual spot for performing worked well for me, and I noticed how much my performance picked up whenever I managed to 'throw some direction in'.