Hitting the wall

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.

Walking down memory lane

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.

Directions

Each teacher has an ideosyncratic style, and obviously I consider some more efficient than others. The turn with Penny yielded some amazing results, she uses the entire body and her enjoyment of the work infected me easily. Feeling already easy made it difficult to achieve more results in the second turn with Julia, which was the first time we worked together at all.

Penny avoids the term inhibition as best as possible, instead she tries to convey new experiences, and her hands do an amazing job. The group work focussed again on the whisperped aaah, this time in standing and with exploring hands. I tried to use the palm first approach to connect to my fellow students, and certainly feel the need to make my hands more sensitive. However, I noticed significant differences between Kate, Ana, Rossi and Michael. I'm less drawn into bodies, and manage it better to stay in my body while observing with my hands.

The warm up for the performance consisted of singing again, and I didn't feel any apprehension in the choir setup we used. Performing myself offered some amazing revelation: Constant directing expanded my voice throughout the entire body. I thought that directing immediately before I start to sing would be sufficient, yet I need to renew the directions quite often during the performance. Although I had my difficulties doing so, the results stunned me and were quite obvious for the audience.

Group work

My turn with Duncan turned out a bit confrontational. I felt like reducing the amount of stimuli by doing table work, yet he went down a different road. I went into the typical twist - wanting to answer his questions (probably with tensed neck and shoulders), while having to life with him stopping me from doing so.

I feel pretty much drained at the end of my first term, though I look forward to the residential, without knowing how this total immersion will work out. Although I like the idea of "quickening the mind" (in FM's words), I fail to see this happening to a larger extend with my fellow students.

I had some lengthy conversation with Bo, trying to tie AT principles into the chat about the use of digital cameras. The communicative aspect of the work appears much easier at the moment to me than observation and hands-on, although it challenges me a lot (especially to keep my directions while doing so).

Libby's group work really made my day. We played with resistance, assistance and neutral while doing chair work. Even though I didn't manage to sense the level of connectedness with Jane and Jen, the I distinguished the quality of movement in the different modes. Especially availability feels very distinct from resistance and assistance.

Working with Gen and Cal felt easy, probably as they direct themselves already very good. I realised that thinking directions helps connecting, yet moving people involves an activity. I need to find the fine line between directing while moving and pushing. I enjoyed the partner work with Cal a lot - she gives very precise feedback, and directs herself very good, which makes it easy for me to stay in my body while working with her.

Ann had her group of year 2 students preparing some group work, which we tried with everyone. I couldn't resist to play devil's advocate, yet I realised that not everyone takes criticism as feedback. Kaz, having his doubts about AT at the moment, provided the most fun way to do group work, using the snap gard came to demonstrate the principle of inhibition.

Undoing oneself doesn't come easy, and the perception of one's identity, or ego, stands mostly in the way. On a mental level, the ego prevents most people from changing their habits of thinking, and working on this opens a difficult battlefield.