Observations

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.

Performance

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

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

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.

Performance

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.

Put your hands up

I woke up today to the sound of bad news - Mark F died in a diving accident on Monday. The first link I forged to this country has left this planet, and it hardly evoked emotions in me. Or rather, I hardly noticed any.

So I chose table work when having my turn with Margaret, and the thoughts about Mark's death went to the background for a while. While observing the other teachers, Kaz asked me to do some chair work with him. The connection with his hands worked really well, the movement felt a bit unsynchronised.

We observed another victim lying in semi-supine trying to make sounds as group work. Only practice enables me to know where to look - although some pattern look similar, everyone combines a multitude of minor misuse into an individual pattern.

The same things happened during the performance session. We could easily observe the effect of monitoring, and its detrimental influence to our performance. Checking one's own use needs practice, and the time required can decrease, once it becomes a habit. However, without presence the performance can not convince.