Rilke’s Letter To A Young Poet

When you first started teaching, did you trust that your hands were directing in the way that they should or could? I am finding myself wondering if my hands are giving the student the experience that I have when my teacher’s hands are on me. I then of course go back to myself, my back and empty hands. But the thought/doubt is there. I’d love your thoughts on trust and the development of our listening hands.

Did I trust that my hands were directing in the way they they should or could? The short answer? No. I knew my hands were not very good. I knew my use was not all that great either. (It still is not great.) I knew I was not giving my students the experience that I was receiving from my teacher, Marjorie Barstow. But as Marj once said to me,  ‘Comparisons are odious.’ And in this case unfair. If you know more than someone else about AT and you have some skill, then you will be able to help them to the degree that you can at this time. You will likely get through, to varying degrees, with some students, and not at all with others, which can be disheartening. When this would happen to me while teaching a group, with other students watching, I would say something like, ‘That’s enough for now, good job. Let’s take a break, watch others, and come back to it again.’  There’s no point forcing things.

It’s humbling when students don’t respond, but it’s good feedback.  It tells you that you need another 40 years of practice. One student is practice for the next. Fake it until you make it. It’s odd, but it helps me not to think about myself so much as an accomplished teacher. (How other people see me is their own business, not mine.)  I choose to see myself as a student who is doing what he loves, studying and practicing. People pay me for the opportunity to study and practice with me,  because of my possessing more experience than they do. Within Jewish communities in Eastern Europe before World War II, being a rabbi was not a profession. A rabbi was someone that the community collectively recognized as a wise and exceptionally learned man, and supported him so that he had time to study and to contemplate, a kind of scholar-in-residence. That’s how I think of myself. I’m a ‘somasopher’, a person with embodied wisdom. People pay for me to meditate on Alexander’s work, which I do a lot.. People pay me to write, (Yes, I know this is a fantasy, but it’s how I choose to frame it), and people pay me to study in the same room with me. No matter the room, no matter the number of people, in my mind, I transform where I am into my livingroom and I welcome people into my home. Because I am at home in the work and with people. That takes the pressure off. I don’t have to be The Teacher who knows everything, or is great at everything, or can solve everything. Why not write your own secret job description, your own personal mission statement?

It’s about relaxing into your practice. It’s about getting thousands of people under your hands, a heavenly host of people with a heavenly host of different life patterns. And having fun. Ask your students what they are experiencing, and not only physically. Ask them to be totally honest, to not worry about pleasing you. Trust their feedback, and then shift how you are working accordingly.

We’re growing into ourselves as Alexander teachers. It’s an organic process. It takes its own sweet time.

As for coming back to yourself, and to your back, and to your empty hands, and to your listening hands. I don’t really know what all that is for you in reality. I would have to see you, and see and experience what your hands are doing and what they are not doing. But I will say that I don’t come back to myself, I include myself. In Judaism there’s a famous prayer called the Shema, and basically it says that God is One. I take this to mean, not two. Our job is to unify, to make things one.

My hands are not only empty, they are full, they don’t only listen, they speak, they communicate, they invite, they welcome, they offer, they lead, they follow, they receive, they give, they promote, they nurture, they love, they read, they explore, they suggest, they comfort, they challenge, they encourage, they praise, they give permission.

So in the beginning it is not about trusting your hands. It’s about using them a lot and getting good at using them, the way anyone with a manual skill gets good at what they do, if they work at it. Then over time, based on experience, you come to trust your hands. Now, my hands know far more than I do. More than I can say.

Have no doubt. Relax into your practice. Enjoy your students.

Photo: Anchan Akihiro Tada

In Japan people work late, often at jobs that have little to do with who they are. They finish work and desperately want to do something for themselves, something they care about. The scene in the Japanese version of Shall We Dance, when the woman rushes in late to her dance class, not having had time to eat, and proceeds to faint, on the spot, from exhaustion is not an exaggeration.

That’s how it was for some of my night students. They’d arrive, and there they were, not really standing, but ever so slightly wavering in the air, on the verge of fainting; famished, weary, drained.

There was no other way to work with them but lying down. My friend Anchan had just made new teaching tables for the Alexander Alliance Kyoto. They were low, about a foot off the ground, so that we could work in seiza. It was easier to work on these tables than to work on the floor. The tables were shaped vaguely like a person, which made sense. They were wider than a massage table at the upper end, providing plenty of room for the arms, while the middle was quite narrow, allowing the teacher to come in close to the student’s torso, making it really easy to reach over to the other side, and the lower end of the table widened out, slightly, for the pelvis, legs and feet. For me, it was perfect.

Our sessions were quiet, meditative, long, sometimes lasting for an hour. Strangely enough, rarely did a student fall asleep. Usually at some point, a student would begin to talk to me, and we, (my translator, Midori Shinkai, and I) would listen. There was little I gave in the way reply. I replied with my hands, helping them to become soft within themselves as they spoke to us of their hardships.

Sometimes, I’d sit there feeling like an old tree providing shade and shelter. Sometimes, I’d become so utterly silent, I could hear the ocean inside them. They would leave, rested and awake, as if they had remembered who they were and why they were here.

But that was years ago. I had fallen out of doing lying down work. I had moved on to other ways of working. For forty years Alexander’s work has led me to where it has wanted me to go, and I have followed like a faithful servant.

Yesterday Yamashita-san arrives, an Alexander Technique teacher.  He specifically requests that I give him a lying down lesson. “I’m so sorry, I say. I hardly ever do table work. It’s not what I am trained in, not what I practice, not what I am good at.” Apologizing is, however, something one practices a lot after living in Japan for a while. “Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu, he says. Please teach me.” I tell him I will do my best for him.

“Okay. Let’s begin.” We open up a standard massage table. “Yamashita-san, without thinking, just lie down on the table any old way.” Like a high jumper, he does a kind of western roll onto the table, ending up on his back, legs outstretched and turned out, head slightly tilted back, his hands resting on his belly.  “That’s great. Don’t move. Don’t correct anything. Don’t arrange yourself. No Alexander Technique. Just hang out and rest.”

‘This may not be the conventional way to begin an Alexander lying down lesson, but entertain  me. I have my reasons, which I will share with you all along the way. I want you to understand my mind, I say, then if you ever want to, it will be easier for you to do what I do.’

“You look comfortable. I like being comfortable too. No point being uncomfortable.” I pull up a fairly high stool, (it’s what’s in the studio I happen to be teaching in), place it at the end of the table, just behind Yamashita-sans head, and sit down.

“Okay Yamashita-san. (Yama means mountain, and shita means under.) Here’s the first thing I do. I look. I look at my student, my person, without any desire to come toward them and help them, without any desire to change them in any way.  At the same time, I don’t pull back away from them and begin critically analysing everything I see. I call the way I practice seeing, beholding, holding a person’s being inside me. Beholding frees me. It’s as if I were far away, high on a mesa, gazing out over a vast, beautiful landscape. Yet, I feel strangely close to what I am seeing, almost touching it with my eyes, while at the same time, receding from it, as if I were on a ship leaving a land that I love.”

“Usually, when we see something the first thing we do is identify it. Our minds quickly name what we see. I look at you and my mind says, man.  And then the mind thinks that it no longer has any more to do. Its job is finished. But years ago, when I first started birdwatching, I read a book written by Donald and Lillian Stokes on bird behavior. They said that if you really want to go beyond identification, if you really wanted to see a bird, to see it’s behavior, how it lives its life, you had to watch it, at the very least, for three minutes. At some point, you begin seeing what is actually going on in front of your eyes, not the name, a red winged blackbird, not the symbol, not the icon of a red winged blackbird, but of what is actually happening in front of your eyes, of reality itself.”

“So that’s what I am going to do with you now, and I will share with you what I am seeing. This will begin to awaken your kinesthetic sense, as you will soon experience. This is important, as you know. You probably also know that when Alexander came to London in 1900, he stood out on a street corner handing out little pamphlets about his work. He didn’t call it the Alexander Technique. He referred to it as Kinesthetic and Respiratory Re-education. So that’s what we’ll be doing for a little while.”

“I begin by looking at the lay of the land. To do that I imagine a strong rain, raining down on the earth, which is you. I watch where it looks like the rain would seep into the ground, where it would collect, and where it would begin to run down, and the path that watercourse would take.”

“When the rain hits your sternum,” touching his sternum in the place I want him to sense, “I see the rain running down toward your left shoulder/boulder, collecting, and then cascading down into the pit, the arm pit.” I slide down his sternum following the incline toward his left arm pit. I return to the ridge of the sternum and slide my hand to the right, along land that I am sure Yamashita-san can feel is level.

“What’s happening kinesthetically, Yamashita-san?” I say, noting he’s wide awake.  “I can sense and see exactly what you are seeing,” he says.  We continue in this way until Yamashita-san has a vivid sense of his body’s landscape; the slope of his forehead, the bridge of his neck, the caves under his hands and feet, the pools of his eyes, his rib tunnel, the pelvic revine, the roll of his legs.

“Now, having awakened your kinesthesia, having got a sense of the lay of the land, I will begin to use my hands. If we extend this metaphor, my hands would play the part of external forces which change the shape of the earth; the sun, the wind, the rains, and time itself.”

As I work with my hands, I not only talk to Yamashita-san about what I am doing, I tell him why I am doing what I am doing, sometimes how I am doing what I am doing, and sometimes from whom I learned to do what I am doing. “That’s from Elisabeth Walker, that’s indirectly from Joan Murray, that’s from Robyn Avalon, that I made up, that too, that’s from Robbin Simmons, that’s from Walter Carrington, that move is from Nica Gimeno, that’s an image from Martha Hansen Fertman, that image is from Ethel Webb, this idea’s from Barbara Conable.”

Along the way I tell Yamashita-san why I don’t work symmetrically, why I don’t have a set routine, why I use myriad qualities of touch, why I work unpredictably, why I don’t talk about breathing, how I get shoulders to widen and settle, wrists to unset, ribs to soften, nostrils to open, organs to move, hip joints to un-grip, legs to balance themselves.

The hour flies by, and yet it’s as if we’ve traveled together for years, hiked up hills, rafted down rivers, climbed up cliffs, slid down slopes, camped out in caves, rested upon rocks.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get back into table work again someday. Maybe not. It’s not up to me. I’m a servant. I listen to my master.

Pottery by Dorothea Chabert

I.

While Eva prepares dinner, I am in the living room holding a ceramic pot in my hands. “Eva, tell me about the large brown pot by the window. It looks like it wasn’t made. It looks more like it was grown.”

“My friend made that, Dorothea Chabert. We lost touch a long time ago. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.” “Eva, why don’t we find out?”

Eva did find out. She called a number she had penciled into an old address book. Eva’s in her mid-eighties and never bothered with computers. It’s a relief to be in her world for the days that I am every year, a world with few distractions, few interruptions, where long conversations happen over long meals, sitting at a beautifully set table with spoons, and plates, teacups and pitchers enjoyed in her family for generations. A world where time moves at its own pace. A world of hardback books, framed photographs, oil paintings, and pottery, a world you can feel and touch.

In Eva’s little Fiat, on the Autobahn, BMWs, Audis and Mercedes Benz are passing us at alarming speed. “Eva, I say, tell me more about Dorothea.”  “Dorothea lives in Wolfsburg, she says. She used to live in Wolfsburg Castle. Now she lives in the coach house beside the Castle. That’s where we’re going, to Wolfsburg Castle. She was part of an artist collective back in the 60’s called Scholsstrasse 8. She taught ceramic art in a university for some years, I think in Braunschweig. She’s more well known in Japan than in Germany. It often works that way.”  “You can’t be a prophet in your own city,” I say, “sometimes not even in your own country.”   

Old wooden floors, huge wooden beams, large wooden work tables, and everywhere wooden shelves, like scaffolding, lined with pottery. A potter’s paradise. “Eva, I feel like I’m walking into a church.” “Me too,” Eva says. Dorothea sits at her wheel, looking out a large, open window. A soft Vermeer-like light illuminates her calm, weather worn face.

Hours pass in Dorothea’s company mesmerized by hundreds of bowls, vases, teapots, cups, containers, and large plates with glazes that look like galaxies. Being in Dorothea’s studio is like being in a scholars large, private library, entranced, surrounded by a person’s unpublished autobiography, written in clay.

In the twilight Dorothea’s pottery sits quietly, numinously. As if she could read my thoughts, Dorothea says, “You know, I don’t throw much anymore. I can’t sit for very long because of my back. But I spend time looking at my wheel. On good days I used to feel God sitting right there in the center of my wheel. On those days throwing a pot was like Creation, like Genesis, a world whirling itself into existence. I lived for those days, those meetings.”

Eva and I leave, each holding a simple cup in our hands, and Dorothea in our hearts.

II.

Sitting in a room full of students, about to begin a workshop, I’m the opposite of nervous. I feel at home, in a place I know, a place full of warmth and comfort. Allowing the room to grow quiet on its own, listening for that poignant silence, I find myself thinking about Dorothea.

“I love pottery, I say. It’s the way it feels in my hands. One day I was in Italy. It was hot. I was thirsty. I spotted a water pump in a plaza. I primed the pump. Water spilled out. I squatted down, cupping my two hands together, filled my palms with cold water, and drank. I looked down at my wet hands and thought, two hands, the first bowl ever made.”

“When I came here to Japan, I knew I had landed in my artistic home. Your country reveres pottery, constructs entire ceremonies around a tea bowl.  The chawan is Japan’s holy grail, a sacred vessel with a sacred purpose; to commune with nature, with people, and with life itself.”

“Maybe that’s why pottery feels so quintessentially human to me. We unearth ancient civilizations and what do we find? Pottery. Where there are people, there is pottery. Like kanji, the word human is comprised of two images. The character hu, as in humus, meaning earth or clay, and the character man, as in main, meaning hand. So human could mean, an earthling made of clay who has hands.”

If we’re made of clay, then maybe potters have something to teach us. Maybe if we study their creative process we might learn something about transformation, about how to change ourselves into something beautiful and useful.

III.

This essay will contain notes on teaching for those of you who are educators. They will appear in italics. When I teach a workshop where there are a number of trainees and teachers assisting me, which is usually the case, I will occasionally make a T-shape with my hands, indictating that I am about to take a “Teaching Moment.” Actors refer to this as “breaking the fourth wall.”  It’s as if I leave the workshop for a second and turn my attention to my trainees and teachers. The difference is, however, that I want the workshop participants to hear what I am saying to the trainees and teachers, because I actually want the workshop participants to understand my pedagogical choices. You can now officially consider yourself one of my trainees at the workshop!

IV.

The metaphor has now been established for the workshop. It serves me, as you will see, as an outline for the workshop. Within the metaphor lies a sequence through which I can allow the work to unfold. It’s a physical metaphor with metaphysical implications. That means while I am connecting the metaphor to their bodies, I am also connecting the metaphor to their lives, to what it means to be human. I’ve also set the stage for using my hands to do my work, for making physical contact with people.  I have revealed a little about myself as a person: that I like pottery, that I’ve been to Italy, that I love Japan, and by revealing a bit about myself I am indirectly giving them permission to tell me about themselves.

My strategy is to begin big, to create breadth. What it means to be human. I don’t want them reducing the work to their bodies. I want their attention on their lives, on how it feels to move through their days.

V.

“So where do potters begin? My friend, Filipe Ortega, an Apache potter from La Madera, New Mexico who speaks four languages and has a Master’s degree in theology, goes down to a nearby pit his relatives have used to extract clay since the early 1800s. It all begins there, in the ground. When Filipe calls the earth his mother, he’s not being poetic. That’s reality for him. He experiences the earth as his loving mother. It’s his source of life. From where doth thou support come, it cometh from the earth. What could be more obvious?”

“Matter in Latin, Matur, means Mother.  Physical life needs nurturance. Life cannot live without it.

But for a couple thousand years Westerns have lived in a culture where the spiritual has been severed from the physical; the spiritual elevated, and the physical debased.”

“If physical life is less valuable, then the nurturers become less valued; the mothers, the caregivers, the nurses and the therapists, the teachers, and the gardeners. Those of us who use their hands, their bodies to do their work, the manual workers, become deemed less worthy, of less worth, and thus are paid less, thought less of, less than those who make a living using their ‘higher’ functions, who live in a more sophisticated world, an abstract and symbolic world.”

“This is one reason why it is important for me to be an Alexander teacher, because first and foremost I am a nurturer, a person who cares for people. I am a male mother. Education is wonderful, but alone, education is not enough for humans to grow. Education and nurturance together make people grow. The Alexander Technique is not about learning; it’s about growing.”

“The mind did not evolve in isolation. Our brains, our voices, our uprightness, our ability to walk, and to use our hands all evolved interdependently. The Alexander Technique values these uniquely human abilities, equally, attends to them equally, continues to see them as interdependent.”

The physical is holy. The senses are holy. The body possesses wisdom that the mind will never understand. Coming to our senses is exactly what we need to be doing in this day and age.”

“Touch is an indispensable sense for nurturance. Infants cannot live without it. Certain primates spend up to 20% of their day in physical contact, grooming each other, huddling together when they are scared or need comforting, keeping themselves warm on cold nights, carrying their young on their backs as they go about their work.”

“I am a manual worker, an intelligent manual worker. I am proud of that. I am tactually literate. Alexander work, for me, heals this mind/body dichotomy. It helps make us whole. It helps restore our humanity. It brings us back down to the earth, to our mother. We all have the same mother. We mustn’t forget this. For Filipe and me, this is not just a metaphor; it’s reality.”

VI.

“Before a potter begins to throw a pot, their clay must have a high degree of plasticity. That means it must be flexible, moist but not too moist, and strong but not dry or rigid. This is why potters have to wedge their clay. Once they get a homogenous distribution of tone through the clay, the clay ‘wakes up.’  The same is true for us.”

“There are two ways of wedging clay. Some potters wedge clay into the shape of a ram’s horn, but the Japanese, being islanders, wedge clay into the shape of a conch shell, both spiraling forms. Embryologically, bones spiral themselves into existence, and then muscles spiral themselves in the opposite direction around the bones. It’s a helical pattern. The heart itself is one spiraling muscle folded in on itself. The spiral is a primary pattern within us, and within the universe at large.”

I invite the group to huddle around my computer to watch a video of a master potter wedging clay. They look like little kids ready to watch some cartoons.  (Go ahead. Be a little kid too. Take the time and watch the video.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzX9gtZRyns

It seems many of the students have never seen a person wedging clay. You can hear the occasional rising Ehhhh…….sound that Japanese make when they are surprised and impressed by something.

“Okay, let’s begin to learn how to wedge our own clay.”

I demonstrate a movement on the floor of what a baby does as it learns to roll over from its back to its front. I show them how it’s possible to initiate this spiraling motion from the eyes and head, from the solar plexus, or from the knees, thighs and pelvis, all creating spirals through the body.

I station my assistants around the room, placing them at the head of each student. They serve as a stimulus, something the baby wants to see, creating the impulse to initiate the spiraling motion from the eyes and head. I show them how to use their hands to assist the student in clearly initiating the movement from the eyes and head and insuring that the body follows sequentially.

I’ve now begun to physicalize the metaphor. I call these ‘movement metaphors,’ or moving ideas, ideas that move you.

I sit down and watch. I watch both the Alexander trainees and teachers, and their students. Where needed, I help. People are animated and enjoying themselves. When I see that everyone has improved, I bring the group back together.

VII.

“The clay is then patted into a sphere, another primary form within us and within the universe. A sphere is equally high, wide, and deep. This creates maximum volume, with minimum surface area. A sphere has neither sides, nor a top or a bottom. We have lots of sphere-like shapes within us, like our skull, rib container, our pelvic basin, and lots of ball joints; shoulders, elbows, knees. We’re full of bowls, and domes.”

The assistants and I go around the room showing them beautiful drawings of human spheres from Albinus On Anatomy. Then we go around gently enveloping all the heads, rib cavities, and pelvic basins in the room. Once I can see that everyone is sensing the roundness of their structure, I have them walk around the room.

“Is that how you usually feel when you walk down the street,” I ask? “Zen zen jigau, totally different,” several students say.

Everyone sits down, most of them looking somehow different, less collapsed, and less constricted.

“The sphere of clay is then dropped onto the wheel, as close to center as possible. But to get the clay truly centered, the potter almost always brings the clay up and down a few times, guiding it ever more finely onto center. If you know the poem Burnt Norton, by T. S. Eliot, you cannot help but feel the connection between what the potter does and to Eliot’s ‘still point in the turning world.’ Eliot writes, “…at the still point, there the dance is.’”

“So lets bring the clay up and down. Humans get up and down in many ways, for all kinds of reasons. Buddhists and Muslims bow. Dancers plié. Aikidoists roll. We get up and down from chairs. Here, lots of us sleep on the floor, and get up and down from Kotatsus.”

“I happen to know that, in this room, we have a Zen Priest, a professional ballet dancer, a couple Aikidoists, and people that get up in the morning from their futon and down again at night after a hard day of work. Lets make four groups and do some rising and lowering. Go into the group you want and bring your clay up and down.”

I sit down and watch. I watch everyone. I do my best not to intervene unless absolutely necessary.  And again, people are having a good time.  The bowers are having a great time. They look reverent and about to break out in laughter at the same time. When it looks like a couple good waves of learning have happened, I invite people to finish up and then sit down again.

“Now a great potter doesn’t just bring their clay up and down in any old way, they do it in a way where they become that still point in the turning world. And we can learn to do that within ourselves too. Alexander found a way into this. He called it the true and primary movement. He discerned that there was an inner movement, an inner rising and lowering. This inner movement has a certain look to it. It’s effortless, it’s smooth. There’s a lightness to it. It seems to happen by itself. Let’s look at another video, this time of a potter making a bowl. The way the clay changes shape, the way it rises, widens, and spreads out looks a lot like Alexander’s true and primary movement feels.”  (Watching a master potter turn a lump of clay into a bowl is mezmerizing and magical. As you watch this make sure to imagine the movement you are seeing actually happening in your body. See what you are seeing kinesthetically.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpG_rkIvIdc

And so it begins. Everyone is now ready and excited about experiencing Alexander’s primary movement. Soon they will feel the effortless rising, the wetness, the fluidity,the stability, the spreading, the still point in the turning world. Soon they will feel themselves opening, sense spaces within themselves unbeknownst to them.

(If you just watched the potter throw the bowl, then you will see how much Alexander’s primary movement looks like the clay effortlessly rising and opening. I never get tired of feeling this motion under my hands.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRD66HTDQ4

VIII.

“Okay, what about using our pots? If they’re going to last, don’t they have to be glazed and fired? Here’s how I see it. The glaze is your personality, your color, your design, how you express yourself. We don’t want to change that.”

“And the firing? The firing is your life. Will you be able to withstand, endure, survive the pressure of life, its demands, hardships, disappointments, and ordeals without cracking, irreparably? If you can, if you do make it through this trail by fire, you will become useful, able to serve. And though you may, along the way, as I have, suffer cracking and chipping, and though you may even fall and shatter and have to glue yourself back together piece by piece, as I have, you will, with age, become beautiful.”

“So it’s now time to discuss among yourselves, in small groups, what situations in your life are currently stressful. It may be a situation at work, dealing with deadlines, with bossy bosses. It may be relating with your partner, or your children, or your parents. It might be the pressure of performance. But whatever the situation, take time now, find the people in the room who can help you set up the stressful situation you find yourself in, and let’s enter the fire together, let’s use Alexander’s work so that we can be made stronger by the fire.”

The stage is now set for the second part of class, for applying the work into their lives. The Alexander Technique is not about the Alexander Technique. It’s about an approach to living. When I asked Marj Barstow, my mentor, what my job was as an Alexander teacher she said, “Bruce, your job is to help people to become sensitive, and to help them to bring that sensitivity into their everyday lives.”  Almost 40 years later, that’s still my job, still what I am figuring out how to do, for myself and for others.

Scenes are enacted; an aging daughter caring for an aging parent, a teacher unable to motivate her students, an analyst stuck behind a computer all day, a singer with performance anxiety, a therapist listening to a suicidal client, a physical therapist having to help a stroke patient up from a chair and into bed. These are the kinds of situations that inspire me. The tough ones.

IX.

It’s time to bring the workshop to a close, always a delicate moment, like arriving at the last line of a poem.

“You are the clay. You are the material with which you have to work. You are the potter. You are the bowl. You are the person who shapes yourself. You are the person who has the potential to open yourself. You are the one who can make yourself beautiful, and useful.”

“And it is you who must, ultimately, ask the question and make the decision. With what do I wish to fill myself?”

The room is utterly silent. We sit in that silence together for a long time, in a circle that suddenly looks to me like one big bowl. I bow, thanking my translator of 27 years, my organized organizer, my dedicated trainees, my devoted teachers, and all the openhearted students. I am filled with gratitude.

Yes, I think to myself, that’s my decision.

Sometimes it’s a matter of how you frame it, how you pare it down, where you make the connections, what you deem significant.

It took me a while to come up with a framework for my life that made sense, that rang true. I’ve chosen to piece it together in a way that lets me see my life as good, as blessed, as rich, and as mysterious.

It goes like this…

First life…I was young. I had parents. I married a good woman, raised two good kids, founded and directed a school in Philadelphia, bought a big, old house and fixed it up. In this, my first life, I was athletic. I lived, and I danced, full out, until I could dance no longer.

Bardo…My kids leave home, my marriage ends, my house is sold. I leave my school. My mother dies. My father dies. Seven dark, interminable years pass. 

One day, I wake up into the light of day and discover I am another person, living another life.

Second life…I am old. I have no parents. I am married to a good woman, a different woman. I am not raising children. I live in New Mexico in a small adobe house, and in Osaka in a small apartment, both places where I have no school. I am a contemplative. I teach. I write.

Sometimes I wake in the morning, surprised. It takes me a second. Aha! I am not in my first life. And I am not in my Bardo. I am in my second life!

Yes, I know that in my first life I was born, and that in this life I will die. There’s a sweetness in knowing my days are numbered. More and more, I find myself savoring experience, lingering, slowing everything down.

Yes, in this second life the days feel shorter; the years too. But the moments, they last longer, much longer.

Small infinities. Ephemeral eternities. Momentary immortalities.

For eleven days, Rusty was nowhere to be found. Of course, we notified the local animal shelter, put up posters everywhere that made sense, notified people via Facebook. But it was disheartening looking out at 1.3 million acres of forest, a forest with mountain lions, and Coyote packs.

Officer M. Vigil arrived shortly after we ran off the road and Rusty had bolted. He looked to be about 40, slow moving, calm. The first thing he did was take down a lot of information about me, and just what happened. “I’m supposed to give you a ticket, but it’s been a bad enough day for you as it is, and the last thing you need on top of it is a ticket.” After a neighbor, Ernesto Trujillo, a generous man, came down and took Yoshiko and her mom, Masako, back to the house, and after all the kind people who had stopped to make sure we were okay had left, (some of them drove around looking for Rusty), there we were, just Officer Vigil and I, waiting for a tow truck to arrive. Given how far away we were from civilization, it would likely be a while.

Feeling shaky, after having withstood such a strong impact, I was a bit wobbly around the knees, and without thinking, I just leaned against the police car. When I noticed what I was doing, I said, “I hope it’s okay I’m leaning against your car.” “Some police officer’s are mighty protective of their vehicles, but no, please, go ahead, just rest.”

I don’t know why, maybe it was from all the training I had with Byron Katie, all that work we did on seeing through our prejudices, undoing all the beliefs we have about all kinds of people, about all police officers, or all republicans, or democrats, or about all Spanish, Anglo, Native American, African American, or Asian peoples, or about all gays and lesbians, or about all very overweight people, or about all people who live in the city or in the country, or about all old people or young people.

But whatever it was, I just saw this man next to me as a person, a person I knew little about, other than that, so far, he had been kind to me. And then again, it was as if I did know him, the way we know everyone, when we really see them.

“Where do you live,” I ask the officer? “I’m from Taos, that’s where I was born and raised.” “How was that, I asked?” “Well, Taos was a whole lot smaller when I was growing up. No Walmart, no big stores of any kind. No fast food chains. Everybody knew everybody.” “What did your parents do?” “They were both schoolteachers…’ and so it went for the next 40 minutes, as we waited by the side of the road, leaning on his super clean car, on a perfect sunny day, under a vast blue sky, with nothing around us but open space going forever in every direction.

The tow truck came. It wasn’t easy getting the car out of such a deep ditch. Officer Vigil stayed until the very end, just watching, making sure everything was going to work out. As I was hopping into the tow truck, I looked back, and called to him. “By the way, what’s the M. stand for on your badge?” “Matthew.” Looking at him in the eyes, I said, “Matthew, thank you for all you did for me. I won’t forget it.”

Eleven days later I get a call. “Is this Bruce?” “Yes.” “This is Matthew. I’m the officer that helped you out when you had the accident. Do you remember me?” “Sure I remember you.” “Have you found your dog yet?” “No, we haven’t.” “Well, I’m down by Abiquiu Lake keeping watch over things here in the campgrounds and there’s a dog roaming around. Is your dog kind of red in color, male, mid size?” “Yes,” I say, as I stand up looking for my coat.“I think this may be your dog. Take my phone number down. I’ll be here. Don’t rush.”

A half hour later, Yoshiko and I pull in next to Matthew. We shake hands. “I didn’t think I’d see you again Matthew.” “Good to see you too,” Matthew says with his straight face, unemotional voice, but sparkling eyes. I turn, whistle loudly. Rusty comes over. He’s thinner, but fine. We thank Matthew again. We drive by the campers who fed him that night and thank them too. On the way out we pass the gatekeeper. “I hear you found your dog. I’ll tell you, there’s something special about that officer. When he came in tonight he asked me if I had seen a dog roaming around. I hadn’t. He was driving around here for the past hour looking for him.”

Last night Rusty slept soundly. Sometimes his eyes would kind of turn back inside his head and begin to flutter, his body twitching. I would have given anything to know where he was, where he’d been, how he survived.

It’s morning. Rusty’s resting in the sun. Curious, I Google, “what does the name Vigil mean?” The Vigil surname comes from the word “vigil” which is from the Latin “vigila,” meaning “wakefulness.” Also, it may derive from the town of Vigil, in Asturias, Spain.

Then I Google, what does Matthew mean?

Gift from God.

Member of Jeong Ga Ak Hoe, Traditional Korean Music Ensemble

Erika Whittaker, the person who holds the record for studying Alexander’s work longer than anyone, almost 90 years, was one bright, honest, and kind woman. Long ago now, Erika said to me;

“I spent four years staring at Alexander’s hands when he worked, seeing precisely where he put them, and what he was doing with them, when all along I should have been wondering what was going on inside his brain. I had this revelation right before I was about to graduate. I decided then and there I’d best stick around for another couple of years. And I did.”

Bill Conable and I spent countless hours watching Marj Barstow’s hands. She was using them all day long, getting stunning results, one person after the other. Bill would lean over and whisper something like, “Marj has her hands, one on either side of his pelvis, to help center him over his hip joints because, as he went to walk, he began to sling his pelvis forward. See, she just felt him come back into his back and over his hip joints, but she sees he’s lowered his eyes and tucked his chin under so she’s going to place her left index finger right in his line of vision, and slowly, like Yoda, raise that long finger of hers up, bringing his gaze up with it, then she’s going to move that finger off to the left and his head is going to turn slightly. See, she’s going to guide his weight over his left foot and send him off for a walk, but just as this guy turns around to come back to her, I bet he’s going to drop down a little and Marj is going to say, “Eh? Did you catch that? Did you notice how you just dropped down a little bit as you made that turn?” And now she’s going to say…and so it went, a running commentary, usually right on the mark.

Bill and Barbara Conable, two of Marj’s first apprentices, taught me in this informal way for years. They could see. They knew what was happening and why, and slowly they helped me to see and to understand what lay behind Marj’s seemingly magical ability to lead people, without any effort, into a powerful and refined way of being and functioning.

For 30 years now, I have been helping my students see and understand why I, and other experienced teachers, use their hands the way they do, and why.

Let’s use the photo at the top of this piece as a way in. Let’s imagine I’m teaching my apprentices, and you are in the class with us.

Okay. Why am I behind my person? (Why, I ask you my reader/apprentice, why would I use the word person rather than student?) Most often I ask my students questions, rarely do I give them answers.)

So why am I behind my person?

“You want the group to be able to see.”

“It makes you kind of invisible, maybe making it easier for her to attend to herself and her instrument.”

“Maybe you are supporting her back slightly with your lower leg.”

Okay? What seems to be working inside of my own coordination and what could be better? (I am the first to tell my students that my use, my level of organization within myself is often not great, that I am my slowest student.)

“Your right arm looks a little retracted, pulled up.”

Yes, thank you. Knowing that helps me. Where are my hands, how am I using them, and what are they doing?

“They’re under her clavicles, right at that place where the clavicles begin to curve up. It looks like you’re catching, kind of scooping up the left side of her body more successfully than the right side. And the fingers on your left side look like they are functioning more independently, each finger saying something distinct, whereas the left fingers look less differentiated. The left looks like a glove and the right like a mitten.”

“Her left hand looks easier than her right hand.”

”Your thumbs are soft and light.”

Good. So you’re seeing how I’ve chosen to orient myself around my person, where my hands are, and how I’m using them. That’s a start. How would you describe the direction I am inviting the person to go?

“It looks like you’re directing her attention in toward her upper ribs and up under her clavicles.”

“And, at the same time, up and out.”

What’s happening as she goes with me?

“Her head is finding its balance on the spine, and it’s almost like her eyes are settling back into her skull, and she looks like she’s looking down on her instrument from up on high.”

“She’s lengthening up the front without shortening down the back.”

“She looks focused and calm and strong, like a Buddha.”

“She looks like she goes to Berkeley and is proud of that.”

So from looking at me, what would you guess I’m thinking about, or feeling, to bring about that change?

“Your thinking about your own use.”

Good guess, but no, I am not, though maybe I should be. I rarely think about my own use when I’m working. When I’m working I feel more like a musician who is in a live jam. I’ve done my homework. I’ve practiced a lot. But now I am playing music. I’m not thinking about the notes. I’m not trying to play well.

“You’re thinking about her.”

That’s closer. But when I am at my best there is no I, and there is no she. There is only an “us.” I’m not thinking about me, and I’m not thinking about her. We’re inside of one event, one experience. We are in an “overlap.” Our circles are intersecting, and expanding, each into the other. We’re together, inside of that shared space. We’re in meeting. We’re changing together. We’re changing each other.

Photo: B. Fertman

How do you think I am feeling?

“There’s a kindness I’m picking up.”

“Pleasure.”

Yes and yes. You see, I’m “in-forming” her, but at the same time I’m being a nurturer. I’m feeding her, and breathing her, through touch. I’m helping to make her strong and proud and capable. That’s why I like to think about her as my person. Sure, she’s my student, and she’s learning from me. But humans need more than knowledge to grow. Humans need to be nurtured.

On a deeper level, she’s not my student, and I am not her teacher. In that deep place, together, we are growing into ourselves, and at the same time, we are coming out of ourselves.

Can you see that?

.

If you look closely at some of the large figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, you may notice something peculiar. A good number of them have books in their hands. It seems they want to read. Perhaps Michelangelo wanted to read too, but had no time.

When I was a modern dancer, I wanted to read too, but I was either in technique class, or rehearsing. I remember seeing a bumper sticker that read, I’d rather be dancing. I knew, straight away, that person was not a dancer. If they were a dancer their bumper sticker would have read, I’d rather be reading.

There was one figure on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that mesmerized me, that possessed me, that became my muse, and eventually the logo for the Alexander Alliance. She was the Libyan Sybil. When I began using her image as the logo for the Alexander Alliance, students wondered why, why her. And as I often do, and did then, I answered their question with a question.

Why do you think?

She’s beautiful.

She’s strong.

She’s poised.

She’s got a great back.

She’s spiraling.

Once I feel my students have seen what they are going to see then, if there is more that I want to direct their attention to, I will.

Notice how Michelangelo figures often appear androgynous. I like this. Often as men undo their culturally acquired masculine holding patterns, they feel more feminine. And as women undo their culturally acquired feminine holding patterns, they feel more masculine. I move people away from their acquired gender bodies and into what I call their mammal body, the body that men and woman share, their human body.

Of course, from an Alexander point of view, the Libyan Sybil’s got a great “monkey.” Often, when we think of Alexander’s monkey, we think about a synergetic flexion of the hips, knees and ankles. Of course that’s part of it. We want that happening, but we want it happening in conjunction with an expanding back that is emanating power through the arms into the hands, and through the spine and into the skull. And the Libyan Sybil has got all that going for her.

Something else I love about the Libyan Sybil is her upper appendicular skeletal system, her arms. They remind me so much of Marj Barstow’s arms when she worked with us. Marj’s scapulae were wide. Her shoulders were neither up nor down, more just out and away, one from the other. Her elbows and wrists were articulate. Her elbows were ever so slightly back and out, creating room between her arms and torso, while her wrists were going in slightly toward the mid-line,and forward. It all looked very natural and elegant. Her hands looked at once easy and powerful. Really, Marj’s arms were just like the Libyan Sybil!

Then there’s that exquisite spiraling throughout her body that you’ve noticed. Let’s look more closely at what is going on there. There’s a descending spiral, and an ascending spiral. The descending spiral begins with the head and eyes. Something’s got her attention; something’s turning her attention away from her book. The descending spiral is primarily concerned with orientation; when orientation begins to change. You hear something, or you see something, and your orientation to the world shifts. You can see this descending spiral happening in some of our other readers too. Go and take a look.

Now what about the ascending spiral? From where is that initiating?

From her hips.

Lower.

From her left foot.

Lower.

From the ground.

That’s what it looks like to me; from the ground, and then sequentially up through the body.

So if the descending spiral is about orientation, what’s the ascending spiral about?

Maybe action. It’s helping her to hold up the book.

Power to do what she’s doing.

That’s how I see it too. Maybe she was oriented more fully toward the book and then something got her attention, and Michelangelo caught her just at that moment of transition.

Why would he want to do that?

Because it looks cool.

For sure. The cool factor is very important. The Libyan Sybil is a super cool figure. Just imagine how cool the Sistine Chapel was when the first people ever to enter that room looked up and saw these huge three dimensional figures almost falling out of the ceiling. Painting was not Michelangelo’s thing. He was a sculptor. He was forced to paint the Sistine Chapel. So he discovered new techniques for making his two dimension figures appear three dimensional.

Maybe Michelangelo likes that transitional moment because some change is taking place. But you don’t know what she’s really doing or why. It’s mysterious. Is she opening the book or closing the book? What is she looking at? What’s gotten her attention?

Right. Something is going on. There action. She’s in motion. Maybe Michelangelo wants to make a static image move. He’s not just painting form, but motion, coordination, emotion, drama. He’s a motional and emotional anatomist. He’s a story teller.

Now when you really think about it, there aren’t two spirals. There’s just one. Imagine you are holding a wet towel. Get your scarf, or your coat, or a towel, and try this. Hold it in your hands and turn your top hand gently in one direction as you counter that action by gently turning your bottom hand in the other direction. Imagine turning it so gently that no water is squeezed out of it. When we wring out a wet towel our spiral turns into a twist. An area is created where both movements oppose one another and stop each other, creating torsion. But if the spiral is gentle enough, and if it moves through the whole towel, there is no conflict, there is no blockage, there’s just one integrated spiraling motion occurring in two complimentary opposing directions.

The Libyan Sybil, for me, is the symbol of a person who can gracefully transition, change direction, change opinion, adapt, without losing poise, without disturbance. This is what Alexander means when he refers to ‘the critical moment,’ that space between one action ending and another beginning. Imagine being a parent who is trying to do something, like read, or cook, or pay the bills, and your two young children have just started physically fighting with one another. How are you inside of that transition? How gracefully can you shift your attention? How do you adapt to changing circumstances?

To be continued…

I am going to compare our Libyan Sybil to another figure, one of the Ignudo figures, one of the twenty naked, muscular figures on the Sistine Chapel. Let’s take a look.

What do you see?

Another androgynous person.

The ignudo is freaked out.

Worried.

Dreading something.

Really sad.

Feeling hopeless.

Maybe he/she is hearing something scary, feels threatened, and wants to see what it is.

Images are like Rorschach tests. We project our inner life onto outer images. Why else would we all be interpreting what we see differently?

So what are the physical, the visual cues that tell you she’s feeling the way she’s feeling? What do you actually see?

Her eyes of way open, bugging out.

Her eyebrows and forehead are raised up.

Her mouth is open. Maybe she’s gasping for air.

Great. What else. (I say, what else, a lot.)

Her head is tilting back and jamming down into her spine.

Her right scapula looks like it’s bulging out and retracting in toward the mid-line and up a little.

Wow, you guys are getting good!

Now let’s compare the Ignudo to the Libyan Sybil.

The scapula’s moving down and out and around the ribs.

The spine looks long. The neck is not compressed or shortened.

The eyelids are lowered; forehead and eyebrows relaxed.

The mouth is closed.

The head, instead of tilting back, is tilting ever so slightly forward.

Yeah, instead of looking over the shoulder by flipping the head back, the Libyan Sybil is tilting the head forward and rotating around; two ways of looking over the shoulder, but they’re so completely opposite.

Go ahead. Try both ways and see if it changes how you feel emotionally. Do your best to do exactly what they are doing. And once you have them let yourself gently, slowly, softly transition between one and the other.

They get to work. I sit back and watch. Again, getting to know my students. Frank Ottiwell, a wise Alexander teacher I learned much from, once said to me, ‘Bruce, our job is not so much to help our students, but to get to know them.’

So what was that like?

It’s amazing. When I take on the Ignudo, I become scared. I start to panic. And when I become the Libyan Sybil, I grow calm, and I feel mature.

Many heads are nodding in agreement.

Now what Alexander discerned was that when this head poise is happening it has an organizing, integrative influence, a governing influence throughout the entire body/self. And when this head poise is disturbed, disturbance happens throughout the whole body/self.

So lets look one more time.

What do you see happening to the Ignudo figure’s body?

It looks really uncomfortable. The head is looking back to the right, but the right arm and upper torso is twisting to the left, and the pelvis is falling back and looks weak. His body looks stuck, disorganized, and confused.

His head is in front of his torso and his right arm too. And maybe that’s counterbalancing his torso falling back.

He looks really compressed in his chest and belly, and his mid-back looks like it’s pushing back with a lot of force.

When I look at him, I notice I’m holding my breath.

Why do you think I sometimes choose to teach people about the body through art instead of through strictly anatomical drawings?

Because they’re beautiful?

Because sometimes people get a little scared around pictures of skeletons?

For some people who are not academically oriented, it might feel like studying, like it’s going to be difficult, like there’s going to be a test.

They’re images of humans that are not alive, not whole, not living.

Yes. And because I want you, first, to see a person’s beauty. I haven’t seen a person who wasn’t beautiful in 35 years. And usually the more down and out, the more beautiful. And through that beauty I want you next to see a person’s humanity. And only then do I want you to drop down into the physical structure of a person.

Alexander’s work is not, as I understand it, primarily about how we use our bodies. It’s about how we are being in ourselves. So I want you to begin by seeing a person, how a person is, how a person is being, in their entirety. That’s what Michelangelo could do. Profoundly.

Perhaps now you may see why I fell in love with the Libyan Sybil, and why I chose her as our school logo.

It is said she has the power to “reveal that which is hidden.” Perhaps she ‘s turning toward us, opening the great book for us, and inviting us to read, and to learn.

Ninety percent of the time I work with people with their eyes open. I want them to see the world, and be in the world. At the same time, when people first experience deep kinesthetic lightness, often their eyelids close naturally, as if they were holding a flower under their nose, and letting its sweet scent rise up into their being. This also happens with advanced students too, when they experience, for the first time, a truly new freedom within themselves. I hope you enjoy this short video. I welcome your impressions.

Bill Coco

“Show me how to do that?” And I would. I would stop my own workout and teach someone how to do what I had somehow figured out how to do, like a front somersault, or a reverse kip up on the rings, or circles on the side horse. No wonder I missed making the Olympic Team. I was busy coaching. Looking back, it’s clear; I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

I was supposed to be learning how to use my hands to guide someone into balance, to indicate exactly from where to initiate a movement, in what direction, and with what quality of impulse; to punch it, or snap it, or swing it, or draw it out, or press it up, or let it go.

I was supposed to be developing my ability to use language to facilitate coordination. Unbeknownst to me, I was supposed to become an Alexander teacher, but when I was twelve, and first began using my hands to teach other kids how to move well, I had no idea what that was.

As gymnasts we used our hands to help each other as a matter of course, and sometimes as a matter of life and death. My first coach, Bill Coco, gave me my first experience of educative/nurturing touch.

“Okay Bruce. You’re going to do your first back layout with a full twist. I want you to show me your round off. Remember no more than 3 preparatory steps, one back handspring, block, with your feet so you transfer your horizontal power vertically, hands reaching toward the ceiling. Don’t look over your left shoulder until I say, “Look,” then wrap your arms quickly and closely across your chest, and leave the rest up to me. Got it?” “Got it.” My faith in Bill was total.

One step, round off, lightning fast back handspring, block, reach…”Look,” I hear Bill say! I look, wrap my arms across my chest, and there’s Bill’s big hands, soft, light, around my hips. I’m suspended, my body laid out in an arch, weightless, floating two feet above Bill’s head. I’m ecstatic. Bill’s hands spin me to the left, and the next thing I know my feet have landed squarely on the ground. “There you go Bruce. Your first lay out with a full twist. You did 95% of it on your own. By the end of the week it will be yours.”

I guess that makes Bill Coco my first Alexander teacher. He taught be how to lead with my head and let my body follow. He used his hands exactly where, and only when needed, and only with the amount of force necessary. Bill looked like a boxer, more often than not with a fat, unlit, cigar in his mouth, disheveled, sported a sizable beer belly, seemed like a tough guy, and deep down was the softest, gentlest, hugest teddy bear alive. He died when he was forty. I was fifteen. But he passed on to me exactly what I needed, and no doubt he did for a lot of Philadelphia kids like myself.

Bill Coco

And so it went. Teacher after teacher, teaching me exactly what I needed to learn to get to exactly where I am now; a person who knows how to use his hands to bring people into balance, a person who knows the language of movement, and pretty much a soft, gentle teddy bear of a person, minus the cigar.

But were my teachers only teachers? What else were they to me? How did they really pass onto me what I needed to learn?

There are teachers, coaches, counselors, instructors, educators, professors, rabbis, priests, role models, idols, heroes, and mentors. We’ve got different names for people from whom we learn, people who pass on knowledge and skill to us, who bring out knowledge and skill from us. But what is the name for those teachers who pass themselves onto us?

It’s important for me to know what, and who I am to my students if I am to best serve them, if I am to pass on to them the best in me, if I am to leave myself in their hands. Sometimes I am teacher, father, friend, coach, holy man, enemy, sometimes mentor, advocate, adversary, role model. I am exactly, at any given moment, who my student perceives me to be, and needs me to be. I know I am, in essence, none of the roles I assume. I am the person who assumes them.

Marjorie Barstow

Marj Barstow was many things to me, which is why she made such an impression. Most importantly, she was a mirror into my future. She was the manifestation of my potentiality. I could see in her what was lying latent within me. And so I watched, and I listened as if my life depended on it, which it did.

She was not a holy person, not a guru, not a mother, Boy, did she not mother us. She was not a technique teacher, not a coach. She was an artist who showed us her art, over and over again, a kinesthetic sculptor. Humans were her medium. And sometimes horses. (Marj had trained world champion quarter horses.) Sometimes I think she really didn’t care all that much about us as people. She was not a person-centered teacher, as I am. She was a technique-centered teacher. She used us to work on her technique, on her art. That was okay with us. We benefited from her artistic obsession.

Marj inspired me. Her work was astoundingly beautiful, mesmerizing, like watching a master potter spin a clump of clay into a graceful bowl.

Marjorie Barstow working with me.
1977

More than anything in the world, I wanted to be able to do what she did. I watched her work day after day, year after year, but I didn’t just watch her with my eyes alone. I watched her kinesthetically. I watched her with my whole body and being. I developed a kind of synesthesia. I was taking her in, at once, through all of my senses. It was like I was swallowing her whole.

I “grokked” her. When I was in college and read Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, I knew that was how I needed to learn. “Grok” means water. To grok means to drink, to drink life. Not to chew it. Not to break it down to understand it. At the moment of grokking the water and the drinker become one substance. As the water becomes part of the drinker, the drinker becomes part of the water. What was once two separate realities become one reality, one experience, one event, one history, one purpose.

Marj didn’t break things down. Marj didn’t teach us how to use our hands. After we would watch her for a few hours Marj would say something like, “Okay. Let’s divide into smaller groups. Bill, Barbara, Don, Bruce, Martha, and Mio, go and teach for a while. (Or it could have been, Cathy, David, Diana, Catherine, and Pete.) The teaching just happened. We could do it. It was as if we were riding Marj’s wave. We were grokking her.

About a year before Marj died I had a dream.

Marj was dying. She was in her bedroom, in her house in Lincoln Nebraska, a room I had never seen. “Bruce come sit next to me.” I did. Then slowly Marj pulled the corner of her bedcover down and asked me to lie down next to her. I was shocked, but I did as she asked and gently slid by her side and covered both of us. Then Marj said, “It’s okay Bruce. Now I am going to breathe you for a while, and she placed her mouth on my mouth and began to breathe into me. I could feel her warm breath entering and filling my lungs. I could feel my breath entering into her lungs. We did this for hours, in total darkness, until I no longer knew who was Marj and who was me.

And then I woke up.

I got out of bed, picked up the phone, and called Marj. “Marj, are you okay? I had a dream about you and got nervous.” “Bruce, don’t worry about me. I am fine.” “Okay Marj. Sorry if I bothered you.” “No, you didn’t bother me. Thanks for calling.” “No, thank you Marj.”

I’m still thanking her.

Rebbe Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

What was he to me, a rabbi, a teacher, a spiritual father?

Marj gave me my craft, my art, my vocation. Rebbe Zalman taught me how to teach, how to sit quietly with people, as if they were in my living room. He showed me that it was fine to be silent, that it was okay to take the time I needed to think, and to wait until I had something worth saying. He taught me how to tell a story. He taught me to be unafraid to look into people’s eyes. He taught me how to think metaphorically. He taught me how to listen to my still, inner voice, and follow it. He taught me how to listen to the inner voices of others. He taught me how to bless people, and how to be blessed by them. He taught me that I could never know one religion unless I knew two and actively encouraged my interest in Zen Buddhism, in the Christian Mystics, and the Sufi Poets, and in the teachings of Lao Tzu.

Rebbe Zalman

One day Rebbe Zalman entered a classroom at Temple University where I was taking a graduate course on Martin Buber and the Early Hasidic Masters. Rebbe Zalman enters the room, walks across the room to the other side, stands in front of a large window and looks out at the day. After a minute or two he turns around, walks to his desk, sits on the top of his desk, crosses his legs, closes his eyes, tilts his face up toward the ceiling like a blind man, and begins gently rocking from side to side, bending like grass in the wind. He begins singing a niggun, a soft melody that repeats itself and has no ending. At some point we begin singing with him, singing and singing without end, until we feel as if we are altogether in one boat, floating upon an endless melody, down a endless stream.

Rebbe Zalman’s voice fades out, and ours with his, until we’re sitting in a palpable silence. Eyes closed, his rocking slowly getting smaller and smaller. And there in the stillness, in the silence, we’d hear,

“That reminds me of a story.” And Rebbe Zalman would begin to tell us a story, and within the story there would be another story, and within that story another story, until we were transported, like children, into another world. And when we’d least expect it, at a particular point, the story would end.

No commentary. No discussion. Class was over. We’d leave knowing those stories were about us, about our very lives. Rebbe Zalman didn’t have to give us any homework. He knew those stories would be working within us until next week.

Marj Barstow and Rebbe Zalman were transformative educators, par excellence. They knew how to educe, how to lead us in, and then how to lead us out, out of ourselves, into places unknown to us.

A Modern Day Bodhisattva

Many years later I met a woman, another modern day bodhisattva, another person who inspires, who teaches through example, who knows how to bring out the best in people. I spent hours, years, watching her work, watching her lead one person after another out of their confusion; I spend years grokking her, absorbing her through my pores, into who I am now.

11th century Guanyin statue, from northern China

Again, I see there are no accidents. We meet exactly the teachers we need, exactly at the time we need them, so that we may become exactly the person we were meant to become.

Aaah, but that is another story.

Words. They’re important. They’re worth thinking about. It’s worth taking the time and finding the precise word or words that express your truth. It’s worth visiting those words over and over again, as your understanding of what is true changes, and then changing those words, once again, until they express your truth as it lives within you now.

Certified. This word lacks beauty for me . Certified US Beef. Certified mail. Certified gluten free. Perhaps it has something to do with my having grown up in Philadelphia, a city founded by a Quaker, William Penn. It remains the only state where you don’t need a priest or a rabbi, or a government to certify that two people are married. What you need is a community. It’s your community that knows you, who recognizes you, and who cares about you. And it’s your community that supports you. A marriage has little chance of surviving in a vacuum. And so does an Alexander teacher.

Thirty five years ago, when Martha and I first founded the Alexander Alliance, we chose to award graduating students by giving them a document called a Statement Of Recognition. The words had meaning. The words matched what was happening. A person who had studied deeply, who had made a real commitment, was being recognized by their teachers, their colleagues, and their students. Perhaps most importantly, by the students they had begun to teach. The reason why I say most importantly by their students is because, ultimately, it’s your students who decide whether you are a teacher. No students. No teacher. If anyone certifies a teacher, it’s their students.

Marjorie Barstow didn’t certify us. She didn’t believe in certifying us. She didn’t believe it was necessary. She would say when asked if she certified teachers, “No, I don’t, however, some of my students have gone on to become excellent teachers of Alexander’s work.” She wanted us to know when we were ready to teach. Yes, there was a day when Marj said to me that she thought it would be good for my learning, if I began to teach more. But that was a suggestion. The decision was mine to make. Yes, she did write a letter saying I was a good Alexander teacher, but that was simply a letter of recommendation for a position I was applying for in a university theatre department.

And so it was, in this spirit, in Marj’s spirit,  that I chose the words I did for the document Martha and I gave to our graduating students.

Years have gone by. Almost three hundred people have graduated from the Alexander Alliance International. I felt it was time to look again at our Statement Of Recognition, and surprisingly, the words still rang true. But something was missing. In the original document I ended by saying that the graduate was “capable of imparting Alexander’s work to others.” I have changed this to, “and has made a commitment to imparting Alexander’s work to others, respectfully and benevolently.” Knowledge is not enough, not in our work. In Judaism we speak of possessing a “heart of wisdom.” That’s what I want to see from my students; that their knowledge of Alexander’s work emanate from the heart.

Soon another crop of students will graduate from the Alexander Alliance Germany. Their Statements of Recognition will read:

Graduates. Open your hands and give. Really, there’s nothing else to say.

At the ripe age of 64, I hereby announce my retirement. Below, you will find my letter of resignation.

June 15, 2015

To Whom It May Concern,

I have quit.

I’ve quit being overly ambitious. What I have is exactly what I want. And what I want is exactly what I have. And when I believe otherwise, then I know I am confused. That’s when I stop profoundly, get still, and wait until the mud settles and the water is clear.

I’ve quit needing to be in control. That’s what the first half of life is about. Taking your life by the horns. Exercising your will. Creating the world in your own image. The second half of life, that’s more about giving up control, letting go of your grip on things, letting go of your grip on yourself. It’s not about being willful; it’s about being willing.

Willing to be wrong, which means I’ve quit having to be right all the time. I don’t have an opinion about this, and I don’t have an opinion about that. I’m old. I don’t have the energy to butt heads. Besides, it’s funny how often it turns out I am wrong! It’s really helpful to have a lot of people around me who know better.

I’ve quit having to be good looking. Sure people sometimes tell me, especially in Japan, that I look like Richard Gere, (minus the hair). But, in reality, I look more like Bernie Sanders. I’m no longer lean and mean. I’m pudgy. I’m getting crusty on the outside, but supple on the inside. On the surface I’m looking old, but deep within I’m finding my innocence through my maturity.

I’ve quit having to earn money to justify my value. I know my self-worth, and it’s got nothing to do with money. Poverty is having nothing left to give. I’m giving away what I know as generously as I can. Sometimes I make money doing that. Sometimes I don’t.

I’ve quit having to be a star. I know what it’s like to be a star that has lost its constellation. It’s like being nowhere, lost in space, spinning in utter darkness. Existence is co-existence. To be means to be with other people. Less celestrially speaking, I’ve changed from being a pitcher, to being a third base coach. I stand on the sidelines, speaking in code, discreetly tipping my cap, pinching my nose, and pulling on my ear. I want others to make their way to home base.

I’ve quit feeling responsible for the lives of my grown children. That was a tough job to give up. Loving my children; that job I will never give up.

I’ve quit taking myself personally. Whatever people see in me, I know they’re seeing themselves. I know I’m just a mirror, and that others are mirrors for me. I know we’re only reflections of one another.

I’ve quit acting like a donkey with a carrot dangling in front of my nose, forever enticed by something I’m never going to get. I’ve quit chasing after the carrot of enlightenment.

I don’t dance. I quit being a dancer, not modern, not tango. No twisting again. One day I woke up and after 40 years of doing Tai Chi everyday, I just stopped. And I don’t miss it at all. I don’t identify with being a good mover, nor a movement educator. I’ve quit identifying with my coordination. I don’t care about being physically fit. In fact, I’ve quit identifying with my body at all. I’m a big, not so fat, no-body. For a long time I thought I was a somebody, somebody special. But now I know better. I’m finally free from that illusion. Free at last. Free at last.

Know that, though I resign from my previously held, long-standing position, I still love my work.

I hereby throw myself, with renewed vigor, into my life as an “Alexandrian,” as a “Barstowian,” and as a “Fertmanist.” I throw myself into my life, into my destiny, with joyful abandon. I throw myself, I scatter myself, into the world like Von Gogh’s sower of seeds; what grows, grows; what doesn’t, doesn’t.

What Walt Whitman declared in Song Of The Open Road, now I too can declare:

All seems beautiful to me,

I can repeat over to men and women,

You have done such good to me I would do the same to you,

I will recruit for myself and you as I go,

I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,

I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,

Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,

Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.

Photo: B. Fertman, Pedernal, Coyote, New Mexico

Yours truly,

Bruce Fertman

P.S. Where This Path Begins by Bruce Fertman

Photo: B. Fertman

Not in a place, not in a space,
Not a person, not a thing,
Not a ping or a pong,
Not the soundless sounding of a gong.
Not a word, surely not absurd.

Don’t look.
You’ll not come across it in a book.

Don’t seek,
And you will find,
It is not yours, not mine.

It has no foes, woes, or toes.
There – off it goes!

It hates to sit.
Does not come in a kit.
Some think it illegit.
About to quit?

It’s a zone…where you are not alone.
It’s a ball…floating through us all.
It’s a climate…of refinement.
It’s a breeze…full of ease.

It’s changeable as the weather.
Totally untethered, soft as a feather,
Like a field of heather.

Nowhere does it dwell.
It’s like a well, but without the well.
Well, well, well…impossible to tell.

It is…it is…it is.

From Where This Path Begins by Bruce Fertman

Photo: Tada Anchan Akihiro

Babies don’t interfere with themselves.

Babies don’t judge, correct, or evaluate themselves.
They can’t make a mistake because they don’t know what it means to make a mistake.
Babies can’t fail because they don’t know what it means to fail.
Babies are moved to move. They don’t know why. What does why mean to them?

Babies want what they want. They are happy when they get it.
What they don’t want, they don’t accept. They’re honest.
Babies are unselfconscious, unabashed, and unpretentious.

We love them because we want to be like them.

•

Babies sit on the floor, effortlessly upright, delighted to see the world from a new perspective.

Babies stop eating when they are no longer hungry.
They immediately throw up anything they don’t like.

A baby can scream for hours without straining their voice.
Babies express strong emotions, and when the reason for doing so is gone,
They stop, and forget about the whole thing.
Babies cannot hold grudges. They don’t know what it means to hold a grudge.

Babies can spread out all their toes, even the little ones.
Babies can put their feet in their mouth and they don’t care what anyone thinks about it.

Babies fall, over and over again, don’t care, don’t get hurt, and don’t take it personally.
They just get up.

We love them because we want to be like them.

•

As babies,
We did not identify ourselves as male or female, or even as human.
We had no identity.
We were uncoordinated, inarticulate, illiterate, uneducated, unskilled, and unsocial.
Appearing completely selfish, we had no self.
As we ceased being babies, gradually, we became more self-conscious.
Coordinated, articulate, literate, learned, skilled, controlled, socialized and civilized.
We assumed an identity, a false identity.
We gained impressive skills,
We lost, to a great degree, the inherent qualities we had as babies.

•

We yearn to become unself-conscious, unambiguous, uncomplicated.
We long to unlearn, not to know, to surrender control.
We no longer want to equate our self worth with our skills and accomplishments.
We don’t want to be dictated by what others think of us.
We want to be ourselves, without apology.
We want to experience our innocence, through our maturity, to come around, full circle.
We want to be able to play again.

•

We want to see the world, one more time, through the glistening eyes of an infant.

From Where This Path Begins by Bruce Fertman

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Richard M. Gummere, Jr.

Once I asked a man what he did for a living and he said, “I’m an anesthesiologist. And what’s your job,” he asked? “I’m a esthesiologist. You say to people, ‘You’re not going to feel a thing.’ And I say to people, ‘You are about to begin to feel everything.'”

My mom wanted me to be a doctor, and my dad thought I’d make a great rabbi. So, in my attempt to satisfy them both, I became a metaphysician…of sorts. In Greek, meta can mean, after, along with, beyond, among, or behind. I’m not equipped to know what lies after or beyond the physical, but I have given an enormous amount of time considering what accompanies the physical, what lives “among” and “goes along” with the physical, and with what dwells “behind” the physical.

I am not an academic metaphysician, though I did bumble through as an undergraduate Philosophy major, studying primarily western European philosophy, my favorite characters being Heraclitus, Plato, Heidegger, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, William James, Emerson, and Buber. No doubt, some of their ideas sifted down somewhere into my unconscious.

I’m a metaphysician by trade. I’m a clinical, personal metaphysician. My work centers around changing people’s subjective experience of time and space, of what it feels like to be, and to change. It’s about the practical relationship between mind and matter, about how we perceive and interact with the stuff of the world. My work is about shifting people’s sense of self, encouraging them to question their sense of identity. In a nutshell, my work revolves around improving a person’s quality of experience. And given that life is but an accumulation of experiences, one streaming into the next, Alexander’s work, Marjorie Barstow’s work, and now my work, becomes about improving the quality of people’s lives.

If we were only physical, then we would not have come up with the words, mind, heart and soul. Instead of saying, mind your own business, we’d be saying body your own business, or body your manners. The title of that Dean Martin song wouldn’t be Heart and Soul; it would be Body and Body.

You see, we are not merely physical; we’re metaphysical. Sure, we can physically reduce ourselves down to oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. But we don’t go walking around feeling like oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus. That’s not our experience of who we are. That’s what we are.

When I first started out as an Alexander teacher, I was predominately movement oriented. My mentor, Marj Barstow, was too. She used to talk about life as movement. She’d say it’s all about movement. No movement. No change. I get that as a philosophy of life. We can’t stand still. Life comes to pass, not to stay. But I think many of us who studied with Marj, especially those of us who were athletes and martial artists and dancers, took her literally. The work became about movement, about the quality of our coordination, about physical grace, comfort and clarity. We all knew it was about something bigger but, technically, pedagogically, most of us ended up focusing on the physical dimension of the work.

Buzz Gummere served as the historian and philosophical advisor to the Alexander Alliance for 25 years. Buzz studied briefly with John Dewey. He trained with F.M., A.R., and with Marjorie Barstow. He trained along side of Frank Pierce Jones. He was super smart, could finish the New York Times crossword puzzle faster than any man alive. Like Frank Jones, Buzz taught Greek and Latin. He helped found Hampshire College, was the Dean at Bard College, and a career counselor at Columbia. Why he came almost every month, year after year, to the Alexander Alliance I don’t know. He loved our community, and we loved him. And we learned from him, continually. Maybe that’s why.

After one of my classes Buzz came up to me and complimented me on my class. “You really got everyone organized and moving so well. You’re a great movement teacher.” That should have felt like a compliment, but it didn’t. Why didn’t Buzz say I was a great Alexander teacher? Like Socrates, Buzz had his way of throwing me into a state of constructive doubt.

At the end of a retreat we were saying our goodbyes, and I asked Buzz, as I did often, “Do you have a question for me, something to consider?” He looked at me for a moment, quite sternly, and said, “What’s the difference between a movement teacher and an Alexander teacher?” Then he smiled and laughed and thanked me, as he always did.

I think, after 30 years, I can answer that question. Our work is only secondarily about movement and postural support. They’re perks. As Alexander clearly said, the work’s not about endlessly getting in and out of a chair. It’s not a form of physical culture. Our work is primarily about how we choose to respond to stimuli from within us, and all around us. How do we choose to respond to our own thoughts and emotions, to sensations within our own bodies, sensations of appetite, sexuality, discomfort, fatigue, and pain? How do we choose to respond to criticism, to praise, to deadlines, to the wind? How do we interact, how do we adapt, how do we relate, how do we receive, how do we play the game?

Now I am almost the age Buzz was when we first met. I want to tell him my answer, like some little kid in school who finally solved the problem. I want him to see I’ve grown, changed, matured; that I’m finally an Alexander teacher. I want to know what he’d say in response to my answer.

“But Bruce, why do you want to know what I think,” I hear him saying through his severely loving eyes, suddenly smiling and laughing, thanking me as always, turning and walking away into the white, cloudy distance.

Summer of 2000 – Buzz Gummere, at 90, and Bruce Fertman

photo by Bruce Fertman

When an investigation comes to be made, it will be found that every single thing we are doing in the work is exactly what is being done in nature where the conditions are right, the difference being that we are learning to do it consciously. – F.M. Alexander

There lies the rub. Conscious naturalness is virtually a contradiction in terms. As soon as we become conscious of our breathing we immediately begin interfering with it. Consciousness is a double-edged sword. It can free us, and it can stifle us. In our attempt, as Alexander teachers, to understand, embody and impart naturalness to our students we sometimes, unbeknownst to us, begin manifesting certain artificialities.

We can, at times, become a bit stayed, crusty, overly starched and pressed, like the beautiful white shirts my grandfather once wore. Sometimes, rather than simply occupying ourselves, we be become preoccupied with ourselves. Giving so much attention to the subtle relationship between our head, neck and back, we can become top heavy, losing our full ground support.

Inadvertently, in our quest for poise, symmetry, and calmness, we can hamper our spatial, gestural, and emotional freedom. It’s not easy being consciously natural. It’s understandable that sometimes we fail. In this workshop we’ll take a look at what some of the antidotes might be for countering these unwanted side effects.

If you are an Alexander student, trainee or teacher I hope you will join me.

Bruce Fertman

Founding Director of The Alexander Alliance International

photo: B. Fertman

Within but not enclosed, without but not excluded.
Hildegard von Bingen

•
The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.
Gary Snyder

•
Our souls dwell where our inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.
Novalis

•
I don’t paint what I see. I paint what is between me and what I see.
Monet

•
All I’m trying to show you is a little bit of nothing.
Marjorie L. Barstow
 

The Alexander Technique is as much about the metaphysical as it is about the physical, as much about the mind as it is about the body, as much about the spirit as it is about the senses, as much about stillness as it is about movement.

Good postural support and moving well are wonderful, but they’re not, essentially, what the Alexander Technique is about. They’re perks.

The Alexander Technique is about space, space deep within us, physically, mentally, and spiritually. It’s about presence through absence. It’s about the space all around us, beside us, behind us, before us. It’s about the space between; it’s about closeness through distance.

In this workshop you will learn, practically, how to bring greater spaciousness into your body and being. It may very well change the way you relate to yourself, to others, and to the world at large. It’s not difficult.

Whether you are new to the work, studying the work, training to become an Alexander teacher, or an Alexander teacher, I invite you to join me for a day you likely won’t forget.

Bruce Fertman

Founding Director Of The Alexander Alliance International

Photo: B. Fertman

Who would have thought? I mean, who would have thought that when I was 25 years old and utterly convinced that Marjorie Barstow’s approach to teaching Alexander’s work was superior in every way to the stiff, postural, ritualistic procedures that had come to be known as the Alexander Technique, who would have thought, that forty years later, I would not feel that way?

I mean, wasn’t it completely obvious that working in groups was the best way to develop your eye, that it was the best way to get your students working on their own, of weaning them from dependence on your hands? Didn’t everyone know that group teaching was the way to get the work into the larger system of education, where learning happened in groups, like in universities and elementary schools, in dance classes and yoga classes, and in physical therapy colleges? Wasn’t it as clear as day that working in activities was the quickest way to demonstrate to people that the work was eminently practical? And wasn’t is a no brainer that adhering to a 1600 hour, 3 year residential training model as the only possible model for training was absurd? I mean how could one not recognize this training structure as elitist, as out of touch with the needs of everyday working people? Hadn’t they noticed the emergence of night schools, of adult education, of retreat centers, of all the ways society was enabling hard working people, people with families, to study and train and grow?

Those were my beliefs as a twenty something, arrogant, brazen Alexander teacher. Slowly, very slowly, I got off my white horse, I took off my shining armor, I stopped fighting, and I started questioning everything, most importantly, Marj’s work, and my own opinions.

Really, was my use all that great? Was I not physically uncomfortable some of the time? Wasn’t my body still inflexible in certain ways? Wasn’t I still driven, obsessed? Was I really free to respond to situations the way I wanted? Was I able to control my impulsivity, my anger, my defensiveness? No, I wasn’t. So why did I feel like I knew what was best for the entire Alexander world?

It came down to wanting to be right, special, the best. So of course I had to have a teacher who was the best, better than anyone else. How, without having directly experienced all the approaches to the Alexander Technique I was capable of arriving at the irrefutable conclusion that Marj’s work, and therefore my work was the best work out there, I have no idea. But there you have it, the human mind at work in all of its glory.

I see now that Marj, like everyone, had her strengths and her weaknesses. She had a great eye, but she had her blind spots too. I needed to get some distance from Marj, I needed to see her and her work more honestly if I was going see myself honestly, if I was going to see what I knew, and what I didn’t know, which the older I get I see is just shy of infinity.

For example, Marj changed Alexander’s directions from “neck free, head forward and up, back to lengthen and widen” to, “what would happen if ever so delicately your whole head move slightly away from your body and your whole body immediately followed?” I clearly understand why Marj chose the language she did, but now I also know what she lost by excluding reference to the neck and the back, and to directional language such as forward and up, or lengthening and widening. I can get both ways of directing to work for me, but honestly, I love Alexander’s directions. At this point they work better for me. I’ve also developed other ways of directing and allowing the primary movement to surge through me, but the point is I know now that there isn’t one way that’s right for everyone, forever, all across the board.

You see that’s the thing. When we are getting something new, we don’t see what we’re losing. And when we are holding on to what we don’t want to lose, we don’t see what we could be getting.

My friend Lena Frederick died in her early 40’s. I would have loved to see who she would have become if she had lived into a ripe old age. Lena trained with Walter Carrington, and then went on to study with Marj for many years. I remember her telling me that Alexander’s procedures were too hard for most everyone. She said that it would have been much easier for her if she had first studied with Marj for about ten years, and then went on to study with Walter.

I didn’t understand what Lena meant by that, but I knew Lena was a wise woman, so I decided to take that in, and clearly I did, because 25 years later here I am realizing it’s true. Now I’m ready to work through Alexander’s procedures. And I’m going to find a way to do that.

It’s like Keith Jarrett, for his entire career an improvisational jazz musician, deciding to play classical music, which he did. Or Steve Paxton, originator of Contact Improvisation, as an old man, deciding to choreograph ever so precisely to Johann Sebastian Bach, which he did. I’ve spent my life teaching improvisationally to Alexander’s principles outside of his classical procedures. I know how to do that.

But if I want to keep growing, if we want to keep growing, we sometimes have to leave what we are good at, we’ve got to go forward toward a place unknown, into a place we resist, into a place we feel is wrong, just what Alexander suggested we do.

It’s in that place where we didn’t want to go, that’s where the gift may lie, just what we need, just what we always wanted.

Photo: B. Fertman

I think I’m getting it. The more we, as Alexander teachers go about waking ourselves and our students up to the true and primary movement, the primary control, inherent control, the primary pattern, the integrative pattern, whatever you wish to call it, the better. Whether it’s through Alexander’s procedures, Barstow’s procedures, (she had them), or other ways-etudes-procedures that talented teachers have evolved is not my main concern here. For me the key question is, for what are these procedures for? Imagine someone gives you a new tool; state of the art, top of the line. She teaches you how it works, but neglects to tell you what it’s for. That’s my question. What is Alexander’s work for? What does it offer us? What can it do for us? Why, 40 years later, am I still asking myself this question?

Phase One. We help one of our students, a singer, Maria, become beautifully poised, exquisitely organized. She now stands effortlessly, walks elegantly, and sings like a nightingale. People love watching and listening to her perform. Helping people with postural support, helping people to move well, sing well; it’s great. Phase one.

Phase two. Maria begins to notice how, not only her singing, but many things in her life are getting easier; doing the dishes, vacuuming the floor, riding her bike, opening jars, falling asleep. She’s getting increasingly curious about the technique. She begins to realize what still gives her trouble, what is still effortful; scrubbing out the bathtub; working at the computer, carrying bags of groceries up three flights of stairs, putting in her new contact lenses. You suggest she bring some of these activities into class. You tell her that if she brings her life into class, she will bring what she learns in class back into her life. You suggest having a lesson at her place to work on the site specific activities.  Phase two. As Marj once told me, “Bruce, our job is to help people become sensitive and to make good use of that sensitivity in their everyday life.”

Phase three. Maria comes into class obviously distraught. Her daughter is showing signs of anorexia. She sits at the dinner table and won’t eat. “It’s driving me crazy. I sit there angry, sad, scared. I have no idea what to do. I’m a nervous wreck.” You suggest that there’s no time like the present. “Let’s work on it right now. Remember, bring your life into class and you will bring what you learn in class back into your life. Be brave. I am sure your Alexander friends here will be happy to help you. Maria, what’s your daughter’s name?” “Jody.” How old is she?” ” Twelve.” “Where are you eating and who else is sitting around the table?” “Her sister, Laura. She’s nine.” “Is there anyone here that reminds you even a little of Jody and of Laura?” Maria looks around and finds two people. “Okay, will all of you help get a table, some chairs, go into the church kitchen down the hall and bring back all the stuff we need to set up a dinner table. Don’t dilly dally.” Off everyone goes, and in a flash everything is set up. “Maria where does everyone sit?” “I sit at the head of the table, Jody is on my right and Laura on my left.” “Great. We’re almost ready to go. I need to ask you a couple questions. Tell us what everyone’s day was like before getting to the table. See if you can do it in less than a minute.” Maria sums it up. “I drop off Laura at day care, rush to work, spend most of the day on the computer, pick up Laura, get home, throw together dinner, try to get my kids away from the TV, and sit down. Jody bikes to school, hates her school, comes home, does her homework. She’s super smart. She watches her favorite cooking show, which is funny now that i think about it, and then comes to the table and doesn’t eat.” “Okay. does everyone know who you are and what you are doing, I say to Maria, Jody, and Laura? Take about 30 seconds and just be quiet, and then begin.”

At first everyone is smiling a little but after about 45 seconds it suddenly becomes real. The triggers have gone off. The buttons have been pushed. Jody is curled over herself, sulking. Maria is off looking up to the left, away from Jody, her hands on the table, shaped into fists. Laura is eating as if she hasn’t eaten in a week. You can feel the tension in the air.

And so the work begins. “Maria, don’t move. Just notice what’s going on physically. Start from the ground up until you have a picture of what you look like. Does that position feel familiar?” “Absolutely.” “Now, I’m going to come over and, together, quietly and ever so slowly and gently, we’re going to undue this pattern and see what happens.” My role, primarily, is to be softer than soft. The first impression I want to give Maria is one of nurturance and kindness. This is what she needs most. I proceed how I often do; dissipating the tension in her neck region. Everyone can see what happens. As the neck ungrips, the shoulders drop and spread, the hands unclench, breath enters, and her head turns and she looks at Jody. “Maria, what’s happening?” “I’m getting calmer. I’m really seeing Jody. I can see she’s sad and lonely.” Maria starts crying. Jody looks up. Laura looks up.

And so it goes. The ice breaks. The melting begins.

Phase three, and where I believe Alexander wanted us to go with the work. For me chair work was Alexander’s movement metaphor, a metaphor for what happens to us in our lives. In chair work someone tells you that in a moment you are going to stand up, and you find that your neurological preset for reacting to that stimulus, and the stimulus itself, are coupled together, like two links in a chain. Chair work then becomes about decoupling the stimulus from the response, so that you can unplug the neurological preset which, when successful, creates the option, the possibility of a different and perhaps better response, a new response, a fresh response. As Alexander said, “You are not here to do exercises, (doing chair work), or to learn how to do something right, but to get able to meet a stimulus that always puts you wrong and to learn to deal with it.”

It’s one thing to be able to decouple a stimulus that doesn’t have a lot of charge to it, as in chair work. For sure, it’s a good place to begin. That makes sense. Consider playing with other simple, everyday movement metaphors: opening a door, (entering into a new space), eating an apple, (a famous metaphor, how much do we bite off? Do we swallow things whole or chew them over), tying our own shoes (doing things for ourselves; remember when you couldn’t tie your own shoes?).

But then comes the truly formidable task, the truly humbling task of encountering what Alexander aptly called our habits of life. Until we’re able to discern what triggers our disintegration pattern, every time, and begin to deal with those triggers, be they our critical thoughts about ourselves or others, or our grandiose ones, or our destructive emotions like anger, jealously, envy; or resentment, hatred, and greed, or our fears, we don’t get our black belts, we don’t get into the major leagues. How can we be integrated, how can we be free if we are holding a grudge? How can we be free when we are gossiping? How can we be free when we are busy defending ourselves, or rebelling, or retreating, or panicking? Can we learn to meet a charged stimulus, something that unnerves us, and learn to deal with it in a better, more humane way?

It’s dawning upon me how profound our work can be.

I haven’t been able to stay on every road I’ve begun walking down, but I’m staying on this one. Like Nikos Kazantzakis once said, “At the end of the road, that is where God sits.” And that’s where I’m going, where I’ve been going all along.