Yesterday, I went back to D. for an AT refresher and a cup of tea. When I arrived there, I was a bit apprehensive; I have dilligently worked on myself over the last months, added running and meditation to the menu, and overall, I feel that I'm doing well. But there's always the nagging sensation of doubt in the back of my head. The 'what if...' , the 'shouldn't I have...'.

All that disappeared the second we started working. I didn't even need to think about how to free my neck or stay with the moment, it just happened. Somewhere halfway through, something opened up, deepened in a way, and something happened that I guess I can best describe as a real, true, genuine and sincere encounter with myself, with D. and with the world in general.

What a precious experience.

Had my last AT lesson today. Well, not really a lesson, more of a last cup of tea. I've decided to stop with AT. Don't know if I'll ever resume, I guess not. I don't feel it to be a very difficult decision, nor a very heavy one. At this time, I'm dealing with questions that cannot be answered by taking a lesson in something. Questions like "who am I in the first place, what do I want and need?" Things to which I myself want to, have to, and eventually will find the answers. I've already had a sneak preview, and oh boy, it's going to be a lovely ride.

So, no, I won't miss being a student. I won't miss AT either, because it will not leave me. It's my own thing, and it's up to me to do something with it or not. I will miss D. though; I just hate it when I have to say goodbye to a really inspiring teacher. Especially because you don't exactly meet them at every streetcorner. So far, I've only met three of them in 31 years, and I'm already counting myself lucky.

And I can honestly say that five years of AT have been a life-changing experience. Fun doesn't do justice to the quality of the lessons, but there was an overall lightness that made it a lot easier to go through the more confronting parts. I'm not an easy learner to please, get bored with things very quickly, my mind wonders all the time, but none of that during D's lessons. And besides learning a lot about inhibition & direction, I now also possess a whole range of funny voices & phrases to suit different occasions, like fake surprise ("O ja joh..."), recovering from a rather intense move out of the chair ("Helleuh!"), and confirmation of understanding AT theory ("Simpol"). Nice fringe benefits, definitely.

And this blog...I don't know yet. I'm still moving forward and up, I still read Alexander's work, and over the next few weeks, I'll probably want to feast you on my AT memoires. Oh puh-lease M, cut the crap, you're not dead yet.

You translate everything,
whether physical
or mental
or spiritual,
into muscular tension
- FM Alexander

...this is your wake-up call.

You can't change and stay the same.

Bugger.

Buggerbuggerbugger. Bugger.

Bugger.

I always say that each lesson was the best I've ever had so far, and today is no exception. Not much explanation today, just flying across the room and having fun doing it. Lightness all over the place, I could've sworn that at one point I was floating against the ceiling.

Must be summer. Feels great.

Whether it was the ridiculous heat outside, or just a bit too much direction at once, I don't know, but when I got out of the chair this time, I felt the blood withdrawing from my face, and got a bit dizzy. So instead of the usual standing and sitting, we did a lot of hands on the chair instead. Very useful stuff indeed.

- Fingers are stretched, but not as in stretched out. Think more like fingers are glued to chair.
- Position of hands & wrists may look like it requires some effort; however, it does help to support the out & round idea. Effort in itself is not wrong, you're not after relaxation or limpness.
- Awareness of the connection between each part & how it relates to the whole. This is not a doing, just an idea is enough.
- Think separations & unity: arm runs from bottom of the spine to fingertips, but between each part, think a separation (just as you do with the head-neck-back).
- It's not about copying a previous good idea (e.g. of what it means to allow the neck to be free), but to renew this idea time and again, in each situation. Likewise, it's not about copying the experience of a lesson, but of taking home some ideas and slowly but gradually incorporating them into your life. Your body will find a way of expressing these ideas on its own.

Things went well today; it didn't take me very long to find the stillness inside, and I think I managed to stay there for most of the lesson, even with the heat. The notion that it just takes an idea to wake up my awareness really hit home; it's not about thinking with my brain, but thinking with my body, in a way. I tried both approaches, and I can see the difference more and more clearly.

Yesterday's lesson started out quite well; it wasn't too hard to find the connection between my sitting bone and the top of my spine. Halfway through though, something just got stuck inside, and things got a bit more sticky and confusing. I told D. and he made his guidance a bit more 'physical' by putting one hand on my neck and one on my chin. This gave me a better sense of what to stay free of, and resulted in quite a bit of release. Also, tiny changes on my side, like thinking of the connection between the bottom and the top of my spine, rather than starting somewhere in the middle, resulted in noticable differences.

We paid a lot of attention to first going up in order to get anywhere else. Although I get the idea intellectually, I still notice that I find it hard to let go of the concept of needing to get anywhere in the first place. At some point during the lesson, I remember asking why I cared so much about where to go. I decide not to, and then not to, and then, just a moment before things happen, I still do. Experimented with this a bit, going from standing to sitting with a bit of an unexpected detour. This clarified a lot about what to pay attention to (not contracting my head & neck in relation to the rest of the spine) and what not (where the bleep is he taking me?).

We also discussed what happened with my shoulder, and how come I didn't see this coming. My shoulder- no, correction, I am much calmer now. Last night in bed, something in my lower back suddenly started disappearing, kind of dissolving, and a huge breath of air did itself. Felt great, I can't remember the last time I breathed like that. Might even have been the first time ever.

Lots of talking and lots of brain activity today. Lots of it. Plus wobbly legs.

Sitting: I should maintain and renew my upwards direction also after having met the chair; at the moment, something inside me 'sits down' on reaching it.

There's not really much use in noticing 'wrong' things after they happen. It makes you a great noticer, but the real achievement is to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Demonstration of forward and down vs. forward and up (first makes you fall over, second takes you, surprise, forward and up).
Give up all responsibility except the responsibility for upward direction.

Our representation of what we feel will never be completely right. It may get less wrong eventually, but it will never be 100% accurate. Learn to live with that, accept it, because that's the only way you'll ever going to learn something.

Impossible is only impossible in my head. I can really get out of the chair without repositioning my feet, helping with my arms etc.

Fun!!!!!!!!!!!

Had a nice lesson yesterday, with lots of attention for what it is to allow the neck to be free or to let the shoulder come out, rather than physically helping or pushing. We did some walking around, and something really funny happened: it's impossible to direct upwards and drag your feet at the same time. That's some nice positive reinforcement; usually I only notice that bad use prevents free and healthy action to happen, but this time, it was exactly the other way round. Came home pretty much knackered, and this morning, my shoulders felt like I just had had a major workout session. But I slept really well- finally!

The Alextech list is not just nice for discussions and questions, but also for finding teachers! Turns out that one of the members. P., lives quite close to my home town, and since I really like visiting other teachers, and I could really do with some ontfrutseling, I went to visit her today.

I haven't done tablework for ages, so doing some work lying down was a real treat. We paid some attention to talking, what happens when I do so, and whether it's the only possible way. Chairwork was cool too; talked about trust, the actual size of the lower half of the spine (it's huge; even bigger than my forearm), and how you can trust it to do what it should be doing. Something new for me was getting out of the chair and stopping halfway, at a kind of 'point of no return'. P. made me wait and wait, with muscle tension building up, until the standing up more or less did itself. It's not something I'm used to, and it felt quite awkward.

It was nice to have worked again. And it's also nice to know who you're talking to on the list.

Today's lesson was one I won't forget for a long time, but I couldn't tell you why. I know why, but I can't find the words. Each time I try, I only find huge amounts of space.

Something that I've been learning lately, is that the place inside of me that defines me is the origin of a lot of things: memories, sadness, questions and doubt, but also wonder, insight, inspiration and creativity. It's a complete package, you cannot access one without encountering the others.

Today, I experienced that if I want to send directions from their proper starting point (me), I sometimes need to go someplace I don't really want to go.

When I do so and face sadness or fear, the result is not just 'nice' in terms of 'good directions', 'improved posture' or anything like that. It's not even 'rewarding' in that I gain insight, or am touched by how someone else can guide me towards something I'd rather run away from. It's essential, because doing so gives me a fundamental touchstone by which I can define what's me, which feelings and emotions are mine, and which aren't. And that's the place I can always return to. Or preferrably never leave.

Pfff, I started writing one hour ago, had two internet time-outs, and I still haven't said what I really wanted to say. Oh well. Bananas.

Even more new stuff: lunges. And here, I noticed something weird: doing lunges with my right leg seemed much easier than doing them with my left leg. When I did them with my left leg, I experienced the same kind of short-circuiting in my head as when I try to use my mouse with my left hand: when I do that, I start to stutter, my reading direction changes to right-to-left, and I'm all of a sudden unable to speak in proper sentences. Left and right aren't my strong points to start with anyway ; on a clock without numbers, I always confuse three o' clock with nine, five with seven etc. and I always have to think about what is right or left.

Not that this is a major problem or anything, but it makes me curious about how handedness relates to things like co-ordination and balance.

Yesterday's lesson was slow and woozy. Well, not really, but I was. At first I told myself this was because of a cold that I've been having for two weeks already. And granted, a clogged nose and blocked sinuses do not really contribute to a clear state of mind. But down inside, I knew perfectly well that the real cause was that we were doing new things. Yeah, strange! Good! Yuk! About five minutes into the lesson, we switched to pronouncing vowels, and I didn't like it at all. Gosh, this looks stupid on paper.

But then again, that's what AT does to you; it's not about what you do, but how, so really ordinary things can turn into quite an obstacle. I remember the same sensation when I moved from the table to the chair, somewhere in my early lesson days. It looks like such a small and mundane transition, from lying down to standing up, but at the time, it made winning an Olympic medal or a Nobel prize look easy. How I have internally cursed that chair, cursed the blue walls, cursed Alexander, Macdonald and my teacher, cursed my knees that refused to bend while I sent directions, until I finally, completely frustrated, told the world in general to sod off, because I was doing this no longer. Which was, of course, the key that unlocked everything.

What I find remarkable though, is that even though I now know -in my mind- that this feeling of discomfort is part of the process, and that it's OK, it looks like there's no shortcut to this process. Even more, because it's about my voice this time, my perception is that the stakes are much higher, that there's much more to lose, that it's much closer to me as a person. At one point, I noticed that I'd rather stop using my voice that try something new with the risk of having to let go of the old. Go figure...On the sunny side, at least one AT teacher won't be out of a job anytime soon.

Travelling the Zen way is all very well if you're a Tibetan monk walking barefoot in the sunshine with a thermos of tea-and-yak-butter on your back. Travelling the railway is a different story, especially when you discover that no trains are running to any of your destinations, your nose freezes off and your shoes begin to leak. That's Zen on a rainy Dutch day for you. Today's universal lesson: we all go back to where we came from, it takes a lot of detours and you end up with a runny nose.

But AT was cool again; I have been thoroughly rebuilt, at least that's how it feels. My shoulder was giving me a hard time again, after some weeks of relatively good behaviour, so we worked on that part a bit. (Note to self: not much news in words, but check previous weeks for reminders. Out, from sitting bone, renew directions upwards all the time, not just once, and include shoulder as part of back. Remind myself in situations like computer work and sport, don't go autopilot). Lots of talking and new sensations, so I won't attempt to catch too much in words. Also got proof that directions can travel through wooden sticks.

Wonderful lesson today; managed to make my directions more detailed, more stripped of any doing, and quite easily found and maintained a connection between the bottom and the top of my spine by using my inner eye. I wasn't too sure about what inner eye is for a while, because I confused it with looking inside. I think I'm getting the right idea now. D. explained staying backwards and head-neck-back relationship by having me put my hands on his head and back -worked really well to 'see' this on someone else, especially because it really hit home the fact that it's a relationship, not a posture.

Four years of AT, and I'm not bored yet. On the contrary, I can't remember a time so full of discoveries and new things to learn as the last couple of months. And the good thing is that this will not stop -ever, because the more consciously aware I become, the more things I notice, and the more opportunity I have to experience things, learn from them and deepen my understanding of them in relation to me.

The only pity is that I cannot find the appropriate words to indicate this apparent shift that I'm going through right now. I would like to express the increasing amount of detail that I experience in directions, in my ability to notice things in myself and others, the profound effects it has on me as a person, with words that are equally detailed, equally rich and equally emotionally moving. But I find this very hard to do, even though I work with words on a daily basis. I guess this calls for a completely different way of writing. Or perhaps just plain silence.