Layered Impressions

I've been in awe lately of the seeming truth that when one speaks or writes about something, one soon after then receives another layer of understanding through a circumstance or event. Even after all these years and life-miles trekked, for some reason it is surprising that knowledge, understanding and impressions are layered.  The experience frequently is as if the universe provides an inkling and then a completely unexpected "lesson" follows; one I could never have asked for or anticipated (making it also apparent my imagination is not what it could be).  "Laws" are at work.  "Knowing" is relative and probably always partial. I am a pawn on a mega-universal chest board, an intimate set of related threads in a tightly woven cloth.

The often repeated adage:  "You teach best what you most need to learn" must be true.  And that probably goes for any of the communication arts such as speaking, writing even energy exchanging. Could it be any type of manifestation is the Guide presenting the next layer of understanding in the provided impression?  In this arena, choice, visioning or determination has little do with it.  If anything, that type of force only gets in the way.  In this way, the idea of manifesting a destiny, forming a purpose appears negligible.  Those past times are the ego's playground?

photo: Ernst Haas

Which brings us to two almost-popular holistic approaches to life.  1."Visioning": One feels into one's vision and purpose opens, and allows (universal?) energy to be attracted to the vision.  In this approach, the concept is that the magnetism of your wish attracts what is necessary to meet the vision, the allowed openness receives it. This approach is limited by ego involvement and imagination. 2. "Reception": One feels into oneself and aligns, priming receptivity for the universe to seamlessly direct. One does not determine the direction as in #1, but allows oneself to be led.  This approach is limited by one's capacity to maintain adequate relaxation, hence receptivity.  Because it is not directed by self, it is easy to lose the thread of intention.  These are two very different ideologies.  In one, we primarily believe in oneself (ego driven or not). The other believes the universe knows better than the self as far as determining the needed direction.  Both believe in the power of the macrocosmos to impact one's life; in the first instance, it is almost an adjunct, in the second it is the master.

The question is where does my executive self, my ego play a useful role?  Maybe, once the direction is established, the useful aspect of ego, the performer, the doer, can provide the needed manifestation toward fulfilling the direction. Possibly, this is not a question to be answered until I am quite familiar with the workings of the ego.  How has the ego been experienced? In First person ("I") or Second person ("She/He/It")? How have I experienced the hindrance, the passive, the positive of the ego engaged?  Most importantly, who in me experiences ego?  The ready judge? The alter-ego?  Is there in me a space of objectivity, a suspension of the many buffers that color and hide ego's work?  In "Visioning", it is difficult for it not to play a role (useful or obstreperous). In "Reception", there is almost an abdication of an ego role, at least in the pre-direction aspect.

Regardless, the sense of an impression being layered is profound.  It brings to mind the layers of fascia and sinewy ligaments that layer gorgeously over each other to create a whole slice of optimally functioning musculature, a working organ and system. These layers are timely; coming both in sometimes quick succession or with long pauses in between.  Our human experience.

photo:  Ernst Haas

"As Schopenhauer says, when you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect. So I have a theory that if you are on your own path things are going to come to you. Since it’s your own path, and no one has ever been on it before, there’s no precedent, so everything that happens is a surprise and is timely.  — A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living.

Present to Death

Death and dying and contemplating this passage for oneself is a sobering reckoning most of us visit privately and with others at least a few times in life's journey.  A recent experience of this topic discussed among friends stayed with me for several days, and I feel compelled to write about it.

We all die.  And, if we are honest, we are afraid to do so.  If we had a chance to choose how to die, it would basically come down to a choice of the least unpalatable means (wishful thinking) for most of us.  What interested me in the aforementioned conversation among friends was the general insistence felt among the many in the conversation that they be present to themselves and the experience of dying; they wished not to miss the process, not to be in a drugged stupor nor apparent absence of dementia, but to experience their life to the fullest right up to the end.

As a nurse, all I could think was, "may the angels not be listening to this."  This human existence is an endless series of rounds of suffering (and joy).  There is no avoidance of pain.  It's our birthright and payment we make as human beings.  Experiencing our thresholds of pain in different layers is a valuable, even an illuminating materiality that can bring a richness to one's life.  That experience is something we take on willingly, especially if we know there is an end to it, a reprieve in sight (i.e. childbirth, brief uncomfortable procedures, a really bad headache, a divorce with a court date).  Pain medications are a god send when you need them.  Our pain thresholds decrease as we age.  The more frail we become, the more acutely we feel pain.  Pain medication and adjunct therapies that address pain receptors in our bodies/brains (clinical aromatherapy, bodywork, energy work, acupuncture, qigong) should be freely accessed if possible.

A question came to me when discussing this idea of being fully "present" right up to the end:  How could we not be present to this cataclysmic event, same as the impossibility of not being present to our birth?  We are born as Whole selves.  Seemingly our purpose is to find how to live this wholeness in the time we are given.  We don't spend a lot of time knowing or experiencing this.  We don't know how, but (hopefully) spend a lifetime working toward being in relationship to the Whole that we are.  But despite this lack, we are still One.  A muscle is still a muscle even if it is atrophied.  We can't miss our passing because we're in a coma, or in a medication-induced delirium.  To imply this, is to believe Presence is a cognitive state.  It is not.




The body is an incredible dimensional, layered and impossibly complex organism.  Some type of life is going on in a person living in a coma. Arnie and Amy Mindell have proven this in their studies of coma patients.  You just have to hang 
around people in these altered states for a period of time to sense this is true.  We on the outside are 
not privy to this passage they are moving through.  But there is no mistake the experience of moving 
toward a death is not passing them by.  In the case of quick, usually violent deaths (it is my opinion), 
the layers of ourselves (body, energybody, spirit, soul) are separated.  And there is a need to re-assemble 
before a passing is complete.  There is a presence in this, an actual energetic movement toward the 
Wholeness we are in body on earth, and probably beyond.

So, we may have these temporary distractions of suffering, agony, trauma, violence which ultimately leads to our death, but our innate divinity is always present.  It's the thing that leads us Home, through this important transition.  We seemingly are in preparation our entire lives for this moment, are living this truth in small ways almost on a daily basis; through our system changes, relationships, the almost inconsequential letting go and acceptances that is our daily bread.  The cultivation of a deeper understanding of the layers of presence possible to be earned in a lifetime, is a support to an actualization at (bodily) death.  It is impossible not to be present to one's own death.  The cells, the energy fields within our body system are constant cues, despite our denial variations or momentary circumstances that seem to remove a consciousness from the equation.  The reality of the breath and depth of consciousness sinks in.  Consciousness... Presence are not cognitive activities.  They are a fuller, deeper, more whole experience, connected within, connected without.

Foreign Territory (over 40)

Remember that queasy feeling of not knowing what the hell you are doing, where you are going, why you are where you are at a particular juncture in one's life?  It is a familiar feeling from age 15 to 40.  That extended age group is in a chronic developmental and maturation learning curve.  But by the time  middle age has hit, most of us have secured ways, gotten most usual life learning experiences under our belts making us more knowledgeable and experienced.  We have guaranteed for ourselves an obliteration of that queasy feeling of not knowing by getting a lot of knowns down pat.  But then life has a way of throwing us back into that "what the hell" territory when we're given unexpected illnesses, unforeseen change in life shocks, a turned-on-its-head event one didn't see coming  and the queasies re-enter.  And unlike those earlier years, there sometimes isn't a lot of others in our peer groups to commiserate with or exchange notes about these life dilemmas.  All our well-worn decades of experience seems not about fending off the new, exciting, traumatic, terrifying process of never-had-unknowns.  Change is a bitch, and we are hard-wired to resist that inevitability at all costs.

What about foreign territory, one willingly submits to?  The place you've never been to before but are being organically pulled, even when the very notion is almost paralyzing?  No avoidance.  No turning away.  Once assumed, fear does not surrender herself; she and Intention walk side by side.  The submission of Intention takes on parental qualities. The gnashing teeth of Fear wears on the intended. The parent embraces, reassures all that the fear drags with her.  The odyssey continues with a few blips and pauses. Until the day the foreign territory is reached.  Fear recognizes she has been a carriage without wheels, Intention has been dragging along. Intention recognizes the willingness to have Fear accompany (that she even belongs on the journey), even providing the wheels and brake-release for Fear.  What is created are conditions for an unlikely partnership.

For, despite Fear's childish railings, her negative and resistant faculty is an important and necessary aspect of the Whole. And the maturation process the Intention has had to acquire to amble willingly the unknown odyssey has created a tolerance and allowance for the Fear.  There is no contemptuous annoyance, wish to obliterate, blaming finger for Fear any longer.  Some kind of understanding and forbearance has evolved.

Traversing foreign territory means embracing these two aspects of one's humanness.  Our hard-wired 'avoid at all costs inconvenience and discomfort' and the innate adventurer who has questions about what is beyond what is already known.  Nature prepares us under 40 by making most experiences new, having us experience what we don't already know out of necessity.  After 40, we have choices.  We can trust these past lessons of trial and error or we can hunker down in the acquired comforts.  We can bury the adventurer in the norm of human resistance, or rekindle the young person's open inquiry, striking out into foreign territory.

Witnessing: Attention, Intention and Healing

When we think of healing ourselves, the thoughts and focus revolve around me, myself, I-- my needs alone, and what is necessary to become whole.  Antennae should sprout up whenever a concern or effort becomes self-centric, because that type of concentration isn't healing, it's actually antithetical to healing.  That type of focus is small, cramped, without space or breath.  And a healing is not possible when I am living in that compressed space.

Counter intuitively, holding someone or something fully in your attention is an act of self-healing.  This is so because your energy is in flow, moving from inside to out and back again. It's not a masochistic "you come before me", but more an inclusive acknowledgement that a universal love flows in and outside myself, connecting, interconnecting.  A salve completing the Whole.  In physical terms, this might resemble the infinity symbol, the horizontal figure eight.  In that act of interconnecting, we allow ourselves to let go of ego's narrow agenda and we enter a universal connection.  Because of this unconditional attention to someone else, paid attention becomes a prepayment I benefit from.  This paid attention benefits the environment, myself as well as others.

I've written about materiality and energy in space (Place, Space, Materiality and Health), wherein I speak about the influence of energy on space, humans and nature.  We all have felt an environment or space blessed by a smudge stick, prayer or meditation.  And alternately, we have felt the tension in the energy of a space that has had a recent argument or violence in it.  We don't consider the vitality of this energy, how it supports or undermines a flourishing.  Similarly, we don't consider the energy of a full attention on an other or on a space.  Humans are designed to connect.  It is in this connection, these exchanges of energy that create a healing.

How could it be that this simple act of observing another (without an agenda) could be so nourishing to another and oneself?   Giving attention, to be a witness is to be in a relaxed, tension free place in oneself.  Our bodies and more whole self relax into the rightness of the Self in this state.  This unto itself is a healing.  It rights (normalizes) hormonal releases (endocrine system), the neurotransmitters that dictate hormone releases from our central nervous system, it hosts a more relaxed, stress-free environment from which to act from, to Be in.  In this state, one creates a slower, more accepting self environment that impacts relationship.  This type of energy nourishes the atmosphere around it, as mentioned above. One can feel the difference; this ripples out.  And as indicated above, it circles around and cultivates the same within.  Mutuality.  Healing is never singular, but always exponential.

What does intention have to do with an attention that heals?  For many, an intention is a mental formation directed.  An intention might start with an idea, but if it is true, it is surrounded by feeling.  It is something that does not wince at not knowing and uncertainty.  Feeling supports intention in a language with non-words the cognitive self cannot understand.  It is a connection to this type of feeling that allows the Witness to suspend the monkey-mind's goings-on, permitting a deeper attention, which saturates an atmosphere with a more relaxed openness.

lenticular cloud formations (energy rings) over mt. fuji

Welcome to the Anthropocene

"Anthropocene is an informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems. The term was coined recently by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer, but has been widely popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth's atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch for its lithosphere." --Wikipedia

I've been almost halted in my tracks as of late with the perception of the incredible dysfunction and seeming corruption this planet, this world and nation are currently suffering.  Everything appears upside down with a grim trajectory imminent.  With the statistical research having prompted the video Wealth Inequality in America - YouTube  to go viral, pointing out the illusion of the public as to how bad the inequality is and the general consensus of the broad sampling, to be a country unlike its current state. This along with the ongoing, endless polarization and lack of sense (but a lot of maneuvering) exhibited by our government which will only negatively impact the already desperate poor, and the seeming lack of ownership of that responsibility (when one is oppressed, we're all oppressed).  My alarm isn't so much over the chaos (there will always be that) but the ongoing and continual fracture that continues to divide us, the smoke screen that keeps us passive despite a practically unanimous understanding (amongst the diverse sampling in the mentioned research) of what is fair and equitable.  There appears no awareness in the relationship of environment to health to inequality, to prejudice and manipulation; only a frenzied barreling toward divisiveness.  Where is the long view?  Where is the world community awareness?

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

--MLK  "Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963

After looking at the research for the above mentioned video (where from were the statistics gleaned, how was the research carried out, what was the sampling?), I was introduced to some material on Anthropocene and a study being done on alternative business practices created from a larger perspective.
 
"The Anthropocene calls to us to recognize that we are all participants in the ‘becoming world’, where everything is interconnected and learning happens in a stumbling, trial and error sort of way. In the spirit of this participation, many offer the experiment as the only way forward: the only way to approach such a period in which uncertainty is high and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living." (Dumanoski 2009, quoting C.S. Holling)

"At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both as sites of becoming and as opportunities for belonging. But no longer can we see subjects as simply human and places as human-centered. The ‘arrival’ of the Anthropocene has thrown us onto new terrain. Feminist critiques of hyper-separation are pushing us to move beyond the divisive binaries of human/nonhuman, subject/object, economy/ecology and thinking/ acting. The reframing of our living worlds as vast uncontrolled experiments is inspiring us to reposition ourselves as learners, increasingly open to our interconnections with earth others and more willing to intervene in adventurous ways. In this article we begin to think about more-than-human regional development and regional research collectives that have the potential to perform resilient worlds. For us the project of belonging involves both participating in the vast experiment that is the Anthropocene and connecting deeply to specific places and concerns."


"2013 ingredients of a new world-shaping movement: 1) assemblages that are experimenting with new practices of living and being together, 2) the ubiquity of these assemblages, and 3) the potential global compass of a new discourse of ‘belonging’ linked to a more than-human regional development imaginary. Our working definition of regional development is: how ‘we’ (that is, all the human/nonhuman participants in the becoming world) organize our lives (or how life organizes us) to thrive in porously bounded spaces in which there is some degree of interconnection, a distinctively diverse economy and ecologies, multiple path-dependent trajectories of transformation and inherited forms of rule."

Following are some examples of business practice in relation to this decentralized movement.

"Our first adventure is an experiment in regional development led by individuals and institutions that are motivated in part by an ethic of caring for place and environment. Capturing and democratizing wealth to care for people and environments in place.  The Evergreen Cooperatives are a set of new employee-owned businesses, based on the cooperative model, that hire local residents and contribute to environmental sustainability. In the Greater University Circle of inner city Cleveland, Ohio, investment flows easily into world renowned cultural, educational and health institutions that were originally established by philanthropic industrialists of a past era. Up against these well-endowed institutions are run-down neighborhoods housing some 43,000 residents whose average median household income is under $18,500 per year (Evergreen video 2010). Little of the massive institutional investment in salaries, procurements and real estate development stays within these inner ring neighborhoods. According to Bob Eckhardt (2009), senior vice president of the Cleveland Foundation, each institution acts ‘as if the world ended at its respective property line’. The Cleveland Foundation, established as the ‘world’s first community foundation in 1914, decided in the mid 2000s to concentrate funding and capacity building activities on the Greater University Circle to make sure that ‘as the big institutions grow and prosper, the neighborhood prospers as well’ (Ekhardt 2009). Its mission was to create jobs for local residents in green industries and to generate wealth that would circulate within and help stabilize the neighborhood."

"The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry was the first experiment to get off the ground. It is an ‘industrial-scale, environmentally advanced, state-of-the-art, commercial laundry providing services to area hospitals and assisted living centers’ (Yates 2009). A feasibility study showed that commercial laundries could pay reasonable wages if they were not under pressure to generate profits for owners and shareholders.  Making the employees owners through a cooperative meant that an employee-owned laundry could immediately offer jobs paying a little better than the going rate for such work, offer better benefits and also be a wealth-builder for employees over the years." (Yates 2009, 17) Gender, Place and Culture."

"We draw here on a video report on the rise of peer-to-peer exchanges by the Wall Street Journal’s tech reporter Andy Jordon.  Jordon presents a series of interviews that begin with young corporate executives who trade in Ven, a virtual currency used to ‘buy, share and trade knowledge, goods and services’ (Jordon 2010). Tamara Giltsoff, a sustainable business consultant, is one of the ‘urban influentials’ who are members of Hub Culture, one of many meshworks that have grown out of the social networking capacities of the internet. In selected world cities Hub Culture members flock to Hub Pavilions where they can book space to work, meet, trade non-tangible value and recreate (bookings can be made for a personal chef for 10 or more people, a personal trainer, or a reflexologist/reiki/polarity therapist). Giltsoff describes using Ven: ‘It begins to put a value on intangible exchanges, I guess. I have gained Ven by making introductions to other people or doing favours for people in the network.’ Dan George, a promoter for international music recording stars says: ‘With fluctuating exchange rates you know that if you have a certain amount of Ven you can, sort of, count on it when you are working between countries.’ According to the Hub Culture website (2010): The price of Ven is made up of a weighted basket of currencies, commodities and carbon futures and trades against other major currencies at floating exchange rates. Ven is the first currency to include carbon externalities in its pricing factor, making it the first environmentally linked currency in existence."

taxi fleet after Sandy

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.  -- MLK,  Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1964

These ancient/new assemblages that experiment with new practices of living and being together,  and the potential global compass of a new discourse of ‘belonging’ linked to a more than-human regional development imaginary is a relief to what we live with now.  It provides hope for a new paradigm of operating.  It gives breath to more of what matters than is currently acknowledged, in the markets and systems currently in place.  Both for health and well being, these sorts of changes are essential for putting into place justice and equality for the masses.

The world is changing.  Environmentally and health-wise it is not tenable for there to be the magnitude of inequities existent in the world (in this country), as there is.  Both the French and Russian Revolutions are historical indicators to this; the Occupy movement is a heads up in our own time.  The paralyzation of governments holding to this untenable way of operating, resistant to a more equitable shift of power, money and influence has only one cataclysmic outcome.

off a broken warf

Cooking with Economy and Grace

"Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings.  They usually pick up where something else leaves off….Meal’s ingredients must be allowed to topple into one another like dominoes. Broccoli stems, their florets perfectly boiled in salty water, must be simmered with olive oil and eaten with shaved Parmesan on top; their leftover cooking liquid kept for the base for soup studded with other vegetables, drizzled with good olive oil, with the rind of the Parmesan added for heartiness.  This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking.”—Tamar Adler

Tamar Adler is a woman after my own heart (and my mother’s heart and grandmother’s as well).  Although I don’t think she mentions the word “relationship” in her newest book, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace: Tamar …, her entire subject matter is about bringing thoughtfulness, consideration and especially awareness to the way we approach food preparation.  Hence, to have an intimate relationship to a basic life activity.

I’ve always been a little self-protective, sometimes embarrassed at my own sense of economy in cooking.  I got this sensibility from my mother (a "Depression baby"), who got it from her mother (a puritan-minded ‘waste not want not’ Irish Catholic from Minnesota, oldest of 11).  However, for me, economizing with food was not based on saving money (entirely), it was more about respecting the life force of the food, the trouble it took to get to me for my benefit, and for this reason, not to discard any of its materiality wantonly.  In the times we live, waste is everywhere.  And I have relaxed my past vigilance somewhat in light of the passive forces that surround me (and which are reflected in me) at every turn, especially around food.  Adler’s book reinforces my previous more caring attitude in relation to food preparation.

“..cooking is an act of gathering in and meting out, a coherent story that starts with the lighting of a burner, the filling of a pot, and keeps going as long as we like.”

Adler’s love and respect for the raw ingredients she cooks and the process is apparent.  She speaks about the denser marrow in free range chicken legs, humanely treated animals (not necessarily the ones labeled ‘organic’, often an industrialized product) as opposed to  the factory farmed variety.  And though they might cost three times the amount of industrial-raised chickens, it makes more sense to purchase and prepare them.  They make heartier stock, are more nutritious; it’s worth the money.  Her viewpoint is not austere, but full of good common sense.  It is how every cook worth their salt has cooked through time.  This is because cooks through the ages love the (intuitive?) relationship they enter when they handle, consider and partner with the raw elements of a meal.  There is no unworthy aspect of anything born, raised and harvested for the benefit of our bodies.  What limits us is our common sense, imagination, patience and memory.  “… at the bottom of any pot of vegetables or beans or grains or meat are unrepeatable flavors themselves, all the alchemy of today’s cooking distilled into a liquid you can neatly pour into a glass jar.”  And use later (if you remember it is there!).

“…. We don’t need to be professionals to cook well… we need to shop and cook like people learning to cook, like what we are—people who are hungry.”

The way we have become related (or unrelated) to the food we ingest is a mirror to the life we lead.  We often fall into the mire of one end of the spectrum or another: on one hand, uncaring where the raw product comes from, indifference to how one marries ingredients, unawareness to color, texture, harmony and balance. There frequently is an obsession with making a meal as time limited in its preparation as possible, as well as eating it equally as fast.  On the other hand, the bored and thrill-seeking turn to a fussy, fancy, over the top use of exotic ingredients and novel cuisine interpretations.  There are lots of ways we manifest our inner fragmentation:  this loss of relationship is a loss of interest in something very basic, a wholesome curiosity to what Is.  Our need to eat regularly is an honorable connection to nature, eclipsing the tendency to lean toward convenience. Adler's warm and witty appreciation of this connection is hearty nourishment to the soul.

“Catching one’s tail [the often ‘tail’ end of components used in a meal] is a curious business. We watch dogs in their constant, fruitless chases all the time.  Plato thought tail chasing not only practical but divine.  He wrote that the mystical symbol for infinity a snake swallowing its tail, was the perfect being; it made what it ate and ate what it made, needing nothing but its own existence for perpetual life.”

 

MAKING WAVES: Alexander Technique and the undulating self

Aileen Crow, is a woman whom I consider one of my "mothers", and whom has been an invaluable mentor (and friend/"playmate") to me for over twenty years.  In my mind she is the quintessential "maverick", who has modeled and taught credibility through self-ownership; that is, when one is true to oneself, there can be only rightness (in relation to bodywork and everything else).  Aileen is someone I have worked and played with with the greatest of intensity.  She meets you.  She matches you.  Brilliantly.  Even when the vibration is extremely (unbearably?) deep or profound.  Aileen is a Master.  For me, she is a model of love, gratitude, appreciation and most of all Joy.  She walks her own truth and is absolute in her permissiveness that you walk your own. It is my great pleasure to print here, respective writings she produced in 1992 (Inner Flow and the Spiraling Spinal Wave) and for the Alexander Technique International Conference on Consensus, (Making Waves), 1996.

"We all know that the Alexander Technique [AT] leads to expansiveness and lightness. Once we attain that, what do we do with it?  If we just maintain an expanded shape or a state of expansion and lightness, it is static.  Oscillation and inner movement define control of movement impulses and its torso held in one piece sometimes looks like an elegant empty suit.  In our desire for "good use," we must be careful not to eliminate the fluidity of movement that allows torso rotation and undulatory, spiraling movements of the spine.

To make contact with the flow of inner movement impulses is essential for actors, dancers and singers--- for anyone who wants to make emotional contact with others.  The inner movement impulses communicate emotions.  Often involuntary and spontaneous, they may not suit our self-images, but they have their own reason for being and if they are ignored they will reappear in symptoms or in dreams until their wisdom is received and integrated into our lives.

In a cross-cultural study of movement styles, the Choreometrics Project (1) demonstrated that the world can be mapped into areas defined by two different body attitudes.  One is a one-unit torso, associated with patrilineal control of sexuality.  The other is a two-unit torso, with twisting and undulating, from matrilineal cultures in which sexuality and fertility are valued. FM Alexander lived and taught within a Northern European one-unit torso culture; the limited range of movements used in his teaching and in most Alexander teaching today reflects the attitude toward sexuality inherent in that culture.

If Alexander's principles are cross-culturally valid, Alexander lessons should include movements that use three dimensional torso twists, spirals, and spinal waves; and not be limited to those that maintain a straight spined, one-unit, flat torso that only folds and unfolds at the hip joints (as in 'monkey').  Unfortunately, many people see that carefully maintained (if high class) limitation as a cliched 'Alexandraoid' look.

Every bone, muscle and organ in our bodies have a three dimensional spiral to it; there are no straight lines.  Even our DNA spirals.  From conception, living tissue is formed from spiraling, flowing plasma.  Anything that flows, spirals. (2)

The design of the human body is that of muscles in a double spiral pattern - left and right twin spirals - around the bony structure (3,4) with its wave-like spine.  And or bodies move in complex spirals and waves, if they are not culturally conditioned otherwise.

Any such influence that restricts the  natural fluidity of the body also tends to isolate the individual and distort emotional communication within their human relationships.  We naturally move in synchrony with each other on a micro-movement level (5). People with communication disorders are out of movement synchrony with themselves and with others.

In parts of the world characterized by a two-unit torso (such as parts of the Middle East, Africa and India), undulating movement promotes communal harmony.  In the Middle East, it is a way of passing on the skills that inform sexual communication; women wave/dance together in unison, forming harmonious support groups for themselves; and women wave/dance around a woman as she gives birth, to encourage her.

I personally feel that the relationship problems within the Alexander community are related to a mistaken idea of what 'good use' is.  Carefully maintaining an ideal body state or shape restricts fluidity and sets up a hierarchical mind-over-body relationship within the individual because of the constant need to control inferior, non-ideal body impulses.  Maintaining the Alexander ideal of good use necessitates inhibiting any movement impulses incongruent to that ideal.  Those incongruities may very well be the body wanting to speak its mind, perhaps expressing dissatisfaction at having 'one right way imposed on it by even a benevolent director.  The unwanted bodily impulses may be offering another point of view, or counter examples to the ideal, or even new discoveries and new connections that could benefit the total person.

That's analogous to the political situation in the Alexander community, with its problematic concerns about who's in and who's out, and who gets to approve of and controls whom, etc.

It is also interesting to me that so many Alexander teachers are doing Authentic Movement in which spontaneous 'incongruent' movement impulses are followed and expressed until they yield their indispensable meaning. I hope this ATI conference work on Consensus will help lead the Alexander community to this kind of complementary [alignment] and to a broader cross-cultural identity."

(1)  The Choreometrics Project, Forestine Paulay and Irmgard Bartenieff in Folk Song Style and Culture, Alan Lomax, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968
(2)  Sensitive Chaos, Theodor Schwenk, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1965.
(3)  The Double Spiral Arrangement of Voluntary Musculature, Raymond A.Dart, Human Potenial, Vol. 1, No.2, 1968
(4)  Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation, M. Knott and D. Voss Harper & Row, 1968.
(5)  Cultural Microrhythms, William S.Condon, Interaction Rhythms, edited by Martha Davis, Human Sciences Press, NY 1982.

Aileen Crow has been an Alexander teacher since 1969.  She taught at ACAT in New York City until she formed her own AT training program in 1978.  She is a Creativity Counselor in private practice in NYC and in New City, NY, is a Laban Movement Analyst (since 1969) and a Dreambody Process-Oriented therapist.   Her most recent interests are calligraphy, Solo Focusing and transforming trauma.

Aileen's more recent writings have been in A Moving Journal (1993-2006 ),  AuthenticMovementCommunity Blog, and the Journal of Authentic Movement and Somatic  Inquiry (JAMSI) AuthenticMovement.Journal.com.

Unimitable Aileen at Play