All flesh is as grass
The biggest opportunity I see opening up to us is devising a means of teaching the Technique online. I’ve already proved to myself there’s huge scope, just from email dialogue. I can’t imagine how well that could be enhanced, using Skype or its successors. If we can forget about hands on, there’s no obvious need to ever meet a student, in person. Would that be good or bad?
Well, if we can’t teach without using our hands, the main benefit from the online revolution is getting our
Day 1: We arrived at our very niftily positioned hotel in the heart of town, well away from the tourist strip. It had a resident blind accordion player outside, and a veranda overlooking a bar. We took a walk uphill, towards the Botanical Gardens, got lost, and returned after dark.
I read this book with increasing frustration at the author’s fairytale hope of a world where not only are farmyard animals no longer eaten, they coexist happily with humans, while living in conditions indiscernible from those of their forebears. Really? Who would feed them? Why? What would their purpose be? To suggest
A comment I read recently:
“For two and a half days, every waking moment, I gave those directions–and I mean *every* waking moment–except when I was talking to someone, because I can’t give directions inside my head and talk at the same time.
I also added one:Â “my neck to relax, so my whole head can move forward and up, my whole body can lengthen and widen and whatever I’m doing to cause that pain I can stop.”
In the middle of the 3rd day, I realized my back didn’t hurt any more. And it never did again.
I can experience much the same ‘lightness of being’ commonly described as a corollary of Alexander lessons as a result of a many different things happening, such as:
Opening a letter and having an unexpected cheque fall out.
Talking with someone and making a ‘connection’.
Receiving good news.
I’ve just passed a couple of weeks in the presence of several adults and two young children. The adults spent most of their time lounging in various designs of chair, while pursuing a variety of ‘activities’ – reading, computing, talking, eating, drinking; occasionally, they would stand still, doing other activities – cooking, washing up, pontificating; sometimes, they walked about; occasionally, they ‘did’ an intense bout of something more active, like swimming or lawn mowing.
The children spent very little time either sitting or standing still. They did a fair amount of walking and
A traveller should never venture far without his personal bottle of Hydrogen Peroxide and his trusty Alum stone. I took neither, to a place of insanely high heat and humidity, and suffered the indignity of smelling like a stale baby’s nappy from constant, leaking perspiration, and then having to suffer the ritual outbreak of tingling pustules on my lower lip that turned over a number of days into a crusty, pizzalike protrusion that bled every time I opened my mouth.
I thought I had the answer to the cold sores, though. I had been reliably informed that repeated applications
I had prepared two separate boxes, one for the bike frame, the other for the wheels, and stuffed both full of frying pans, muesli, flip flops, mosquito tent and assorted stuff. They weighed in at 20kg each. I made them out of original, full length bike boxes from Halfords. Big mistake!
I got them to exactly the Air France regulation size; but when we pitched up at the check in desk, lo and behold, Mr Jobsworth himself was there. What was in these boxes? Err, mostly pans and muesli and clothes. Not bikes? No, not at all. Why, then, were they in bike boxes? I explained they were not ‘bike boxes’. per se,
I’ve had a dodgy tooth for a while now but my dentist assured me there was nothing wrong that a bout of using mouthwash and diligent flossing wouldn’t cure. So I embarked on a course of oral hygiene and thought things were moving along swimmingly when, the day before yesterday, I made the mistake of masticating a bowl of chilled yogurt using both sides of my mouth and a sudden jolt of pain hit me in the temples.
Since then, life has been lived on the precipice.
My main quibble with the traditional approach to teaching the Alexander Technique, which is predominantly hands on, is the dependence it appears to foster in students, which can make for a lengthy and problematic learning process. At least, it did with me; although not everyone responds in this way.
My overriding impression from the initial course of lessons I had – and from subsequent ‘turns’ – was one of ‘being put right’. I don’t mean to imply I was handled roughly, or moved against my will, or anything like that; but I would say the