I see all kinds as I run along Meguro river every morning.

One of the themes I have been hammering away at since I starting writing about breathing is outside influences. Outside influences are things like your head/spinal relationship, erroneous beliefs, bodymapping delusions and fairytales. 

Fairytales?

Yes, like the "upper jaw" - which is about as existent as rabbit horns.

Golfers are warned never to change their swing.

And Musicians are cautious changing their embouchure –  the way you pass air into any wind instrument depends on more than your lips, breath and instrument.

Any Professional that relies on skilful movements to accomplish their technique understands the difficulty in readjusting a skill set that began at an early age through the instruction and intuitive mimicking of others.

There are many sad stories of professionals who tried to change their technique and ended up worse than when they started. 

Why is this?

It's a weird question; I'll give you that. (the Subject line silly)

Alexander put it another way, which helps make sense of it:

"Everyone wants to be right, but no one stops to consider if their idea of right is right."

This is true all over your life. A person can be with their partner for years, then one day wake up and wonder:

"Do I really love him?"

Wait.

All these years and NOW you're asking!? 

If you still don't know that, how do you know that you know ANYTHING?

Buddha was a smart dude, no question.

2,500 years later and we're still following Gautama's lead - so why did he see the "whole Self" so differently from the way we do today?

Is the contemporary Body-Mind-Spirit way of thinking just a big load of baloney?

If human movement was an R & D Project of a large corporation - it has already been in research for 550 million years. 

That's how long ago a few cells first clustered together - with a string of fibres hanging down like a chord – to electrify its tadpole waggle towards the most likely place to find food. This is how the Chordates began - to which all birds, reptiles, fish and mammals belong. 

This week I spent several days as a student of Cathy Madden.

Cathy is an American teacher of Alexander's discovery – and teaches teachers in Europe, Australia, all over North America and England. She is now here in Japan working for BodyChance, so I decided to spend the day discovering new things with her.

We both discovered…