While everyone is rushing off to master the latest science about our miraculous human brain, I might take a right turn and follow the ethologists for a bit.

Is it just a coincidence that one of our finest advocates - Noble prizing-winning scientist Nikko Tinbergen - was himself an ethologist?

Why my sudden fascination?

Losing a lover as a partner in life has highlighted for me how much of an animal I am. I mean that in a clinical, not derogatory sense. I am a mammal, and so are you.

Part of my work involves getting up at 3.30am to coach clients scattered around the world.

At first I reacted with horror; now I get up at 3.30am anyway.

In Tokyo, the light is already peeping through the clouds by 4am.

The streets are deserted, the traffic lights aimlessly changing in vacant stupidity. It's quiet, and there you see a tall, erect-looking man, thumping along the side of the river alone, wondering why he would want anyone to love him?

It's impossible not to be strategic, manipulative, plotting and Machiavellian, when you are unable to listen to the clear communication of another human being.

A case in point is the way I am continuing to treat my ex-partner, as if he were an animal needing to be re-captured. Despite his clear request to remain free.

As if he didn't know his own mind?

As if he can be tricked into thinking like mine?

How could I objectify another human being this way?

It's mammalian behaviour. It's how I am programmed to respond.

Years ago I was having dinner in a restaurant in Paris with Marie-Françoise Le Foll, when a serial killer - in the guise of a French intelligence officer - strolled over and, uninvited, began intruding on our dinner conversation.

Our table was on a raised platform, and he stood below, his arm over the rail...

Of course at the time I did not immediately know he was a killer, but he soon happily let us know about a murder he had completed a week before in South Africa. This was in the early 80's, before Mandala's magic had cast it's spell.

Teaching as a teacher is a horrible thing to do to a student.

For a start, it's an arrogant position to start from. How do you know they don't know? When you project ignorance onto another person, it's a pretty egonic position.

"I am the one who knows."

How does it feel to be taught by someone like that?

Of course, SOME kind of teaching is all about information, BUT NOT our work. There is no curiculum for Alexander's discovery.

How can you learn what you already know?

When you're in pain - what do you do?

I personally follow one of two stategies: medicate or meditate. The first takes the form of netflixing, shopping, drinking - you get the idea. Alternatively, I become the monk: withdraw, go silent, pray, be good and hope insight will lighten my mood.

However, there is a middle way, that straddles two worlds and it all starts with with physical/emotional/spiritual pain.

I find myself - when teaching in BodyChance - telling my trainees over and over:

"Pain is what is right about you."

And I thought it was all over. Is it ever finished?

There I am, sobbing on my green couch this morning like a 5 year old, after reading these words from Byron Katie:

"Life on the other side of inquiry is so simple and obvious that it can't be imagined. Everything is seen to be at its best, just the way it is. Hope and faith aren't needed in this place. Earth turned out to be the heaven I was longing for. This is the unimaginable life that I live, that we all live."

Why are the artists, seekers and innovators often so neurotic?

Is it a prerequisite to do great things?

Abraham Lincoln suffered from depression, Beethoven went nearly insane with grief as he lost his hearing, Oscar wild died destitute after wandering the streets of Paris: broke, alone and abandoned by most of his old friends.

Desmond Morris, in his 1971 book Intimate Behaviour writes:

"If the monkey is a male, it will never again, as an adult, know the total intimacy of a loving bond. Until the day it dies, it will continue to exist in a loveless world of rivalries and partnerships, of competition and co-operation."

Isn't that the life of an increasing number of people today?

Reflecting on an end of intimacy I experienced recently, I wrote to a dear friend that I was mourning the loss of

How long would it take you to give 24 individual lessons to 20 people?

First off, would you work an 8 hour day?

If so, how many in the morning and afternoon? 8? 12? 16?

In my heyday, I gave 13 on average, 16 on a busy day. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. But 6 in the morning, and 4 in the afternoon, I could do that. 10 a day.

Could you do that?

Then keep reading.