Basil is a remarkable BodyChance teacher, famous throughout Japan in the classical music world (“It’s very small.” Basil assures me) yet virtually unknown to the wider Alexander community. Totally fluent in English, Basil is an American citizen born in Hong Kong, who grew up in Japan from the age of one.

Basil is a delightful experience here: American on the outside, Japanese on the inside.

Money never motivates you.

Sure, we love to have it. We think about it a lot. But it’s not money we seek – it’s freedom.

It might be freedom from a past. It might be freedom from a situation. It might be freedom from an identity.

Many successful entrepreneurs – enough to establish a pattern – have an origin story of epic proportions. Often one of their parents died or disappeared on them at an early age. Another is abject poverty: the “rags to riches” story. Another is a clever, misunderstood kid out to prove something.

Whatever.

On July 4th, 1907 Willie Keith stood helplessly in Battle Creek, Michigan watching a fire consume his precious factory.*

Willie was 46, yet he had launched his company barely a year before. He’d already worked for 25 years as the unofficial business manager for a famous Seventh-day Adventist Sanitarium (re-invented from the word ‘sanatorium’) under the shadow of his gregarious and extroverted brother Dr John Henry.

Viktor E. Frankl - in his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning - tells the story of a well-known composer and librettist whose death illustrated a mechanism of hope. One day the man gushed to Viktor that he had dreamt he would be free of the Nazi concentration camp. “When?” asked Frankl. “On March 30th, 1945” whispered back his friend.

He died on March 31st.

Cause? The death of hope in Frankl’s estimation. The loss of his hope triggered a deadly weakening of his immune system, and the man ultimately fell to the ravages of typhus.

In May 2007 I was sitting on a plane on my way to New York. One of the highlights of my visit was to ask advice from Lucy L. Brown Ph.D. at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, on our BodyData project in BodyChance at the time.*

As preparation for our meeting, I was brushing up on her Alexander orientated speculations by re-reading her Paper on Sensory-Motor Contagion† from the first Lugano Conference in Switzerland.

Once at breakfast, I remember being interrupted by a girlfriend pleading with me in an exasperated voice:

“What’s wrong with you this morning?”

I was genuinely surprised (and a little irritated).

“Nothing.” I lifted my eyebrows.

“Fine”, she re-joined “have it your way.”

I was fed up with this.

“What are you talking about!?”

I know what it feels like to be awake in a nightmare.

Lying in bed, looking into the dark.

Frightened. Wondering. Uncertain.

What is going to happen to me?
Will I make the rent?
Will we be OK?
Can I keep living here?

Are you a teacher who is finding your practise shrinking? Or the influx of new students has slowed down, and you wonder how secure we are?

You are right to be concerned. We are in a new digital world.

Numbers matter.

Every area of knowlege involves numbers and mathematics, even philosophy.

When you tune in, numbers both reveal and predict behaviour.

How brave are you?

Read on, and you will understand why I am asking this question.

This morning I was reading Peter Drucker – a famous management consultant who often worked in Japan - and a sentence in his book jumped out at me as quite profound. He wrote:

"Individual self-development in large measure depends on the focus on contributions."

How you can contribute to Society is a tricky question.

Years ago, when it was not so fashionable, I was involved in the work of Werner Erhard.