Or even hugged by a chimpanzee?

I haven't, but Zoologist Desmond Morris relates his experience of both in his book Initmate Behaviours:

Discovery needs celebration.

Without it, the physiology required to imprint insight fails to energize. Celebration is physiology - it facilitates oligodendroglial* cells to myelinate the axon pathways ignited by your discovery. The result is the ability to act faster.

Yesterday, I nearly yelled at one of my students.

Metaphorically, I certainly did. These days I have stopped being middle-class nice – what a wasted life! - instead telling it how I see it. My trainee was a robust, heavy-set man with a problem. He could handle it.

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

My recent dispatch declaiming the sacred sheen of Alexandrian inhibition brought forth some solid affirmations. Phew!

From Jane Buhler comes this nice summary of the original post, throwing in a declaim of another AT sacred cow…

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At Golden Week - BodyChance's annual residential near Mt Fuji - I usually teach a dozen beginners who brave a world of strangers to explore Alexander's discovery.

This year there was only one.

There is a secret to BodyChance's Golden Week residential, and I am going to reveal it.

Anyone who follows my feed on Facebook knows there is a frenzy of activity every May.

During the Japanese holidays of Golden Week (what a great name!) BodyChance holds its annual residential. We started it in 1999, and still going strong.

In the third module of my BodyThinking Online course, I illuminate how we manage to be an upright mammalian being.

The leg is the door into the miracle of bipedal locomotion.

As I describe hip, knee and foot movements, I make this phenonomen of two-legged locomotion a recurring theme, throughout the third module of BodyThinking Online.