People have asked me:

“Why do you insist on calling our work ‘Alexander's discovery’?”

It’s a valid question, and one I continue to ask my Self. The simplist answer I have is this:

Alexander's discovery is just that, a discovery. It is not a technique or method.

It’s like the realization that the earth revolves around the sun. Knowing it doesn’t change it, but it changes you. It changes your ideas, your beleifs, your choices.

Alexander's discovery can be expressed in several different ways:

This Daily Blog is emailed out to around 500 people, both in Japan and overseas.

The readers of the original English version are a mixture of AT teachers, trainees, some devoted AT students, friends and ex-students.

(BTW: You can sign up if you don't get it by email here)

In Japan, it goes out mainly to my trainees – I have 137 of them now – and Graduates – now 80. The rest, I don’t know. BodyChance Basic members, public and friends I guess.

Sonja Higgo, one of my star students - and her Self an experienced teacher of many years - just emailed me this note…

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What I have noticed recently is that I benefit and enjoy doing the task I intended to do rather than procrastinating once again. As I experienced relief and joy about such a simple decision I found it really easy to change.

***

It was timely for me, as procrastination recently haunts my days.

I get up, make a list, and do very little of it. DAMN!

How do you manage the mammal in you?

I've been coaching two friends - both with the same surname which is funny - about how to love. Young Japanese men who need an older senpai.（先輩）ME.

One gay, one straight - and you know what?

It doesn't matter.

Mammals are all the same when it comes to love.

There are no new love stories. Oxytocin, an occasional dash of sensible serotonin - he doesn't, she doesn't; when will he? why doesn't she? She can't. He will. I don't. BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

It's all the same.

Carol Dweck, in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success* tells the story of hugely successful athletes, who all started out, with no particular signs of greatness about them.

Michael Jordan wasn't recruited by the college he wanted to play for. He wasn't drafted by the first two NBA teams that could have chosen him. He was cut from his varsity team.

His response?

A number of kind readers picked up from my hospital blog, that my love affair with hospitals all started as a 2 year old boy, tied to a bed for 3 months. When asked about how I could have endured such a thing, I found my Self replying:

"The pain is at the heart of why I can keep going."

To do truly transform your life, it's an advantage to have a death wish.

It’s an image I have…

A true image from an event that happened.

I am 10, riding on a bicycle in a loose T-shirt, hands free. Happy.

Suddenly there’s a hole in the road, and my bike falls over, sending me sliding along a pile of pebbles. My exposed belly is sandpapered by the little stones. I skid to a halt face down in the dirt.

I am in agonizing pain, my belly ripped open by the rocks.

It happened when I was 10, and it is still a vivid memory.

I am tackling again in this dispatch the role of Consciousness in human life.

Years ago, at a workshop in Sydney, I suddenly heard my teacher Marjorie Barstow saying:

"If I Only had 4 Tongues, I Could Explain It Better"

As usual, Marj managed to encapsulate complexity into an amusing metaphor; a metaphor that graphically captured the essence of our challenge in consciously managing co-ordination. If that's what we're even doing…

You see - I write long sentences like that one, and Marj just makes you laugh.

SORRY!

I've always been trying to run away from Japan.

I feel like Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in the Godfather III* movie, when he growls:

"Every time I think I have left, they keep pulling me back in!"

The first time, I took a 6 month sabbatical from BodyChance, and lived in Australia with my family. I tried to start BodyChance in Sydney, and all I succeeded in doing was losing $40,000, disappointing 5 trainees, ending my marriage, getting another retinal detachment and very nearly destroying a beautiful friendship.

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.