In a session - just yesterday - an ATSuccess member asked an innocent question:
“Do I need to be an expert of a student’s activity, to be able to help them?”
Intellectually it’s obvious – Tiger Woods’ coach doesn’t play golf like Tiger! Does that stop him seeing areas for development? Older, beer-gutted men are often coaching baseball teams in America – would these old guys survive on the field?
“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:
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.
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It was timely for me, as procrastination recently haunts my days.
I get up, make a list, and do very little of it. DAMN!
I won't give you all the details via this blog, I do it separately, so sign up here. I've already gathered an audience of listeners, maybe you are one of them…
The content of this course is unique and unseen in the AT world before.
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.
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.
