To live a public, vulnerable life takes a lot of self-love.

When you are looking to others to validate your actions: HOPELESS.

You have the life you imagine others want you to live…

• I must do this for my children
• My partner won't like that
• Can I really say that to him?

And so on and so on until you don't know who is listening, and you don't know what to say and you end up in bed, in the morning, with no energy to get up, with no energy to live.

This is not the life you want to lead.

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?

Or even hugged by a chimpanzee?

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

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?

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