ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE WORKS WITH YOUR WHOLENESS
When I’m working with a student I’m taking in all of them in the moment, the conscious, the unconsciousness of the habits, their whole being. By the fact of our bio-energetic fields overlapping, the student’s body is learning from my body’s natural use and my ‘thinking hands’; the student’s body’s intelligence is learning from mine.
In other words, my vibrational frequency, is by the nature of the Law raising their frequency; all things come to vibrate to the higher frequency. It informs me where my attention needs to go, in order to bring conscious awareness to me of it, and thus me to bring it to the student’s awareness.
You feel it when you sit next to someone calm and steady, you become calmer. Their energy influences our energy and raises our frequency to a higher level, however infinitesimally. We walk away, feeling lighter. That and more is happening in a lesson, that is what is going on underneath the conscious radar.
There is so much happening in a lesson; the student at the beginning is so eager and wanting to do so much to understand this thing called, ‘the Alexander Technique’ and the benefits which it brings. You want to do what the teacher is telling you, to think, you want to ‘get it’! From our educational conditioning, we have learned to do something in order to acquire it, and therefore sustaining doing nothing is a new concept to most. For perfectionists, or earnest students like I was in my training, you come to understand after awhile the concept of non-doing and letting yourself be, in the process of the unlearning.
As one becomes aware of one’s habits and the voice of the habit, that impulse to do, to return to what is comfortable, whether it gives you pain or not, it’s familiar, and that’s comforting emotionally. The voice of the habit expresses itself as pressure, as not being right, awkward, unfamiliar, nagging, like a child at the grocery checkout crying out to have mom buy them the candy that is at their eye level! (Marketers do that intentionally, they know human habit. Selling is all about that, but this is another subject altogether!)
We have been taught in school to separate things, identify, label in order to locate; math, literature, geography, science, etc. But how do you locate yourself, when everything you’ve been taught takes you further and further away from the wholeness of yourself and experiencing the wonder of the world?! It is what brings us to our present day crisis of misunderstandings.
I have had to throw out so many things I learned wrong in the reclaiming of my natural and whole self; undoing so many habits and healing the wounds of the past. The journey and sacrifices along the way have all been worth it, because I know this wholeness is all I can ever take with me, and what no one can ever take away.
You are all you ever have; relationships come and go, family members die, friends leave, even our dog/cat family passes away and we are left with our grief and loss. How we respond to this, in allowing the grieving process is necessary. It also may tap deeper tones of loss which can bring a kind of despair. I despaired in my 30’s even as I was doing all kinds of healing work; feeling didn’t hinder the process, it was the process. (I think I could have wallowed less though, as I look back, but at the time, the boulders inside just felt like they were crushing me and moving them felt Herculean!)
Two decades later, a teacher at the school, ACAT where I was certified, was taking me through chair work, and in my inner vision, I saw a large boulder, and I didn’t remark on it to the teacher. On the next ride down and up, she confirmed how to send my knees away, and the fear that was in the tissue, had shown itself to me, by the vision. When I listened to her direction ‘to send my knees away’, and my spine lengthened, the chair was there waiting for me. When she took me back up, the boulder was gone! It had been busted by more fully allowing my knees to bend in the integration of the movement and a fear in the form of a boulder was eradicated!
Each movement in and out of the chair is introducing wholeness back into the student, by letting the habit, or the discomfort be disturbed or in that instance, of the boulder to be dissolved. Our wholeness is there within us, it’s just been covered it up with a lot of divisive ideas about the world because we were taught by a system of separation and division.
You are affecting your body with your thoughts and movement patterns, so you are not separate from the body you are living in, right? You are affecting the relationships you have with others through the hues of your past experiences and your habits. You affect the world around you; you are not separate from the life you and your habits are creating for you. You have the power, and only you, to allow change to happen, to allow more of your whole self to be revealed to your Self.
I tell my students, we’re peeling the onion, each time, in and out of the chair, it’s an undoing of the old, so the shiny you that’s in there becomes more visible. Seeing from the eyes of wholeness is a whole other kind of experience, one worth pursuit and investigation. Ask yourself, ‘what would it be like to see from wholeness?’ And see what answer comes back! Are the things you’re involved in bringing you more wholeness or creating more division within you? Wholeness brings ease, lightness, a curious excitement and openness to receive the moment, for whatever it shows you.
Walking the road back to wholeness requires courage to let go of what you think you know, and allow the next moment to be different, and know that awkwardness of the newness is taking you forward, and if you would like my help in that pursuit, I’m happy to lend my thinking hands, and my presence, to your healing process. The next step is yours — email me at cate@thelisteningbody.com to schedule your first or your next fine-tuning lesson!
