You Are Your Work of Art
In reading What Painting Is by Doug Elkins, about the alchemy of painting, I naturally associate the substances they mixed (without the benefit of atomic numbers), to the psychophysical transformation of a person.
Exploring alchemy in the olde sense was a hit or miss venture, as they progressively strove to understand their world at the time, and Alchemy in relationship to what happens in an Alexander Lesson brings me to the substances that constitute it.
Space, form, energy, brain and nervous system, consciousness directing the energy as in thought or thinking, electricity that passes between the synapse and next nerve receptor, the sensory-motor system, etheric bio-energetic field of each person that overlaps in a lesson. And not forgetting the imprinted habits in the tissue, for which constitutes the reason for the technique!
For anyone who has not had an Alexander lesson, these substances just sound like ingredients for a mind-body elixir for which there is no meaning, yet…but allow me to bring them in and out of the chair, asking them to think something or not think of something else, and the somatic concoction begins to mean something, congealing into an experience, a new experience.
That’s all Alexander was trying to get at; to allow a new experience, and the succession of enough new experiences over time revealed an increased allowing of newness to enter — the proverbial snowball rolling downhill, a collection of ice crystals gathering speed. In this case the ice crystals are the old habits melting away! The newness that is allowed to enter, is because there is more space, or space has again been made available in the nervous system.
The process over time becomes the alchemical transformation that turns inefficient psychophysical patterns of ancestral inheritance and wounded childhood misunderstandings into the living carvings of Da Vinci sculpture — YOU.
It’s not hard, it just takes practice and continued awareness and curiosity, but it’s not without its bravery. Anyone who has ever tried to stand in a rocky boat begins to understand the value of balance and the relief of putting one’s feet upon a sturdy dock. More and more, one’s movement becomes that sturdy dock, though the potential flow of the river is always there, underneath.
Any Alexander student knows, after doing a satisfactory number to rides in and out of the chair that taking that walk around the room is different than when they entered the studio. Lighter, more floaty, and easeful. Momentary awkwardness may show itself as a part of accepting the new, but letting it be ok, because the old habit is under there, ready to resume it’s job, if it’s given permission.
Taking conscious control back is like stripping away years, giving one a fresh new look at how to use your particular chemistry and these substances we’re given command of as humans in a being state. Are you ready to begin a new painting?!
