But What Do I Write About?

"It's an incredible art – something the world has never seen before. More on that tomorrow."

Chancer's Posture Daily | August 15th, 2019.

***

She was a young, well-dressed Journalist from a trendy alternative mag. 

It was 2008 in the evening at a summer BodyChance Intro to Alexander's discovery at our Meguro studio in Tokyo. She was there to introduce her readers to the "Alexander Technique" which was doing the media rounds then.

"Rather than my talking," I suggested as we planned her article, "why not come and see a lesson in action?" She came.

The first lesson that evening was with a young lad who needed help dealing with his customers. He worked in his family pillow shop and was easily flustered by a wrathful housewives complaining about one thing or another. So I asked one of my middle-aged trainees to pretend to complain about something.

She was good and got stuck into it immediately!

The lad stood at the counter listening, and soon his composure was gone – his body stuttering, head pulling down, breath short, eyes darting about. He looked mad.

"What's your movement plan for a situation like this?" I asked him.

He smiled because as I asked him that question, I was using my hands in a head/spine configuration as a subtle hint. (Head moves, all of you follows)

"Oh," he said coyly, "I forgot."

We both smiled at each other, and he tried again. 

This time I offered some support by touching his head and spine to remind him to employ his Alexander movement plan. As he moved head and spine, he found easier access to information and spoke things about cushions that he had previously forgotten. He gained confidence – I took my hands off - and the whole exchange continued in a dramatically different way.

I saw the Journalist poised to write, but unable to take her eyes away from the action.

Next came a ballet dancer. She wanted to do a sit-up but found it hard to get upright with her legs fully extended on the floor.

"Let's see what you do." I proposed.

It was obvious. Instead of thinking through a way of firing her system logically, her mind was fixated on the end – "end-gaining" FM called it. We worked together finding a "means whereby" she could use head/spine/whole Self to sit-up. Her fixation on results was producing an abdominal contraction out of sync with her need. This fixation was disabling her ability to sit-up smoothly. 

We changed that, and she popped up like a jack-in-the-box – to all the ooohs and ahhhs of watching participants. She was joyful, clear - another day at BodyChance.

I carried on for another 60 minutes – towards a great variety of requests - until finally 9.30pm rolled in and it was time to finish.

"So…?" I queried the Journalist once we were alone.

"That was fascinating!" she enthused; and then the expression on her face fell into despair:

"But what do I write about? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

As I wrote yesterday, Alexander is primal. It's Paleo Posture. It reaches back into 500 million of year of evolutionary movement to pluck out the one fact that governs it all – head/spinal co-ordination.

It was apparent to me that this was what I was dealing with. In every case (serving a customer, doing a push-up), I was helping my students optimize their primary co-ordination. However, for the Journalist, it begged belief that so much could be accomplished by so little.

I'd love to take the credit, but the credit is not mine to take.

Nor is it Alexander's.

Whoever is responsible for it raining, for stars in the sky and universes – parallel or not – is also responsible for the miracle of transformative sensorimotor activity in vertebrates.

I don't know who to thank; I'm am just thankful that it is.

Don't believe me? Come see it in action at one of my Pro Paleo classes.

If you come, we are going to talk to you about joining, so be ready to make a pivotal decision about discovering your own primal coordinating system.

Details here:

https://bodychancejp.mykajabi.com/2019-s2-pro-trial