Going Beyond the Idea of You

My current series of Dailies is inspired by Megan Macedo’s “Be Yourself Community” 21-day writing challenge. 

Megan is maverick marketer with a leading edge message: people are more interested in you first, your product second. Particularly in the area of human potentiality and self-education.

Of course, this is me charaterizing her shtick – she will put it more elegantly than I. Personally I see her work as part of a long term movement that the great, grumpy, grandad of modern marketers - Dan Kennedy - first pointed out.

In one of Dan’s many advices, he encouraged us to rush down to the library and check out the covers of any famous magazine over the last 10 years. The trend – he predicted – will show how celebrities have taken over products and problems. Covers are now dominated by human personalities. And of course, this trend led to the unhealthy fabrication of personality that Megan’s movement is so intent on countering.

Of course all personality is a projection. It’s all a hallucinated fabrication.

I gradually understood this through my work sharing Alexander’s discovery.

Often a student will have a breakthrough perception of the reality of how they move. For example, lifting the leg backwards in an exercise regime or ballet movement. The projection is that their leg bends backwards from their hip-joint; a perfectly reasonably idea except that is a fairy tale.

Legs cannot move backwards and up – in a arabesque movement from ballet for example – without the pelvis and lower spine moving together. This is perfectly obvious and simple to understand if you watch it, yet so many dancers and exercise enthusiasts are detirmed to lift the leg from their hip joints, then wonder why they can’t get the flexibility they want.

Showing them the truth – a “movement reality-check” - instantly disolves a source of physical discomfort and is accompanied by great excitement.

But then hallucination & projection quickly take over.

The new movement is mechanicalized into something fixed, just as we are apt to do with our own self-image. It’s turned into something formulatic, repeated over and over again like those YouTubers who copy each other’s narrative…

“I am soooo excited to be here with you today and share….” 

In movement the mechanicalized projection complicates their Posture in a new way by obstructing their natural organisation.

So my student is soon back complaining that their insight is not working in the same way it did in our session together. And so we investigate and discover a newer and subtler hallucination that took over from the previous one.

Which is to say there is no Self that exists longer than the nano-second you manage to perceive it. About knowing your Self, my wonderful and precious teacher Marj used to say:

“You have to do the brainwork, every single time.”