Japanese Earthquakes 

When my 10th-floor Tokyo apartment sways from side to side, my Japanese friends told me not to worry too much.

Oh, nice.

But then they said:

“When it goes up and down, please worry.”

This morning, the floor under my desk went up and down.

“Stay calm”, an alert texted while my iPhone’s siren screamed at me – pretty much guaranteeing I could not “stay calm”. Who designs these things? Maybe they could play a pleasant funeral song instead…

ANYWAY.

I survived. I am writing this. 

As I meditated on this morning’s experience, I understood what a gift it is. We expect things to stay the same – the homeostatic design of all our life systems underlies this broad attitude we have.

My apartment will not fall to the earth.
My partner will stay with me. 
I can continue in my job.

Until the day we realise this is not true.

Until the day we realise:

NOTHING IS PERMANENT.

This was one of FM Alexander’s insights - he put it rather impolitely once in a lesson:

“All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing.”

When you believe that how you feel is how you always will be – you are stuck. But it goes deeper than that – we believe the world is the feeling we have of it. We react to that feeling as though this is real. This is who I am.

i.e. I am who I feel my Self to be.

But is that really true? 

How “permanent” are you? If your apartment, partner, and job can change in an instant – can’t your feelings about you do the same?

Feelings represent your past, not your future.

Finding out who you could be starts with feeling yourself differently. But how do you do that? Alexander discovered that whenever he tried, he bumped into his homeostatic design. You set the parameters of what your life can be and live within the fishbowl of those expectations.

You need to wake up to what you can do – that is a thinking process. That requires recognition. Recognition that life is not fixed – your situation, no matter how bad – will not stay that way forever.

Hope never left you, and she’s waiting patiently nearby.

And as soon as you wake up to that - as soon as you stop believing that you are who you feel you Self to be – you will have your own (safe) earthquake.

Change can happen anytime. Anywhere.

Right now.