Life After STAT - And Terror

Everything changed after 2 years.

It started in 2002 when I was struck down an escalator and dislocated my arm - my wife had just walked away with our baby daughter Angelica and I was lying in agony at the bottom of the moving stairs. I screamed out her name louder than I ever have before.

“JALDHARA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

She heard. An ambulance came. They put me back together again.

What was wrong?

Kaorie was an ACAT-trained teacher in Kyoto who kindly agreed to come to Tokyo and teach for my school, given there were so few teachers in Japan at the time. We were chatting after class one day when she asked me:

“Why do you want to train teachers Jeremy?”

And without warning, a flood of tears burst out - sobbing uncontrollably, I managed to answer:

“I don’t.”

That was my problem.

I’d been saying that for years before I got to Japan. In Australia, I had been involved in setting up SATA, a training school in Sydney with Don Burton, Kri Ackers, Andrea Beesley, Vivien Mackie and a parade of different teachers acting as rotating Directors. Later, with Duncan Woodcock, I set up John & Lynn Nichols training school in Melbourne - MATTS. Both were like prototypes for Japan - but I knew it wasn’t for me, so instead, my sister Rosemary and her husband Bill set up a school in Sydney, and I taught on that.

My standard reply had always been: 

“Starting a training school is like starting a family. I’m not into that.”

Well, now I had a family.

In the first two years of ATA - BodyChance as a name was yet to be invented - I had used all my old teaching tricks to get by, but that wasn’t cutting it any more. After the rejection by STAT and my terrifying dislocation in the bowels of Sanjo Keihan station, I finally woke up…

I. Was. A. Training. Director.

This was the time I finally started to take on the responsibility of thinking deeply about what that involved. Weirdly, I started reading Alexander’s books. My wife began translating Ron Brown’s “Authorized Summaries of F.M. Alexander's Four Books” and I used her translations to create the Books Course. Thanks to Yasuhiro Ishida - who later did the full translations - the Books Course eventually grew into a self-sufficient program that even members of the public today can and do join. Japanese.

I also began inviting teachers I could learn from: Cathy Madden, Peter Grunwald, Lucia Walker & her mum Elizabeth, Tommy Thompson, Rachel Zann, David Gorman, and Vivien Mackie among many other fine teachers. So many. When they came to Japan, I would take a rest and be a student.

I was training again - but this time, I was researching “How do you train people to communicate Alexander’s Discovery?” and I learnt so much in the next decade through these “Continous Learning” master classes in Japan.

I was sailing along beautifully for a few years. I had no idea about business. I would go to the ATM, check the balance and be excited if the amount was high. I’d grab what I needed and be on my merry way.

But soon, I began to dread going to the ATM. 

As another 3 years passed, trainees graduated, others wanted to cut down their time, and my income was slowly draining away by the ever-changing geography of my students.

I’d hold my little girls close as I put them to sleep, wondering:

“What am I going to do?”

Like a fearful manga character, I'd lie paralysed at night looking up at the ceiling, my eyes slowly blinking open and closing again.

I was 47 years old, living in a foreign country - whose language I could not speak - with zero knowledge of how to run a business. And two little girls who depended on their dad.

My school was collapsing, and I had no plan.

I was terrified.

This is the twelfth in a series of daily emails exploring my challenges in communicating Alexander’s Discovery.