Rescuing My Family

The night my wife-to-be reconciled our beleaguered relationship, two typhoons were raging in Kyoto. As she later commented: “Those tycoons were like a sign - that’s why I married you. I just knew it would never be boring.”

But I don’t think either of us realised how dangerous it would become.

Running an Alexander practice anywhere is a challenge, but running one in Japan was doubly difficult for me as I could not communicate except through surrogates. My initial burst of success was built upon the generosity and support of Yuzuru Katagiri - the Godfather of everything Alexander in Japan.

But in 2004, Yuzuru visited me in Hieidaira where we lived and confessed:

“I can’t do it anymore. I am too old.”

He had bequeathed me wisdom and a mailing list, but I could no longer live off his initial promotional work. 

Jim Collins - in his 2001 book “From Good to Great” - observed that every successful business finds a simple metric to reflect its health. People usually assume that metric is profit, but that’s only for short-term thinking shareholders. The true metric reflects your vision and mission. I belatedly realised that my metric was the number of people in training - but now more were qualifying than joining.

As I lay awake night after night, paralysed in fear, I started conjuring up preposterous schemes to save my school - and my family more to the point. That was another reason I started my Buddhist practice of Precepts. At that time, I was giving individual lessons to a person in SONY management at a high executive level. Our lessons often devolved into deep discussions about Buddhist concepts. She was one of the most intriguing students I had ever taught. Suddenly I thought:

“Ask Yuko!”

So I did. She listened to me after our next lesson and was deeply worried on my behalf: “I love this school,” she declared, “let me think about what we can do.” I discovered later that her role in SONY included developing business strategies, so I had lucked out again.

Or had I?

I was soon to find out…

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