The Random Order of Everything

As my teenage daughter grew older a new word appeared in her vocabulary.

I woke up to it first when I saw her talking to someone in town. As I approached them, the older woman walked away. We were in Mullumbimby, a country town in Australia where people know each other, but I didn’t recognise her.

“Who was she?” I asked my daughter as I joined her in the street.

“I don’t know dad. Just a random person.”

“What do you mean – random!?”

She looked at me through a generation gap: “Dad! Random, you know – just random.”

“Oh,” I thought, wondering what-the-heck.

As the weeks passed, I heard this word more and more. 

There were not only random people - there were random messages, random shows on Netflix, random decisions and random purchases.

What is this random world my daughter is living in?

It isn’t my world. I live in a polar opposite world - and I have my theatre background, Arnold Mindell and Buddhism, to blame for that. Arnold Mindell – who developed process oriented psychology (p.o.p.) - also “invented” the concept of your “dreambody”.
And it is the total opposite of “random”. 

Everything has a meaning if you seek it out. Even the simplest hiccup. As I was emerging from my heavily guarded self into a more honest interaction – I sought out the secrets in others. I developed a new style of teaching which gives significance to “random” things.

Alexander started with “random” things – his gasping for air, his hoarseness and his pulling back the head. How they all related perplexed him, but he still sought out a connection – and eventually found it! FM’s discovery that head/spinal movements calibrate all the other systems in your body is the foundation of the Alexander Technique.

This principle of “random connections” is at the core of my work. A musician may be complaining about a sore little finger, but from that sore finger, you can journey back and discover everything that caused it.

Like the tip of an iceberg: there is so much more underneath to discover.

It would lead me on an extraordinary journey into the lives of others – and it started in Stockholm when a tall, gracious Swedish man handed me an obscure book by J. G. Bennett called “Enneagram Studies”. Nothing to do with personality types.

That little book would lead to a revolution in my teaching, and as I boarded the plane in Stockholm, I was about to find out how…

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Solving problems of any kind involve this kind of “random connections” approach. No information is redundant when it appears to you – a constant stubbing of your toe may be a sign of serious misalignment of your hips/spine and legs.

This approach to teaching is adventurous and fun. You learn to ask questions, act as a detective, and start experimenting with solutions. How this works is the central theme of my ThinkingBody courses. You can read more about them and purchase at the link below:

https://bodychance.mykajabi.com/store/TGFBWut4/