The School Of You

Out of retreat and in London with my children. It's 9.30pm and my two girls are finally asleep after a long flight from Tokyo. I am sitting at my desk in the Savoy, excited to be soon offering my workshop to a good gathering of students, teachers and friends on August 4th in Regents Park. Are you coming? It's going to be the School of You: you are the doer of your business, not your business the doer of you. Anyway, saying I am all "refreshed" delivers a distorted image of what I was up to the last 9 days! I was on an intensive journey into The School of Me: what do I do to me that causes pain? How do I find my natural state which is free of pain and moving into lightness of being? Sound familiar? It's a work that shows the cause of the cause. In Alexander Technique we say the "cause" is the way head co-ordinates all, yet what moves your head? Your thoughts of course. Your habits of thoughts: more precisely your fears, beliefs and prejudices. It's one reason why my favourite book of Alexander's is his first: Man's Supreme Inheritance. In that book he passionately puts forward fixed ideas as "cause"; but by the time we get to his last book Universal Constant of Living, "cause" is all about the use of head/spine relationship in everyday living. In my opinion, he jumped the wrong way. Jumping the other way is getting back to "mind" as cause. Our thoughts move our heads and whole Selves, not the other way around – although many of us try to do that. When we do we suffer from accusations of looking "Alexandroid" like. I think it is true – because that was me once. I was so obsessed with "correct use of the self" that I held to an idea of me. It's how I am often able to guess a teacher's lineage: it's clear there's an idea driving their "use of the self" but Nature doesn't need your idea to drive you. The right thing does itself. We have no business carrying around an idea like that in our head. Pardon me to anyone feeling "attacked" but I include me in the "attack" too: I am every bit an "idea" mover – and this last 9 days I got busy undoing "that" in my thinking. I consider my Self embarking on my fourth round of Teacher Education: first time in London in the 70's, then again with Marj in the 80's, then again while inventing my teacher training programme in the 00's, now expanding into mind as cause with Katie in the 10's. Here's how she puts it: Think → Feel → Act → Have Having is believing there is a such a thing as "the correct posture." It's wanting to "have" something that causes interference with our natural movement system, our True Nature. Alexander Technique teachers all denigrate the word "posture" but if you are truthful, you can find many fixed ideas about your "use of the self." I keep finding them, it's shocking… To discover the layers I attended sessions from 7am to 9pm every day. On average, I slept 5~6 hours per night. I did not need the sleep – joy has a way of energizing you. Happy people are not fatigued, and this week was happy. Now I have a gift for you, starting in August – Service Product. How to re-engineer your work – based on niche – to make it palatable (means sellable) to the world of 2013. This is going to be all about finding a way to teach in groups, finding a way to teach electronically, finding a way to reach more people in a lifetime than every teacher who ever came before you. It's about finding exponential growth of your work. It's time. Our time. Alexander Technique is a science for this coming century – where the scientific focus is finally coming around to: what makes a human "human"? What is consciousness? How do we "know" we know? Great stuff – our stuff – but you need a technique that talks in today's language, that relates to mainstream thinking. I have many ideas that I hve proved work in the market place – but you can judge for your Self this coming August!