TTT-02 My Secret That No-one Can Quite Believe

As the cash was dwindling from my BodyChance school’s account - you’d think I’d live frugally, watching the pennies so the pounds would look after themselves. Right?

The opposite was true.

I spent like a crazy man - even my daughters tried to stop me, despite often being the beneficiaries: “I want to do it on my own dad”, one of them declared to me recently.

So how could I spend like that?

Well, firstly, it wasn’t money from the school. Remember - I wasn’t taking out a salary for the final year of the (old) BodyChance. So how could I do it? And that’s the secret that is hard for people to believe. In one word…

Precepts.

I am a Buddhist and quite a serious one. I follow the Indo-Tibetan Mahayana Buddhist teachings epitomised for the world through the influence of HH Dalai Lama. Precepts is a one-day practice for busy people, and I started doing it back in the early noughts as a way of praying for the good health of my three brothers-in-law, all of whom had life-threatening diseases.

As I was raising my family in Japan at the time, I felt for my sisters and wished I could do something constructive to help them. I had read about the 8 Mahayana Precepts, and Lama Zopa Rinpoche wrote that one of the benefits of this practice is…

“During this degenerate age, one who takes the Eight Mahaya Precepts and keeps them purely will definitely receive whatever one prays for.”

Sounded good.

I started doing them once a week. You get up before dawn, perform a ceremony, make eight vows (not kill, steal, lie, have sex, eat after midday, dance/sing, wear perfume or sit your ego on a high bed), and that’s it. For a dad raising two young children while trying to build a business, it was doable.

And then a strange thing started to happen.

Every time I took Precepts, something outstanding happened in my business. I didn’t notice it at first, but after a few times, I started to recognise the pattern. Eventually, I came to expect it and I was rarely disappointed. It was uncanny: a new trainee would turn up; a magazine wanted to do an article on us; I found the exact right person I needed to employ; a vast tax problem would miraculously evaporate - and so on and so on. It never let up, and during that time BodyChance grew from 12 trainees to embrace over 140 - the largest school that has ever existed in Alexander’s work since 1894. Talk about receiving what I prayed for!

I’d love to claim credit, but I can’t.

Meanwhile, one brother-in-law died, but the other two are still going 18 years later.

So what has all got to do with the resurrection of BodyChance and my prolificate spending?

Well, be patient, and more will be revealed tomorrow.

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