You. Do. See. Everything. (Day Eight)

It was constant worry. I don't see anything! How can I teach in activities, when I don't notice anything to work with? These thoughts were often running through my mind as I began shifting my teaching from "Alexander-is-a-feeling" into "Alexander-is-how-you-think". Then I realised - how ridiculous. Of course I see. I must see. It's just I don't register what I am seeing. When Marj watched a pupil, I saw exactly what she saw - how was it possible otherwise? Unless I needed glasses, or had cataracts, with eyes open and watching my student, it was impossible for me not to receive the same information that Marj was receiving. I don't have the power to jam light waves. So I do see everything. Everything I need is there, and I do see it all. It may seem silly to you, but this was a breakthrough for me. Finally I understood that the information I needed was going into my brain. My many sensoring abilities were consuming billions of bytes of information, and brain need only be told what to serve up for my conscious recognition. It was a problem of thinking, not a problem of seeing. My breakthrough was a result of a fascinating Buddhist text I had been studying about the elements of mind involved in knowing. Asunga listed 54 "mental factors", but what most caught my attention were the "The 5 Ever-Present Factors of Mind" which I've blogged about previously. Some factors are only occasionally there - factors such as shame - but these five working was a definition of being alive. They were primary. For Alexander Technique teachers, they are serve as a map on how to observe your students. Application of the Five Factors in Group Teaching [NOTE: This second half of my blog is a paid area describing ideas and exercises (to design and market groups) which are explored in a secret Facebook group together with 43 other teachers and students. You can join anytime and be part of the discussions.] 1. Clarify Your Intention

What is your intention as you are with your pupil? This can be nuanced - being honest, I could see I had many intentions such as: "I must show this student I can help them" or "I wonder if I will succeed to-day?" or "I don't think they like this lesson" or "I must find something to work with" and so on, and so on. Each of these thoughts arises from different intentions - to be liked, to prove I am OK (to them, to me), to know the truth, to seek out what I am looking for. What is intention would serve me best? To look. To gather information. How do I do that? 2. Make Direct Contact With the student. Hear them, see them, experience them in every possible way. There are at least 23 different senses that gather information, and until the information is received, there is no way of knowing what to focus on. So it is important not to "look" for anything specifically, but to be open to receiving any information. When I considered this factor more deeply, I came to see that I was mostly in "contact" with my insecurity in not being able to see anything! Paradoxically, this kept ensuring I didn't. I love the story told about Japanese base baller Ichiro who, after a magnificent catch, was interviewed by a gushing reporter: "How do you do it!? How do you catch these balls like that???!" "I look" deadpanned Ichiro. When you are in the mind "I can't see anything" - at that moment you are not in contact with your student's movements. You are in contact with your thoughts about it. Be simple like Ichiro - just look (and see, hear, feel, sense anything and everything). 3. Continue Your Attention I started to practise this and I was amazed at how simple it was. Oh, I just look. And the minute I truly made contact with my students activity, I started to gather all kinds of new information. It was like magic. I got reports from my unconscious about their movement, about their language, about their history, about odd inexplicable moments that left me wondering. Then I realised my wondering was constantly drawing me away from being in contact - I needed to redecide, redecide to make contact - until I had the information I needed to move the lesson on to another stage. It wasn't a one moment thing, it was a constantly renewing thing. It was a process. Then it became clear what emerged in that sustained attention… 4. Discern The Elements Things would jump out at me. "What was that?!" a voice would appear in my mind, highlighting for example, a moment in a dance movement where something odd seemed to happen. I discovered that I needed to listen internally to my unconscious as it whispered to me. These promptings are easy to dismiss, because they do not arise logically or with much force. These clues are often quite faint. Our brain is processing massive amounts of data. Here's a quote from Gizmodo from June this year:

Taking advantage of the almost 83,000 processors of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, the team was able to mimic just one percent of one second's worth of human brain activity—and even that took 40 minutes.

We are astronomically beyond anything we have managed to manufacture to date, so trying to "find what you are looking for" is hopeless. Instead, with clear intention, you can trust your unconscious to do the job for you - bringing your attention to data that will serve your conscious intention as a teacher. Providing you have your one line Job Description to sift out the data you want. Conscious intent, step one. 5. Knowing I akin this to "moving into the zone" when I feel an absolute confidence that this will work out, absent of any specific knowledge on how. I am in it, in a process that I know will yield results. It is so fun, like riding the roller coaster at Disneyland. The old panic I used to feel at the start of a student's unknown activity has been replaced with an exhilaration in my "not knowing" knowing. Teaching this way is fun. https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/