When I'm teaching Alexander Technique I often unnerve people by pointing out exactly what is going through their mind at the time.
Whether it's some kind of processing, that their awareness is closed off in a certain direction or that they are off somewhere else.
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That's very interesting.
Where would you say your own anchor, to use my own terminology, is located when you are doing this?
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In my example my awareness stays firmly 'here', so to speak.
Part of the work as a teacher is to notice the effect the student has on your own subjective experience, the pushes and pulls, and to leave yourself alone while noticing changes in the student.
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Getting caught up or in some way dragged along by the experience of the student means I'm no longer able to be useful - I'm on the same rollercoaster they are.
My role is to provide an external anchor – an awareness true north in the here and now – that they can hook onto.
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Sure. Spending all your time inside someone else's body is very destabilizing. It's like trying to read on a screen when someone else is constantly changing what's on the monitor.
I found that being outside both my own body and the other person's body made me sensitive to both.
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Agreed.
So when I'm teaching with hands on the student, there's a moment of 'connection'.
I can put my hand on your back and it's just a hand on your back. Then I make a change (hard to describe) and now my system is mapping your system (and we can both feel this).
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Sounds like the same kind of deal.
Does this fit? Your hands become not just a 'doing' to your girlfriend, there's a quality of listening as well. This is a non-doing touch, even though you're massaging. It's like there's a non-verbal communication between your system and hers.
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There's a very conscious (or at least it CAN be conscious once you know it) switch between pushing someone around with your hands and 'the two of your systems moving as one system'.
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The best prompt I've found to teach this is to ask an AT teacher trainee to put their hand on someone and not do anything at all, just listen.
"Let you hand be shaped by their back."
This is the quality of physical listening that activates the connection I mean.
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Looks like I've been self-teaching Alexander Technique, then!
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Haha AT is just a systematised way of accessing things that I suspect are accessible to everyone, it's just that
i) we don't know that these things exist
ii) we don't know how to access them if we did
iii) we don't know what to do with it once we have the skill!
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Yeah. For me the main sense I had when I first got into this stuff was that I'd made some sort of disjunction from just "meditating".
These exercises feel qualitatively different from the meditation I was taught/self-taught.
I'm happy to realize I'm not the only explorer.
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