In kundalini yoga, I heard a lot of things that were way beyond my rational understanding. I’ve rarely encountered that in the Alexander world. It’s all so logical.
But then I heard this Paul Cook interview with Tommy Thompson (the highest charging Alexander teacher in the world at $150 per lesson). Registration (free) is necessary to hear the interview.
Tommy says he took his first Alexander lesson from fellow Tufts faculty member Frank Pierce Jones in 1972.
Tommy: “At that moment of the lesson, Frank was the first person ever to put hands on me from whom I felt no threat, but until he put hands on me, I had never known I felt threatened.”
“I wasn’t interested in the Technique. I was interested in Frank. He was the complete opposite of me. I was 29. He was in his late 60s. I was intrigued that I had felt threatened by contact.
“Six years later, I discovered why. It was in a meditation in which I saw my birth. The first hands that touched me were a nurse’s but they pushed me back for an hour-and-a-half because the doctor was drunk. So the first hands that touched me, the feminine energy, it was rejection and betrayal. The second hands were a drunk man’s. The masculine energy. So you come into the world rejected and betrayed by the two energies you spend the rest of your life encountering. You set yourself up to be rejected and betrayed and hurt by every little boy and girl and man and women you meet, so you never really see the person who’s in front of you. So until Frank gave me a means of letting go of holding on to those patterns that had been established at birth, I was not really living my life. I was living the life predetermined by that moment of birth. Later, I found an aunt who’d been present at my birth who corroborated my story.”
