On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “More and more Americans are given this heroin [free government largesse]. Money is like a drug. People become dependent on it, even those who don’t want it.”
“If you are given money, you will budget your life accordingly.”
“It’s like taking a country into a rehabilitation center and breaking them of their drug habit.” (Feb. 16)
I’ve rushed around most of my life trying to get a lot of stuff done.
This has not been an efficient way to live. I’ve often had to repeat my shoddy work and often felt like a chicken running around with his head cut off.
I had bosses who complained that I would get tunnel vision and ignore everything except the task at hand.
David Gorman discusses this tense way of living in an interview with Robert Rickover. (Also check out David’s interview at DirectionJournal.com.)
David: It occurred to me that what was going on in the teaching room [with some students] was not that important but it was what was going on at work.
People were getting ahead of themselves and this rushing around caused needless tension and inefficient movement.
Robert: “Many people are not present with themselves.”
“If a person is not present, then telling them to talk to their necks and to not tense it might not be effective because a whole period of time has gone by and they’re not present and the damage has been done.”
David: “Maybe it is the whole way the person is going about to do things and the tension is the coordination of them rushing like that.”
“So I’d then spend the lesson helping someone to go out there an experiment with going to work one day and deciding not to rush. You might get less done. See if that is what is causing your tension. People could do it if we set it up as an experiment, as something to try for one day. People who managed it came back and said, I did not get tense. I was more present. I did a better job because I was not juggling three things at once.”
“This was the start of the Learning Methods. I saw it was not a set of unconscious habit patterns of functioning but more a use of themselves, what the self was up to, not what the body was up to. The body functioning, the tension, is the coordination of the human being rushing. That rushing is just one pattern.”
“I work with a lot of performers. There’s another huge habit pattern — it is extremely important to get everything right. Consequently, there’s a lot of fear of not being perfect. So they’re putting undue attention on getting all the notes right and then they wonder why they get so tense and caught up.”
“Why would you have a neck that wasn’t free? Could it be because of these ideas?”
Most of Robert’s interviews are over in 25 minutes but this one lasts over an hour.
I think I played tackle football twice in my life, sometime around seventh grade.
I hate being hurt. I hate getting tackled. I hate pain. I hate the risk of injury.
Yet I love watching football. I love to see a blitzer tackle a quarterback from behind and just watch his body crumble under the impact.
I would never box yet I love watching boxing.
I would never have sex on camera and share it with the world and yet I have often watched people do just that.
I think the self-destructive nature of engaging in such activity makes it particularly compelling to me to watch it.
I don’t think I’d ever go to a dangerous place in Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere just for a news story, yet I love to read the stories of people who do just that.
I would never want my children to risk themselves in the activities yet I am happy to be entertained and informed by those who freely choose to do so.
I am generally against the government providing welfare and subsidies yet I am happy to take advantage of such when that serves my self-interest.
I last played touch football in April 1998. I fell and broke a bone in my wrist that day and have not played since. I avoid roller-skating for similar reasons and any activity that could lead to a sudden fall and injury. I don’t have much calcium in my bones and they break easily.
On the other hand, I write freely about personal details of my life that most people would never share publicly. I have no problem if such people particularly enjoy my work. I want them to read me and it does not matter to me if they’d never say such things themselves.
As the moral leader to thousands of impressionable young Jews around the world, I have more severe strictures on my behavior than the average guy who’s free to drink and smoke and lend his bum to other blokes.
Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax writes:
If you do start (or stumble into) the “should” conversation, then try approaching it as a true-or-false question: If you believe an industry is so unsafe or dishonorable that you wouldn’t offer up yourself or spouse/child (real or hypothetical) to work in it, then you shouldn’t use the products of that industry.
Cool thing is, this works not just for porn, but for meatpacking, contact sports, mining, art, education, pubs, multinationals, politics, you name it. Discuss.
My frequent posts this week indicate that I am on the up side of my bipolar cycle.
Though not clinically bipolar, I have many tendencies in this direction. If you read many of my posts, you’ll notice that I tend to swing from thinking that there are no consequences for my actions (the up side) to feeling that there is no hope.
I took a small dose of lithium for about seven years (prescribed 600 mg a day, I sometimes took this much and just as often skipped it completely as the side effects of weight gain, etc were too much). I also took small daily doses of clonidine and clonazepam.
A few weeks into my Alexander Technique teacher training, I talked to one Alexander teacher about quitting my meds entirely. I realize that many perhaps most Alexander teachers will not opine on such matters. This particular teacher said that quitting might be a good idea but he/she was not a doctor and could not give medical advice. This teacher said that few if any Alexander teachers took psycho-tropic (is that the right term for mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics and the like?) meds. The teacher said that many people who take regular Alexander lessons find they can do without such meds. That these meds tend to dull your kinaesthetic sense (though some people should take them as prescribed).
After about two months of my daily Alexander teacher training, I tapered off all my meds. I did not bother consulting my psychiatrist or any doctor about this. I’m way too arrogant for that.
Though I’ve never been asked to be on a poster for mental health, I’ve yet to dance naked in public either (perhaps I just haven’t heard yet the right music).
I feel like I’m doing fine though everything I’ve done to get myself in trouble over the past three years would likely not have happened if I’d stayed on my lithium (I tend to get arrogant and out-spoken when feeling good and write anti-Patrick McDonald screeds without factual foundation and this destroys many of my relationships). On the other hand, there’s probably a lot of good writing I’ve done that would not have happened if I had stayed on my meds (just don’t ask me to name any).
Does anyone have any thoughts on Alexander Technique superceding the need to take your psycho meds?
If your spouse has some kind of syndrome, how much should you put up with?
I say you should not put up with any more than if the spouse had no such diagnosis or syndrome.
There’s nothing that forces you to treat somebody badly. There’s no syndrome that forces you to speak badly to your family.
In my experience, some people take advantage of their syndromes to abuse others. Other people with as much duress treat others beautifully.
Some wives claim PMS as their excuse for treating others badly. I don’t buy it.
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager made the case against unconditional love. “No matter how I treat her, I will get love?
“People should feel that they should earn the love of their spouse every day. Didn’t you feel that when you dated? When you dated, didn’t you try to earn the love of the person you were seeking? Why should that stop after you marry?
“You wanted to look your best, smell your best, act your best, when you were dating. Why shouldn’t you want to look your best, smell your best and act your best after you marry?
“You know before you marry that there is no unconditional love. The love is conditioned on how you act. So why should that notion stop after the wedding?”
“You get unconditional love or you get romantic love but you don’t get both. If you think that no matter how you act, the person will still love you the same, you won’t act as well.
“If you were told at work that no matter what you did, you would get the same salary, would you work as hard? The idea of an unconditional salary is absurd, but why is that different from unconditional love in a marriage?”
“You get better behavior when people have to earn love.”
This link and video are in Hebrew.
John* emails: Just watch the video, you can see Chaya come on at about 1:53, and it is pretty clear from the end of the video that they just seized upon this poor old odd guy. There’s a mob of women running around calling everyone pedophiles, telling their children to make up stories, etc. There seems to have been some incident for which 3 charedi men were detained, and that spawned this mob mentality, where an (apparently ozzie) women who seems rather mental is compiling “lists” of pedophiles, essentially of all the men in the neighborhood.
The worst part is, that what she says is so offensive. If she really believed he was a pedophile, then what she’s saying isn’t sufficient, and if he isn’t, its just insane.
Alexander teachers would benefit from publishing more before and after pictures.
I like what Amira Alvarez does here.
I was shocked by the before and after picture of Lulie Westfeld in her book on her Alexander journey. These kind of photos are powerful.
Most people I know would like to look more attractive and Alexander Technique helps that.
I don’t think Alexander teachers should get nervous talking about beauty and sex and attraction and status and the stuff of real life and how Alexander helps with it. Alexander teachers strike me as trying too hard to be professional (a response to the insecure nature of the profession) and hence flee from anything that might offend.
I became interested in the Alexander Technique from one sentence in a book by Neil Strauss on meeting women — “The Rules of the Game.” It made sense to me that if I was more poised and had better posture, I would be more attractive to women.
For almost every single guy I know well, almost everything they do is to become more attractive to the opposite sex. Few things will be more effective in this regard than Alexander work.
Sometimes beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but most of the time beauty is objective. We are evolutionarily programmed to respond to certain proportions.
Think about the way Alexander Technique can help redistribute unsightly fat bulges so that people look more proportionate.
In my humble understanding, the Alexander Technique has a lot to say about facial tension. I often tell my students to think about the face widening. As with other widening instructions, these are just directions to the self to stop unnecessarily compressing and scrunching and pulling down and in.
I sometimes bring my hands to the face of the student lying down and let them rest lightly on their cheeks or forehead to promote this release of unnecessary tension.
I try to get my students to notice unnecessary tension around the eyes and the lips.
With the reduction of this tension, the students tends to become more serene, more present, and to display a more resonant voice. And yes, they often look better. More tranquil and yet more alive.
In my third year of training, I spent a couple of weeks of my teacher turns concentrating on developing my voice. I was shocked to see how much my voice improved when I let go of tension around my eyes and lips. A resonant voice is more attractive.
Mike Cross is an Alexander teacher in England. He writes:
The essentials of Alexander work are the same for children and adults alike:
– learning to say “No”
– consciously sending messages from the brain to parts of the body
– going into movement.
FM Alexander was born in 1869; he was born two months premature and was not expected to live. He was beset from birth onwards with respiratory difficulites, which the technique he evolved later solved, indirectly. This personal history caused Alexander to be far ahead of his time in his understanding the obstacles to healthy development and growth of a human being. His understanding is reflected in the hierarchy of the traditional Alexander directions for (1) neck, (2) head, (3) torso, and (4) limbs.
As a child develops, he or she can gradually learn how to say “No” to the sending of unwanted messages — all in the context of playing games and having fun — and to send new messages for the neck to be free, the head to go forward and up, the back to lengthen and widen, and the knees to go forwards and away…!
Alexander work can be particularly beneficial for children who were born prematurely (see Alexanderbabies.com); for children with symptoms of dyslexia & dyspraxia caused by immature Primitive Reflexes; and for children who are poor at Listening.
Mike Cross tells Robert Rickover: “Alexander Technique is not as useful for children as it is for adults. If you have children with coordination problems, dyslexia, dyspraxia, I’d recommend Alexander work to help you understand the cause of the problem and how important coordination is.”
“For children, we use movement. For adults, the Alexander work is about saying no to certain ideas and stimuli and thinking of your directions to use yourself in a new way, and then going into movement. With children, the movement is all important. It’s difficult to get them to say no and think in such a considered way, but by doing certain movements, that can help their coordination and development.”
“The really important movement that many children don’t do is crawling on their hands and knees.”
“Children don’t spend enough time on their tummy because of the fear of cot deaths (SIDS).”
Robert: “The pediatric society here has told parents to not let kids sleep on their stomachs because of the danger of SIDS.”
Mike: “The advice not to put babies on their tummies is rubbish. Babies should spend lots of time on their tummies making the movements necessary for the brain to get control of certain primitive reflexes.”
“If children don’t make the movements they need to make, these primitive reflexes get stuck in the system. That’s the root causes for dyslexia, dyspraxia, hyperactivity.”
“Children who struggle to write may be quite smart but as soon as they have a pen in their hand, they can’t think. The cause of that is immature asymetrical tonic neck reflex.
“When a baby turns his head in the womb, its arms will go into a fencer position. It’s a fencer reflex or an asymetrical tonic neck reflex. As long as that reflex is in the system, as soon as the child turns his neck to one side, the arm on that side will want to extend.
“When it comes to writing, then, the child will consciously want his arm to flex but his arm will subconsciously want to extend. So a conflict is set up in the child’s system between its conscious intention and the reflex.”
“Most Alexander teachers would not understand the problem as I am describing.”
“Alexander lessons will help you not to end-gain — to not go directly for the target you have in mind before you understand the problem in the broader sense.”
Primitive reflexes are crude automatic responses that a baby has at birth to help it survive. They are the building blocks of all human behaviour.
Often these reflexes are retained in immature form into childhood and adult life, in which case they are the root cause of problems as diverse as:
– irrational anxiety & phobias
– mood swings and emotional gusts
– motion sickness
– inability to write and think at the same time
– inability to sit still
– difficulty with eye-tracking
– lack of left-right coordination
– distractability
– poor listening skillsAt the Middle Way we focus in particular on four reflexes. Each of these reflexes relates (synergistically or antagonistically) to the others, and all four work together to influence muscle tone and head/neck balance.
The baby panic reflex is seen when a new-born is dropped and its hands fly out. Called the Moro Reflex after the scientist who identified it, it is a response to a stimulus perceived as fearful or threatening.
I discuss the weekly Torah portion with Rabbi Rabbs Mondays at 7:00 pm PST on my cam and on YouTube. Facebook Fan Page.
This week we study Parashat Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1-24:18).
