* Rabbi Berel Wein writes: “It is the unwavering courage and tenacity of Avraham, in the face of all defeats, hurts, hostile enemies and false friends, that most impresses us about our father. This strength of constantly renewing resilience is the legacy that he has bestowed upon us, his generations and descendants.”
* Rabbi Wein writes: “Throughout Jewish history, the Land of Israel has posed the greatest challenge to Jewish communal living. It is no surprise therefore that we who live in Israel find it to be a daily struggle in our lives. Nevertheless, it is the place for the greatest Jewish accomplishments and achievements. And therefore it is the destination for Avraham in his quest for spiritual growth and attainment.”
* Jews don’t call themselves children of Noah, but children of Abraham. Noah didn’t leave us much of a legacy. Abraham did.
* Rabbi Wein writes: “It describes Avraham as a person whose influence flowed from his personality and his behavior rather than from public pronouncements or ideological statements. By feeding the hungry, befriending the lonely, remaining loyal to those who were no longer really worthy of his loyalty, he “called out the name of the Lord” wherever he was. People saw in him a special person, a unique figure, a hero of spirit and action. Eventually people saw godliness in him. And finally, people saw God Himself, so to speak, through Avarham’s eyes and faith. All of this through Avraham’s behavior, demeanor and public reputation.”
“Western society, post-modern and essentially rootless, pursuing pleasure and individual gratification at almost all cost, unwilling to sacrifice for the future or for others, suffers from a lack of heroes and role models. Sports stars, movie actors and actresses, princesses and politicians, all have proven to be poor objects of emulation and imitation. Having no standard by which to measure ourselves, we are unhappy in our narcissism and mediocrity. We do not realize the cost to ourselves and our world of remaining ignorant of Torah and Jewish tradition, of not attempting to reach out and touch the hem of our father Avraham, of being smug and self-righteous in our prosperity and selfishness.”
“Having no memory any longer even of our grandparents, let alone of Avraham, modern American Jews facing self-induced extinction, blissfully whistle past the graveyard and espouse causes and struggles that can only further dim the Jewish spark still remaining within us. We were meant to represent godliness, morality, goodness, tradition, loyalty, and family in the world. These were the prime beliefs of Avraham and through his behavior, the rest of humanity came to recognize and even adopt these values. Does the non-Jewish world see these traits and life-style in the Jewish community today? Are we interested in “calling out to the name of the Lord” in today’s world? Are we proud to be the children and people of Avraham, or do we feel the whole matter to be superfluous and irrelevant to us and our families in today’s world? These are the crucial questions that face Jews today – not pluralism, peace processes, continuity and other manufactured sloganeering. Let us be the children of Avraham in deed as in name!”
* Rabbi Wein writes: “What is the lesson of this wandering state of Avraham and of his descendants throughout the ages? Why, even when the Jew has seemingly struck deep roots in a country and its society, is there always a storm that pushes the Jew on to a new home and a different Land? In our century, Jewish Europe was decimated and almost completely destroyed. The Jewish wanderer has now settled mainly in North America and in Israel. Are these more or less permanent homes for us or are they also only temporary havens (God forbid)? Why was it the Jewish fate to be the wanderers of the world?”
Jason Maoz writes: If you’re a conservative who’s tired of the increasingly cartoonish yawping coming from the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Savages of talk radio, you might want to check out Michael Medved’s nationally syndicated program (heard in the New York area on WNYM 970 from 3-5 p.m. weekdays and 3-6 a.m. Sundays).
Medved, a conservative who refuses to see the world in one-dimensional terms, is the author of several books, notably the mega-sellers What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?, an anecdotal account of suburban Los Angeles baby-boomers coming of age; Hollywood Vs. America, a searing indictment of the entertainment industry, and Right Turns, a political/spiritual autobiography.
Born in Philadelphia and raised in San Diego, Medved currently resides in the Seattle area. In an interview with the Monitor for a profile some years ago, he described his upbringing as having been traditionally Jewish but not Orthodox.
“My family belonged to Conservative synagogues,” he said, “and my mother always felt guilty about not keeping a kosher home, which she had done until I was about six. But I remember feeling when I was a teenager that my parents were old-fashioned and tribal, and way too Jewish.”
Fascinated with politics from a young age, Medved said he was more or less a typical 1960s liberal – active in the antiwar movement, a worker in Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign and a supporter of George McGovern four years later – though never one of the era’s self-styled student revolutionaries preaching the evils of capitalism while living off generous allowances and trust funds.
But a new interest in Judaism – “during a six-month period,” he said, “I went from a position in college where I saw my parents as too Jewish to one where I saw them as not Jewish enough” – coincided with a decidedly rightward drift in Medved’s politics.
In 1973 he became a Sabbath observer and joined an Orthodox congregation, experiences touched on in What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? and explored more substantially in Right Turns. At about the same time he began to seriously question the political wisdom of liberals who were so vociferously condemning U.S. foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Soviet Union.
In addition to being repulsed by the moral equivalency argument advanced by liberal intellectuals inclined to apportion equal blame for the cold war or, worse, paint the U.S. as the prime culprit, Medved was appalled by those whom he saw as hawkish on Israel but dovish on everything else.
“It seemed very hypocritical to me,” he said, “for anyone – especially anyone claiming to be Jewishly committed – to call for more and more military aid to Israel while at the same time being opposed to American defense spending and the U.S. military in general. That kind of hypocrisy, not to mention shortsightedness, really got to me.”
It was only a matter of time before Medved’s evolving political views led to a switch in party allegiance. The last Democrat he supported for president was the late Henry “Scoop” Jackson in the 1976 primaries.
Medved graduated with honors from Yale before going on to Yale Law School and working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and a film critic for CNN and theNew York Post. His greatest visibility before he began his radio career came from his twelve-year stint as co-host of “Sneak Previews,” the movie-review show on PBS.
Medved’s radio program reaches an audience of nearly 5 million. Though the show is primarily about politics and current events, listeners often call or write to tell him how much they’ve learned from the show about Jews and Judaism.
Something else they learn is that not all Jews share the ritualistic liberalism promulgated by the secular Jewish establishment. For many listeners, Medved is one of the few Jews they’ve seen or heard in the media whose views aren’t lifted verbatim from the editorial page of The New York Times or the platform of the Democratic Party.
For conservatives who prefer to think rather than be yelled at, Michael Medved offers a smart alternative on the radio dial.
Author Michael Gelb, the world’s most famous Alexander Technique teacher, says to Direction Journal: “Alexander Technique has had a dreadful exercise in branding itself over the last 30 years. The work is more valuable than ever.”
“It’s hard for Alexander people put so much energy and time into training for the Technique, it’s hard for them not to go on and on about the process, about non-doing, and all the stuff that makes no sense to normal people. All people are interested in are benefits. What are the benefits to me? Will this help my back problem? Will this help my singing? Will this help me improve my tai chi?”
“People have this notion that it is unAlexandrian and end-gaining to engage in sales whereas F.M. Alexander was the biggest promoter, salesman, marketer, deal-closer. He charged a lot of money for his services. He knew their value. He wore the finest hand-made suits. He drank the best vintage wines. He was not some whiny process-oriented hippie saying, ‘Ohmigod, it’s all about the means whereby’.”
Robert Rickover graduated from the School of Alexander Studies in London, England in 1981 where he also served on the faculty. He studied for over fifteen years with master Alexander teacher Marjorie Barstow and frequently assisted her in teaching her Alexander Technique workshops in Lincoln, Nebraska. Robert began a private teaching practice in Toronto, Canada in 1981 and maintains a dual practice since moving to Lincoln, Nebraska in 1990. He holds degrees in physics and economics from Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Robert is a teaching member of the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (STAT), the American Society for the Alexander Technique (AmSAT) and Alexander Technique International (ATI).
Luke: “When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
Robert: “A disc jockey on a country music station in the South.”
Luke: “How did you come to be an economist?”
Robert: “It was a tortuous path. I originally studied physics and engineering. I was good enough at it to keep going but not good enough at it to want to keep going. I eventually dropped out of that and shifted over to economics [doing the classwork for his PhD but never writing a thesis]. I did that for 12 years.”
“A colleague at work [for the government of Ontario] was taking Alexander lessons [in 1975]. That intrigued me. I could see changes in her. I checked it out [in late November] and got hooked quickly.”
Luke: “Were you ever physically gifted at anything?”
Robert: “No. Nor particularly interested.”
Luke: “What was your reputation in high school?”
Robert: “I was a nerd before nerds were cool.”
Rickover trained for three years at an Alexander teaching school run by Paul and Betty Collins. It was an off-shoot of Walter Carrington’s course, which had a long waiting list. “I had lessons with everyone I could find in London.”
Robert became intrigued by Marj Barstow’s ability to work with groups. Alexander Technique has typically been taught one on one.
Robert: “A teacher only has two hands. How are you going to work with a large group of people? The whole issue of working with groups in London at that time was very contentious. There were nasty meetings of STAT (the Society of Teachers of The Alexander Technique) about that.”
“There was one meeting I can remember and I was just astonished at the level of nastiness. I don’t think there’s anything quite like that today.”
Luke: “If Marge has a successor, who is it?”
Robert: “There is no successor to Marge. There are some pretenders.”
Luke: “Is Alexander Technique hands-on work erotic?”
Robert: “Not as far as I am concerned.”
“The reason that Alexander teachers don’t have enough clients is that they haven’t thought through the question of how is someone going to find out about the Technique in a way that makes sense to them and how are they going to find a teacher in their area. With exceptions, Alexander teachers are extremely bad at both of those.”
“The fundamental issue is that Alexander teachers have not figured out how to get the word out about the Technique and about themselves in an effective way.”
“Most teachers have not thought through how someone can be interested in this work and what it can be useful for.”
“If you are immersed in a three year training course surrounded by people who take it for granted as being good, you have to step out of that box and pretend you’ve never heard of it and bear in mind that there are a zillion competing methods promising something similar to the untrained ear to the benefits of Alexander Technique.”
Luke: “Could you elaborate on your statement that you learned more about freeing your neck from cranial sacral than from Alexander Technique?”
Robert: “The method that has intrigued me the most outside of Alexander Technique is cranial-sacral work. It can get at subtle tensions that are way below any possibility of direct consciousness and redirection. Complicated tensions. Fascial twists and turns. In theory, you could direct yourself out of them but it could 200 lifetimes to do it.
“To me, it is complementary to Alexander work. It gets at the complex patterns of tension that Alexander can not get to easily.”
Luke: “Were you able to reexperience your birth?”
Robert: “No. A couple of times maybe slight intimations of that. Cranial-sacral is not rebirthing work. I did get a sense that holding patterns in my body probably did have some relationship to birth. I was born in the era of forceps delivery. I can imagine what happened with one shoulder being caught but I have no basis of proving that.”
“I think the Alexander Technique can be taught in a far more simple form that it is typically taught. My preference is to work with large groups. You can get 30 or 40 people doing some advanced thinking on their own after a few days.”
“I think there are people who can learn everything they need in two or three group classes.”
“Cranial-sacral is not demanding. You can just lie on the table and go to sleep. I like that about it. The Alexander Technique can be taught in ways that engage people’s thinking but doesn’t seem like a big deal.”
“You can teach it all in a group class. You can even do it without any hands-on if you’re really good. I don’t think I could do that. But I don’t use my hands a lot in teaching groups. I think hands have become fetishized by Alexander teachers.”
“Paul Collins told me that legacy teacher Frank Pierce Jones did not have good hands, but Frank was able to engage a student’s thinking in ways that most other teachers couldn’t.”
Luke: “Should [Dutch historian of Alexander Technique] Jeroen Staring‘s work matter to Alexander teachers?”
Robert: “I think so.”
“I don’t agree with him that the Technique is fatally polluted by these discoveries.”
“When you have close contact with a small group of teachers, it’s inevitable that their stuff is going to get transmitted to you… There are certain attitudes in the Alexander teaching profession that are influenced by F.M. himself. Just as you see in the teachers trained with Marj Barstow. She had some attitudes that were not healthy. And you can see that among her teachers.”
“F.M. Alexander had some weird ideas. We need to make sure we don’t take on any of that stuff ourselves.”
Luke: “Reading Jeroen Staring, I don’t get the sense that F.M. discovered anything. Rather, that he ripped it off from other people.”
Robert: “You can find all the Alexander procedures [done by others earlier]. His understanding of the connection between thought and movement, he discovered that.”
“I don’t think the teaching procedures have much importance.”
Luke: “What did your father think of Alexander Technique?”
Robert: “He had no understanding of what it was. He did buy Alexander’s four books and read them. I can only imagine what he thought when he saw John Dewey’s introductions. When I was a kid, John Dewey was a household topic of conversation among my parents. My sense of what they were saying was that he had single-handedly wrecked American education.
“Dewey is this guy who’s followed me around all these years. I went to university and took an introduction to Philosophy course and we got to pragmatism and there was John Dewey, the leading exponent. I thought, the same guy who wrecked the school system? A few years later, geez, John Dewey has written some good stuff on Alexander’s work.
“He’s hardly a household name these days. Most people confuse him with one of the other Deweys.”
“I think it puzzled my father.”
Luke: “What did you love and hate about being the son of a great man?”
Robert: “You got certain privileges, but you also got people coming up to you and expecting that you would have certain interests. I try to downplay it as much as possible.”
Luke: “What’s been your relationship to Judaism?”
Robert: “I was not brought up Jewish. Actually, I was Presbyterean but not in any real sense. I dropped out of that as quickly as I could. I had no interest in religion. I was intrigued by Buddhism in my 30s and 40s, but only intellectually.
“It seemed like all of my girlfriends were Jewish. When I moved to Lincoln, I moved a block away from a temple. I made some connections there. Over the years, got more interested. I converted [to Judaism] about five years ago.”
The typical Alexander Technique teacher trainee is going to hear many times over his three years of instruction that “we’re not here to make the student feel good, we’re here to help them learn something.”
I’m not sure there’s such a flaming sword between feeling and learning.
I think that if I as an Alexander teacher can help my student feel great, that the student is likely learning every bit as much as if I tell him that he’s raising his shoulders when he sits in a chair.
There are many paths to learning. Feeling great is a perfectly valid path.
Yet Alexander teachers have this hang-up about feelings. They’re not reliable. “Don’t try to reconstruct the feeling. Reconstruct the thinking and the good feelings will follow.”
I love what John Nichols (one of the world’s three great Alexander teachers) said on this score.
John: “When you look at the jargon we use — constructive conscious control, use, primary control, inhibition, stop and say no — it has a rigid off-putting boring stiffness about it and a refusal on our part to go out and meet our audience and try to express things in a way that catches their attention and communicates something more alive, more energized, more positive. We get stuck on the dogma.
“I remember giving a talk in London. Another experienced Alexander teacher came. I try to avoid jargon. I said the musculature of your body, an animal’s body, has three main functions to perform — support you against gravity, move you around, and breathe you. Breathing is largely muscular. These should be harmonized. Most small children handle that synergy well but with adults, patterns develop that distort that harmony. Habits of postural support interfere with breathing. Habits of movement interfere with breath and postural support. Habits of breathing interfere with postural support and movement.”
“At the end of it all, this senior teacher came up and said, ‘But John, you didn’t speak about primary control!’ Well, so what? I talked about things that are primary control but I didn’t use that phrase. We get stuck on this dogma that we have to use these terms. We must insist that it’s not just about the body, it’s about consciousness. We must insist that it’s all about learning to stop.”
“We can help you be more fully expansive and open and this is energizing and it feels good. Dare we say that? We get afraid to say that. What are we doing it for if it does not feel good? Why do we have to be frightened of saying that?”
“In his books, Alexander says that lessons help make our sensory perception more accurate. Somehow, we forget about this and we go around saying, ‘Never trust your feelings. Never trust your feelings.’ That’s alienating to me as is this harping on about consciousness.”
“I like that you have Direction Journal. Could you imagine putting something on the market called Inhibition Journal?”
“The word ‘posture.’ When we pussyfoot around and say this has nothing to do with posture, we’re just confusing people.”
“How can you be fully erect without being stiff and rigid and still fully able to breathe? We have contributions to make but we need to be willing to talk the language that connects to people instead of insisting on our alienating jargon.”
Most people I know who’ve heard of the Alexander Technique regard it as body work. Yet almost all Alexander teachers say it is not body work.
We think we’re teaching psycho-physical awareness. We’re teaching observation, inhibition and direction. We just happen to use our hands to teach.
London School of Economics sociologist Jennifer Tarr studied part of the Alexander Technique world in London and published an essay.
She wrote: “While clearly a form of body work in the sense that it ‘takes the body as its immediate site of labour, involving intimate, messy contact with the (frequently supine or naked) body, its orifices or products through touch or close proximity’ (Wolkowitz 2002: 497), the Technique goes out of its way to avoid addressing the body as such. By positioning itself as holistic in the sense that it works on the integrated body and mind, it strives to
overcome mind-body dualism by addressing the self, as phrases such as ‘good use of the self’ attest. This distancing from the body has a twofold effect: it both emphasises the conscious nature of the work which lies at its core, and also detaches it from a concern with the negative aspects of the body for which body work is stigmatised, such as its relation to sexuality, waste products, and decline (Twigg 2000).”
So what would be a typical Alexander teacher response to this? “She doesn’t understand Alexander Technique.”
This is the sort of response that makes me feel at times like I’ve joined a cult. Whenever an outsider makes an observation that differs with the dogma of the cult, they are dismissed as “not understanding.”
It was the same way with Christians in my youth and Marxists at college. Outside criticisms come from lack of understanding. Nobody who’s not in the dance can possibly get what we’re doing.
Well, I’m not sure that Jennifer Tarr does not understand Alexander Technique.
My opinion is that she’s right and my teachers are right. There’s truth in both views.
Alexander Technique works with the body and it sure looks like body work. On the other hand, the Technique is much more than body work and the emphasis of my three years of study has been on the cognitive direction of the self.
So, yeah, I say the Technique is and is not body work.
I love thinking out loud on this blog and having the freedom to say controversial things. I’m sure that some Alexander teachers read my stuff and say, “Luke doesn’t understand the Technique.” They’d dismiss me as a teacher. They wouldn’t send me students. They wouldn’t hire me to teach the Technique. They’d regard me as a pariah.
Oh well. I want the freedom to write even if it costs me professional success.
I look at most of my peers and I think, “They’re careerists. They tell their teachers what they want to hear. They do what their teachers want them to do. They don’t rock the boat. They develop good relationships with their mentors and use these relationships to get ahead. They refrain from saying anything publicly that could damage their careers. And as a result, they have an easier time getting hired and getting ahead and making money and moving forward socially.”
I envy their ease of success but I am who I am. I’m 45 years old and I am not always going to repeat back to my teachers what they want to hear. Sometimes I’ll risk saying things that they don’t like.
When I’m in these bouts of grandiosity, I think of myself as a truth-seeker atop a white steed battling for the right and the good.
Let’s say I tried to raise a discussion with experienced Alexander teachers on Jenn Tarr’s observation above. A senior teacher who knows me and my love of stirring up controversy and putting myself forward to get the maximum attention would probably say something to me like this, “Luke, I’ll know you’re serious about being an Alexander teacher when you stop wasting time with these fringe opinions and instead develop ways of marketing the Technique so that you can get lots of students and make money doing what you love.”
I understand this response. It’s smart. Unfortunately, I’m doomed to making my life difficult.
So why does any of this matter?
Well, imagine you’re in a room filled with people doing Alexander Technique. Half of them are teachers and half of them are students. You’d see all the teachers talking gently to their students and putting gentle hands on them and helping them to move with more ease. And you’d likely think, this is erotic stuff.
And you’d be right. This can be erotic stuff. Yet, as Alexander teachers, we’re trained to keep a neutral mind and to not get emotionally involved with our students.
In almost every three-year 1600-hour Alexander Technique teacher training program in the world, you would most likely go all three years without ever discussing eros.
Sure, you’d learn the code of conduct that prohibits taking advantage of your students in any way, but there’d be no discussions of the powerful attractions that sometimes develop between teachers and students.
I have a confession to make on this score. There are people who I never thought about romantically until I started putting my hands on them with the Technique. Then suddenly they became the most desirable objects in the world to me.
It did not, however, affect my behavior. I play within the rules. And I intend to stay there.
I get this silence in the official Alexander training about the messy nature of the body and the sometimes erotic nature of our work. The rules are clear. No more needs to be said.
It’s like the argument about sex education in public school. Conservatives say that the more you talk about sex to children, the more likely they are to engage in sex. Alexander training programs have this same attitude. They don’t discuss sex with students (except to forbid it) on the belief that to mention it is to enable it.
On the inside, Alexander teachers tend to insecurity.
So do Alexander Technique teachers have sex with their students? I’m sure it happens. It is forbidden by the code of conduct. The professional bodies of the Technique would investigate anyone accused of taking advantage of a student and would expel such a teacher if found guilty. His fellow Alexander teachers would regard him as scum.
On the other hand, you don’t need any qualification or membership to call yourself an Alexander teacher.
Another messy part of the body that does not get much attention in Alexander teacher training is the messy nature of the body. While some physiques are beautiful, many are just gross. They’re fat or old or decaying. They smell bad. They respond awkwardly to our direction.
We’re taught in Alexander training to maintain a neutral reaction to our students. If we get emotionally involved, it can interfere with the work. It’s almost impossible, for instance, to teach the Technique a family member or an ex.
So, in the end, no matter how messy the body you’re working with, the best direction for an Alexander teacher is to follow the rules, maintain a neutral mind, and to concentrate on teaching observation, inhibition and direction. You don’t need to put hands on to make a difference. Instead, the primary thing you need to reach in your pupil is his mind.
In a telephone interview with Paul Cook, Alexander Technique teacher John Nichols says: “There’s just one huge obvious challenge [facing Alexander teachers today] that dwarfs every other challenge — the majority of Alexander teachers around the world do not have enough work. I hear this again and again. It’s so hard to make a living. It’s so hard to get enough of a clientele. How do we get this work out there? We love this work. It’s powerful and deep. Why are we not connecting with more of the public?”
“Osteopaths and chiropractors and voice teachers are wonderful sources of referrals.”
“Why are we not getting enough work?
“Point one. People are willing to spend time, money and energy on practices that they think will improve their health such as yoga and pilates. I started practicing yoga in London in 1968 and if I even mentioned it to people, I was thought to be weird. Now yoga is an industry. In 1968 in the UK, yoga was no more popular than the Alexander Technique. Where did we miss out?
“One point is that yoga is a group activity. People willing to spend time and money to increase their health equate learning with joining a group. People like a shared experience. There’s the yoga community. The tai chi community. They go to summer camps together. They love that sense of a shared community.
“So many people who’ve taken Alexander lessons say to me, it’s a solitary thing. You go to a lesson and you talk to your teacher. And there may be nobody else you know in your life with whom you can discuss it.”
“In yoga, tai chi and pilates, people feel that they go home and practice the exercises. We’re fuzzy around that thing. There are no exercises. It’s not about doing, it’s about non-doing.
“With group classes, the cost is shared by the class. It seems to be cheaper.
“When people hear that to learn the Alexander Technique you come to a one-on-one session and the teacher puts his hands on you, people associate that with therapy or chiropractic. The one exception to this are performing artists who are accustomed to going to your voice coach, your instrumental teacher, one-on-one.”
“Point two relating to those eastern disciplines. How did yoga become such a massive industry? Yoga, tai chi, qi gong, meditation, martial arts, they come with a ready-made millenia old philosophical and spiritual framework. When you get into yoga or tai chi, you absorb that Eastern worldview. You may have gotten into it because you have a bad back, but you find it has psychological effects and can even become a spiritual discipline.
“The western world does not have a commonly accepted philosophical framework any more [to allow Alexander Technique to be as easily accessible psychologically and spiritually as yoga, tai chi, etc].”
“I had the pleasure of an interview many years ago with one of the leading Tibetan Buddhist teachers. Jimmy Rimpoche. He asked me about my work. I said it’s called the Alexander Technique. He smiled and said, ‘Very good meditation in activity for western people.'”
“Third point. The language we use when presenting ourselves.”
“People say to me, ‘I’ve looked at some books on the Alexander Technique and some websites and honestly, John, it seems old-fashioned, a bit stiff and rigid and boring.’
“When you look at the jargon we use — constructive conscious control, use, primary control, inhibition, stop and say no — it has a rigid off-putting boring stiffness about it and a refusal on our part to go out and meet our audience and try to express things in a way that catches their attention and communicates something more alive, more energized, more positive. We get stuck on the dogma.
“I remember giving a talk in London. Another experienced Alexander teacher came. I try to avoid jargon. I said the musculature of your body, an animal’s body, has three main functions to perform — support you against gravity, move you around, and breathe you. Breathing is largely muscular. These should be harmonized. Most small children handle that synergy well but with adults, patterns develop that distort that harmony. Habits of postural support interfere with breathing. Habits of movement interfere with breath and postural support. Habits of breathing interfere with postural support and movement.”
“At the end of it all, this senior teacher came up and said, ‘But John, you didn’t speak about primary control!’ Well, so what? I talked about things that are primary control but I didn’t use that phrase. We get stuck on this dogma that we have to use these terms. We must insist that it’s not just about the body, it’s about consciousness. We must insist that it’s all about learning to stop.”
“We can help you be more fully expansive and open and this is energizing and it feels good. Dare we say that? We get afraid to say that. What are we doing it for if it does not feel good? Why do we have to be frightened of saying that?”
“In his books, Alexander says that lessons help make our sensory perception more accurate. Somehow, we forget about this and we go around saying, ‘Never trust your feelings. Never trust your feelings.’ That’s alienating to me as is this harping on about consciousness.”
“I like that you have Direction Journal. Could you imagine putting something on the market called Inhibition Journal?”
“The word ‘posture.’ When we pussyfoot around and say this has nothing to do with posture, we’re just confusing people.”
“How can you be fully erect without being stiff and rigid and still fully able to breathe? We have contributions to make but we need to be willing to talk the language that connects to people instead of insisting on our alienating jargon.”
“There are four major groups [of potential Alexander students]. There are people with specific physical, usually muscular aches and pains, lower back issues, neck issues, hypertension or breathing issues, the quasi-medical clientele. Making contact with doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists, acupuncturists. Anyone who might be dealing with these problems. Passing around summaries of the BMJ report with other literature that helps them to see how the Technique could help their patients.
“Then there are the professional performing artists.”
“Then there are people who are interested in growth of consciousness, be it via meditation or other Eastern disciplines or psycho-therapy. More and more people are aware of the mind-body connection. That your inner turmoil is not unconnected with your musculature.”
“Then there are the baby boomers who want to stay in good health in their long retirement.”
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.”
Dennis Prager writes: Last week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens, a physics professor and history professor at Eastern Nazarene College, respectively. The authors take evangelicals to task for being anti-intellectual, anti-reason and anti-science. Their evidence:
— Evangelicals doubt man-made global warming,
— Evangelicals believe that gays can “pray away” their homosexuality.
— Evangelicals believe Earth is only thousands of years old and that men lived alongside dinosaurs.
— Evangelicals oppose same-sex marriage.
Given how often they are made, it’s worth analyzing these charges.
With regard to man-made global warming, the accusation that all skeptics are anti-science is despicable and, indeed, anti-science. The list of prominent scientists who dissent — including the scientist widely considered the dean of climate science in America, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — is so long that there are entire websites that feature their names and credentials: There’s a Wikipedia page titled “List of Scientists opposing the mainstreat scientific assessment of global warming” and a website called PetitionProject.org.
The authors of the Times op-ed piece, like virtually all other left-wing intellectuals who comment on the subject, dismiss all skepticism regarding the Al Gore hypothesis that humanity is headed toward a worldwide apocalypse due to heat resulting from man-made carbon emissions. This is a reflection on these intellectuals’ politics, not on their commitment to science.
With regard to “praying away” homosexuality — if it is indeed the normative evangelical position that all gays, with the right faith, can cease being sexually attracted to the same sex — that position is wrong. But to the best of my knowledge, that is not the normative evangelical position; evangelicals believe that no more than they believe that prayer alone will end any undesired physical condition.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
