Alexander Lessons: Teaching Tales

My work is a form of poetic science.   Although at this time such work is peripheral, invisible and largely unrecognised, it is the shape of the future.   In my teaching, a good lesson is like a poem, shaping new and different ways that an individual may see themselves, often visiting places within themselves they may never have previously before been and illuminating fresh insights.   In a lesson there is also acute observation, rigorous checking and a free movement back and forth from ideas to consequences – all key elements of science.

What I present here is a handful of teaching tales that embody moments of insight often possessing a quite profound beauty.   These are all as different as the individuals who experienced them and yet they share a number of key qualities.   All of these poetic moments share a glow of familiarity – about which you might say:  “Why, of course.   I somehow knew this all along but the truth of it was only somehow lightly veiled, hidden from view, just around the corner.”  The discovery of ideas in science invariably shares this sense of: “How come I never saw things this way before.”

In lots of ways the work I do is a preparation for moments of insight, though I have only recently recognised this aspect of teaching, but the actual moment of their discovery always comes unexpectedly – the AHA! effect as the edge of the unknown is approached and rolls back a little.   It is the air of surprise tinged with paradox that lends these moments their authenticity – the genuine golden ring of truth.   To make these explorations always requires great personal courage.   It is about facing up to oneself.   It is the inspiration of the heartedness and courage of the pupils I have worked with and taught that I draw upon to write this piece.

I teach something known as the Alexander Technique which involves passing on the insights and discoveries developed earlier this century by Frederick Mathias Alexander.   Alexander himself drew on great reserves of courage in pioneering his technique of self-work. I hope that, as a teacher, I not only pass on this technique but also cultivate it.   For me the best of teaching involves an on-going process of discovery.   In this regard, WHAT F. M. Alexander discovered is not so important as HOW he discovered it,  That is the PROCESS he went through to develop his ideas rather than the product we know today as the Alexander Technique.   To constantly move to the edge of self-understanding is the authentic work of the self.   To go to the outermost edge of oneself, as all these teaching tales celebrate is to have the courage to look down the divide between the edge of the known and the edge of the unknown.

Recently the husband of a pupil coming for lessons developed a bad back.   His wife tried to persuade him to try a few lessons.   He would agree to an introductory lesson on the strict proviso that, after the lesson, all he needed to know  to sort out his bad back could be tapped on to a keyboard and into his computer, so that at the touch of a button the required knowledge would flash upon the screen.   In our fast-food-teak-effect culture  we demand to know NOW.   Instant gratification.   In the nature of things  preparation to know can never be the knowledge itself which is, of course, often tantalizingly close by but not YET revealed.

My inspiration is the work of preparing for poetic-moments when the edge of the unknown folds back.  A poetic-moment can never be contrived or made to happen.   It is never one that is flashed up on a VDU screen, never a moment when we are being told or instructed.   A poetic moment is a matter of supreme subjectivity in which the knowing is often deep and silent.   If words enter they are poetic and simple.   Poetic moments involve an experience of sensing ourselves differently or in new and rare ways and in such moments what is revealed, even though it may be already known to us, always transforms, enriches and above all heals.

 

SUE’S TALE:  WE WOULD BE WHERE WE WANT TO BE IF ONLY WE COULD STOP PUTTING OURSELVES SOMEWHERE ELSE

Poetic moments are unexpected and the work itself is a preparation for the unknown.   Surprisingly, Sue’s moment of insight came in a first lesson.   When an introductory lesson goes as well as this one it is easy for me, as a teacher, to forget the strangeness a pupil can feel in an introductory lesson.   I touch people for a living.   Day in and day out I work with touch.   In our culture, being touched sometimes troubles an individual.   Then there are the NON-DOING challenges, things that, in their nature, you cannot do, because they only happen if you let them.   A person is comfortable if it is clear what is expected of them but often the expectation that is brought to a first lesson is to be asked to MAKE something happen in order to correct something that is wrong.   It is odd to be challenged to make changes of a non-doing kind, but Sue had no trouble with the efforts of letting go and we had worked well on one arm and shoulder.

With a certain guiding of her attention Sue had got in touch with a pattern of tension that held her shoulder up off the support of the floor.   Such holdings are habitual.   Once these holding-patterns are attended to, muscles shortened by habitual tightness can ease and lengthen.   Our bodies are like children; comforted by attention.   They need ‘minding’ too, otherwise they become peevish and wayward!   The work in this introductory lesson had gone exceptionally well and Sue’s arm and shoulder looked more rested and easy.   An improvement had taken place but even this can trouble people because I, as a teacher, do not DO anything, for example, such as a manipulation which might account for the change, nor indeed did Sue DO anything. The ‘unclenching’ of her shoulder came more from an ‘undoing’ that allowed the change to occur.   This is peculiar in that there are no straight forward cause-effect pegs upon which to hang such changes.   Often individuals are concerned by the fact that there is nothing to point to and say, “This work is a little bit like this or like that…”   It can be so frustrating when trying to explain to others the experience of a lesson!

But Sue’s lesson had gone well and, as I edged around so that we could begin work on the other shoulder, I asked in passing Sue how she experienced any difference between her two shoulders.   This was followed by a few moments of still reflective silence.   Her voice as she spoke her simple words seemed to resonate from a deep well inside.   She said, “The shoulder we’ve worked on – well it feels like it’s where it WANTS TO BE.   My other shoulder feels like I’m putting it somewhere.   It’s just that – well I don’t know how to stop putting it there.”

There is a simplicity, a housewifely ordinariness about the words and yet they are a container for an extraordinary and profound truth.   Sue reached deep into herself and the words matter-of-factly encapsulate her experience beautifully and poetically.   She observed the fact that she had been guided through a process that had brought the instrument of her body into her consciousness.   She became aware of habitual holding.   Letting go of this tension enabled her shoulder to change shape and through this disciplined non-doing attention her shoulder became somehow more a part of her.   The shoulder had a sense of ‘placement’ – being more, as Sue put it: ‘where it wants to be’.   Freed out of its tension pattern, the shoulder had become actively rested.  It is actually more poised and prepared to move.   When Sue’s attention was drawn to comparison with her other shoulder, she became aware of something pushing her other shoulder out of order.   She has the glimmer of understanding that it is her habit, her creation that pushes her shoulder out of shape and yet she cannot quite find the sort of self-control through which she could choose to stop pushing herself out of shape.  But Sue’s well on the way!

“We’d be where we want to be if only we could stop putting ourselves somewhere else.”   As a piece of knowledge this is not very interesting.   Flashed up on the VDU screen it might even invite ridicule.   It is a kind of Zen nonsense.   What is of the greatest importance is the process of self-discovery from which the words arose.   Here the discovery process is vastly more important than the words on the screen.   To be there, in the presence of such moments as Sue’s insights is to be present when real human thought is taking place.   One is silent in the presence of it.   In our noisy, mechanical, problem-solving world we are rarely in its presence.

The ancient Greeks gave us the word  ‘philosophy’.   They formed the word from two words – philos, meaning friend or lover, and sophia, meaning wisdom.   Before the word ‘science’ was born the activity we now know as science was called ‘natural philosophy’ and ‘nature’ then stood for what today we might refer to by two different words: psychology and environment.   Perhaps buried at the origins of science are the roots of poetic-science, the coming together of heart and mind.

That Sue’s moment of insight came in a first lesson while Colin’s came after two years of lessons is of no consequence at all.    Poetic moments do not only take time.   More importantly they take their OWN time.  There are a lot of similarities between Sue’s story and Colin’s story which comes next.   Both moments of insight concerned comparison between a shoulder and arm that had been worked on and one that had not yet been worked on.   There the similarity ends, because what happened in each instance is a very different story.

 

THE ACCOUNTANT’S TALE – THE STORY OF A MAN WHOSE ARM WRESTLED WITH ITSELF

This is the tale of a Reluctant Head.   There always seem to be a few Reluctant Heads coming for lessons at any particular time.   A Reluctant Head is attached to a Grateful Body.   Indeed it’s the eased and grateful body that persists in walking the Reluctant Head (and the Reluctant Wallet) back and forth for lessons.  Colin was a Reluctant Head, an accountant who came for regular weekly lessons for about two years.   With an affable grumpiness this Reluctant Head would churn away during the lesson, trying to find a cause-effect ‘peg’ to account for the improvements his Grateful Body took away from a lesson.   It is healthy to be sceptical but this mind-wrangling is quite fruitless.   It’s so frustrating.   The teacher doesn’t seem to DO anything and the pupil doesn’t seem to DO anything.   Colin’s Reluctant Head is full of straight lines, of rows, columns and balance sheets.   With an edginess in his tone of voice that was a bit like a finger jabbing at your breast-bone he would say, “Is this faith-healing or what?   I don’t know what you do.   There must be some sleight of hand in it somewhere.”  As a teacher you learn to ride over these remarks.   If thanks are wanted they can be taken silently and wordlessly from the Grateful Body.   These ‘finger-jabbing’ remarks went on until  a remarkable teaching-moment when Colin’s Head, in a flash of insight, ceased to be reluctant.   Let me set the scene:

Colin lies comfortably on his back.   One arm is outstretched at about shoulder level.   The other arm is bent at the elbow with the hand resting on the hip.   After two years there is a well beaten path to an improved bodily integrity in the past work we have done together.   We are about half way through the lesson.   We have worked on one arm and shoulder – that’s the one that is out-stretched.   Even to an untutored eye the arm we have worked on looks somehow at ease and seems to flow as it connects into the upper body.   For the purposes of this story I’ll call this the non-doing arm.   The as-yet unworked-on arm, the doing-arm, looks lumpish by comparison, appearing not to ‘fit’ into the trunk as easily and quietly as the other arm.   We were about to begin work on the doing arm, when I chanced to remark that there was nothing he could DO to MAKE his other arm the same as the non-doing one.   Immediately a look of incredulity and challenge came into his eyes.   What nonsense!   After all wasn’t it logical.   It MUST be possible to position his arm to push it into a similar position to the non-doing one.   After two years I am used to working around this sort of situation.   Time is precious – expensive – I don’t want to be drawn into fruitless argument and I was about to press on when I held back and heard myself say, “OK, Colin, go on, DO it, MAKE it the same….”   What was about to follow was every bit as strange as the sound of one hand clapping:  THE SIGHT OF ONE ARM WRESTLING WITH ITSELF.

In order for the challenge to be at all meaningful, the non-doing arm had to remain unchanged.   It was an important reference point.   This lent an odd, quiet air of smugness to the non-doing arm.   This strange detached quality was contrasted by the doing arm as it began to rive and thrash around.   As the scene developed, the writhing, doing-arm resembled a fish landed on the bank as it flopped and twisted about this way and that.   Occasionally, the Reluctant Head would loll from side to side, to check certain details which would be followed by a spasm of further writhing adjustments.   The battle was fought for a full five minutes and all the while the non-doing arm remained  serenely detached from the manic struggle as the doing arm wrestled with itself.   In the end with a final gasping flop the doing arm gave up, Colin’s eyes brimmed with unfamiliar tears as he said with a voice now without a trace of its former prickliness, “No, you can’t DO it.   It’s not possible.”   In what appeared to be defeat was a great victory.   Now the hand that had so recently fought with itself was opened out and as peaceful as the other arm.   This is a state of poise, a condition of rest-without-inertia – a consciously organised state of preparation for healthy action.   Such a hand reaches out to the world as if it were a beautiful blossom to be touched with tender appreciation.   The world we often reach out toward is a thorn-bush and the thorns are usually of our own making.   The arm reaching into this dangerous world retracts, pulling in like a creature whose foot has been pierced by a sharp thorn.   We can never move well or freely on such ground – threatened and uncertain of mind, threatened and uncertain in step.   I have never seen Colin again after this lesson but there is a little tail-piece to this story.   After the lesson my receptionist, said, “What’s wrong with Colin today – he’s just given me a great big hug.   I can’t believe it.”

 

GORDON’S TALE

Aside from the excess of ‘world’ that sat upon them, Colin and Sue had no particular difficulties with their shoulders.   Gordon did.   He had a particularly painful and distressed shoulder.   Like Sue, Gordon experienced a moment of insight in a first lesson, but while Sue’s moment emerged out of a favourable experience, Gordon’s did not.   Gordon’s lesson began in the very worst of circumstances because he didn’t really choose for himself to have lessons.   I opened the door to greet Joan for a lesson only to find Gordon on the doorstep with Joan, his wife, a few paces back and looking like she’d pushed Gordon onto the step.   Joan was fed-up with Gordon complaining about his shoulder and, at the last minute, had ‘shanghaied’ Gordon into taking her lesson.   Gordon had the vague impression I was some kind of physio-therapist.   He had never heard of the Alexander Technique and had very little inclination to find out anything about it.   This is an extremely bad start to a lesson!   An individual has to come to this work for themselves.   Besides, the work I do is as far away from a treatment as anything imaginable.   Gordon had suffered a lot of pain with his shoulder which had been treated by a number of physio-therapists and doctors.   There was much talk of operations and cortisone injections.   To be treated one becomes a patient and to be a GOOD patient is an important part of any recovery programme.   But the work I do is about the other important aspect of recovery which is the opposite of being a patient: an agent.   Since the work I do often involves no speech it is not a talking treatment or therapy.   I do no manipulation either, often doing nothing at all except guide attention to certain details.   Small wonder people wonder if the emperor has any clothes at all!   Agency simply concerns all the things through which one can help oneself.   From the start Gordon was seeking help from me in the form of diagnosis and treatment.

Alarm bells in me were ringing:  this lesson looked like a total waste of time.   Unlike in Colin’s Tale I now had an ACTUAL finger jabbing me in the breast-bone and Gordon saying, “Now YOU tell me what’s wrong with this wretched shoulder and tell me what you’re going to do.   How do you propose to treat it?”   Clearly Gordon was not at all happy about my light and seemingly ‘airy fairy’ hands that touched his painful shoulders.   It was as if sharp spiky thorns pierced every attempt to open up any non-doing explorations between us.   The instinctive reaction in such circumstances is to prickle back.   I was perilously close to ending this non-lesson, in which case we’d have skitted briefly together like two hard billiard balls and gone off in our separate directions.   However, one of the essentials of self-work is to stay back from instinctive reactions.   This is a difficult discipline but sometimes a space opens up where unexpected things might emerge.   I continued to work on myself despite the growing aggressive prickliness.   Gordon’s right shoulder was a mound of contorted sinew and flesh set into hard biologically-reinforced concrete.   When he prodded me again as to what I was going to do, I remember saying honestly that his shoulder was by no means the prime concern.  Gordon had a heart condition and had recently had open-heart surgery.   My concern was for the unnecessary strain he was placing on his circulatory system.   His body was rigid with tension.   His face was quite blue and cyanosed.   Since the circulatory system passes THROUGH muscle he seemed to me to be giving his damaged heart even more work to do to push blood around a tension-ridden framework.   He had agreed to lie on the floor but every nerve, muscle and sinew seemed strained and stiff.   The neck that my hands touched was unresponsive, rigid, like the branch of a tree.   There is an enormous amount of trust in the early stages of this work and, when someone like Sue opens up and enters the fabric and texture of their being one feels very privileged to be involved.   This situation was the very opposite.   I was close to winding up this non-lesson and gently but firmly showing Gordon the door.   Then, out of the blue, the neck that my fingers contacted, that was so previously so strained and tight, opened and softened and the same wave of release went down his back and across his shoulders.  Eyes filled with tears and a voice that seemed to come from the back of his head said the following words:  “This is my life”, spoken as a question without anticipation of an answer.   Gordon had made a leap of courage in which he jumped across a whole universe and into his own skin.   Often we glimpse some of the damage and devastation we have done to the marvellous instrument of our body – the caretaker of our lives, and we close down because the damage is too great to contemplate.   To stop and face this state of affairs takes a monumental effort.   “This is my life”.   When someone powerfully connects back into themselves, it is revealed that, what was happening up to a few moments before that realization, was not life but something reactive and mechanical.   Life living you instead of you living your life.   In one moment all the thorns had disappeared and beneath my hand Gordon’s neck that was so held and rigid and above-all numb now became soft, supple and alive.   Once again, I am silent in the presence of real human thought and as with all of these moments they are redolent with emotion. At such times I would not want to be in any other place except to be present in that moment of awakening self-awareness.   To be there.   In such moments the discovery and the deep experience belong wholly to the individual.  Although the ground has been tilled and prepared the moment has nothing to do with me.   I did not make the experience happen.   All one wants from these moments is to be present – to be there.

Five years and many, many poems further on, Gordon still comes for regular lessons.   His heart has stopped attacking him.  He has found for himself all kinds of nurturing and caring expressions that have naturally radiated outward like ripples in a pool, from the care and nurturance he has given himself.  Much as we might WANT to, we cannot give something that we do not have.   ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ – it is the ‘as thyself’ clause that requires so much self-work and effort.

Recently Gordon and I worked together in a lesson.   I had my hand on what used to be that thorny mound of tortured and disordered flesh that used to be his shoulder.   Nowadays it is as open, supple and responsive as a child’s shoulder.   Unexpectedly Gordon, flushed with anger.   The anger that filled him that day was different from  the old, withering sort of anger of that first lesson and he said,  “You know, I’d like to go back again to those clinics and hospitals and show them this shoulder.”   True enough it was now whole and fully restored.   We let this thought hang in the air as we worked on.   Eventually we opened this thought out a little and it became clear that while everyone at the clinic or hospital would easily recognise the change, there would be no means of giving any understandable account as to why it was healed and restored.   There were no pegs to hang these changes upon.   An emotion of real red anger remained in the air.   Then Gordon said forcefully, “The trouble is that we are not here.”   Gordon meant that the work we were doing was invisible.   There were no frameworks to understand it.   It is a fact that for many years scientists looked down microscopes at chromosomes but never saw them until a framework for understanding them was erected.   Gordon’s moment of realization, one that grew out of his anger had a profound effect upon me:  for a moment a friend landed on my side of the looking glass momentarily sharing my frustration and loneliness.   This enabled me to own those feelings and let them through – a process that continues as now as I write.

“The trouble is that we are not here”.   This has so many other resonances:   Often my hands are upon bodies that have certain characteristics of deadness, stiffness, unresponsiveness, rigidity.    A numb state that could be described as ‘anaesthetised’, a word which broken into its roots means ‘without sense’ with an overtone of ‘without beauty’.   It was F M Alexander’s observation that the most degraded and least nourished of all the senses is the body sense.  When consciousness is brought to this sense there is an awareness that PRIOR to the moment of conscious release one was in some sense ‘not here’.   To bring consciousness to this sense, to refine and cultivate it is to turn base metal into gold.   Not only are we so detached from this sense that we refer to it as ‘the forgotten sense’, there is also an understanding that the Self has been somehow expelled.   To cultivate it is a kind of heresy.   At the time that people were being burnt at the stake for heretical views on science, artists were developing the perspective machine, an apparatus which involved a frame with various mechanical devices with which to work out the rules of perspective.   At the same time that the mind and body were being systematically separated the artist was walking out of his frame – observer and observed were being separated.   The universe including the human body was seen to be soulless, a machine.   Over those 400 years since Renaissance times we have become progressively ‘disembodied’.   Poetic science is part of a fundamental change equivalent to the artist, who walked out of the Frame four centuries ago turning around and walking straight back into the Frame!   The work of the Self has to be readmitted – The world of deep biological and physical nature revealed by science undermines any credibility to the idea that observer and observed can, in fact, be separated.   To bring back the self begins with ‘a reclamation of the body-sense from a state of mechanical, reactive chaos.   No work on the self, no knowing oneself can begin until the sense of self is refined and developed with all the rigor and testing that we have brought to science.   One can never be detached from  such an endeavour.   To cultivate the sense is to awaken to one’s experience of oneself and the associated sense of one’s place in the universe.   We do have a big problem, as Gordon realised, “The trouble is that we are not here.”

Poetic moments come unexpectedly and they touch the whole:  the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.   And to become more whole in oneself is to heal oneself.   The words whole, heal and holy belong to the same old-English ‘HALA’.   To heal yourself is to restore integrity and bring order back into the texture and fabric of your being and your body.   Becoming more fully who you are – the process of individuation involves exploring fully the quirkiness and individuality that is you.   Integration and individuation are the same – it is impossible to have one without the other.   Through integration and individuation we build faith and confidence in ourselves.   Inevitably as we think well of ourselves we care and nurture ourselves so we grow in the refinements with which we bring consciousness into the structure and fabric of the instrument of our bodies as it moment-by-moment plays the music that is the experience of our lives.   If there is a container enwrapping the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual elements – a holder of the intelligence we can bring to looking after their integrity, then this container is called HOPE.   Many things in our culture render us hopeless.   Many spikes puncture the container leaving it rent and torn.  None is more fearful and powerful than the diagnosis of CANCER.   Hopelessness is by far and away the swifter killer than the organic disease.   No amount of fine surgery, clever drugs or smart-bomb-  radiation therapy can halt this killer in its tracks.   This is an observation – a fact not an opinion.   The array of sophisticated treatments builds hope in the form of help coming in from the outside.   The work I do involves the hope that comes from the inside.   “Don’t worry”,  “Don’t be anxious”, are as useless as saying,  “Don’t think of the colour blue.”   My work concerns itself with awareness – examining the effects of worrying and anxiety as they are played out through the instrument of the body.   This is a way of fixing up the container from the inside working directly against the most certain killer:  HOPELESSNESS.

 

MARTIN’S WORDS

Martin’s words – there are only four of them – come at the very end of this piece.   I’ve called this tale ‘Martin’s Words’, because most of this story is not Martin’s Story but mine.   Martin’s closing words are, in a way, like a magic spell turning a baser metal into gold.

Martin has made a remarkable recovery from a life-threatening cancer.   Martin has turned around many things in his life – one of the things he has changed is his cancer.   Martin lives more fully and more present than anyone I know.   A man of great acumen and courage, who knows both how to be a good patient and good agent.   Martin is a great inspiration.    One Friday in September I tore a muscle in my calf quite badly.   I love to run the fells of the Southern Lake District barefoot.   This is a rigorous form of checking some of the principles I teach.   The mountains around my home are my laboratory, a testing ground for discovering more about human balance and co-ordination:  uncertain of mind, uncertain of step.   It is a straight-forward enough way of working albeit somewhat quirky:  either get yourself together so you are working well or risk damage to  unprotected ankles and feet.   This discipline has been the source of great joy to me.

I damaged my calf while taking a rather leisurely leap over the ornamental cobbles scattered among the paving stones on Lancaster’s main Market Street.   With a thwack of pain as if someone had, at close range, hit a golf ball at my calf I was suddenly crippled.   Quite unable to bear any weight on my leg, I clung to the wall, hobbling ignominiously back towards my teaching centre.   Nodding at my bare feet one laconic Northerner commented, “Serves the silly bugger right!”   Quite right in a sort of way.   I wasn’t THINKING when this happened.   By the time I’d suffered what seemed many disparaging looks and eventually arrived back in Bashful Alley I would have been at pains to say what hurt most my pride or my leg!   What was to happen over the next two days was like a TV cartoon-character as they are very often portrayed – slithering, sliding, slipping in a great flurry of dust before eventually skidding to a halt.   To begin this precipitous slide I arrived back in my teaching centre and, ignoring the pain, went on to teach a lesson.   Roy said he thought it was dutiful and kind to carry on.   Later I gave Roy his money back for that non-lesson, making it clear that, although I could easily have fooled myself that what I did came from kindness this was not so.   It was ego-driven and ran contrary to what I teach.   Had I followed my own teachings I would have recollected myself and attended to myself by packing ice around the injury and resting the damaged calf.  Word seemed to spread quickly and soon people were coming in to see the man who sets himself up to teach co-ordination, who reckons to run mountains barefoot and evidently can’t even walk down the High Street without damaging himself.

Later that morning the physio-therapist who treated the injury explained for at least a few days I’d be on crutches and that it would be a matter of weeks before I could walk comfortably on that leg and that it would be for some while that I would limp.

It was important to stay off the injured leg and rather than be seen hobbling home on crutches I decided to hole myself up in my teaching centre.   A friend brought in a pile of fruit and some other easily prepared food, locked the door behind him and left me to my forced weekend retreat.

There was little else to do besides lie on the floor where at some point all my pupils lie during a lesson but I could find very little stillness.   My mind was caught with worry , anger agitation and frustration.   My ego was running that sort of commentary that goes, “What will people think of me?   What will they say?”   Somebody had already remarked , “How the mighty are fallen.”   Had my teaching lost its credibility?   On top of all this mind-wrangling there was the added frustration concerning all the things that I had planned to do that I could not now do.   From the  most trivial to the most important I could let go of NOT one of the things I had intended to do.   A pupil with cancer was sick and close to death and I had planned that Saturday to relieve some of the tedium of the long night’s vigil.   On Saturday morning, six-year-old Joe and I had planned a trip to the woods where we would make a den and light a fire in order to fry sausages.   Such was the grip of this plan that I invited Joe into my teaching centre where I crawled around on all-fours and together we made a den out of some wood and some blankets.   It was a good construction in which we fried sausages on a camping stove.   What I couldn’t do, I was acting out in fantasy – anything but STOP, and so the slithering and sliding continued and with it a growing and depressing awareness that since I seemed wholly unable to relinquish the hold of these plans and intentions that I had to face the simple fact that they were holding me.   I had been happy in the illusion that I was not really attached to such things.   This is like a rather sad alcoholic friend who said, “I know I’m getting pissed, but I DON’T HAVE TO.   I could stop if I wanted.”   So these misery-making reflections were added to the other worries and anxieties.   Also the injured calf hurt a lot and I slept only fitfully.   Lying there on my teaching room floor quite unable to be there for myself unable to stop putting myself somewhere else, wrestling with myself.   There was a lot of real suffering in this, only a tiny part of which came from the physical injury.

It now seemed an attractive idea to give up the retreat and hobble home thoroughly dispirited and demoralised and take a few weeks off work.   I felt hopeless.   My ego was now firing a lot of damaging flack about who the hell do you think you are – teaching people when you can’t get these things going in yourself.   YOU ARE A FRAUD and so on I skidded and slid and suffered.   I am sure that it was the personal courage of the people who had lay on the very floor beneath me that anchored me there and prevented me from sloping despondently home in a cloud of recriminating depression.

It was in the middle of Sunday afternoon when I finally gave up and came to a stop.   Now I was with myself, vices, flaws, doubts, talents and all.   In this moment, I realised the profound difference between Life and the Habits of Life – that it was the habits-of-life that had hampered the surge of life that now seemed to flow so uninterruptedly through me.   I had a very clear and detailed ‘presentation’ of the nature and extent of the muscle injury.   A sense of deep joy accompanied the tingling and buzzing I could feel deep in the calf muscle.   Worry, frustration and anxiety seemed to have departed from the universe as if they never existed.   Above all I was clear that what I felt to be compassion for the dying man was not true compassion.   I would never have believed this and would have been deeply offended had anyone suggested it to me.   To be present in the way I was now experiencing it was true compassion and what I needed to be of comfort – to be there for the dying man.   Perhaps, in a sense, I had to die a little in order to appreciate the truth of this.

It was now a source of exhilaration to sort out the immediate future.   The damaged calf that had been such a source of depression before had now become a whole lot of fascinating problems to solve.   Soon I was exploring ways of moving that enabled me to move without hurting the damaged muscle.   On Monday, I needed crutches no more and could walk with a slight limp.   On Tuesday, so long as I was attentive and present, I could walk without a noticeable limp.  Occasionally I would forget and be reminded by a jab of pain.  Most noticeable of all my teaching seemed to have a greater sureness and solidity.

It was on Tuesday morning that Martin came for his lesson.   Touch is such a rewarding sense to work with – so basic, immediate and honest.   As we worked, it was easy to open my heart out about my experiences of the weekend.   Martin whose own suffering makes mine so paltry by comparison listened deeply and seriously.   Touch is the most basic of all our senses.   Indeed all our other senses derive from touch:  eyes to the touch of light-waves, ears to the touch of air vibrations and taste and smell to the touch of certain chemical shapes.   On that floor we worked together treading familiar paths that fixed up the container and refined an improved integrity.   It seemed as if the entire surface of Martin’s  body became one listening ear.

A deep sense of mutuality and friendship suffused the spaces between my words.   I came to the point in the story where I had slithered to a stop and I asked the question, “What happened here?”   The question hung in the air without any anticipation of an answer.   We worked on together over what seemed to be a long reflective intimate silence which was broken by Martin’s four words which end this piece as they ended that lesson.   His eyes darted decisively to the side as he spoke like a kind of full stop to this whole experience and the words weren’t spoken profoundly but with a gentle throw-away quality as you might tell a friend “Hey, your jumper label is sticking up.”.   The lesson – my lesson was over with these words:

“You just loved yourself.”