3 November

Bit of an esoteric one except for my Alexander friends. Watched this again on the weekend, and was struck at just how strange it is and why I moved away from AT ideas. Every single moment of this session forces this poor young woman to become obsessively focused on the movement of her body. From a tradition that espouses mind-body unity. Classic Alexandroid transformation. And the stuff about heads pulling back. They don’t pull back, they fall back as a balance reaction, nobody is pulling their head back as a habit. And the little tricks, ‘just bend the knees quite quickly’, something she was already doing. Alexander (an Australian) fundamentally misunderstood what he discovered. Yes the ‘head-neck-back relationship’ is crucial, but what’s crucial is going nowhere near it. And hands on bodies only focuses attention on bodies. What frees the head from the neck and back, and then cascades freedom down throughout the rest of the body is releasing your attention out into the world. That’s a unity, because you then have no body, and no mind. You’re just in the world, in your activity.