The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Embodiment

This is my 5th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop. If you missed the first 4 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

A primary principle in the Alexander Technique is what F.M. Alexander called 'inhibition.' This is not the Freudian concept of repression. It is a moment of conscious awareness of there being a choice to stop prior to a movement in order to inhibit habitual patterns and allow one to organize the body for correct usage. As counter-productive habits are prevented, the body becomes freer and is allowed to lengthen and widen into its natural state of poise.

In The Stop, Appelbaum describes this activity as finding "a gap in the revolving door of habit." He says that it is a receptivity directed toward an "embodied awareness."

So now we have come to the crux of the matter - embodiment, a state of "global sensation." Appelbaum says that the work of awareness is "the return to an organic, archaic level of experience." I thought that his choice of the word 'archaic' was rather strange so I looked it up in the dictionary. The first definition is "belonging to an earlier period." I think he is referring to childhood - that time of our lives before we got stuck in our heads. 

One of the subheadings in the Introduction to William Patrick Patterson's Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time is "The Facticity of the Physical." It's a succinct description for how being embodied moves us from the world of abstraction into the real world. He writes, "Simple observation will show the attention abstracts randomly (or because of fear, desire), switching past-future, future-past, between what has happened or will happen, or some admixture. So, though we appear to be here, our attention, and the thoughts and feelings which accompany it, are off there in a world of abstraction, not in a here whose facticity is a concrete, palpable experiencing."

This is why in the Gurdjieff work the practice of self-observation begins with postures. If done correctly, it brings us out of the head brain and into the body and the present moment to observe the facts of what we are doing - not what we are thinking about what we are doing. F.M. Alexander was also aware that “All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing.”

In the next post I will relate Appelbaum's descriptions of the "body of sensitivity."

Comments

[Ian]

I'm loving this series of Alexander Technique posts, thank you Ann.

[Ann Seeker]

Thank you! I was wondering if anyone was reading them.Writing these posts isreally forcing me to ponder the material and find the connections.

[Ian]

Yeah, I get the same feeling from my blog, though I have managed to attract a few repeat commentators at this point.

But really, I think the important thing in keeping these kinds of public journals is that it forces us
1) to learn,
2) to record our learning
3) to have a sense in our learning that we should be able to relate it to others.

If people actually find value in it and tell us that they do, that's the icing on the cake, but in any case, it is still beneficial to us.

Plus, after a few years, it can be quite the kick to go back and see how wise and how stupid we were all along, and never realized it... :)

Anyway, please do keep it up (as long as you want to of course). I do read all the posts, I just don't always find that I have something to add.

[libramoon]

I hope you don't mind that I forwarded this post to The Healing Dance Network.

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/healingdance/

[Ann Seeker]

Hi LibraMoon,

Thanks for sharing my post with your Yahoo! group.

You have some beautiful art work on your blog - http://emergingvisions.blogspot.com

Ann