Following on my 'Doing' post, I'm going to continue with the second pitfall to the Alexander Technique that is found at this site - http://performanceschool.org/ - and again draw a parallel with Gurdjieff's teaching, this time on self-observation.
The Performance School describes the second pitfall as the desire for "reassurance that you have, in fact, made some change. You will want to 'feel different.' The changes you are making, however, are very, very small and subtle. .... Also, you are not used to paying attention to yourself in this way. Because you have no experience in this kind of work, you don’t even know what you might feel, and might not notice a change when one happens. Nonetheless, you will probably still have a strong desire to 'feel something happening' to reassure yourself that your thinking has had an effect. We want the reassurance that we have 'done it right.' What most people do, unfortunately, is begin their nice, easy, clear thinking, and part way through interrupt themselves to 'check' and see if anything happened. ...THIS WILL NOT WORK. Remember, you are making changes in the way you move by making changes in the way you think. You will only be able to continue changing if you continue your new way of thinking. Any time you check to see if something happened, to see if you 'really' made a change, you have stopped your new thinking, and therefore stopped any change you may have started. So, no matter how tempting, no matter how strongly you want to feel you have 'done it right,' just be very clear that you are continuing that nice, easy, gentle awareness of how you are doing what you are doing."
Gurdjieff's practice of self-observation entails the observation of all of our functioning - our thinking, our emotional states as well as our physical postures, gestures and movements. The pitfall to self-observation that Gurdjieff warned against was analysis. I see it as being similar to the second pitfall to the Alexander Technique in that they both have the hidden agenda of self-judging. (Thus, the picture selected for this post - the people at the table represent our various "I"s heavy into self-judgment.) This is how Gurdjieff described this pitfall:
"Self-observation, especially in the beginning, must on no account become analysis or attempts at analysis....In trying to analyze some phenomenon that he comes across within him, a man generally asks: 'What is this? Why does it happen in this way and not in some other way?' And he begins to seek an answer to these questions, forgetting all about further observations. Becoming more and more engrossed in these questions he completely loses the thread of self-observation and even forgets about it. Observation stops. It is clear from this that only one thing can go on: either observation or attempts at analysis."
Photo Source: www.belonging.org
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