A Seeker

Retreating with Gurdjieff

I just returned from a retreat with William Patrick Patterson at a beautiful Jesuit retreat facility in Morristown, New Jersery. Right before I left for the retreat I received Leland Vall's Alekander Tip (see my previous post for how to sign up for these) which included the picture below of the diaphragm. It was very helpful to have this image in my head since the diaphragm was the focus of many of the breathing and meditation exercises. Until seeing these pictures I had not realized how large the diaphragm becomes with the exhalation.

The retreat was a harmonious blend of the physical, emotional and intellectual. For the intellectual part, Mr. Patterson provided many insights to the From the Author section at the end of Gurdjieff's All and Everything. My physical and emotional centers were fed by wonderful walks in the wooded area surrounding the retreat house. The physical center also enjoyed the wonderful meals. The first night was glazed salmon with chocolate-dipped strawberries for dessert!

Mr. Patterson's next retreat is going to be in California in September. I highly recommend it - although no guarantees on the food. You can get the details here. Hope to see you there.

Judging - Gurdjieff and Alexander

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

Free Alexander Technique Tip

I've been enjoying the weekly Alexander Technique tip that Leland Vall emails. Just seeing it listed in my inbox list is a reminder to think the directions. Today's tip was about breathing and the connection between "your pointing spine and your hanging ribs." 

Go here to sign up - it's free!

Doing - Gurdjieff and Alexander

It had been several months since I had an Alexander Technique lesson but in the interim I had read The Alexander Technique Manual by Richard Brennan. Although I am sure that I had heard and read many times that you do not do the Primary Directions, you think them, for some reason it had never really clicked with me until I read this book.

For those of you not familiar with the Alexander Technique, the Primary Directions are:
1) Allow the neck to be free
2) Allow the head to go forward and up
3) Allow the back to lengthen and widen

So the other day when I had a lesson and the teacher began with "Give me your best thinking" I actually heard it for the first time. I think in all of my past lessons I must have unconsciously translated that into my way of being - trying to do - and attempted to adjust myself into my idea of a 'correct' posture. But this time I just thought the directions. This could also be described as getting out of my own way.

This all got reinforced after the lesson when I happened to come across this blog - http://performanceschool.org/ - that has a page about the "pitfalls" that can be encountered in the Alexander Technique. (The image above is supposed to represent me on a path that has pitfalls.) The first pitfall listed is "Remember, don't try to DO anything to make any changes."

And this was further reinforced because I had also been reading a section in In Search of the Miraculous in which Ouspensky relates what Gurdjieff says about 'doing.' Gurdjieff is speaking at a much deeper and more complex level but there are parallels with the not-doing in the Alexander Technique:

"...man's chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, all people want to do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood....To get rid of this conviction is more difficult than anything else for a man. You do not understand all the complexity of your organization and you do not realize that every effort, in addition to the results desired, even if it gives these, gives thousands of unexpected and often undesireable results, and the chief thing that you forget is that you are not beginning from the beginning with a nice clean, new machine. There stand behind you many years of a wrong and stupid life, of indulgence in every kind of weakness, of shutting your eyes to your own errors, of striving to avoid all unpleasant truths, of constant lying to yourselves, of self-justification, of blaming others, and so on, and so on."

Photo Source: http://sadanandsafar.blogspot.com

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Vision

This is my 14th, and last, post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 13 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

One of the final sections of The Stop is An Embodied Sight for the Sighted in which Appelbaum discusses how the sighted can learn to see as the blind do so that "vision can be informed by a consciousness greater than the intellect."

A training regime is required that would "remedy the habituated interference of intellect in the act of visually seeing" and involve "a reharmonization of functional aspects of person, intellect, feeling and body." This is the cultivation of the stop which includes "a process of resensitizing sight."  Appelbaum explains, "The momentuum of received visual learning must be arrested in order for a new (or renewed) function of sight to commence."

I believe that Gurdjieff would explain the process as our conditioning to see in a certain way - intellectually - must first be awared through observation. Then with the light of consciousness illuminating this habitual functioning, we have the possibility of changing it.

So first I become aware that I am always focusing my eyes and am not embodied. All of my attention is out there. I get the 'taste' of this. Then I try to soften my gaze so that rather than narrowly focusing the eyes, I include the peripheral vision. The taste of this is of allowing the world to come to me, rather than going out and grabbing it.

Appelbaum explains that once we are released from the strictly conceptual mode we are open to other influences. "What is seen then signifies the wider cosmos as it expresses itself through the visual field." Rather than valuing objects for the pleasure or utility that they offer me, I am open to experiencing their wider, deeper significance. The world ceases to be a reflection of my values, my preconceptions, my interests and "grows transparent with higher purpose….Returning to home in the body, we are returned to our place in an order of things, ever new, ever regenerating."

Amen!

Photo source: www.flickr.com/photos/notsogoodphotography/

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Signs

This is my 13th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 12 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

One of Appelbaum's final concepts that I'm going to try to describe - without fully understanding it - is divinatory perception. Divinatory perception is of signs which connect the invisible, interior world with the visible and exterior. This perceiving is an interpreting of an inner meaning, the essence of things.

Appelbaum goes on at length about signs - including an illustrative consultation with the I Ching - which I won't go into. It seems to me that the important point of this divinatory perception is that I am involved in the process. Appelbaum writes, "To perceive is to be myself perceived." To describe this process requires an unusual syntax. "I touch a flower" would be "I touch myself a flower." "I see a rainbow" would be "I see myself a rainbow."

This is what William Patrick Patterson calls subject-object perception, which is the state of Gurdjieff's self-remebering. In the Fourth Way Meetings section of his  Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time he includes this in an answer to a student's question: "We think we live in subject-object orientation, but do we? If we watch our attention we are all object; that is, our attention is completely identified with the object. Or we are all subject, completely identified, indwelling, full of self-concern. But because you are now being introduced to the idea and practice of having a double attention - having a recognition of both the subject and object simultaneously - it was suddenly realized how swallowed up you were."

Appelbaum calls the 'self' of self-remembering the submerged "I." He writes, "Whatever I perceive assists in revealing a secret identity for which my ordinary identity is a sign....Since I attend to perception as a witness, it can be said that I am attendant to my own birthing."

Image: John William Waterhouse - The Crystal Ball

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - The Shock

 

This is my 11th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 10 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

Shock is an unplanned, sometimes painful, but fortuitous occurrence. Although Appelbaum does not present it this way, it seems to me that he describes two kinds of shocks - both revealing of my mechanical state. One type of shock comes from my state of constant distraction. I am daydreaming and so I walk into the glass door. The other shock comes from the events that reveal my unconscious mental framework. The shock of hearing myself lying reveals the assumption that I am always sincere. So shock uncovers a resisting force that operates beneath the surface. This resistance is the mechanicality of habit, that which, in Gurdjieffian terms, keeps me in a state of sleep.

Shocks are fortuitous because they expose fresh surface. Since my last post I reread the section on surface and saw that I had missed several aspects of the unencrusted surface. First, it is not the skin. Sometimes it is located just under the skin; sometimes it extends further in volume; sometimes it is concentrated; sometimes it is diffused and sometimes it is the whole organism. Secondly, surface is an effort - the effort to surface (now a verb) "what lurks in the shadows."

I think that Appelbaum's surface (or 'sur-face' - which he begins to use to emphasize the meaning on-the-face) is Gurdjieff's self-remembering. Appelbaum writes, "Sur-face makes perception mine in the sense that it is essentially a perception of myself....A background element in my perception comes forth - myself....Sur-face is the enactment of my meeting myself." Compare this to how Gurdjieff introduces self-remembering, "You do not feel yourselves; you are not conscious of yourselves. With you, 'it observes' just as 'it speaks,' 'it thinks,' 'it laughs.' You do not feel: I observe, I notice, I see. Everything still 'is noticed,' 'is seen.' (In Search of the Miraculous, pg 117)

I want to quote here William Patrick Patterson's description of self-remembering because it explains how "what lurks in the shadows" is revealed. "One divides [the attention] between sensation of self and the perception of an object, exterior or interior. In so doing, what colors and personalizes impressions - imagination, identification, inner considering, and judgments - is observed. If one cannot absorb the shock of a given impression, there is immediate reaction followed by a train of secondary reactions. If the impression is registered and not reacted to - not fought, not expressed, not fed - then observation...has duration and depth. The octave of impressions can proceed and its energy is further refined so as to be "food" for a higher body without which no true self-remembering (work with sensation and feeling) can begin to take place. In time a difference in quality is intuited between what is seen - the contents of one's awareness - and awareness itself. The ensuing friction created from the absorption of the energy of impressions and the denial of reaction produces an inner separation, an inner space."  (Taking with the Left Hand, pg 91) 

Photo source: Orlando Weekly

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Surface

This is my 10th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 9 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

The effort to abide within the body develops a sensitivity to events that is separate from pre-existing mental constructs. What Appelbaum calls the "language of sensitivity" provides facts about "the perceiver's state, about resistance, blockage, receptivity, relation, and openness." The body is the milieu through which these facts are expressed. "The language of the body is a language of presence."

One would assume that with the inward focus of perception and the containment of energy that there would be a separation from the exterior world. But Appelbaum says that that is the intellectual perception. The organic perception is different. Here he introduces the word "surface." I don't think it is exactly the surface of the body - the skin. It is a larger concept than that. It is our connector to all and everything. "Surface is a reminder of relation, a tangible sign of the fact that inner and outer mutually penetrate each other and that the distinction is a functional convenience. Surface is where the organism perceives."

Surface is a "sensitive membrane" that can either be fresh and open - via the stop, or encrusted and inflexible - via the reliance on old concepts and assumptions. Without the stop we are insulated against perception and surface "becomes a shield against connections."

In the next post: how surface gets exposed by shock.

Photo Source: flicker.com

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Life of our life

This is my 9th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 8 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

In Chapter 5, The Organism of Text, Appelbaum has a short paragraph about how, with the stop, human perception is dual. At first, I thought he was referring to Gurdjieff's practice of self-remembering as Ouspensky describes it in In Search of the Miraculous:

When I observe something, my attention is directed towards what I observe - a line with one arrowhead:
I ----------------------> the observed phenomenon.

When at the same time, I try to remember myself, my attention is directed both towards the object observed and towards myself. A second arrowhead appears on the line:
I <--------------------> the observed phenomenon.

Ouspensky explains that the observed phenomenon "could as well be within me as outside me."

After reading the paragraph several times I realized that Appelbaum is talking about a deeper, more subtle form of self-remembering. He is talking about an awareness of a "movement of energy" that takes place before our "our inner activities" take form. These activities or functions are our thoughts, desires, judgments, self-will, etc. These are functions that take on forms and we perceive them. But prior to the taking of form, there is a movement of energy and this can be perceived as well. He says, "This is the Life of our life, that which is a source for particular undertakings of functional life. Perception thus takes note of how percipient energy enters life on our ordinary level, how it animates forms of life, and how it remains distinct from these forms."

Although Appelbaum doesn't spell this out, it seems that he is indicating that there is a choice then at the moment of perception of the movement of energy. One could choose to stop the thought, the desire, the judgment and then the mind would remain formless.

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Prolongation of the Stop

This is my 8th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 7 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

Although there is a lot more that I want to write about in terms of Prof. Appelbaums description of the experience of the stop, it seems appropriate while the Olympics are going on that I should relate what he says about the prolongation of the stop. The connection to the Olympics - in my mind anyway - is about perserverance.  Of course, the perserverance required to excel at a sport is of a completely different type than the effort to come to a stop in the midst of the mechanicality of life. So now that I have my excuse for using a picture of Lindsey Vonn, I'll drop the analogy.

Appelbaum says that the stop "has no permanence and must be regained, if at all, by dint of effort. By a kind of exertion...[one] can repeat the action of the stop....The stop is the protoeffort. All effort is directed, implicitly or explicitly, toward cessation of thought construction....It would be misleading, however, to speak of stopping thought as the aim of the stop or as the effect of the initiation of will. The stop takes place, and, as a result, thought stops."

Since The Stop is a philosophy book, not a teaching or a Way, Appelbaum doesn't go much beyond that in terms of how to do it. For that, I go to the literature of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way. In the Fourth Way Meetings section of William Patrick Patterson's  Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time there are several questions from students about the "associations whirling around my head." Part of the answer to one of these questions is: "To break out of the thought-world takes aim, knowledge and effort. The aim is to awaken, but as long as I think I am awake how strong can my aim be? So I must verify through the evidence of my own observed experience that I am almost always asleep in the dream of myself, rarely awake. This observation must be a self-observation. That is only possible if there is self-sensing, a conscious attention. So this is not an 'effort' in the usual sense of the word. It's not an outward effort but inward. We need to get the taste of refocusing, grounding, breathing, guarding, dividing attention."

It is this "taste" that is the key.  I think this is what F.M. Alexander meant by: "You can't tell a person what to do because the thing you have to do is a sensation."

In my next post - the stop and the two-foldness of human life.

Photo Source: nydailytimes.com

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Beyond the Conceptual Framework

This is my 7th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 6 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

In The Stop Prof. Appelbaum explains that without the stop, with a mental, rather than an embodied awareness, we moment-by-moment construct a conceptual frame of the world as a detached onlooker. The frame consists of ideas and concepts all based on previous experience and conditioning. The body becomes one of these concepts. The actual act of perceiving becomes lost, powerless and invisible.  It gives its energy to the conceptual frame. Perception, following habituated pathways of mental associations, views events through previously established intellectual categories. The energy of perception "escapes the fleshy folds of the body."

"The stop arrests an attitude of control, driven by a fear of and vulnerability to the dark unknown. It dissolves a need to foreknow, presuppose, prefigure, and plan out in advance, just as it dissolves the need to arm, fortify, and consolidate territory." (This statement really resonated with me which is why I selected the dark forest image for this post.)

With the stop, the energy of perception remains within the body, no longer magnitized by the mental activity of world-creation. A "network of relations constituting the organism" are sensitized and energized; a nonmental responsiveness is awakened. The body ceases to be an idea and becomes "a container of an unknown identity through which move currents of sensation....One's body becomes available to an attentiveness of an entirely different order."

Listen to how William Patrick Patterson describes it in Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time. "...there is a stop, a shift in which we say 'yes' to Being - that which is consciously aware of itself and its contents, gross and subtle, and in which the quality of breath becomes fluid, palpable....Time seems to stop, space expands. Silence, the ever-present background of all that is, is tasted. Verifying ourselves in this way we literally stand in our own shoes. Released from the self-talk of the make-believe world, the ongoing societal hypnotism, we experience the primary - that is, the sensation of ourselves, the breath, the attention, perhaps an interior sound."

As I get further into Appelbaum's explanation of the stop I see more and more of its connections to Gurdjieff's teaching. However, I'm not familiar enough with F.M. Alexander's writings to find deeper parallels. I invite comments from anyone who has delved into the Alexander literature.

The next post will be about the prolongation of the stop.

Photo Source: msp291.photobucket.com

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Emodied Sensing

 Allegory of the Five Senses by Lairesse

This is my 6th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop. If you missed the first 5 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

In The Stop Appelbaum explains how, thanks to Descartes and others, we take the senses to be separate - each being a different window onto the world outside of us. He relates the problem presented by Locke in his 1694 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. If a man blind from birth is suddenly able to see and is shown a globe and a cube, will he know which was the one that was smooth to his blind touch. Locke answers that he would not know.

From that perspective, because there is no commonality between the senses and no communication between them, there is no unifying awareness.  Appelbaum explains, "The one who looks with eyes is not the same one who touches with hands...sight and touch, hearing and smell and taste, no longer speak a common language....They do not look from one place into one and the same world." This lack of communication "is overlooked in a growing preoccupation with object consciousness." This a selective focus requiring constant discrimination and differentiation. However, the one who makes the distinctions has become invisible; the question of "from what awareness does the object world spring" is not considered.

With the stop, we come back to an embodied awareness. Attention is no longer the hostage of repetitive, obsessive thought. When we arrest "the habits of listing, sorting, weighing, and arranging the furniture of the world...the awareness undergoes a slight shift...to an inner composure....One ceases to be a manager of things - a something among other somethings - and instead takes one's place as an inhabitant of a cosmos. The return is to an original position of embodied awareness and its native perceptivity."

Appelbaum begins Part Two of The Stop with a discussion of what we can see from this emobied awareness. He introduces "divinatory perception." This concept is a bit elusive for me as it has to do with the reading of signs. He says, "Perception must pass from its closed circle to the open pathway, from objectification to a frontier along which the concealed emerges from the unconcealed, the about-to-be-manifest from the manifest." What came to mind in reading this was Ouspensky's description in In Search of the Miraculous of what he was searching for: "I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us." Once he was able to bring himself to the emotional state where he could truly remember himself, experience the stop, he was able to see beyond the the thin film.

In the next post - percipient energy and the conceptual frame.

 

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."

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Between Tension & Poise

 If it is true as Professor Appelbaum says that poise cannot grow out of tension, then how do we get from here to there? He says there must be a transition to poise that "brings closure to the context of preoccupation and despair....The betweeness is a hinge that belongs to neither one nor the other. It is neither poised nor unpoised, yet moves both ways....It is the stop."

He makes the case that the stop is everywhere and in everything. He does this by way of Plato, Aristotle, Kepler, circular orbits versus elliptical orbits...way over my head. But then he brings it down to simple stuff - the stop is evident in every action in which we take part: hammering, opening a door, using a pen, eating, lifting, etc. "All involve a joint. There is a hinge around which events pivot. An initial impetus to movement runs its course and is followed by a new impetus leading to a new movement. All earthly movement is a deviation from perfect continuity in that it stops, begins again, stops again, hesitates, recovers, moves on..."

So what keeps us from being aware of the stop? It is our constant inner talking. Our attention is "repeatedly, ceaselessly, and unknowingly given over to an onrushing stream of associative thought." For this Appelbaum uses the term "rational automatism." "An endles automatic movement of thought obscures the stop."

Gurdjieff described this state as an embalance of "centers." Our three main centers - the intellectual, the emotional and the moving/instinctive - are out of balance because the intellectual is allowed to dominate.

As William Patrick Patterson writes in Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time , "We have become so enthrolled by our rational part, and the material benefits and powers it has given us, that we...are now more and more disembodied, our animal nature misunderstood, judged and renderd inferior. And so our sense of incompletion and isolation has grown proportionately as we have become more and more mentalized, all without our really knowing it."

More on the stop and awareness in my next post. 

Photo source: www.deviantart.com

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Tension

In The Stop Professor Appelbaum gives a description of tension that is pertinent to the modern, information age. He says that tension is characterized by "overabundant information and impoverished by an absence of real facts." In a state of tension I am "trying to figure out, plan, and engineer outcomes." With tension we are always 'out of synch,' missing the opportunities of the moment.

This is the activity of what Gurdjieff called the formatory mind or the mechanical part of our intellectual center. Ouspensky comparied it to a card-index system in the brain. Everything is old, nothing new or creative can come from it, it can't respond to the current moment other than by shuffling through the cards. It lives by rote.

I try to function with this mechanical thinking and am blind to the reality of the situation because I am so afraid of failure and am constantly trying to prove my self-worth. Appelbaum dubs it the "psychophysical milieu of accomplishment."  William Patrick Patterson in his book, Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time refers to this as "the ongoing momentum of life's constant Becoming - where everything is in a a stage of becoming greater or lesser." It is opposed to the state of Being. In the Introduction he writes, "Even a casual observation will confirm that I am constantly talking to myself, comparing myself, judging myself - lost in self-talk. My attention is captured in narcissism of continual self-referral, self-enchantment and daydreams. Though I apperar to be in the facticity of the physical world, I am off into the abstract." In the section of the book that is questions and answers from Fourth Way group meetings there is this answer: "We live in thought. We conceptualize everything, systematizing, organizing, building great edifices of thought dedicated to what? Ourselves, of course...."

The posture that I picture acccompaning this psychophysical milieu is the head back-and-down. (Check out where your head is right now.) F.M. Alexander found that people habitually overwork the neck muscles, tensing the back of the neck, pulling the head back and down. This tension in the neck then works its way down into my shoulders where there is an habitual holding whenever I have allowed all of my attention to drain outward into this milieu of accomplishment.

Until tension eases, poise can only be an idea in the head. Appelbaum says that poise cannot possibly grow out of tension - "a process that begins in distraction, preoccupation, and insensitivity."  How to get from tension to poise? - my next post

Photo Source: Cover image from A Mind Taut With Pain by Philippa King

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Poise

 
In the introduction to The Stop Appelbaum defines it as: "No theoretical construct, the stop is an actual moment, the moment of poise....An active concentration of awareness.... [It] gives us a key to a deeper engagement in a meaning that unfolds our lives. For it offers a choice. Either to remain habit-bound or to regain a freeedom in one's approach to an endeavor. The stop is the advent of an intelligence of choice."

Appelbaum seems to being using 'poise' and 'the stop' interchangeably. The stop is poise and poise is the stop. Here is his description of poise: "...a balanced concentration immediately prior to action. It is the a priori of a self-aware act. Poise itself is an action, but one of a wholly different kind. It differs from ordinary undertakings in point of origination, intention, quality of attention, rhythm, and reason. Poise is the response of awareness to the call of a situation...Poise is ever fresh in its ability to answer to the forms addressing it. In its continually renewed sensitivity, it is unlike its apparent siblings - control, steadiness, and firmness of intent. Poise has flexibillity. It stretches, bends, adapts, and accommodates while the others remained fixed....Poise is fluidity of response."

F.M. Alexander said that we are born with a "natural poise" and that is what we need to return to.

In my next post I'll describe how tension works against poise.

Photo: Sarah Van Patten and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba in Within the Golden Hour, photo by Erik Tomasson

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique

I just finished reading The Stop by David Appelbaum, a professor of philosophy at State Univ. of New York. I am not well-read in philosophy so much of this book was way over my head, but I feel that I managed to glean a few insights and I would like to reinforce them by exploring them here. Warning: this is my interpretation and may or maynot actually correspond to Prof. Appelbaum's thesis.

For those of you familiar with the stop exercise that Gurdjieff employed and that is described in In Search of the Miraculous, that is not what Appelbaum is describing...well, he is describing that, but not as an exercise. I think that it would be more accurate to say that he is, in part, describing a level of Gurdjieff's multi-level practice of self-remembering. And he is also describing the Alexander Technique of "the pause" before movement - the organizing of oneself for proper usage of the body. So I want to explore these concepts and connections and see what I can unravel from Applebaum's thesis.

He begins with sight, perception - making a case for embodied perception that is not distorted by thought constructs that alter what is seen to fit assumptions of the intellect. Disembodied perception excludes the seer and is detached from other sense experiences. "When sight ceases to be related to its organic condition, it loses its freshness of perception. It fails to penetrate assumptions we project about ourselves and grows increasingly intellectual."

Embodied perceiving takes in impressions-unaltered by the intellect-in a way that supplies an energy that includes the seer in the process of the perceiving. This is the result of "resensitizing sight." "Engrained habits of disembodied sight give over to fuller, intenser visual perception."

How does this come about? Through the employment of the stop. I'll describe that in my next post.

I wonder if Appelbaum is assuming that everyone who has not learned the stop perceives in the same disembodied manner. I am thinking of Gurdjieff's division of men (who have not worked on themselves) into three categories: man number 1 whose center of gravity is in the physical body, man number 2 whose center of gravity is in his feelings, and man number 3 whose center of gravity is in the intellect. (In Search of the Miraculous pg. 71) All three are equally asleep, but it seems that their process of perception must be different.

Awareness While Speaking, Gurdjieff and Alexander

In the Gurdjieff Work, one of the objects of self-observation is the voice. This has been a particularly difficult area for me. In conversation I am sometimes able to remember myself as I listen to the other person speak. There is a sensing of the body and an inner listening for reactions that arise. But when it is my turn to speak I go into deep sleep. There is a lack of trust that I can both attend to what I am saying and to what I am sensing and feeling as I speak. I completely give myself up to the concerns of the impression that I am trying to make-the ever-present polishing of the self-image. 

In his essay, The Question of Rebirth William Patrick Patterson describes this phenomenon. "Often I see I talk, but it's really that I am talked, some inner tape playing out the same old story once again. All empty words. No one, no self-awareness is there."

It was a few months into my Alexander Technique lessons with Sherry that she first introduced the concept of the mechanics of speaking.The image that she used was the crocodile - it lifts it whole head to open its mouth. This is what you don't want to do. If you look at the human skull you can see that it makes alot more sense to just let the jaw draw drop from its hinge to speak or eat.

So my hope is that by attending to the correct mechanics of speaking, I will keep some attention on the body and speak consciously rather than from a state of total sleep. 

Photo Source: urbandental.ca

...the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone...

In my last Alexander lesson Sherry noticed that there was something strange going on with my left leg as I walked. She discerned that there was a subtle forward movement of my left hip as I moved the left leg forward. This resulted in a contracting of the mid back on the right side - coincidentally, a spot where I have noticed a sensation of tightness for many years.

She had me practice walking with keeping the pelvis stabilized and beginning the movement by popping the knee forward. She also had me walk backwards for a while because it is much easier to keep everything correctly aligned and not mechanically fall into old patterns.

It all makes sense when you look at the structure of the hip joint. It is a ball-and-socket joint, with the head of the femur fitting into the pelvis at what is called the acetabulum, which means 'vinegar cup'. (Where do they get these names??)

The Caboose aka the Sacrum

 

In continuing with this train image of the spine that I mentioned in the last post...I think of the sacrum as the caboose. The important thing about the caboose is that it shouldn't get in front of the engine. So I try to use the attention when walking or standing to see that the hips are aligned with the shoulders. This puts a lot less stress on the lower back. 

The word sacrum comes from the Latin word sacer, meaning sacred. So the sacrum is the sacred bone. Actually it is the fusion of 5 vertebrae. In the illustration above it is the triangular shape in the middle that connects to the hip bones, forming the infamous sacroiliac joint.  Though the sacrum is securely attached to the 'wings' of the pelvis, it does have some independent movement and can become misaligned. I first became interested in the sacrum when I began to experience pain near my left sacroiliac joint. I don't know for sure if it was misaligned, but something was definitely wrong.  I suspect the problem was due to inproper alignment in certain yoga poses. Or, maybe, it was too much slouching on the couch. But it was what brought me to The Alexander Technique. By learning the proper use of the body and by spending time each day in the wonderful 'semi-supine' position it feels like things are back where they should be.

Photos: Atlas of Clinical Anatomy, Artist: Terry Dolan