It's a good excuse, but for me it only works during the holidays. Well, also when I've got my nose to the grindstone while I'm doing my community services for Bolinas.

Since I'm a juggler, and I've taught juggling, and been to many juggling conventions teaching Alexander Technique to jugglers who were much better jugglers than I will ever be, I wanted to say a few things about what I observed in people who can juggle and who try to be better jugglers.

Juggling and musicianship are obvious proofs that someone may be successful at an unbelievable high level of skill in spite of their personal self-imposed limitations.

My life has been the answer to this virtual question that keeps coming up for me. I hope that there must be a way to suspend judgment and act without avoiding an emotional commitment to having a point of view. This is sort of a mouthful that might not make sense to someone reading, so I'm going to explain it further.

Put me in a group of people larger than five or six, and I would flash in and out of a number of different people's points of view so rapidly that it could make my head spin. I couldn't say a word. Gradually I realized that this "talent" for shape-shifting was a means to establish rapport - an essential part of my ability for sympathetic empathy. It was such a strong talent that I would tend to use it in ways that were inappropriate.

We notice order by giving attention to chaos, without leaving it — by staying with it, laying with it, as long as it takes, until a new order emerges. Regina Bensch-Coe

Yes, seems that creativity is involved, and also patience. As an example of this, I'm reminded of the my childhood fascination with listening to a repeating skip in an old recording of my mother's voice on a phonograph record as it had run out at the end. She had been saying a partial phrase that was repeated by the loop.

I'm wondering why the culture thinks of me as teacherly; or why I have learned to somehow use the language in that way to give people the idea I'm trying to teach when I'm talking. I mean, I do have some Alexander Technique students sometimes - but that's more a process of coaching self-observation rather than a process of disseminating information as most teachers do.

It is in the assumptions where all the meat of meaning is for me.

How can people get past the programming of culture that they are a separate individuality and why would they want to do that?

I find the once you have an identity, it's easier to give it up. That's the value of identity for me. I regard identity is a control issue.

David Bohm: Every assumption is implicitly a reflex and a set of intentions. A person cannot form intentions except on the basis of what the situation means to him, and if he misses the mark on what it means, he will form the wrong intentions.

To restate in my own words, Bohm says that, for there to be an intention and the reflex that carries out an intention, there first has to be an intepretation that is based on assigning meaning.

I'll have to watch situations where that's happening in me.

Many people like to "rescue" insects. When funning across spiders, ladybugs, bats or butterflies in their house, many people go to the trouble of catching them and taking them out into the garden rather than the easier remedy of killing them. Doing such a thing such as that makes me feel that I'm doing a little bit to accommodate the fact that humans have eliminated the habitat of many creatures. This is a story about a mysterious thing that happened one time when I did something like that...

What do you think of the questions on this page about how to determine truth for yourself?

by David Gorman

I really like the idea that he says we have a built-in value meter that tells us when something needs attention. I also enjoyed the way David outlines some of the points of how evaluating can be done by yourself.
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