These feet were made for being placed on the floor...

I sat down on the chair to have my breakfast this morning and crossed legs. After a while, I thought it's probably not so good to do it this way, but why? for 'the good use' sake? I decided to leave it like this and observe what actually happens when the legs are crossed: my back arches, the tension appears in the chest area and breathing becomes shallow & requires effort. So there you go. I'm not saying it has to be like this every time the legs cross, it was just my experience on this very day.

The experience has left its trace...

And in the evening: 20 minute of lie-down. It was a strainging day. I day-dream a lot.

A slug in movement

The last entry in this AT section was posted 2 weeks ago, which is probably a sign that my AT work was flat, or better to say, non-existent. Today a response to one of the older posts has been made and it woke me up, so to speak.

When I remember and pay attention to how I move, the movement slows down and I'm more careful. As if the attention itself had the power to change...

Observe it few times today.

Non-noticing noticed

I don't have a specific commitment for this AT section at the moment, but keeping this journal helped me to notice at the end of this day that i haven't noticed anything AT related today. So ... it's useful.

A little moment of improved use

In the grip of bad habits today, there were very few moments when I intentionally improved my use.

When walking i noticed how all the body is doing, pushing forward, unnecessarily. I gently asked to stop it and allowed the legs to carry on with the job and the upper half of the body just to rest. Wow! Walking can actually be quite an easy and effortless activity.

Honour Sufficiency applied to the movement.

2 rebels

Notice a lot of tension in the soles of the feet today. How silly, as if pressing them down to the ground was helping in staying upright or walking. It doesn't, and in fact it does the reverse. So keep observing these rebellious limbs of mine, and in the meantime keep the overview of the whole body & keep releasing the neck (when I can remember). Surely the morning GC Practice supports this kind of attention work.

Also do an AT lie-down today. Listening. It's comforting to come back to the body. In my case, perhaps because I inhabit my mind so much, so moving the centre of gravity from the thinking activity to awareness of the body presence is a relief, indeed.

Also notice other related recurring habitual tensions, but won't be going into details here, the point is that i noticed them & kept looking at them.

Centaur

I've recently finished reading No Boundary.

From one chapter:

To re-own the body might initially strike one as a peculiar notion. The boundary between ego and flesh is so deeply embedded in the average person's consciousness that he responds to the proposed task of healing the split with a curious mixture of puzzlement and boredom. He has come to believe that the boundary between the mind and body is unalterably real, and thus he can't figure out why anyone would want to tamper with it, let alone dissolve it.

As it turns out, few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies...

Indeed, my body seems just to dangle along under me. I no longer approach the world 'with' my body but on my body. I'm up here, it's down there, and I'm basically uneasy about just what it is down there.
It seems to me that the Alexander Technique offers excellent means to dissolving this ego/body boundary, it applies to the centauric level.

Yet another chair

The bus chairs are designed:

(1) by people who collapse
(2) for people who collapse
(3) in order to induce and facilitate collapsing.

I had such a chair on the bus from and to London. After spending sufficient time collapsing i stopped curving my back into the chair, came back on the sitting bones and invited sense of both being grounded and going up from this base. With my recent use i can't maintain such a sense while leaning against the chair.

This realignment allowed more clarity and ease, and to move to doing something little bit more useful and constructive than tension induced day dreaming and anxiety.

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COMMENTS:

Indeed. There can be a corresponding state of emotional collapse brought on by submitting to the will of the chair! It is our sense of grounding, safety, sureness of place, that allows us to experience the joy of being fully connected to self. This connection allows us to become our True Self, the expression of the light within.

Posted by Rachel

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Dear Rachel,

Many thanks for this contribution!