Jennifer

4 Alexander Technique tips for learning new skills

If your New Year’s Resolution involved learning a new skill or hobby, you might want to consider FM Alexander’s advice for learning something new.

It’s a fairly classic New Year’s resolution, isn’t it? “This year I’m going to learn…” And the skill could be anything: knitting, pottery, scuba diving, extreme ironing… And people have any number of reasons for wanting to learn new things. One of my favourite blog writers, piano teacher Elissa Milne, on a recent blog post even recommended learning a new skill to help teachers understand their students’ struggles better. And whether the activity is knitting or potholing, the Alexander Technique can help you to learn faster and more effectively (as Mark Josefsberg, a New York-based teacher, recently wrote about).

Me and FM on bicycles

FM wrote about bicycles. He said, “I have personal knowledge of a person who, by employing the principles of conscious control which I advocate, mounted and rode a bicycle down-hill without mishap on the first attempt, and on the second day rode 30 miles out and 30 miles back through normal traffic.” * An impressive feat.

Last year I learned to ride a bicycle. My parents tried to teach me to ride a bike when I was young, but for a mixture of practical reasons it never really worked out (gravel path, sloping ground, creek at bottom of slope…). But it has always felt like unfinished business, and even more so when my husband and son started going out on cycle rides and leaving me behind!

So I got some lessons. While I wasn’t as quick off the mark as FM’s friend (in my defence, the traffic is heavier now than in 1912!), it was the experience of my teacher that I was progressing faster than her students normally did, and that I was pre-empting her next teaching point by my questions at the end of each exercise she gave me.

The secret?

How did I and FM’s friend achieve what we did? Here is what FM wrote:

“the principles involved were explained to him and he carefully watched an exhibition, first analysing the actions and the “means-whereby,” then reproducing them on a clearly apprehended plan.” **

So these are FM’s steps to learning something new:

listen to the teacher explaining the principles involved in the activity
watch carefully
analyse the actions and the protocols involved. In bike-riding, for example, which joints are involved in the peddling action? Which parts move first?
make a plan for how YOU are going to do that protocol, and only then give it a go.

If you try these steps, you will discover that your ability to learn is increased, and your fears and worries about learning decreased in equal measure. And me? Well, I’m not the world’s best cyclist by any means, but I can do it without falling off, and I have a lot of fun. And that, surely, is the whole point!

What new skills are you going to learn this year?

*FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete edition, p.130f.
** ibid., p.131.
Image by Roland Gardiner, stock.xchng

The Engineer and the Actor: Enthusiasm, Alexander Technique, and New Year’s Resolutions

Over the Christmas holidays, I took some visiting family to see the SS Great Britain, a local tourist attraction. It is a remarkable ship designed and built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the 1840s, the world’s first iron-hulled screw-propeller steamship. It is not only beautiful, but a marvel of engineering and a monument to enthusiasm and experimentation.

Brunel first designed the Great Britain to be a paddle steamer, and building began with the paddle-wheel design in July 1839. But when Brunel saw the SS Archimedes arrive in Bristol in early 1840, things were destined to change. The Archimedes was a prototype vessel with screw-propulsion, and the new technology excited Brunel. Even as the Great Britain was under construction, Brunel began experimenting with designs for screw propellers. In December 1840, fully 18 months after construction had begun on the Great Britain, Brunel made a major change in the design, and made engineering history.

This story fascinates me because it reminds me so much of FM Alexander. FM had different reasons for beginning the experimentation that led to his creation of the work we now call the Alexander Technique (Alexander was motivated by the prospect of giving up his acting career). But both men were experimenters. Both men had a passion – one for engineering, the other for acting – and it was their passion that drove them to continue experimenting, even in the face of external difficulty or apparent failure. Both men had enthusiasm in spades.

But both men also used their heads. To quote FM, “as to enthusiasm, I will claim that no one is a greater enthusiast than I am myself, but I will not permit my enthusiasm to dominate my reason.” *

FM spent a long time experimenting, testing out different ideas and watching himself in a mirror. His account of his creation of the Technique in his book Use of the Self is full of references to time passing. Similarly, Brunel didn’t see the Archimedes, get excited, and run straight to the dry dock to halt the construction of the Great Britain. Rather, he spent months working on designs and testing them.

Enthusiasm, Reason, and New Year’s Resolutions

In January most of us do some sort of udit of the previous year, and make goals, wishes or resolutions on how we are going to change our lives for the better in the year to come. We begin full of enthusiasm. But how often does our enthusiasm wane under the pressure of trying to implement our resolution before we know how best to go about it?

My advice today is to follow the examples of Brunel and Alexander. Enthusiasm is great. But the likelihood that we will be able to make major changes in our lives instantly and perfectly is low. So let’s not go down that route this year. Instead, try this:

Make a goal/wish/resolution
Do a bit of research around it. For example, if your goal is losing weight, read some books on the subject. Look at different types of diet.
When you feel you are ready, either make a plan of how to achieve your goal, or experiment with using a ready-made one (like a diet book). Experiment. Try it out. See if it is workable for you.

And most important of all…

Be prepared to fail, get things wrong, or backslide occasionally. This is normal and understandable. And completely human!
Hold on to your enthusiasm. This is your dream. Don’t let it be taken from you.

Do you have a goal or resolution for the year? How are you going to go about making it a reality?

*FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.90.

Annual Check-up: the easy route to noticing change

One night last week my son went to bed in pyjamas that fitted. When he got out of bed the next morning, they were conspicuously short in the leg. He had had a growth spurt overnight.

Now such things happen – changes that are sudden and instantly visible. But often change isn’t so obvious. It is gradual and incremental. It creeps up on you. The classic example is not noticing that your child has grown until someone comes to visit who hasn’t been for a while. When they exclaim how tall your child has become, you also look on them with new eyes. Yes, they have grown, haven’t they?!

It is very easy to just let life slide past and thus not notice the effect of the accumulation of small changes, whether for good or ill. Our child grows, the bedroom carpet gets shabbier, our confidence in our new job increases, our favourite shoes develop worn heels…

Small changes. It can be hard to notice the small changes. FM Alexander knew this. In the opening chapter of his very first book he wrote:

“The evils of a personal bad habit do not reveal themselves in a day or in a week, perhaps not in a year, a remark that is also true of the benefits of a good habit.” *

What Alexander means here is that, if we sit or stand or go about any of the “innumerable acts of daily life” in a way that is less than optimal (or even downright harmful), we may not notice the effects immediately. They might not appear for weeks, or months, or maybe even a year.

But notice that he also says that this is “also true of the benefits of a good habit.” When we make changes that are good and beneficial, we might not notice the benefits immediately. They might be gradual and incremental. They might creep up on us. We might not even notice the improvement for weeks. Or months. Or maybe even a year.

Annual check-up time.

Some years ago I decided to take Alexander’s words seriously, and set up for myself a sort of informal annual check-up. At a certain time each year, I think back to that time the previous year. I think back to what was feeling emotionally and physically. I check my diary and look at the sorts of things I was doing each week. I look for the accumulation of the small changes.

Would you like to do something similar?

The end of the year is a good, standard, traditional time to carry out that sort of annual review. One of my favourite writers, Chris Guillebeau, is even making part of his public at the moment on his blog.

Sample questions for your review:

How was I physically this time last year? Are there things I can do now that I couldn’t do back then?

What was I thinking about this time last year? What preoccupied me? Has my thinking changed, and if so, how?
How was I feeling this time last year? Am I feeling differently now? If so, how?

If you haven’t done a review before, give it go, and tell me in the comments how you found the exercise. And if you do this each year, tell me, how does it help you?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.16.

Children and (Learned) Stage Fright: a Rant

This is an undisguised rant about stage fright, why our children grow up to be nervous in front of audiences, and why the Alexander Technique is so important.

Recently my son played cello in his first ever school concert. He got excited about a new piece, and though he didn’t know it very well, he decided he wanted to play it instead of the two he’d been practising. Predictibly, he got stuck mid-piece, and I had to murmur hints to help him to the end.

When he sat down, another parent leaned over to him and said in a consoling tone, “It was very brave of you to keep playing. Well done.”

Both he and I fielded many such comments over the next few days. One even said (to me, luckily), “I don’t know how he did it. I would have burst into tears.”

These sound like nice, nurturing, supportive comments, don’t they? So why was my son nonplussed, and why do I feel the urge to rant?

Because they are not supportive comments. And here is why.

These comments come from a very particular world view. If I asked the parents involved, they would probably admit that, in their eyes, having to perform in front of an audience is tantamount to torture. And making a mistake in front of an audience is just about the most awful thing that can happen to you.

But this is just a point of view. It might be common, but that doesn’t make it the only right or normal way to think about performing. How about this for an alternative: there’s an audience of really nice people waiting to hear me play, and I am going to share my favourite music with them. (That was what my son was thinking. I know, because I asked him.)

So which would you rather be thinking as you walked onto the stage: ‘this is torture and I hope I don’t mess up’ or ‘I get to share my fun with all these people’?

The sad thing about the concert was watching all the other children. Many of them were clearly afraid and couldn’t get off the stage fast enough. One girl even burst into tears beforehand and refused to play.

That sort of fear is a learned behaviour. We are not born with a natural fear of performing. We learn it from the people we love and respect.

So… You may be content to live with a fear of speaking or performing in front of strangers. You may be content as you are. Fair enough. But I want to ask you the same thing FM Alexander asked in 1911:

“What of the children?” Are you content to rob them of their inheritance…? Are you willing to send them out into the world ill-equipped, dependent on precepts and incipient habits…? *

Those of us who have any contact at all with children have a tremendous responsibility. The paradigms we live in, the views we hold have the potential to mould their thoughts and actions, for better or worse. In today’s world, a fear of performing or presenting is a serious handicap – one that we would be crazy to want to pass on. For the children’s sake, if not for our own, we seriously need to reconsider our ideas and attitudes about doing stuff in front of an audience. And for me, the work of FM Alexander is a great way to start that process.

*FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.68.

Image by scottchan from FreeDigitalphotos.net

5 Alexander Technique steps to everyday happiness: 5. Keep experimenting

In my reading of FM Alexander’s works recently, I was reminded very strongly of the supreme importance of experimentation. Alexander writes:

“We must always remember that the vast majority of human beings live very narrow lives, doing the same thing and thinking the same thoughts day by day, and it is this fact that makes it so necessary that we should acquire conscious control of the mental and physical powers as a whole, for we otherwise run the risk of losing that versatility which is an essential factor in their development.” *

The phrase in this that stopped me in my tracks was that first one, “the vast majority of human beings live very narrow lives, doing the same thing and thinking the same thoughts day by day…” Is this me? I asked myself.

Is this you? And even if it is true of me or you, does it really matter if we do and think the same things day by day?

Why it matters.

I am about to say something controversial. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter if you decide to spend the next decade or three slumping. It isn’t going to kill you. With only a few potential exceptions, the way you sit or walk isn’t going to be a life or death issue.

But it is a quality of life issue.

If we choose to do the same things in the same way day after day, or worse, if we don’t even realise we are doing the same things in the same way day after day, we risk dulling our ability to be versatile. We lose our skill at rolling with the punches. Which means that when we experience some sort of (possibly externally initiated) form of sudden change, like an injury or illness or sudden redundancy from work, we struggle to know what to do.

Even if we don’t experience anything so major, if we stay content with doing and thinking the same stuff day by day, we risk a far more subtle kind of injury – the dulling of our enjoyment of things.

Alexander’s definition of happiness is the kind of absorption seen in a child doing something that interests it. And having watched my own son, what I have noticed is that this absorption is most apparent when he is experimenting.

He doesn’t build the same structures with his Lego, slavishly following the instruction book. He builds the bricks that way once, takes it apart, and then goes freeform. He experiments. He plays. He messes up, gets frustrated, pulls it apart, then tries again. And each thing he builds is fascinating.

According to Alexander, versatility is important. And we build versatility by playing and experimenting. We build it by getting things wrong, getting frustrated, going back to the beginning and trying again.

So. Tell me: what will you experiment with this week?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.65.
Image by Afonso Lima, stock.xchng

Interlude: change your rules, change your world. A true story.

I’m postponing the last of the 5 steps to everyday happiness for one week, because I have a really important true story to tell. It’s an important story because it shows so clearly how the rules we make for ourselves can completely change the way we act.

My son is going to play his cello in a concert at school this week. Because he learns outside of the school environment, one of the school music teachers wanted to hear him play so that they could place him at an appropriate point in the programme. So last Friday my son took his cello in to school.

The cello was placed in a safe spot in an office, but I placed his music bag on his coat peg. Clearly he didn’t notice me do it, because later, when the music teacher came to collect him, he didn’t pick up his music. He just went to the office, got his cello, and went off to play.

After setting up, he realised that he didn’t have his music with him.

So what did he do?

What would you do if you realised you didn’t have your music, and you were auditioning for a concert? Would you panic? Would it affect your performance?

What my son didn’t do.

He didn’t panic. He didn’t worry.

What my son did.

Telling me the story later, my son said that he thought, “Oh well, I’ll just have to play my pieces from memory.”

So he did. Really well, according to the teacher.

My son doesn’t know that playing for strangers is meant to be scary. He doesn’t know that playing pieces from memory is meant to be hard. So he did both things unquestioningly and without a jot of worry. In fact, when I suggested to him later that some grown-ups might find that situation hard, he laughed at me.

It’s a question of rules. My son hasn’t learned or internalized any rules that say that playing for other people, or playing from memory, is anything to be afraid of. This means that he hasn’t put up any barriers from playing as well as he can.

So why should we?

Change your rules, change your world

FM Alexander said that “a changed point of view is the royal road to reformation.”* If you change the rules and assumptions that you operate under, then you effectively change the way you view and interact with the world.

Piano teacher and blogger Elissa Milne gave a great example of this in her most recent post. By encouraging her student to stop reading the note names he had placed over every note in his music, and instead to think about the music in terms of shapes, she was able to change his playing from fumbling to near effortless in minutes.

If a piano student can experience that sort of improvement from a change of rule, what sort of improvement do you think you could achieve?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.44.
Image by J Frasse, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

5 Alexander Technique steps to everyday happiness: 4. Live in the present moment

Next week my recorder quartet will be playing a concert, and my thoughts about the rehearsal process are what have led me to today’s tip for everyday happiness: being in and reacting to the present moment.

The piece that my quartet will play to begin our concert is called The Jogger, by Dick Koomans (the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet play it extremely well here). It is one of those pieces of music where one person starts, then the next person comes in, copying what the first person does. Then the third person joins, copying the first two players.

The trouble we had initially with this piece as a quartet is that the third player didn’t exactly following the style of playing (intonation) set up by the first two players. And if all the players don’t agree, then the result can sound a little odd.

What happens is that each player goes away and practises the piece on their own. They spend time working on their own style of playing it. But when we get together to practise as a group, we have to find a way to play the music together, sounding as one unit. This means that we really need to spend time listening to each other, and responding in the moment to what we hear going on around us. And if we don’t listen to each other and just press on and play the way we practised, then the result just doesn’t sound the same.

Lifting past chairs

But it isn’t only musicians who need to spend time in the present moment. Even on the simplest of tasks we can fall into the trap of not sticking with the present moment, but either dallying in the past or straying into the future. FM Alexander used as his example a person asking a friend to lift a chair:

“You will see at once that your friend will approach the task with a definite preconception as to the amount of physical tension necessary. His mind is exclusively occupied with the question of his own muscular effort, instead of with the purpose in front of him and the best means to undertake it.” *

Our friend lifting the chair approaches the task with “a definite preconception” – they will probably have decided upon the likely weight of the chair and tensed muscles in readiness long before their fingers touch the object. To all intents and purposes, they aren’t really picking up the chair in front of them. They are picking up all the chairs they have picked up in the past!

Most of the time it won’t be the end of the world – misjudging the weight of the chair isn’t likely to have serious consequences! But if we keep relying on our preconceptions, to the point where we forget that we are even doing so, then we are locking ourselves out of the present moment. And that will make it so much harder to react quickly when it really counts.

So my task for you this week is this:

Think about the times and places where you do genuinely experience the present moment. For blogger Jamey Burrell, it is when he is running. What about you?
And for the next week, keep an eye on yourself. See how often you operate on preconceptions, and whether it sometimes trips you up.

Oh, and if you’re in Bristol next Wednesday lunchtime and have nothing to do, come along to my concert!

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.63.
Image by Gregor O’Gorman

5 Alexander Technique steps to everyday happiness: 3. Practice, practice, practice!

An old joke to begin:

Rumour has it that once, a pedestrian on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhatten stopped Jascha Heifitz (or possibly Artur Rubenstein!) and asked, “Could you tell me, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The great musician replied, “Practice, practice, practice!” *

I’ve noticed that the concept of practice has been popping up in blog posts gain, and in very diverse fields. For example, author Sarah Duncan recently wrote a post discussing the importance of writing consistently if you want to be any good. And an article by Sonia Simone appeared on the Copyblogger website which talked about the importance of practice to copywriters and graphic designers.

So the concept of ‘doing the work’ is in the air at the moment. Which is great, because it is one of those topics that is so important that it needs to get a regular airing.

And doing the work is definitely a part of the Alexander Technique. Writing in 1911, FM Alexander said, “Fortunately for us, there is not a single one of these habits of mind, with their resultant habits of body, which may not be altered by the inculcation of those principles concerning the true poise of the body which I have called the principles of mechanical advantage…” **

FM’s use of the word ‘inculcation’ is interesting. He wants us to fix an idea in our minds with constant repetition. Sounds a bit like practice to me!

But what sort of practice?

Sonia Simone’s article takes a slightly different slant, though, and it is one that I really like. She asks us to think about the type of practice we are doing, not just the quantity. Because, as she says, “10,000 hours of playing the scales is easy (if really, really boring), but it won’t get you to Carnegie Hall. And even 10 hours of the right kind of practice will bring you something meaningful and interesting.” ***

So we don’t need to do masses and masses of hours of practice – though some consistency would be good! But what are we going to practice? How can we practice the Alexander Technique effectively so that we can move and think more freely and easily?

Well, FM gives us the key in the passage I quoted. He wants us to inculcate (fix in our heads by repetition) the “principles concerning the poise of the body”.

Principles.

Not exercises. Not positions. Not lists of instructions.

Principles.

Principles are great things. They are, in Stephen Covey’s words, fundmental truths of universal application. Remember a principle, and you can apply it pretty much everywhere.

So what principles should we remember?

Yes, I could give you a list. I could give you lots of lovely things to think about. But I’m not.

You see, the other danger with practice is trying to do too much all at once. I would rather you worked with one or maybe two ideas and had some success, than that you tried to work on 6 or 8 things and failed dismally. So…

I recommend starting with just these two ideas, and see how far you get.

Before you start doing something, think about how you are going to do it.
When you stop doing something… STOP!

Tell me in the comments how you get on!

* You can find a discussion on the joke at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hall
** FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.57.
*** Sonia Simone, ‘The 5 Keys to Content Marketing Mastery’, http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing-mastery/

5 Alexander Technique steps to everyday happiness: 2. Rejoice that you are fallible

In my teaching room, I have a cupboard. It has two main uses. Firstly, it stows my computer away out of sight. This is its practical use. But it has a far more important function than that.

It stores all of my students’ sticks.

Sticks? I hear you ask.

Yes, sticks. The sticks they beat themselves up with.

Mental sticks

Obviously I don’t mean actual physical sticks. I’m talking about something far more insidious, though just as damaging. I am talking about the things that people believe about themselves and say to me during their lessons.

“I have such terrible posture.”
“I sit really badly.”
“My right leg is okay. But my left leg is really bad.”
“I know that my walking isn’t good, but there’s nothing I can do to make it better.”
“If my furniture at work was better, I wouldn’t have this neck pain.”

Why these statements are sticks

1. They are examples of what I was talking about last week: they are examples of thinking that is stuck in a groove. They are conclusions masquerading as statements of fact, and the reasoning on which those conclusions are based has long been forgotten. The assumptions are hidden. And hidden assumptions are dangerous!

2. They are conclusions that assume that improvement is impossible. When someone says “I have terrible posture,” typically the unstated ending to the sentence is something like “and it can’t change.” And the student sincerely believes this, because so far they haven’t been able to change what is bothering them. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t change.

3. Because these statements assume that change is impossible, they are a means of abdicating self-responsibility. Think about it. If something can’t change, the how much responsibility do we need to take for changing it? None! Instead, we claim the apparently unchangeable behaviour and use it to make ourselves feel bad.

Give up the stick!

This is what I tell my students. I fact, I hold out my hand and require them to give them up! Here is why.

1. Change is possible.

2. Change begins by owning up to the things that we do to ourselves. Or as FM Alexander would put it, we need to “acknowledge in fact that [we] suffer from mental delusions regarding [our] physical acts.” *

3. Doing this is not an admission of failure. It is an admission of power. As soon as we stop beating ourselves up and own up to the unnecessary muscular activity we are doing to ourselves, we have gained power over it. We are no longer slaves to discomfort. We have, in fact, taken the first major step to mastering it.

So give up your sticks. Send them to me – write them down in the comments and leave them there. And then you’ll have taken a leap away from discomfort and towards everyday happiness.

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.59.

Image by Mati Martek, stock.xchng

5 Alexander Technique steps to everyday happiness: 1. Get out of the groove!

Last week I wrote an article all about FM Alexander’s concept of happiness. I talked about FM’s desire that we should rediscover what true happiness is all about (in his opinion): being able to take pleasure in even something as apparently simple as sitting or standing. You see, if we take pleasure in even these small acts, then we will be increasing the amount of pleasurable experience over the whole range of our day.

But how do we do this? This question may be a live one for you, especially if you are like many of my beginning students and find even just sitting a tiring and uncomfortable experience. How do we even begin to think about taking pleasure in sitting or standing?

By taking some simple steps, and being prepared to work at them. For the next five weeks I will give you some steps that FM Alexander wrote about that have the potential to improve your relationship with your body in even the simplest of movements. But just reading these steps will not be enough to magically make a change in your life. You will need to have a go at applying these steps in your life. You will need to do a little bit of work.

Do we have a deal?

Okay, then let’s begin!

Get out of the groove!

In his first book, Alexander wrote a lot about overcoming mental habits, because he believed that physical difficulties came about as a direct consequence of unhelpful thinking. And when wanting to control mental habits, FM wrote,

“the first and only real difficulty is to overcome the preliminary inertia of mind … The brain becomes used to thinking in a certain way, it works in a groove, and when sent in action, glides along the familiar, well-worn path…”*

I think it is fair to say that on certain topics we all have set views and ideas. But did you know that we can have set ideas on even the apparently simple things in life, like sitting? Alexander describes these using the picture of grooves, or well-worn paths.

Sometimes these grooves are useful and helpful. Sometimes they are not. For example, many of my students first come to class with the notion that ‘sitting up straight’ is good, and slumping (slouching) is bad. They are furthermore secretly convinced that they do the latter (the slumping) most of the time, and therefore work very hard at trying to sit up straight (usually involving arching their back).

There are two problems with this.

1. They have never really thought about what might be involved in ‘sitting up straight’, and so end up using a lot of unnecessary muscular activity in a way that causes them to be tired and achey.

2. Even more importantly, they have never questioned the underlying assumptions of their behaviour model. First, who says they slump most of the time?! And second, why is sitting up straight inherently good, and slumping inherently bad?

(And yes, I know that might be a phrase you thought you’d never hear from an Alexander Technique teacher. But think about it. When you sit on your sofa of an evening with a nice glass of something to watch your favourite movie, do you really want to be sitting absolutely upright? Wouldn’t a nice, efficient slump be more appropriate here? Just a thought…)

The task for the week.

So your task for the next week is this. Pick an activity. Pick something simple, like sitting or standing, or getting out of a chair. And think about what assumptions you may have made about that activity. What are you convinced is true? And what if you played, just for fun, with not having those assumptions. What would be possible then?

Sometimes it is our convictions about what it true and unchanging that are the very things that are holding us back. They are the groove, the well-worn path. If we lift our feet from the path, just for a step, then a whole forest of adventure is waiting for us.

*FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.67.??