STUDY WITH ALFONS

I was looking at trending Youtubers teaching functional fitness exercises. The pinnacle of the movement movement.

Strengthening, stretching, conditioning,
greasing the groove.
Assessing, adjusting, correcting,
coaches approve.
Collecting certificates,
signing certificates.
Performing, competing, teaching,
improve.

My gosh, in some of these exercises they really make it hard for themselves. They deflate their tires, pull their parking brakes, pack on some weight, and then try to drive as hard as they can. I wonder: »Must we always suffer in order to have lightness and ease some time later?«

And on that same note, putting ourselves under pressure in order to get things moving, is that a good idea? (it might, it might not be) Where do these ideas even come from?

We come to this world and we learn. There’s things we learn and things we don’t learn. There’s environments that are more supportive, others less. There’s ideas we’re exposed to. And once we can speak and listen and read, and once we’re able to move on our own, it’s our own responsibility to expose ourselves to new and better ideas, better environments.

Mistakes happen. All along the way.

I don’t think that childhood trauma is immutable, permanent damage. I think it’s a problem about learning. A problem about our immediate environment and the ideas and sentiments we have been (or have not been) and continue to be exposed to. And about which thoughts and views we feel comfortable going with.

So, let’s say someone was never exposed to the ideas of

Moshé Feldenkrais,
Charlotte Selver,
Alice Miller,
John Taylor Gatto,
Stephen Krashen or Frank Smith (the psycholinguists).

Just for example. These are my examples. I could as well say, say, Maria Montessori, Viktor Schauberger, Bert Hellinger, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ignaz Semmelweis, Jim Davis’s Garfield. What of it?

Who are your favourite teachers, what are your favourite ideas? What are the conditions for learning? What makes us go look for more? What makes us stay with what we already have? What is the difference between movement learning in the sense of „Personal Coaching” and in the sense of „Somatic Education”?

I dissolved a couple of fairy tales in hard acid. This removed most of the entertaining embellishments for sure, but also the Poisonous Pedagogy. Kind of reminds me of what we might see in Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellations, once all the relevant members have been placed on the playing field. Or, in a movement based sense, when we clearly perceive the structure of a movement. So. Without further ado, here’s what I’ve found at the bottom of the bucket:

Little Red Riding Hood

A little girl, whose father is not mentioned, was sent away by her mother (into territory where a dangerous predator roams around.) Next thing we know, the little girl was—or was almost—killed, and so was her grandmother.

The Three Little Pigs

A mother sent her three little ones away (into territory where a dangerous predator roams around.) Within mere days two of them were killed, whilst the third one became a killer himself.

Cinderella

The girl Cinderella lost her mother in early childhood. Her father remarried. However, Cinderella’s own father, her new stepmother, and her two new stepsisters all reject her. Finally, Cinderella finds a strong man who fancies her and leaves to marry him.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Snow White’s mother died during her birth. Her father remarried. However, her father’s second wife, her stepmother, is deeply jealous of her and drives a wedge in between Snow White and her father. Next thing we know, Snow White is in a coma because of her stepmother. Finally, a strong man wakes Snow White from her coma, they get married, and all clears up.

Jack and the Beanstalk

Jack, a poor country boy, made it big and yet didn’t forget his family.

I’m not sure if I can sustain reading about psychology and specifically about Poisonous Pedagogy any longer. Important insights, big revelations, but oh so dark. My reading speed did almost grind to a halt. Maybe one last quote:

“Pedagogy Fills the Needs of Parents, Not of Children” — Alice Miller, from her book “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”

Actually that was a chapter title, but… indeed.

Now on to something else, something that delights me beyond measure. A poem a viewer left as comment on one of my Youtube videos:

LOWERING MY BODY WITH THE SPIRAL AND FEELING ECSTASY

Life offers me fluidity
As I spiral
Un
To
Ecstasy,
First from standing,
Then to the floor,
I twist my hips
And so explore,
The joy
Of fluid movement.
What utter grace,
Can be.
As I lower
Of my body
Why it’s all
So
Heav…en-ly.

Poem by Martin Mittelmark, as a comment on my video “Move smoothly from standing to sitting on the floor”, youtu.be/fftXkm6Mlu0

Oh so wonderful! I don’t know if Martin is a reader of my blog, but somehow he must be in the know…

Please (continue to) practice your own creativity, open the flood gates, whether your favourite medium of expression is drawing, writing, singing, dancing, garden work, flower arranging or … good question, which are the ways?

The literature (childhood psychology, adult psychoanalysis) I’m wading through at the moment is quite heavy, or maybe: as heavy as it gets. However, it makes no sense to skip it just in order to avoid difficult topics. They hold value for movement based lessons, and for personal development. I think I can find inspiration there.

However, since these topics are pretty dense, and texts get convoluted and hard to read fast, I will try to condense some of my writing into poems, or something.

Also, I think a lot of these »things« not only apply to compulsory schooling, families and social dynamics, but also how we move physically, or maybe even how we are, physically. What people (“we”, really) do in the garden or gym, how they do sports (or not), sit, eat, stand, walk, stir their coffees, brush their teeth, make love, what sleep positions they prefer etc might not be all that different to the way they conduct and experience their social and family lives.

I guess. Let’s see.

I was under the impression that we’re good, gesamtgesellschaftlich betrachtet, as society as a whole, but this issue just keeps boiling up. It’s like a movie plot that keeps presenting itself over and over again. Different movies with the same plots.

I just don’t know how to write about it, yet. Let me try:

I bumped into this issue—again—a few days ago. After some quite remarkable psychological (I felt more peaceful and confident) and functional (I improved my walking) changes that came about by practicing my pelvis rolling class [How your pelvis connects to your head (UP9.1), youtube.com/watch?v=XOxG5hDnst]. I mean, I don’t mean by following along my own instructions as if they were mandatory guidelines, but by playing with the movements, on my own. In silence. And with music. Or while listening to podcasts. During the night or during the day. On my couch, in my bed, or on my carpet. For hours and hours, and hours. And let new movement patterns and discoveries reveal themselves, unfold.

I then, in search of reconciliation with society, I was reading Alice Miller. Or more like, I was flipping through some of her books, when the subsequent paragraphs drew my attention:

“These considerations help me to understand why so many analysts seem to shrink from their own discoveries. An example of this is offered by Helm Stierlin in Separating Parents and Adolescents (1974) when he uses the parable of the Prodigal Son to illustrate his therapeutic goals. The son returns from death to life by obediently coming back to his father, claims Stierlin, who thus, although he knows better, assigns obedience its biblical value. This means that the father designates as »death« everything that separated his son from him—the son’s youthful disobedience occurring at a time when the father was not part of his life—and describes as »life« his son’s return: »For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found.« Since Stierlin sees it as his therapeutic task to bring about a reconciliation between children and parents, he doesn’t notice that he is identifying with the father’s interests, at least in this case, or that the son finds his way back to his father and wins his love by being obedient. Stierlin does not realize that a restoration of harmony is being celebrated here only at the price of the son’s acquiescence in his father’s definition of everything that separated his son from him as »death«. In terms of the symbolism of this scene, one could say that in Stierlin’s therapeutic endeavors to bring about reconciliation, the relevance of his concept of delegation and its usefulness to the profession must be sacrificed for the sake of reunion with the father.”

Citations from Alice Miller, Du sollst nicht merken, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1. Auflage 1981, Page 341, Kapitel C8. 80 Jahre Triebtheorie. In English: Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, A Meridian Book, 1986, 9th printing, Page 201, Eighty Years of the Drive Theory.

Let me copy down the following paragraph as well:

“A similar phenomenon can be found in the case of Horst Eberhard Richter. The same author who in 1963 published a brilliant book, Parents, Child, and Neurosis, which described parental power and the child’s victimization within the family with virtually unprecedented accuracy, speaks in his book, Der Gotteskomplex (1979), in English language, All Mighty (1983), of the child’s escape from fantasized, fatal helplessness into narcissistic omnipotence. How did it come about that one of the leading experts on the child’s family situation now refers to fantasized and no longer real helplessness? Furthermore, how can we explain the fact that someone who sees and describes the formative influence of the social milieu on adults as clearly, empathically, and with such dedication as Richter can do so without any concern for the earliest imprints? This would not be so puzzling in itself, for a great many professional psychologists still do not know how markedly and lastingly the individual is shaped by his or her childhood. But Richter already knew this full well in 1963. What became of his knowledge?”

So this is the topic. And of course, we know, bad things might happen all the time, not just in early childhood. At any age and at any stage of our lives we might trust in someone, or be in a situation where we depend on someone, and then maybe not only get hurt a little bit, but get hurt badly, maybe even permanently disabled, altered, or entirely re-programmed. We might not even know that we missed an important developmental milestone, or sustained damage, or lost something essential… such as the ability to feel ourselves, or the ability to skip, roll, jump, squat, make music, bake bread, take care of someone, be compassionate, stay cool-headed in an argument, see the bigger picture… and neither to what extend, or even worse: we might have no idea how to recover or carry on (if there’s any insight at all).

I’ve written about this before, by quoting John Taylor Gatto, and his book, The Underground History Of American Education, and his essay, The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher. It’s the same topic. Different movie, same plot.

I’ve seen it before, heard it before, and I’ve also read about it before (for example in the case Wilhelm Reich vs Sigmund Freud). I’ve felt it before, as a kind of knowing, but now I can almost see it clearly. It’s like in the movies, for example, Netflix Stranger Things Season 1. For a while you suspect there’s a monster, and then you know there’s a monster. But you don’t get to see it, yet. Only when you’re so many episodes into the season you finally get to see it in full scale and get an idea of the full situation.

And still. How to talk about it. How to write about it? And what to do about it? And what’s worse, I can see this sickness running even in my own profession. It’s like being in Jack Finney’s, The Body Snatchers. All over again. And up to now, with the tools at hand, sneaking out of the city and then performing a clean amputation seemed to be the only viable solution.