March 16, 2025 BY ALFONS, IN Disquisition and deliverance

Obsession – the only way to live

“Being obsessed over doing something, and be busy with it day and night, is the only way to live.” My best friend commented, while peering over my shoulder last June. This was the time when I decided to improve my handwriting…

…and filled hundreds and hundreds of pages with calligraphy and lettering styles, using the practice sheets I had designed myself, with lines angled at 17 degrees, and a new book on handwriting, (which I’ve not finished.) Furthermore, I went to countless bookshops and stationary stores, spent days inspecting the shelves of libraries, including the beautiful, BEAUTIFUL, National Library in Vienna, Austria… to dig up official documents and research papers on the official Austrian handwriting style…

…for almost half a year I didn’t do much else, day and night. After all, my forsaken home country is one of the few countries that has such a thing: its own handwriting model, the Austrian Schulschrift, last revised by the Austrian Ministry of Education in 1995. And why not, why not learn to model my own handwriting using the Austrian model? …

…maybe because even the Austrian government keeps saying that it’s just a model, and we shouldn’t aim to copy it perfectly. They are right in that sense, perfection is unattainable… for the Os are unlike the German egg-shaped Os… in the Austrian model they are perfectly elliptical, and that’s something humans just can’t draw.

My friend George, who made that comment, he himself is living the way of passionately being obsessed over something and doing only that, day and night, too—but not as a teacher, like myself, but as a musician. Next to sleeping, there’s hardly anything else he and his fellow musicians do, other than practicing, playing and creating music.

We don’t have much money, but we have purpose. Our obsession with what we think of as our work fills us with that rare, highly saught after, ethereal substance called “purpose.” Purpose, an invisible good that seems to nourish us spiritually, fills our lives with meaning, and aligns all our actions to that purpose. And at least I am lucky enough to have patrons who support me and make my deep dives into my projects possible, my deep dives into whatever seems to be the most important thing to do in this world… and is somehow related to my main profession, being a teacher of Somatic Education, with a background in studying the lessons of Moshé Feldenkrais.

This obsessing over topics doesn’t always yield movement lessons, in the sense of being a teacher of Somatic Education. But for once I can say……for once I can say that I have completely and fully understood what Moshé Feldenkrais meant by saying,

“You learn the official handwriting style first,
and only then you develop your own.”

Up until now this quote was only a toothless paper-tiger to me, a bland quote that has been repeated up and down in any Feldenkrais training ever done, cited without passion, quoted not knowing the obsession and the striving for perfection, joy, and purpose. Maybe that’s why—up until last June—this quote never resonated with me, was never convincing. Baseless, emotionless, irrelevant.

But now I understand. Now I can talk from experience. I had to become 50 years old to undo the damage done to me in public schooling, and learn how to use body, mind, hand and pen, to put ink to paper, beautifully, and with great satisfaction.


Here’s a video from my “beginning days” of handwriting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eNLy-YgsKg

Since October last year I have a new obsession:

Romanised Chinese writing and spelling, with the latin alphabet, to the official standard of the Chinese government, called Hànyǔ Pīnyīn.

It started as a feeling, a desire to do something with lasting effect. Something that’s like putting my foot down, making a dent in history, leaving a legacy, doing something revolutionary, gamechanging, joyful and amazing…

…and quickly, within days after my decision to turn Pīnyīn, the romanized Chinese writing system, into something great in my life, my interest in it turned into my new obsession, leading up to the 12 hour workdays I’m having these days, which always feel too short.

I’m working on a web application as a typing helper (to actually be able to write Pīnyīn,) with a new type of dictionary interface. And a Mac app. I’ve given up on the iPhone app, for now. And now I’m doing research on Pīnyīn input methods, devising new ones, comparing robustness, ease of use and efficiency. And with these tools I’ve already transcribed a few thousand words, every day a few more.

Furthermore, right now I’m writing a book about Pīnyīn spelling according to the Basic rules of the Chinese phonetic alphabet orthography (GB/T 16159-2012), a standard by the Chinese Ministry of Education and the Chinese State Language Commission.

I wake up, usually around 6:30am, I do half an hour of Feldenkrais-inspired exercises (without which I would probably break apart,) shave and shower, and then, for the rest of the day……I work every minute I’ve a chance to. And I go to bed at midnight. Monday through Sunday .And besides that, I try to keep up with my work as a teacher of Feldenkrais. This has been most of my days since the past 3 months already.

“Yes, you’re on the right track,” I hear my friend George saying in my mind; and off he goes to his own practice session.

January 27, 2025 BY ALFONS, IN In rage against the machine

We learn what we live

Since around the 1950s, and perhaps continuing to this day, brave individuals have sought innovative approaches to education—Montessori, Waldorf education, Feldenkrais, and even homeschooling. These methods are often seen as a more compassionate and individualized approach, one that respects families, faith, personal development, liberty and freedom.

However, people forgot that they’ve spent staggering 12,000+ hours at school—maybe even as much as 20,000 hours considering homework and what is called “higher education.” In any case, this is certainly more than the supposedly 10,000 hours required to achieve mastery in any area of choice.

We, the people, were schooled in a system that uses curricula and rigid, prepackaged lessons, a system based on collective thinking, certificates, and bureaucratic compliance. We were conditioned to accept the authority of strangers, guidelines, professional profiles, and hierarchies; to believe in the necessity of insurance policies, contracts, and trademarks; and to fear the looming specter of intellectual property battles, cease-and-desist orders, and legal entanglements. Most of it wasn’t for learning to read and write well, or to become good at math, research and reasoning skills—it was about training obedience to a system that measures human worth in credentials and control.

And so, even the brave, they’ve learned what they’ve lived. And they live what they’ve learned. Eventually they pressed Feldenkrais, Montessori—and certainly large parts of homeschooling—into the same system they knew so well.

School. Taking children to school.

Where I live, every morning there’s a traffic jam. Not just from people going to work, but also from people taking their children to school, with private transportation. Completely clogging up all the streets around the many school’s entrance driveways.

And in the afternoon there’s another traffic jam, when children are picked up again, and are put into their extra curriculum classes until dinner time, when they are being watched at home again. Billions of children living under 24/7 surveillance, with not a minute being unaccounted for. I wonder, do these families have surveillance cameras even in their bedrooms?

This is what I was thinking about this morning, when I heard about the Stargate project for the US, and billionaire Larry Ellison’s dystopian vision for society where everything is monitored by AI. I quote, “to keep citizens on their best behavior. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on and we’re using AI to monitor the video.”

On the upside, most people seem to be fine with all this—since it’s the world they grew up to know. They’ve learned what they’ve lived, and they live what they’ve learned.

ChatGPT says that I should tighten up this blog post, smoothen transitions, and highlight the central argument while leaving space for reflection. It says that some phrases, like “billions of children living under 24/7 surveillance” or “do these families have surveillance cameras even in their bedrooms?”, could come across as sarcastic. Softening the tone, ChatGPT says, might ensure my message is received as serious rather than rhetorical.

All solid points. But not today ChatGPT, not today.

January 22, 2025 BY ALFONS, IN In rage against the machine

God, monkeys and our self-image

Moshé Feldenkrais’ book, Awareness Trough Movement, starts like this: “We act in accordance with our self-image. This self-image—which, in turn, governs our every act—is conditioned in varying degree by three factors: heritage, education, and self-education.”

Which means that, for example, it makes a difference whether you think of your chest as a rigid, metal cage, like that of an AI robot… or as a flexible, thick-walled, organic balloon that can expand and contract, twist and bend, and support your legs and arms by being part of the movement — rather than merely being a rigid base with joints on each corner that inevitably will break due to overuse.

Images: Tesla Bot, robotic humanoid, Wikipedia. Adina Voicu, dancer flour motion, 1284217, Pixabay. Font: Tom’s New Roman. Collage by Alfons Grabher.

The way you think of yourself will affect the way you feel, sense, act… eat, walk, talk, look, love, etc. And maybe we can think of the self-image as permanently stored and unconscious, ever available thoughts, internal rules and regulations.

But now get this:

In Christian religion, they teach us that we’re created in the image of God. Genesis 1:27 states: “So God created mankind in his own image”

This means that every person has inherent dignity and value, with a purpose to live, furnished with God’s attributes such as love, justice, kindness and creativity. It invites us to see ourselves as reflections of the highest, most beautiful, most loving, and most radiant being.

Furthermore, this means that our parents, by ancestry, are closer to God than we are, and our grandparents were even closer, and so forth. That’s another logic by which we might love and honor our parents, cherish our family, and respect our lineage. At the same time our children are our offspring, and though they are further down the lineage from God, we hope that the divine spark within them remains just as vibrant. We feel compassion for their journey, guiding them with love and care as we help them grow and thrive.

Which stands in stark contrast to what is taught in public schools.

In public schools, they teach us that humans and monkeys share the same ancestor—essentially some kind of generic, hairy, primitive monkey-man. Monkeys: animals that are often malicious, jealous, destructive, and lazy; always on the lookout to steal food; waging war with other monkeys; and whose leaders dominate their territory by mating with or even forcing themselves upon any female they choose.

And by that logic our parents and grandparents, and all the way up, are ever closer to the primitive, wild and warring monkey-men we supposedly used to be, ultimately originating from some kind of fish or plankton or some highly improbable chemical events at the beginning of life on Earth. And that’s what billions of children are made to believe?

So- which image did you choose for yourself? I mean, in regard to your chest. How do you breathe, how do you move? How do your limbs connect and relate to your center?

And if you would like to explore more about your movements, have a look at my Youtube channel, and follow along one of my lesson, for example this one:

Improving ability, with Alfons, on Youtube, Guided Breathing Exercise : Expand Upper Chest To Breathe Better

December 8, 2024 BY ALFONS, IN Disquisition and deliverance

On breathing

When I first started learning Feldenkrais in a so-called professional training program, some of the teachers kept mentioning breathing with the lower abdomen. And one of the senior teachers went somewhat overboard by taking Moshé Feldenkrais a bit too literally, at least in my opinion: he said we should be able to flip a coin placed on the lower abdomen—by controlling the muscles in that area.

As a software engineer, I wanted to know what that was all about, and if I might be able to learn it. This led me on a journey of browsing through many medical books about breathing, function and rehabilitation; and the vastly larger linguistic corpus of New Age and Yoga-inspired books on breathing.

It also led me on a 2-year long journey of playing the didgeridoo, an Australian wind instrument. I practiced almost daily, for an hour at least, booming away, circular breathing, and using all sorts of breathing explorations, like belly, back, sides, pelvic floor and full chest breathing techniques.  What a time it was to be alive! As for the didgeridoos themselves, at first I just cut some from various PVC pipes, adding mouthpieces made of beeswax. Later, I invested in more pricier originals. I still have two beautifully painted, naturally termite-hollowed eucalyptus tree didgeridoos from Australia in my storage. At this point though, I’m not sure if they’re cherished keepsakes or just dust collectors.

The passion for playing the didgeridoo seemed to happen all by itself, without me needing to motivate myself to practice. Nothing of that sort happened in the New Age breathwork section, though I did visit and attend satsangs with some famous Indian Yogis, Paramahansas, and monks. However, some of the more exciting practices I tried were all from the Western hemisphere, like Holotropic breathing (Stanislav Grof) and Rebirthing breathwork (Leonard Orr). 

And then there was the Buteyko breathing technique from Russia, which took me a while to figure out. Proper resources were scarce at that time. I then practiced twice daily for about a year, and filled almost an entire notebook with numbers and tables recording my progress. I can’t say that I enjoyed it too much, but it did give me the means to keep the mild Asthma in check, which I had since a child.

And then, at some point, my passion for breathwork started to fade. I didn’t go to the Apnoe diving breathing workshop in the Maldive Islands, which my younger brother attended and loved, but for me– my journey into breathwork had already ended.

I did learn a lot, though. The experience and knowledge I gathered is still helping me with my Feldenkrais client work, up to today, in quite a few ways.

Regarding the lower-belly coin flip, supposedly done with the rectus abdominis muscles—which, from a biomechanical perspective, don’t work in isolation but primarily aid in flexing the torso and stabilizing the trunk—I felt confident enough to place that coin-flip where it belongs: in the realm of New Age fiction, Yoga-lore, or perhaps even old-school male fantasies. ;)

As for excelling at breathwork itself, I don’t think I have the talent for it. After all the work I’ve put in, in the long run I still can’t hold my breath for longer than the recommended minimum of 20 seconds control pause in Buteyko breathing. Quite embarrasing, in a way.

But then, I fondly remember the fun singing lessons I took, which cured me of getting overly hoarse from teaching all day. I also fondly remember the following paragraphs from Lilli Lehmann’s book, How to Sing. It’s one of the books I read during the time I was into breathwork, and I particularly like the ending of a particular section. It always helps me put things into perspective and acknowledge how far I’ve come in many of my own journeys, despite my lack of talent in some areas, or the late callings I’ve encountered. Here’s the quote:

Lili Lehman, How to Sing

(Original Title: Meine Gesangskunst, Publication Date: 1924, Translator: Richard Aldrich)

Nevertheless, there are fortunately gifted geniuses in whom are already united all the qualities needed to attain greatness and perfection, and whose circumstances in life are equally fortunate; who can reach the goal earlier, without devoting their whole lives to it. Thus, for instance, in Adelina Patti everything was united—the splendid voice, paired with great talent for singing, and the long oversight of her studies by her distinguished teacher, Strakosch. She never sang roles that did not suit her voice; in her earlier years she sang only arias and duets or single solos, never taking part in ensembles. She never sang even her limited repertory when she was indisposed. She never attended rehearsals, but came to the theatre in the evening and sang triumphantly, without ever having seen the persons who sang and acted with her. She spared herself rehearsals which, on the day of the performance, or the day before, exhaust all singers, because of the excitement of all kinds attending them, and which contribute neither to the freshness of the voice nor to the joy of the profession.

Although she was a Spaniard by birth and an American by early adoption, she was, so to speak, the greatest Italian singer of my time. All was absolutely good, correct, and flawless, the voice like a bell that you seemed to hear long after its singing had ceased.

Yet she could give no explanation of her art, and answered all her colleagues’ questions concerning it with an “Ah, je n’en sais rien!”

She possessed, unconsciously, as a gift of nature, a union of all those qualities that all other singers must attain and possess consciously. Her vocal organs stood in the most favorable relations to each other. Her talent, and her remarkably trained ear, maintained control over the beauty of her singing and of her voice. The fortunate circumstances of her life preserved her from all injury. The purity and flawlessness of her tone, the beautiful equalization of her whole voice, constituted the magic by which she held her listeners entranced. Moreover, she was beautiful and gracious in appearance.

The accent of great dramatic power she did not possess.

November 1, 2024 BY ALFONS, IN Not designated yet

Amazon KDP paperback trim sizes

Amazon KDP self publishing (former Createspace) provides 16 standard paperback trim sizes. Here is a visualisation of how they would look like next to each other (in case anyone is interested, since I couldn’t find this online and thus made this visual myself.)

October 4, 2024 BY ALFONS, IN Disquisition and deliverance

Coffee and Feldenkrais

When it comes to coffee, there might be two main reasons to drink it:

  1. Firstly, to enjoy the feeling—or the taste of it, the social setting and the (sharable) experience of consuming it, maybe also the ritual of preparation, and the act of purchasing.
  2. Secondly, to experience the effects—a stimulating boost, inducing a stronger heartbeat, increased alertness, and enhanced focus.

Maybe something similar could be said about exercise.

However, when it comes to rehab and physical therapy modalities, most people might do it mainly for reason #2, to experience the effects: to get relief from pain, or physical restrictions, or gain a better functioning body. With little regard towards how the therapy itself feels like, or enjoying the process. And maybe for good reason, for I myself, too, have experienced some therapies as not necessarily pleasant, rushed, and less effective than I’d hoped for; while resenting the monetary costs.

How do Feldenkrais-inspired lessons, and these kind of movement sequences, match up with that thought?

It seems that over the past few decades, Feldenkrais has been boxed into a therapeutic corner. As a result, potential clients may ask:

  • Why should I do it?
  • What will be the benefits?

  • How much does it cost and what can I expect from my investment?

When instead they could ask:

  • How does it feel like?
  • Why do you love it so much?

And regarding main reason #2, the benefits: Oh, it can do that? I didn’t know it can do that! Let me try!

September 11, 2024 BY ALFONS, IN Disquisition and deliverance

Bones and flesh and the nervous system

Happy September 11 everyone 😅 23 yeas ago, in fall 2001, I was on a Vision quest (reconnecting with nature, an ancient ritual, water fasting, no drugs) in the vast open desert space of Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, Utah, US. Three days and three nights of solitude, of becoming one with the earth and the stars. When I returned back to civilisation both me and civilisation itself have been changed forever.

Now on to today’s blog post: in a Youtube comment @Didi-m9b asked: “I wish I could understand what it means to push your spine to the left …”

I have answered this question immediately after I’ve seen it. And just now I wanted to post it here on my blog… only that upon re-reading my answer, suddenly, I have second thoughts.

I wrote that in Feldenkrais-inspired movement lessons we often think in terms of the skeleton. But do we really?

Maybe we need to consider this:

In the human body, mechanical forces do not travel solely through the bones. While bones provide structural support, force is distributed across a network of muscles, tendons, ligaments, and other connective tissues. These tissues work together to absorb and transfer force efficiently. If we push a heavy object, the load is shared across our entire system, preventing our bones from bearing the full brunt of the force. Muscles play a crucial role in terms of stabilisation and control, thus protecting both bones and joints from damage.

So it’s a mix. Bones and flesh and the nervous system. In ancient times some folks have thought that the human body is entirely made of clay (which bleeds when you poke at it), and at other times some folks thought us to be entirely made of meat. But nowadays our thinking is greatly refined. What do we think of when we think of movement? For example:

  • what do we think of when we think about the movement of pushing a drawer shut with our hips?
  • What do we think of when reaching up with one hand, or when turning the head, when taking a step, or when touching two fingers together?

In the Youtube video where that question came from, “I wish I could understand what it means to push your spine to the left …” I mean the entire video is about this one motion and how we think about ourselves, and movement…

How can I explain that more clearly? Or, maybe, could it be that, for a wider audience, watching merely one video with DIY instructions might not suffice for establishing a new understanding of ourselves and how we think of movement?

What could be possibly achieved in a short Youtube comment to answer a question that could not be answered in half an hour long video with plenty of speech and demonstrations? I think I will delete my comment on Youtube, leave the question by @Didi-m9b (whom I don’t seem to know) unanswered, and continue to focus more on my patrons, long term subscribers and supporters.