STUDY WITH ALFONS

One fine day, after all was tried, said, and done, I took my mother’s bicycle out west. I was already 38 years old. I pedalled through the city park alongside the lake, passed the prestigious yacht clubs, the campgrounds, cranked the old wheels over dirt-roads, bridges, through small villages. I kept going. I never rode out west that far before. I went hard for almost two hours. Then I stopped.

There came a deep breath. I breathed in, I kept it for a few moments, then the air passed out again. My body disappeared from my senses, dissolved, for the overwhelming beauty of the land; I could feel my heart, my breathing, how I balanced my head over my shoulders over my pelvis over my feet. It was summer, early afternoon. The air was rich, warm, a friendly kind of hot. Here the land was flat. The high mountains, the foot of the alps in the far distance, tiny and cute with their little snow caps – as if somebody put them there to complete a romantic landscape. The bicycle path put the corn and sunflower fields in my back, the marshland to my front filled the view to the left and to the right. A bird reserve and sanctuary. Green and brown and golden coloured reed beds stretching out under a blue sky. A few full grown meadow trees here and there. The lake glittered in the distance, the sun danced in it. I could smell the lake. Clean, pure lake water, the pride of the local people, drinking-water quality, life. The reed grass, the sun, the water. Calm wind brushing over the land. Over my face, over my clothes. The sounds of summer. The feeling of summer. Suddenly.

Suddenly I smiled. I smiled. I felt my ears pulling back. My lips parted and stretched my face wide. I was the one who was smiling, and I was the observer who felt myself smiling. I felt my upper lip move up over my teeth, up to the top of my gum line. It surprised me. It did not shock me, it surprised me. This is me? I can smile like this? I didn’t know that my upper lip could move up that far in a smile. I smiled a little bit more. I turned my head around, to the left, to the right, yes this was me. I smiled. I allowed the smile to get hold of my whole self.

It was not my first time to be by myself, on my own in nature. I’ve seen beauty before. I did go into nature before. I came to a lake side often, any lake. Or to a river, any river. Or to an ocean. Any ocean. To be in the day, the night, under the stars. The land, unaltered, preserved land. The water. The wind. The animals. When others were busy building their careers and families I was standing in forests. I had my moments with the fox, and with the rabbit. I stood in creeks. In the emerald streams up in the mountains of Taroko National Park in Taiwan. I jumped into the ice cold spring water in the forests of Alberta, Canada. I stood in front of streams as wide as lakes. I felt the earth under my bare feet. I felt the trees. The air. The water. The land. But there was always seriousness in my heart. In my face. In my feet. Hopes and dreams, expectations to live up to, failures to digest, things I needed to know, things I needed to figure out, things nobody talked about, things that were obviously right in front of me but I couldn’t grasp just yet. I knew about longings, desires, disappointments, assertions, lies, promises. „Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up”, someone wrote jokingly years before. I laughed back then, I thought that poster was brilliant.

But that fine day, when I stood before the overwhelming beauty of the land, suddenly, this seriousness was not in my heart anymore. There was no here-or-there anymore. No in-or-out, alone-or-in-company, faith-or-science, true-or-false. The sickness was gone. Just as sudden as electrical light shies away the terrors of the night. I never saw the darkness as darkness, but the darkness let go of me. And I never saw the light as light, but the light embraced me. The light was probably always there for me, all around me, waiting for me. Even though I worked on it relentlessly, I don’t know why it took me such a long time to get there. All I know is that it did indeed take me a very long time. From thereon after life was never as hard again as it was before.

„Forget a book !!! We need an online course !!!” – Benny Drees, in a comment on one of my Youtube videos

I was looking at the talented Dave2D on Youtube and wondered how he does it. How many people does he subcontract? How big is his team? I’m certain he’s not editing himself, what is his workflow? How does he record his voice in such a small, concrete-walled room without any reverb at all? How does he study the facts he’s talking about? Is he even involved in creating each video’s outline? Is everything prepared for him beforehand – the bullet points, graphs, animations, the devices he’s presenting in his show (with or without table), everything – and does he thus work like a news anchor does? Just without teleprompter and instead with freedom of speech? Or does he prepare everything by himself? What would interest me most is this: when in his life and how did he learn to speak in such a smooth, flawless, uninterrupted flow?

I will continue with daily writing for a little while longer. Then stop in mid June, or end of June, somewhen around that time. Daily writing is something I feel confident about. It’s very time consuming and demanding, but I don’t feel stuck or overly overwhelmed. That’s why I had the idea today that – after daily writing – I might try daily videos for a while.

End of June, that’s pretty soon. Scary. That’s why I feel it’s time to focus more on writing out actual movement sequences. I don’t have a team, I don’t have script writers. I will probably have to be my own script writer. But I doubt that I will have enough time to write and film at the same time. I spend 3 to 6 hours a day on my blog posts alone. I’m not a fast writer at all. The whole idea of daily video making worries me down to the bone. I would not even have the money to employ a ghostwriter short-term. What good would such a ghostwriter be?

My scripts would need to have defined, concrete learning goals, formulated via its vehicle: movements. That’s the thing: the movements are like words. The movements are the vehicle for meaning. Any spoken word in a meaningful conversation is spoken for a reason. Any written word in an essay is written for a reason. And similarly, every movement in my movement sequences is there for a reason. Every movement carries meaning, is there for you to discover something very specific. And at the same time is also open for the unspecific.

I don’t know where to start. Take „Shoulder Circles – where to go from here”, for example, this is my draft:

Shoulder Circles, Lines: forwards-backwards, upwards-downwards, Arm Positions: hand standing in front of the chest, arms extended forwards and on top of each other, arm extended resting on the side, arm hanging down behind, arm long over the top,  Leading with: shoulder, elbow, hand, Hip Circles, Lines, Leg Positions: folded on top of each other, lower leg bent – upper leg long, Leading: hip joint, knee, foot of long leg, clarify: Movements of the pelvis: turning in sagittal, transversal, frontal planes, auxiliary lessons, Combination of Shoulder and Hip Circles: rolling, twist initiated from shoulders, twist initiated from the hips, Constraint with both knees on the floor, hands interlaced (arms extended)

That’s material for probably two weeks of daily videos right there, each 10-15 minutes long. Maybe even three weeks. Or, maybe I should forget about a script, instead teach to a student directly. Improvise it, film it. And pull a transcript from the video afterwards, instead of creating a script beforehand. Would that work? Is this something I would like to do? Or should I be the only one on camera? Or should there be a pretty model, an actress, like in the Youtube project „Yoga With Adriene”? Or maybe I could teach to a person, but not film that person, and then play the recording to myself, and film myself moving to the lesson, like I did in my „Good Night Shoulder Circles” video. Would I need to rent a studio? Would I need more equipment? Would I need a team? Would I need more funding and all the extra problems that would come with that?

I don’t know about all that. I’m happy where I am now, where we are now. I’m happy with the slow and steady progress. The small but constant, organic growth. The flow feels gentle, benevolent, not overwhelming. I need time for my work with clients in person, I need time for my writing and filming. I need time for my own learning and studying. And I need time to just be myself. Nowadays we are required to be many things. But not everyone can be everything. Maybe I can be the content manager, and the script writer, and the camera man, and the gaffer, and the sound engineer, and the teacher, and the personal assistant, and the editor, and the channel manager, maybe I can also be the project manager… but I cannot be the business person. I cannot make big decisions, big changes in direction all at once. There’s still some weeks of writing ahead. Sweet writing. And maybe I won’t replace daily writing with daily filming, but just stop daily writing. For a while. We will figure something out. We will take it step by step.

„Sometimes nerves get stuck to the walls of their tubes, like microscopic velcro. You don’t want this happening to your nerves any more than your cat wants tape on its paws.” – from Quite a Stretch, by Paul Ingraham

You might have noticed that I don’t talk much about functional anatomy, biomechanics, and sports science. This is a blog about movement learning, and yet, where is the talk about strength, about flexibility, and about safe ways to achieve more of these two?

Also, consider this: in the 17th century René Descartes, the French born Philosopher, addressed the mind-body problem stating that the mental can exist outside of the body, and the body cannot think. A lot of money has been made ever since. Just yesterday I received a text from a fellow Youtuber who was happy to share that he ranks first on Google with the keyword „nondual” and that as of recently his numbers have been skyrocketing. Good for him. Good for them.

Viewed from on outside perspective, by law as a private teacher, I’m doing this: I’m skilfully leading clients through carefully crafted movement sequences. There’s no stretching, no adjustments, no cracking. But there’s learning goals, understanding, and meaning. First at a physical level, and then at an intellectual level, if you care to make this distinction. You first see the clouds, smell the rain, and then learn they are made from water and how all that works. As a side effect, and not necessarily part of my job, clients will resolve chronic pain problems that nobody else could help them with. Scary problems that threatened them to lose their jobs, their lives, their minds (in alphabetical order apparently). I help them feel themselves again. I’m a pretty clear cut diamond, in between sessions I read and think about movement, learning and teaching, all day. I neither think nor talk about meditation, not about mindfulness, and certainly not about the mind-body problem.

There’s a story of Moshé Feldenkrais that goes like this: „Moshé Feldenkrais was once seated opposite a man on a train who was reading from a book held upside down. After a few moments of bewilderment, wondering if the man was crazy, joking, or only pretending to be literate, Moshé Feldenkrais asked him why his book was upside down. »Upside down?« the man replied. »How can a book be upside down?« It turns out the man had gone to a school in a small village where there was only one book to a class. The children sat each day in a small circle reading their book from all directions.”

Maybe I have learned to read the book from all directions, too. Maybe when I was in class all the good seats have already been taken. Or maybe I just didn’t have the elbows. Now, with Internet, Google, Skype, Zoom, and eBooks everyone gets the front-row centre seat anyways. And you get to choose what you read. To some degree you even get to choose what you want to wear, what you want to eat, drink, which language you speak, which thoughts and emotions you have, who you interact with, how you feel, who you want to be. And at the same time, while you do all that just mentioned: how you rest, sit, stand, walk, how you transition between all of those. Btw, you know that, right? Are you making those choices? Or do you go with the default settings instead?

When I was 27 years old I was travelling the West Coast of the U.S. for six months. You would probably not recognise me on photos. I had long, almost full, blonde hair, tanned skin, I was into sports, I was young, I drove a third hand wreck of a car like the surfers in California did, in the movies. 2001 was the year. Yes, that year. That last summer when you still could check into an airport without being treated like a potential criminal, and the main topic in every newspaper was still something related to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Somewhere in Arizona, in Sedona near Flagstaff, for a brief two weeks I’ve had a girlfriend. She wasn’t my first girlfriend ever, I’ve held hands and kissed with a girl before. And it’s not that I was a late bloomer, up to that time I just never had much luck with girls. She was older than me, and more experienced than me. This I knew. Even though back then I didn’t know what that meant.

She brought me to the most interesting places, and events, introduced me to the nicest people, bought me the most tasty food, compliant with my diet, she went out of her way to take very good care of me. I didn’t know why, but somehow she knew what I loved and enjoyed most. One of the most remarkable things about her was this: she listened to me. It was the first time in my life that I had the feeling that someone was listening to me. Like really listen to me. We would sit at wonderful places outside and we would just talk. Hour after hour. Or maybe I would talk, and we would laugh. We would share our stories, our dreams, our beliefs, and the words just kept pouring out of me. I’ve never experienced something like this before. I loved it, I loved how I talked when she was with me, I loved my jokes she made me come up with, I loved my clever remarks on our conversations, she opened myself up to me, I loved myself. I loved myself so much. 

Anyone who knows anything about love can probably guess that this relationship didn’t hold. After two weeks she had to go back to her real life, to her real job. We promised to stay in contact. She never put up a fight. She was sad already days before we parted. She said, „I cannot feel you.” She said that I felt so light. She said that even when we were walking hand-in-hand she felt as if I wasn’t there.

I was though. But I was with me. 

All this I remembered today. 

It’s not the first time that the memory of her came back to me. I sometimes do think of her.  But it’s the first time that I’m able to see it like this. I spare myself the self-criticism. I’ve suffered enough. What I want to say is this:

Here’s a post to life. To friendship. To relationships. To going out of our ways to connect in a world of lockdowns, face masks, diverging beliefs, being in different stages in our development, and a failing biosphere. 

Here’s to daily blogging. An uninterrupted, free flowing narrative that continues and advances further every day. I type. I speak. I speak. I type. My good text editor accepts every single word, it’s always there for me, listens unconditionally. Without judgment it remembers every letter typed. Every single detail. The worst criticism comes in form of red, wavy underlines. For my kind consideration.

But the love and companionship of a text editor can only carry us so far. The seemingly safe harbour of disengagement, of writing privately, a secret diary, without feedback and without another soul to rub against, can only make a difference when we then take to the world through other pathways.

Spoken words cannot be taken back – neither can be published posts that have already been read. And yet, sometimes, I make changes after I pressed „Publish”. And yet, sometimes, we would like to make changes after everything was said. Can I trust myself to say even one more word?

We need to engage, have courage, compassion, speak, type, dance, sing, paint, love to make ourselves real. Where else other than in this world could we test our thoughts and ideas, how would we otherwise be able to assess weight and meaning? Conscience is the indicating feeling whether we strengthened the bonds to our peer group or weakened them. Once we’re here there’s no opt-out. Remaining silent still says something.

„If someone asks you about your day, you don’t say, »Well, first I opened my eyes. Then I blinked and rubbed them. Then I placed my left leg on the floor, and then my right.« You would bore them to death. Instead, you eliminate the extra detail, and concentrate on communicating what is important. That is exactly what you are supposed to be doing [..]” – Jordan B. Peterson’s Essay Writing Guide.

The „I opened my eyes” bit stood out most from Jordan B. Peterson’s Essay Writing Guide. A chance to let my imagination run free. Maybe even a test for a mutual sense of humour and love for the unconventional. Especially since he did not talk about strict academic writing but daily essay writing (up to three hours) for personal practice and development. Surprisingly, he dissed his „I opened my eyes” bit sharply, set it as an example of digression and inability to identify what’s important. Nevertheless I kept thinking about it, „Why would anyone rub perfectly rested eyes?”, „What is his technique of getting out of bed, how does he sit up so that he can place his left leg first?”

„People’s brains function better in the morning”, I agree now that I’m 46 years old. I would have begged to differ when I was 17. I tried for his „rule of thumb, a paragraph should be made up of at least 10 sentences or 100 words,” but fell short. „A paragraph should present a single idea, using multiple sentences,” dares me to put multiple ideas in a single sentence. Furthermore I applied three of his other tips on this post:

1. I wrote 25 % too much and then cut it down again. „Aim at producing a first draft that is 25% longer than the final draft.” I used to think of this surplus of words as wasted energy, but now I’m thinking: scaffolding, consumable supplies and materiel in building construction.
2. I re-wrote sentences that seemed fine, I did it as an exercise, and chose the best version.
3. I re-arranged sentence order to see what flows better, is more precise and meaningful.

All solid tips. „Read each sentence aloud, and listen to how it sounds. If it’s awkward, see if you can say it a different, better way. Listen to what you said, and then write it down”, challenging. Speak first, then write. I like that. Usually I write first, then speak. One sentence stains the next. Monkeys laugh more than lions. Bananas are more fun than meat. Humour, especially good humour, is the last resort, the place we find when we’ve made it through the worst. Jumping to it conscientiously is better than drowning.

I sat down, I listened, and I recognised: I refuse to partake in other teacher’s classes. I stop recordings after 10 minutes, and I start to practice on my own. I review, I develop my own ideas. I do my own explorations. I refuse to listen to other teachers. I am bored with other teachers. I am bored senseless with other teachers. I don’t have the nerves to listen to them. I don’t want to follow their movement commands. I want to spend my time with my own discoveries, integrate the movements with my own thinking, do the things that are relevant to me, to my own life, relevant to my work, to my clients. I investigate, I learn, I learn more, I learn more, I learn more. I need the context. I need my context.

„The primary reason to write an essay is so that the writer can formulate and organize an informed, coherent and sophisticated set of ideas about something important.” – Jordan B. Peterson

I don’t have children myself, but two of my close friends have two girls, one is six, one is eight. I usually get along with children just fine, but in the past year the younger one challenged me repeatedly, worried me, left me speechless. Usually I’m quick to withdraw myself from conflict. Nonviolent Communication or highway. But when you agreed to babysit for two hours there’s no way to exit. So that was the last straw, three weeks ago. Her kind of attacks and disobedience were completely new to me. I might even say: Shocking.

My first step to find back to my own psychological high ground was to talk to a friend who has a degree in Social Sciences and works as a counsellor in a school. This helped. Furthermore I decided to dig up some supporting background knowledge. I knew that we have that somewhere in the Internet, I just never looked it up before. As I found out, we have that since 1980, since the publication of Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders.

After an hour of googling and watching random videos on Youtube, testimonials from wide-eyed parents (or parents with tired faces and black rings under their eyes), I finally found some great clues in a mini-debate between Ross W. Greene and Jordan B. Peterson, the title was „Oppositional Defiant Disorder”.

Jordan B. Peterson used the following as his opening statement: „I think it’s a form of dominance display. Human beings are social animals and they’re interested in climbing up dominance hierarchies. That is partly why children test and kids with Oppositional Defiant Disorder are more dominant and more aggressive and often more emotional and so they show increased rates of defiant behaviour. They are testing limits more constantly and they tend also to be more explosive in their aim so it’s harder for them to control it.”

In contrast Ross W. Greene had a very different view and opened like this: „I don’t view it as an issue of dominance at all. I find that these kids are lacking skills in some very crucial domains such as flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, problem-solving. So it’s a very different point of view. Challenging behaviour is the byproduct of lacking in crucial cognitive skills, not an attempt to be dominant.”

I found Ross W. Greene’s explanation highly humane, and a good explanation. And I found Jordan B. Peterson’s view made sense when regarded as the symptom, not a byproduct. A symptom of lacking in crucial cognitive skills and the inability to handle the stress and pressure that comes with it.

For my friends’ child, the six year old girl, I’ve seen her lacking in cognitive and motor skills even much earlier: when she was two years old she already presented with poor skills in balance, walking, proprioception, object handling and manipulation, and with difficulties to understand simple requests. I’ve never seen a child fall and cry that often. Run at speeds much too high for her abilities and then twist her ankle or stumble and fall despite the floor being perfectly flat. And only after that came delays in language development, and only after that lack in the skills Ross W. Greene mentioned, and the boxes she would tick in an ODD assessment. To me her challenges in early childhood were obvious, but she always looked very healthy and strong, and one could easily overlook and discard all that as „All children test limits”, and „All children learn at their own speed”, and „Development milestones are not in a fixed order.” The final wake up call was when her parents were called to a teacher-parents conversation at her school last week. Again, I guess. But this time they started to make plans to support her Special Education Needs. From what I’ve seen already, I think things are going to get better now. I’m very happy to see that.

To me the whole story is helpful for my own learning and understanding the world. Also, it helps me to locate my own professional expertise in the greater scheme of things. Also, I added six books to my reading list: three from Ross W. Greene, and three from Jordan B. Peterson.  Not that I have time to read them all, but putting items on my reading list is very reassuring, emotionally satisfying. Oh, and I found one more gem: Jordan B. Peterson’s Essay Writing Guide. 24 pages. Free Download. Smart.