Freedom

Freedom comes in many guises. Like many words it is easy to say but what it means is harder to fathom. It is freighted, weighed down, deep by experience, history and myth, surround it like dense fog. To approach it, fathom it, we can turn to dictionaries, philosophers, songs, movies. ‘Freedom is just another word for nothing' left to lose’ in ‘Me and Bobby Mcgee.’ While in Braveheart, William Wallace makes the following speech ‘Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!’
That it is better to die by living, rather than live by dying, is the classic existentialist position.
Sartre a leading exponent wrote that ‘we are condemned to be free’. Our freedom lies in having to make choices, in taking responsibility for ourselves. We cannot blame others, our parents, society, God or evade it by pleading the unconscious. We are not blind puppets, dancing on the end of someone else’s string – it really is up to us. To recall Shakespeare we are actors on a stage, ‘players’, with our ‘exits’ and ‘entrances.’ Playing ‘many parts’ through ‘seven ages’ we start with sound, as infants ‘mewling’, schoolboys ‘whining.’ Before, we become lovers ‘sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad’. Sound is shaped, words arise and we continue as the soldier ‘full of strange oaths’, and then the justice ’full of wise saws’. In the ‘sixth age’, the ‘big manly voice’, is ‘turning again toward childish treble, pipes’, with ‘whistles in’ its ‘sound.’ From speech, back to sound,and then lastly silence.
Sound is our medium, shaped sound our speech. Our voices carry us into the known world and beyond. It is the connecting pattern vibrating between us, if we let it be, as sound. Sounding the depths we fathom our own freedom. We find, our own unique, individual voices, in speech and language. We communicate, and become human. Language is here connecting. It is the gift by which we give ourselves, find ourselves, find love, find friendship - love and friendship are cognate with freedom. The fog has lifted, as it sometimes does and in the clarity of the moment, freedom, love and friendship are together, united in language, three in one, a trinity to aim for. A trinity, experienced last week, with my fellow Dark Angels, to all of whom, my thanks.

Hume and Rousseau

‘You are nursing a viper to your bosom’ was the warning given to David Hume about Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Baron d’Holbach. Although ignored by Hume, it was to prove prescient of his ultimate experience of Rousseau who charged Hume himself with either being the ‘best’ of men or the ‘blackest’. This was in response to Hume’s attempts to aid Rousseau in escaping the Continent to the freedom of Britain and a royal pension. Both men’s anticipations of each other were invalidated by the other’s behaviour. Behaviour which itself came from their own experience and understandings of the world, which formed the basis of their philosophies which are incommensurable and still stand today as opposing influences towards action.
Their falling out, a very public affair, divided their contemporaries. A perceptive and entertaining account of it is given in ‘The Philosopher’s Quarrel’ by Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott. It highlights how philosophy was not so much an academic discipline but a way of thinking about the world and ultimately a way of living in it for both men. This is something too readily forgotten today, yet the fundamental questions of philosophy articulated by Kant, who claimed to have been awoken from his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by Hume, are still of vital importance today. These concern what it is to be a person, what we can hope for, how we know and what we ought to do in the light of the answers to these questions. Rousseau and Hume answered them very differently.
For Rousseau we are born good, it is society that is corrupt and corrupting of an essential goodness that can be rediscovered in nature and solitude, where we can know and be sure of our own hearts, through our own feeling. As a critique of reason and society it captured many other hearts in a Romantic Idealism and it still has a powerful appeal today. Where to believe in our essential goodness can exculpate us of responsibility, allowing us to blame society and where we can place all the wickedness, evil and badness of the world, there and on others. Set against this is a Humean perspective of us being inevitably social, of needing others and recognising our limits, including the limits of our reason, which as Hume famously noted is the ‘slave of our passions’. Reason can though help us, educate us in living, allowing us to recognise the limits of our own understanding and to push it further in understanding others. It is this capacity, to understand others, that is at the heart of being human forming the potential bonds of attachments that can see us through life. Hume having flirted with solitude, and the melancholy that comes with it, was integrated into the social world, attached to it with good friends by the time he died. Rousseau convinced in his own rightness of feeling that he was good, lived in a narrowing world of Jean-Jacques, unable to reconstrue, condemned to self-righteousness and loneliness. He had excluded himself from society in the name of his own goodness, he though, did not complain.

The Importance of Understanding

Visiting Cardiff for the first time at the weekend, I arrived at the airport to realise how little I knew about the city. It was a first visit and landing at Cardiff airport, which is much smaller than Edinburgh, I realised that much I was assuming about the place was mediated by living in another capital city, of a similar-sized country, and from watching rugby internationals on television at the Arms Park. A similar experience occurred a few years ago on arriving in Berlin and realising my knowledge of Germany was almost completely dominated by the myths of two world wars, as well as the Cold War. Everything was propagated by films, newspapers, novels and histories taught and read. The knowledge I brought to each place and people turned out to be stereotypical; cardboard when confronted with real people and real places. Flimsy and shallow, it proved less robust than the stage settings of the operas I had gone to see in both cities. This is not an isolated experience or an uncommon one of taking with us and transferring into situations understandings we have inherited and acquired along the way. In Cardiff, as in Berlin, it was relatively easy to begin to look, see and describe what was there in terms of similarities and difference to other experiences. That, however, is not always the case. In opera and drama, as in life, situations are presented that make up the human drama, highlighting the choices that we make and the various pressures that surround us. These are often more crucial going to the core of our existence, at the heart of which is how we get on with others. Eric Fromm highlighted that, too often, the question here is who will love us? Not who will we love and how? Answering these later questions is the work of a lifetime, with our answers heavily dependent on where we started in life, but it starts with understanding and the understanding of ourselves through others. In this respect, without sentimentalising motherhood or making Raoul Moat’s mother responsible for her son’s beliefs and actions, I’m fairly sure that wishing her son dead indicates a lack of understanding. And lack of understanding is fatal, as this case shows; without it there is no possibility of love and relationships, and without love and relationships we would all be dead.

First Moves

First moves in a situation are often missed in the daily milieu, they are rarely formally announced as in a game of chess, rather they echo into the future sounding loud or soft depending on what they have to say. Their significance permeates our actions determining how we respond, how we experience ourselves and our actions. First moves are the set up for what might follow and arise themselves out of our understanding, our own anticipation of a situation and the possibilities or impossibilities that it holds for us. First moves rest, as in chess, not just on our formal understanding but on our tacit understanding of how things are. We start making them in the womb - we are a form of motion, alive. George Kelly used the idea that we are a form of motion to ground Personal Construct Psychology, while Alexander investigated his habitual patterns of movement to develop the Alexander Technique. Common to both is the recognition that people are not just alive, but making choices, choices which have implications, implications they are not often aware of in the way they move, turn, what they attend to, what they make sense of. Alexander developed a way of helping people become more aware of the implications of their own choices at a micro level of action, which highlights how thought is movement and how movement is thought. Kelly put it this way that ‘behaviour is an experiment’ whether you are shifting your weight to protect a sore foot or knee or whether you take up a new activity or whether you ask someone out for the first time. There is always a theory in the movement of asking, in the shifting of the weight whether it is fully articulated or not. It’s what there in the movement, the first move at the beginning and if we can learn to see it, we can change it and experiment with something else, whether its learning the Alexander Technique, taking up painting or seeing somebody else’s viewpoint for the first time. To see somebody else’s view point, to ‘stand in their shoes’, another Kelly quote, is the first step to building a better set of relationships, dialoguing with them and perhaps building a better world if not for all at least for ourselves. Perhaps ultimately this is the only first move worth exploring, seeing other people and learning to be with them.

Alexander Technique – A technique for what?

The question of what Alexander Technique is a technique for is something I often introduce at the beginning of a first lesson or a workshop. People often find it difficult to answer and I usually go on to suggest an answer in the form of how Alexander might have answered it. The suggestion I give is that it is a technique for developing Constructive Conscious Control and I might add of the Individual, which would give us the title of Alexander’s second book. That leads to a second question, or perhaps set of questions, regarding what is Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, what would it look like and what difference would it make? Well, keeping it short and simple, an answer might go something like this. We all have patterns of moving in the world which are deeply tied up with how we experience and think about the world and ourselves. Those patterns of moving in the world are not something that our bodies do separately from ourselves; they are us, involving our attitudes and everything else that we are. They exist at the core of our being and are so familiar to us that we are unaware of them, they are part of the background – a background we can only see when we move differently. The difference creates a gap we can cross over and, like a bridge once we are over it, we can look back and see where we have come from, where we have been, while holding out the prospect and possibilities of where we have come to be now. The Alexander Technique is a way of crossing over, a bridge to the possibilities and potentialities of a freer way of moving in life, an easier way of being. It helps us become aware, become conscious of the ways we habitually control movement, attitudes and emotions by stiffening our frame, carrying ourselves tightly, suppressing our emotion, rushing at things and generally making too much effort. It invites us to suspend these habits and explore what it would be like to move freely. It offers a choice in how we control ourselves in thought and action, a choice that leads to freedom in movement, and allows us to explore and develop those habits that allow this and which lead to the improvements in posture, back and neck pain that often bring people first to Alexander’s work. These improvements are what make conscious control constructive and follow on from learning to be free of our own habits and reactions, with which we stiffen and tighten – so that in the end, we are, for Alexander, free IN thought and action.

The Great Debate

As the banking crisis first unfolded I had occasion to watch a large number of American senators and congress men and women display their media skills. Watching the great debate last night you could see the same skills being transferred across the Atlantic. It’s clear though that British politicians have much to learn before they reach the level of performance demonstrated by the Americans. Why that should be I don’t know, but the difference is there. While the Americans are able to engage the audience directly and have a well integrated use of their arms and backs, the Brits or at least as far as David Cameron and Nick Clegg still look like they have just emerged from media charm school. Of the two Cameron looked like he had integrated his training better but at the moments when he was most fluent, he was focused not on the audience or the viewer but in the mid-distance. It makes for good stage presence but does not directly engage you. Nick Clegg did, by looking wide-eyed into the camera, engaging the viewer personally into a ‘you and I’ relationship. He talked consensually at these points, labelling the other two leaders as men of the past. The whole effect was an invitation to bond and perhaps allowed him to ‘win’ the debate. Gordon Brown on the whole failed to engage people directly, most notably on the question on education where he ignored the questioner and their question to launch into his pre-prepared answer. The one time he captured the audience and the viewer was when he talked about the economy and he engaged people using ‘you and I’ language as he warned about the danger of a double-dip recession. The rest of the time he tended, as did David Cameron at times, to stick to a prepared script heavy with statistics. The eyes glaze over at such points as the viewer and audience are not engaged directly, they are not included but are offered a spectacle from which they are excluded. In the medium of television, as it is evolving, what works is engagement, inclusion, a sense of ‘you and I’ and what we can do together. Cameron in his language is saying this but Clegg is embodying it. Cameron presents himself as a leader at a time when the medium is flattening values,giving power to what the viewer and the audience respond to. Here wee boyishness helps tremendously and Nick Clegg is the winner here, in this, he is the true heir of Tony Blair circa 1997 and he has one final advantage - a certain resemblance in expression to Cliff Richard. A man derided by many, who has sustained a career for over five decades, whose appeal may be hard to fathom but is undoubtedly there, particularly for women – the group pollsters' say will decide the election.

First Post

Lessons from the chair has had a long gestation of over a decade or more. Back then I was given one of the better bits of advice I have received. Certainly one of the few which when followed has been fruitful and rewarding. It came from Walter Carrington who had been taught directly by F.M. Alexander and who had taken over Alexander’s original teacher training course when Alexander died in 1956. The advice concerned Alexander’s technique and developing Constructive Conscious Control, which is what the Alexander Technique aims for. It came in three parts, the first two referring to set Alexander procedures and is the best advice for any aspiring teacher of Alexander’s work. The first part concerned hands on the back of the chair. ‘Pretty much everything you need to know about human mechanics is there’. The second concerned the ‘whispered Ah’. ‘Pretty much everything you need to know about breathing.’ The third bit of advice was to read Alexander’s books. I have to confess that I was slightly sceptical to say the least when I heard the extent of the claim but, over the years, I have come to see that Walter – master craftsman that he was - had distilled from these basic procedures an excellence in teaching and understanding Alexander’s work that few others have achieved. All that he claims is there and more in these basic procedures and over the years, from working with them and doing straight forward Alexander chair work, I have learned many lessons with regard not just to human mechanics but about human movement, action and ultimately intention. Along the way, I have become a psychotherapist working with chairs in a different way but still concerned with movement, action, intention and most of all meaning. Chairs though are not integral to my work; it is the people, the pupils and the clients as they look to solve their different problems. They are the ones who teach me most as I work with them to look at aspects of their world afresh, to seek in all cases new ways of moving that are easier, freer – and it is ultimately the concern with freedom that unites them. The freedom to be, the ease of being that goes with this, freedom not just of thought and action but ‘in thought and action’, as Alexander put it. How we might get there and some of the lessons we can learn will feature in forthcoming blogs which will range from the quite technical to the more general – I hope you will come with me and enjoy the read.