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Dear Meyer Simmonds,
Your letter in the STAT NEWS of
September 1991, stimulated me to react and not to “inilbit”
my reaction to this stimulus, though my reaction is maybe
not “directed” by the “Conscious Control”,
therefore this reaction, maybe, is wrong because of reliant
on - maybe - “faulty sensory appreciation”.
I would like to discuss with you
the whole issue of the F.M.A.T., and mainly to share practical
work with you. By the way, I use the word “open”
in my teaching, as well as “spread”, “grow”
(to all directions) and mainly “eaglize” .
And yes, nature demands: Be open or die, before your natural
tlme to go comes; but we manage to prolong our time here, on
Earth, in spite of the demand of Nature. This by deallng with
symptoms - “one after the other” - and not with the
Whole, all together. Our mental attitude (F.M. deals with it
a lot in his writings), which is based on and nourished by our
“end-gaining” approach in life, perverts and twists
our sensory appreciation, and therefore our reactions to stimuli
in any sphere of life - and not only in movement and kinesthetic
sense. Our, so called, progress and development in science and
technology, and with it in medicine, enables us to “drag”
ourselves longer in life (if one can call it real natural life),
longer in spite of our habitual contraction, which is rooted
in our mental attitude toward the Whole, toward Nature as it
is. This mental attitude is filtered through our intellect, which
produces unnatural and unnecessary fears, which cause us to create
our “armour” in our bodies - the unnecessary defense
against these illogical fears. Human society is a society of
“End-gainers”. We lost the innocence of all animals;
therefore we need the Conscious Control (Choiceless-Awareness
in S.Krishnamurti's terms) to replace what Nature gave us and
we lost. We can't imitate animals, and very young children (before
we manage to tame them.) - it is unnatural.
When you suggest that we have:
'to understand how Nature has evolved us, and THEN GET OUT
OF HER WAY (inhibition?-N.R.) NOT BY FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS
(what kind of? verbal? or practical through the hands of the
teacher? - N.R.) AND UNDOING THEM BY NON-DOING (??-N.R.)
- by which means you convey the understanding of the issue, how
do you make your pupils understand IT - by showing it with models?
How can your pupils, whose sensory appreciation is faulty, unreliable,
untrustworthy, get the practical experience, through which they
can acquire the creative conception of the whole issue? How can
they apply practically their understanding which, as a
matter of fact, is no rnore than on the level of intellectual
theoretical understanding? How can they stop the wrong
if their habitual reactions to stimuli are not consciously inhibited?
What role plays the Conscious Control (the corner-stone and the
core of the F.M.Alexander Technique) in your teaching.
This business of gravity
and anti-gravity has nothing to do with the real F.M.Alexander
Technique. Teachers - mainly those who were trained in a certain
school - tend to excuse (they call it to explain) our unnatural
(therefore unnecessary and harmful) contractions and blocks in
the flow af energies, by blaming the natural force of gravity.
This is wrong, indeed. During the evolution, of the Human Creature,
we naturally adjusted ourselves - like all living creatures -
to the force of gravity of our planet. Otherwise we would be
extinct. We are even with gravity. Our problem is our “Mental
Gravity”- mainly the unnecessary fears which we accumulate
since we acquired consciousness and developed the intellect and
its “filter”. This causes us to move more and more
away from the natural way of life. In order to defend ourselves
from the fears we created the mental armour; we produced the
illusive reality, which rnoves more and more away from
the natural reality. We are in conflict and disharmony with the
natural reality. We are scared of the Unknown, of the
Timeless - Endless - Measureless; we try to “put it in
a cage”, to confine it within the limits of the Known.
This is the “gravity” that pulls us down, inwards,
away from “open - spread - grow - eaglize” . We want
to be safe, to feel secured, therefore we dare to look at the
Whole only through the key-hole. We want to understand the Unknown
by means of the Known; we want to experiece ends, borders, walls
of security. This is not what the F.M.Alexander Technique (Way,
Process - N.R.) is about. In order to follow and apply the Alexander
Techniqve in reality - and not to adjust it to our illusive reality,
we have to experience and exercise what F.M.AIexander described
as Man's Supreme Inheritance - it means: The “Conscious
Control”, which is a state of acute awareness of the Whole,
a choiceless-unlimited awarness, a total awareness. We have to
“inhibit” the limits and the “filter”
of the intellect.
Concerning inhibiting habitual
reactions: When your house is on fire while you are in it and
you are not in a panic, you have the chance to react according
to the immediate need for surviving; if you are in a panic your
chance of reacting properly is nil. So what should be inhibited
is the PANIC, the source of the panic which causes either
to be paralized, or the choice of wrong escape. Anyhow “Inhibition”
can't be measured in time; “Inhibition” is not seperated
from “Directions”. They are “All together”,
and within the “All together”, while IT “All
together”, comes “one after the other” . The
Timeless is fult of moments. The gazelle knows what to do according
to the need of the moment, as long as she is in her natural environment.
How can one teach the F.M.Alexander-Technique
not having the creative conception, the practlcal
conception, of it? How can you evolve a conception that is already
a WHOLE? And the conception doesn't belong to F.M.Alexander;
he discovered and unveiled a natural process that human creatures
lost and neglected through misuse of the self, following a wrong
course of development of consciousness. F.M.Alexander, whose
mental attitude was ripe for the adventure of discovery, breaking
the frame of habits and the Known, was busy all his llfe - since
he begun his exploring Journey - to go deeper and wider in the
process of becoming acquainted with the Unknown, the Endless
- Timeless - Measureless. He found practical means-whereby to
improve the use of himself (his SELF and not his body),
by improving the functioning of the Primary Control and applying
the Conscious Control to deal with the source of the causes of
the interference with the natural functioning of the Primary
Control. He developed the manual means to convey through his
hands the “Directions” he produced in himself, for
his own use. He was aware of the misleading effect of spoken
and written words. He realized that only pupils who are ready
to be criticised can learn and follow the way he discovered.
Only such people can develop and evolve themselves along the
way, and not try to evolve the original concept. Being aware
of what is going on in the way F.M.Alexander Technique is taught
and dealt with nowadays, I can safely state that those who pretend
they teach the F.M.A.T. know it “perfectly” and know
how to teach it. The most they look for is new tricks of teaching,
to be the best and famous. They continue the habltual
“End-gaining” tradition. They don't go beyond any
practical conception, that deals with the Whole, but they manage
to shelter behlnd the paper walls of consititutlons, regulations,
taboos and all the rest of a Society. By this they manage to
secure their habitual weaknesses, shortcomings, etc., instead
of “inhibiting” them....
Sincerely Noam Renen
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