After the lesson: recreating “feeling”
Alexander students often ask if they need to be recreating the “feeling” of a lesson after their lesson. How else can they retain the experience of a hands-on lesson?
In an Alexander lesson, the teacher’s refined use of self in hands-on contact potentially expands and refines the student’s co-ordination, and choice about co-ordination. It is a co-operative process. Nothing is forced, shaped, or rushed. It’s not what you do, it’s what you don’t do. A dynamic undoing builds a new skill of dynamic undoing, which is a very dynamic skill indeed. Years of habitual doing begin to quiet. The instrument of self changes.
The attempt to recreate a “feeling” recruits memory, current sensory feedback accuracy (based on entire instrument of self), and a belief that recreating a previously experienced moment without the context, contact, light, emotions, blood pressure, brain state, and muscle activity of that moment is possible. In recreating this moment, we have to fix ourselves into what the “right” feeling might be. It requires us to return our entire co-ordination to a moment that is almost guaranteed to be inaccurately recalled. Instead of moving into new neural connections, we fix into a recalled mode.
Your tool is your attention and your means is your intention. External attention to the broader, wider, world beyond you, up and out of yourself, connects you elastically to life. Effective intention dynamically refuses to interfere so something new can happen.
Happy curiosity brings your lessons to life.