Quipping Away At The Truth – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Quipping Away At The Truth 

December Retreat 2011

In

The Work of F.M. Alexander

Santa Fe, New Mexico

USA

Anything organic takes its own sweet time.  (A reference made to the learning of this work being an organic process, not exclusively conceptual.)

Student:  What are you looking for?

Bruce:  Nothing.

Your job is not to help your student but to know your student.

You get students curious by being curious.

When you feel for a person (love, care, empathy) that feeling is actually inside your body, inside you.  Getting physically closer does not necessarily get you any closer.

We are bringing touch into the process of learning.  We are not teaching through touch exclusively.  We are integrating touch into the use of other educational tools, into our use of language, and into teaching through example.

What Alexander referred to as “inhibition” is not stopping an action, it is stopping a habit inside an action.

Inhibition is a word that is not useful to the “subjective” experiential self.  If you use words people don’t understand then you are not communicating.  Jargon is not needed when you know what you are talking about.

The way you get control is through surrender.

The way to touch time is through becoming more spacious.  If you want to slow time down, don’t try to slow time down.  You can’t do that. Release into the space within you, and around you.

Awareness, on its own, can change the nervous system.

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(Quoting others.  Some of my favorites.)

You want the mind of a sober man, and the body of a drunk.

Tai Chi Classics

Tension doesn’t happen in places, it happens in patterns.
Barbara Conable

Confidence is the absence of fear.

Krishnamurti

I spent 4 years watching Alexander’s hands, and then I realized I should have been trying to understand what was in his brain.

Erika Whittaker