Over silent waters

Part two -

Moment by moment, things are losing their hardness: now even my body lets the light through - Virginia Woolf

‘Do come in,’ said a quietly-spoken voice.

I remember feeling suspicious and sceptical.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’ve come to find out about this Alexander Technique. My name is Pippa.’

‘Hello, Pippa. I’m Margaret. Please do take a seat.’

‘Thank you.’

Margaret Farrah was standing the other side of the room at the end of a massage table. In her quiet presence I detected a sense of gentleness. Yet there was something strong about her too – but not the kind of hard-hearted toughness I had been searching for. She reminded me of a character from Jane Eyre or perhaps like one of the Brontë sisters them selves, as if she were from a different century. I was immediately struck by her dignity.

The room was dimly lit. There was a soft orange standard lamp in the corner and the carpet was beige with brown flecks. Victorian windows, two of them, looked out onto a busy York high street. Cream woodchip wallpaper swept down to grey gloss skirting boards. I noticed the massage table seemed extra-large and had a pile of three or four books at one end rather than a pillow. Next to the massage table was a dining room chair. In the far corner was a small desk with a crystal lamp, an antique-type white vase with maroon tulips, a diary and a pen. All very minimal. A couple of photos were on the wall - one of the Buddha and one of a seascape.

Margaret, who in my mind was now Charlotte Brontë, seemed to glide across the floor, as if her feet were hardly touching the carpet. She was wearing a calf-length, grey pleated skirt and a white blouse with a ruffled lace collar high on her neck. The blouse had pearl buttons set close together all the way down the front. Her hair was dead straight, very fine mousy brown and cut sharp to her jawline.

She asked me again if I would like to sit down - I was still standing, feeling a little unsure. She said she would like to explain a few things about the Alexander Technique. She told me that F. M. Alexander was born in the nineteenth century and became a Shakespearean reciter in his early twenties. After a while he lost his voice, and because neither doctors nor voice teachers could find what the problem was, he set out on a journey to discover himself how this had happened. She explained his journey and discoveries, that Alexander discovered something about the way we ‘use ourselves’ as a whole - how we tend to be reactive and unconscious - and how this manifest in habitual patterns. He discovered a minute relationship between the delicate balances of our skull on our spine – and how this has a profound effect on the way we are as a human being.

I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about. It all sounded like a lot of mumbo jumbo to me.

‘I want you to just stand in front of this chair, Pippa. I’m going to put my hands on your shoulders and your neck. My hands are ‘non-doing’ and will ask your neck to release and your back to lengthen.’

I moved towards the chair as she had asked, but was nervous to have these non-doing hands on my body - or any hands, in fact, as at that time I wasn’t comfortable with being touched.

Margaret again said a few more things about ‘empty hands’ and ‘non-doing’ and that I didn’t have to think about it or do anything.

‘Your body has its own way of learning,’ she said. ‘All we have to do is get out of the way.’

So here we were. A monk-type, Jane Eyre woman and me in my early twenties with a big angry chip on my shoulder, who was studying harsh karate to protect, cover and hide and to make myself safe and strong.

Defensive and defended, my body was tense and as tight as a woodlouse curled up in fear of someone touching it. My back was twisted round - so much so that I had a kind of hump on one side. My shoulders nearly touched my ears, my hips held tight, my knees and my toes turned in. My head still looked at the ground as it did when I was a child.

Margaret explained that she would simply put her empty hands on me, and a release would occur through my neck and spine. She put one hand on the back of my neck. She hardly touched me and yet something was taking place. I felt things moving inside me; then my balance shifted. I felt a rushing inside me, like a river flowing – a river made of air and warm sparkles. Then I felt my whole-body unfolding, like a fern opening in the springtime. My arms seemed to grow out of my shoulders in slow motion. I felt I was becoming like a monkey. My back and hips moved position as if they were growing too. I also started to feel very vulnerable.

Life is feeling

This is what happened. What was numb and unknown came alive, as if my body moved from inside itself. It started to open, to warm up, and I felt rushes, as if shooting stars were flowing through me - and a river of memories and feelings arose too. They passed through, almost too quickly to catch, and tears started to fall. Time passed as if it had never existed. After the chair work, which probably only lasted for five minutes, we moved to the table. I lay there with my head on the books and my knees bent in a position she called ‘Semi-Supine’ while she continued to quietly and gently go around my body. She was placing her ‘non-doing’ hands on my neck, under my shoulders and back. Placing her hands and moving them away as if she was waiting for my body to listen and respond - and it did. Sorrows and sadness seemed to rise up, then subside, until I came to a peace inside. I felt a warmth inside - a glow and aliveness. My back was not so rounded and my chest seemed more open. I felt vulnerable. Maybe for the first time in my life, the distrust, hatred and bitterness had gone. Gone, at least, for those moments. A seed had been planted. My mind couldn’t catch it, couldn’t force it, and couldn’t control it. But it had been planted and I had tasted peace – a deep peace inside and a peace outside.

When our session came to an end, I was silent. It was not the inadequate silence of being unable to speak or express myself. It was just a stillness of not having to use words or to justify anything. I thanked Margaret very much, paid her and left. I walked down the same stairs I’d come up, only now noticed my breathing. I felt my feet touch each step as I placed them on the narrow stairs. I felt warm, not stiff anymore, not cold, and not ice. The world was different. I walked out of the door, the same door that I came in, no longer with a fast-beating heart, which habitually pumped with constant anxiety. Now I was calm. I had never known my body to feel this way before.

Margaret Farrah may have been Charlotte Brontë in camouflage, but she was also a tender-hearted, kind and non-intrusive woman. She did nothing, just as she had said, and yet all this happened. My mind was now quiet, with no war inside, as I walked out of that Victorian door into the courtyard before the main road. I hadn’t even noticed that there was a small wooden-slatted yellow gate. I could see rainbows coming out of it. I could really see colour coming out of everything. It didn’t matter whether it was the yellow gate in front of me or even the houses over the other side of the road, I looked up and everywhere there was colour coming from all the buildings. Later I came to realise I was seeing their aura. I noticed the rowan trees lined up along the roadside like I’d never seen them before. Everything was alive, everything was oozing with life. I was alive and I had a body. Probably this was my first experience in my life of feeling my body directly.

Poetry of the Body

My first Alexander Technique session planted a seed in my soul, but it took many years of incubation before I was ready to face what lay inside my tight body. Eight years later, I started weekly Alexander T sessions. After several years, in my late twenties, I decided to train as an Alexander Teacher. I didn’t particularly want to teach it, but knew deep down that this gentle work was a way to unlock my body and soul.

The non-doing way of the Alexander Technique had opened up a space in me, and in that space, I became aware of the things that trapped me - the habits and patterns that I saw as ‘me’, my whole life and my whole way of being. Most of the time, this is an unconscious reactionary state. This open space, that the Alexander sessions allowed, taught me to become conscious of how I was attached to my mind states, my belief about myself, and how this coincided with a physical set of tensions. These complex patterns seemed to run right through my whole life, right back to my birth.

During an Alexander T session, moments of expanded consciousness arose. My awareness expanded, and I became more than my thinking and my emotions. I got a glimpse behind these, and myths that I hadidentified with and attach to my definition of my ‘self’. This offered the space for me to see where I was actually standing and, later, even who I truly was. I realised that if I only projected out from an unconscious pattern, then I wasn’t truly seeing and being myself or seeing anyone I was relating with. I was also caught in other peoples’ projections instead of being responsive to my expanded, more open self.

“To see the world in a grain of sand And Heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity is an hour” - William Blake

https://www.ancienthealingways.co.uk