Flow

Noticing before, during, and after moving encourages a sense of flow in the movement. When a substance like water flows, it behaves in two pretty interesting ways: it will take on the shape of whatever vessel it encounters and it will seek it's own level.

Flow in movement is similar. A flowing movement adapts itself both to the requirements of the activity and the mechanical potential of the body. It utilizes energy more efficiently and takes advantage of the intrinsic strength and flexibilty of the body.

One of the most interesting characteristics of flow in movement is that you can experience it in an ultra-sensory way; i.e., you can "feel" it without using your normal senses. It's an intuition about the quality of your moving that "precedes" the movement itself.

As strange as it may sound, you can "know" what a movement will be like before you do it. It's a little like looking down the road when you're driving except that there's no gap between what you see ahead and what later happens: they both occupy the same moment in time; they both happen in the now. Freaky! N'est Pas?

Forecast

Do not think
The Moon appears when the clouds are gone.
All the time it has been there in the sky
so perfectly clear.

Zenkei Shibayama
Zen Comments on the Mumonkan

From a Distance

Movement is about change. In order to change you have to let go of one movement to make room for the next. This is the key to moving easily. It allows change to evolve smoothly. When you're Noticing you can watch the way a movement evolves as if from a "distance". That "distance" allows us to observe without getting in the way. We get in our own way when have an agenda about how we think the movement is supposed to feel. If we are constantly checking to see if the movement is feeling how we think it should feel, we interfere with the movement.

As we move it is natural to experience changes in the way our body feels. Some of those sensations are more pleasant than others. Some sensations are familiar; some are not. The key is not to take those sensations too seriously. As the movement passes through you, let the sensations pass through you as well, without your evaluating them. Instead, ask yourself: "Am I Noticing right now?" That way you stop evaluating how you are doing in terms of your old idea of how you think it should feel; you keep track of how you're doing from a "distance" by knowing whether or not you are Noticing.

Noticing allows you to evaluate the movement objectively by focusing on the process instead of the results. This frees you from your old habits and gets you out of your own way allowing your whole self to function as it was designed to

Let It Roll

Feel your feelings without trying to figure them out. The way it feels to do something is constantly changing. It's as if your sensations are on an assembly line that never stops. There is an aliveness to this kind of experience that is one of the most wonderful things in life. We constantly release what we're currently feeling in order to make space for the next experience. The problem that arises is that usually we won't let go of what we're feeling . We stop the flow of experience in order to evaluate and analyze what we're feeling in order to make sure we're having the feeling we think we're supposed to be having. Whenever this happens the freshness of life diminishes and we're stuck trying to be right.

Notice Now

Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.

Love moves away.
The light changes.

I need more grace
than I thought.

Rumi

The Gift of Awareness

Wouldn't it be wonderful to love what you're doing no matter what you are doing?

The Blind Leading The Blind

"It seems strange to me that although man has thought it necessary in the course of his development in civilization to cultivate the potentialities of what he calls 'mind', 'soul' and 'body', he has not so far seen the need for maintaining in satisfactory condition the functioning of the sensory processes through which these potentialities manifest themselves. As a result, the functioning of his sensory processes has become so unsatisfactory that the use of his mechanisms is constantly misdirected in his efforts to 'do', and when he tries to put right the results of this misdirection, he has no other criterion for self-critism to guide him in these attempts but that of the untrustworthy sensory processes which originally led him into error."


F.M. Alexander
The Use of the Self

The Use of the Self

"As flying is the essential thing for a bird to be a bird, to study the self is the essential thing for us human beings to be human. A human being is a living being that needs to study the self to become the self."

Reverend Shohaku Okumura

Don't Take My Word For It

"I don't want you to believe a word I say. I want you to listen to what I say, endeavour to put into practice what I'm teaching you,and you're going to be the judge of whether I'm talking through my hat or not."

Marjory Barlow
An Examined Life

Far Too Many Birds With One Stone

Noticing/Inhibtion is the remedy for trying to lead your life with a death grip on the fast forward button.

Now Flowing Into Now

Noticing/Inhibition induces a kind of profound relaxation that is a wonderful balance of activity and stillness where the fulfillment of one activity becomes the exact preparation needed for the next, gracefully allowing the present to extend into the future as a deeply satisfying flow.

Quick Things Come To Those Who Wait

If you want to move fast, first you have to take your time.

Noticing/Inhibtion

Noticing can be thought of as an attitude towards things. It is an approach which encourages the impartial observation of the choices you make as you are making them. It's also a strategy for making positive changes but one that brings into question who {or what} the agent of change actually is. In some ways Noticing seems passive but the positive change it induces can be deep and far-reaching. It is a form of non-doing that allows things to be done "through" you. It is an act of willingness that helps to dissolve willfulness.

Unthinkable

In many ways the changes that occur when you apply Alexander's discoveries are unthinkable. When you experiment with Noticing, Inhibition, allowing your neck to be free, moving your head delicately etc. there is no way to predict exactly what is going to change or how. Fortunately, we don't need to know what's going to happen in order for the results to be valuable. It's enough just let our desire to improve transform into the desire to know what's going on

Bumper Sticker 2

YOU'RE SMARTER WHEN YOU THINK!

Bumper Sticker 1

IT'S EASIER WHEN YOU THINK!

"Do you keep this going all the time?"

"People ask me, "Do you keep this going all the time?" and I say "As well as I am able, that's what I aim to do." And they say, "Well how do you know?" and I say "I know when I go wrong. I feel it the minute I go wrong." So if i'm not feeling that I'm going wrong, I know I'm all right. It's not knowing the right, which is changing all the time, but being able to detect when I deviate. Volition always has an element of the habitual and familiar about it. Inhibition is almost the neural equivalent of saying,"I don't know." We're all afraid of not knowing. It's our only security."


Marjory Barlow
An Examined Life

Inhibition

"Good things come to those who wait."
Proverb


"First things first."
A.A.

Marj

I had the great privilege to study with Marjorie Barstow from 1973-1994. The power, depth and subtlety of her teaching changed my life. Here are some examples of the things she said to students while working with them.

It's so simple it's shocking.

All you want is a little bit of nothing--but the trouble with all you people is that you all want something. And that something is your habit.

You don't want to reproduce the feeling but the mental process.

Inhibition is the activity by which the old habit cannot take place.

You stopped that constructive thinking that wouldn't have allowed
the habit to take place.

Learn to laugh at yourselves: you always move better with a smile.

When I find myself pushing, I have not taken the time to see where I am before I start to move.

If you memorise your feeling you'll never change.

You have to do the brainwork.

You'd better talk about a 'preventing',
because if you talk about a 'keeping', you will stiffen.

Pupil: "My feelings are confused."
Marj: "So long as your thinking isn't confused, you're OK."

Pupil: "I move my head but I'm not sure."
Marj: "You're never sure. You move your head and you see what happens."

You are not supposed to expect something--
you are supposed to be experimenting.

The longer I teach, the more I realize how very simple Alexander’s work actually is. Its simplicity and subtleness seem almost beyond comprehension. Strangely the learning process seems to go on forever.

Noticing

Noticing is a process that can circumvent our habits and uncover our natural sense of ease. When our habits dominate they can seem so natural natural but that naturalness is just a form of over-doing that we have become accustomed to. Moving with ease is not something that you do as much as it is something that happens when you stop over-doing. It's something that's available to us any time we are willing to exchange "know-how" for "learn-how".

I'll Never Let Me Go

"Even though we can't possibly hold on to anything, clinging remains one of our strongest habits. Useless though it may be, we devote much of our energy to grasping at that which is elusive and impermanent."

Pema Chodron
No Time To Lose

Unity

The true beauty of Non-Endgaining is the unifying affect it has on your life. By Noticing before, during and after doing something the focus shifts away from just "getting things done" to include what is happening to you as you do things. Although you may do a thousand different things during the day they all have one thing in common: YOU. Noticing allows you to see the relationship between what you are doing and what's happening to you as you do it making it possible for any activity to improve the quality of every other activity you do.

Less is More

"You're all so complicated, why can't you be simple?"

F.M. Alexander

Keeping It Simple

Notice

Move

Leave Yourself Alone

See What happens

The Garden of Easin'

In the garden of gentle sanity
May you be bombarded
By coconuts of wakefulness.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

You Will Miss the Whisper If You're Waiting for a Shout.

The purpose of Noticing is not to break habits. Trying to break a habit is like trying to pry open a clenched fist with your free hand. Even if you manage to do it, you've wasted a lot of energy and your fist is likely to clench back up as soon as you're not looking. Noticing is a quiet kind of attentive openness that encourages our natural openness so that it can expand. That expanded non-judgmental state gives you insight into how it's the process of trying itself that creates our bad habits. But that insight doesn't usually arrive as a resounding revelation. It's more like a gentle release. Like a whisper escaping from inside a soap bubble with a tiny POP!

Sense and Nonsense

"It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them so you think you see them. This is how your "seeing" is made. This is the function you have given your body's eyes.It is
not seeing. It is image making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions."

A Course in Miracles

The Devil You Know

Our habits of movement are a form of conditioning. Although, we possess a built-in intelligence that always provides precise information about the easiest way to do things, that information cannot pierce the clouds of expectation that obscure our view
of how to proceed. We move according to our habits because there a sense of safety in recognizing familiar feelings and we have come to believe that familiarity is a surer basis for success than is openness.

Position vs. Direction

It's not a question of a right position, it's a question of a right direction. It's not so much where you are but which way you're pointing.

Another Way of Knowing

There is a way of knowing how you are doing that doesn't depend entirely on kinesthetic verification. Noticing is a way of monitoring yourself by paying attention to the content of your thinking and letting the feeling component of the experience move into the background.

Just Click Your Heels

We are usually secretly {or not so secretly} trying to get somewhere, but the instant we stop trying, we're there.