Postcards from Ulysses

Caution: This brief essay contains ideas about Buddhism and the Alexander Technique.  Don’t be ridiculous.  Doubt every word.  Be your own light, and look into your own concrete experience.

    It is hard to go wrong with a book from Shambhala Publications.  They publish important books, the kind with the power to transform.  If read carefully.  Being Bodies: Buddhist Women on the Paradox of Embodiment is one of their anthologies, and it contains many bright gems.  One of them is, “The only Way I Know of to Alleviate Suffering,” by Darlene Cohen.  So bright is this particular gem that it should be required reading for many students of the Alexander Technique.  The path for alleviating suffering outlined by Cohen is the very path of the Alexander Technique.  Again, she is not a teacher of the Alexander Technique, and I am not suggesting she would endorse the work or the way I have related it to her essay.  Nonetheless, her essay reveals the deep relationship between Buddhism and the Alexander Technique while uncovering some of the central challenges faced by students of the Technique, whether or not they have come for lessons because of “physical” illness, injury, or pain.
    Let me first get a silly issue out of the way.  There may be some who think this anthology is a book by women, for women.  Maybe that's true, but nothing could be further from the truth.  It is a book about the structures of human experience.  We are embodied beings, whether male or female.  The deepest facts of our embodiment transcend the distinctions–all of them.  Moreover, to the extent that one nonetheless reads here a collection of essays by female authors about their lived experience, one has the opportunity to bridge the gap created by those very real distinctions between the experience of men and the experience of women.  In short, men have as much to learn from this book as women do.  Not more per se.  As much.  Some of it will push from a different direction.  Ultimately, the task for any reader of this anthology is to allow the essays to work on him or her, to give in to the possibility of an opening, to see more clearly what is.
    The essay begins with lines that will open any reader who lets them: “Self-healing is an area I’ve explored intensely because I have had rheumatoid arthritis, a very painful and crippling disease, for eighteen years.”  This cuts right through the ego of the reader.  Other essays can have a similar effect, especially those within the same section of the anthology, grouped under the heading, “Body as Suffering.”
    Cohen goes on to sound out a clarion call from The Blue Cliff Record, the words of Yunmen: “Medicine and sickness mutually correspond.  The whole universe is our medicine.  What is the self?”
    This is not just a question for students of Zen.  Like all key questions from Zen, this is a questioning of the human condition, and all humans face it, like it or not, accept it or not, notice it or not.  Teachers and students of the Alexander Technique must face this question.  Even on the simple level of skill, this question becomes central.  We’ll come back to this.  For now, let’s follow the golden thread of Cohen’s experience and insights.
    Right away she points out one of the gifts of real suffering: it heightens awareness.  Many times we turn this gift against ourselves.  We brace against the heightened awareness.  The odd result: we actually increase our suffering.  The mind adds its ideas to the raw experience, and an awakening pain becomes an unbearable pain.
    Cohen found a way to begin breaking through this sickness.  She tells us that she lived just half a block from the San Francisco Zen Center.  By the time she made it from her home to the stairway leading up to the entrance to the center, she was sometimes in so much pain that she could do nothing more than return home.  The very ground had become part of her sickness.  Stepping on it gave her such pain that the walk to the steps left her totally drained.  She just couldn’t go up the steps to the entrance after the great struggle to arrive at them–they presented a fever too treacherous to bear.  One day, she asked why.  As she turned her attention to the act of walking, she noticed she wasn’t really walking.  She was doing her idea of walking.  The idea was a clump of weeds separating her from the garden of actual experience.  As she turned her attention to that clump and began to see through it, to consume those weeds as medicine, her experience of walking changed, and she found her stamina increased.  She never again had to turn back from those stairs.  Thus the sickness became medicine.  And it had more healing to offer.
    She began to notice other clumps of weeds growing in her garden.  By turning our attention to such weeds, they can become herbs of healing.  Then we find ourselves standing in garden of rich, nuanced experience.  The nuances are places where we can touch our lives intimately, body to body.  These are the places where we smell the fragrance of “altogether now, one after the other.”  She tells us that, at arthritis workshops, she brings out carrots and a cutting board.  In the body-minds of those watching, this immediately provokes the ideas of carrot cutting that people do instead of just cutting carrots.  They know their arthritis prevents them from cutting carrots.  It cannot be done!  Yes, that’s the point.  It cannot be done.

 

when you actually hold the knife in your hands, feeling its wooden handle and sharp, solid blade and you touch the vulnerable flesh of the carrot on the cutting board, your wrist goes up and down, up and down, and the orange cylinders begin to pile up on the board, and you realize: “I can cut carrots.  Tears come to people’s eyes.

    She goes on to examine the many facets of attachment as it relates to health.  She points out that most people are “temporarily abled.”  Many people enjoy the blessing that, for relatively long stretches of time, their body gives them few problems.  They can walk, run, dance, do yoga, climb sheer rock faces, catch thundering waves.  But all of this is impermanent, and even a bit illusory.  If we look closely, we know that the greatest athletes suffer many injuries.  Some of these injuries keep them out of the game for weeks.  Some athletes have to play with their injuries.  Some find their careers suddenly over.  What happens when a serious injury or illness comes into our lives is that we enter a period of intense mental suffering.  We cannot let go of what we had, that feeling of health, that freedom from this unrelenting pain.  Oddly, we are attached to something that never existed in the first place.  In some cases, we never really touched our own bodies with mindfulness.  Our body was a tool, a servant–sometimes we found it a stubborn one.  Now we grieve for it.  We eulogize the body as a medicine that has become a sickness.  This is natural.  And then, Cohen tells us, we must do something else: “see [our] present bodies as real and [our] current lives as demanding all the creativity and energy [we] can summon.”  When we do this, the sickness becomes medicine.
    Cohen details the nature of this duality between sickness and medicine.  It is deeply rooted and resilient.  Supported by our ego and its attachments, it creates many stumbling blocks in our growth as human beings.  Cohen admits that

it’s true that you can use mindfulness practice to achieve your health goals.  You may even get rid of your disease or injury.  But if you practice mainly to get rid of your suffering or restore an ailing body to function rather than to express your life and your nature, it is a very narrow and vulnerable achievement . . . . a goal oriented practice cannot permeate deeply enough.  We must penetrate our anguish and pain so thoroughly that illness and health lose their distinction, allowing us to just live our lives.

That really cuts to the bone.  Many of us turn to spiritual practice precisely because of suffering.  The sickness may be mainly psychological.  But anyone with severe enough psychological ailments or injuries knows they can hurt as much as the supposedly physical ones.  Likewise, many people turn to the Alexander Technique because of pain.  This pain becomes an obstacle, and the path becomes materialistic, whether that path is a spiritual tradition, the Alexander Technique, or both.
    It so happens that I seemingly chose not to specialize in people with pain.  The issues Cohen examines had nothing to do with that decision, but I foolishly thought about their absence as a side benefit.  I couldn’t easily imagine how teachers deal with it.  People in pain want to be free from pain.  When someone has a serious health problem that other modalities have not resolved, they come to an Alexander teacher wanting it to be the thing that works.  The Technique is not a therapy, and no one would claim it can heal injuries, cure diseases, or relieve pain.  Nevertheless, people taking lessons often experience a correlation between the lessons and these kinds of goals.  Word gets around.  Next thing you know, a line of people want to see if they can manage their arthritis, deal with their fibromyalgia, cancel their back surgery, recover from a car accident, and more.  That’s a lot of pressure for a teacher of non-doing.  The student is begging for something to be done.  Naturally, the teacher feels compassion and wants to help.  A crisis of faith in the efficacy of non-doing ensues, in the teacher, in the student, or in both.      
    I chose my areas of specialization by following my bliss and my sadness.  Since they weren’t "directly" connected to chronic pain, I naively hoped for many "healthy" students.  It would be so nice, I figured, to move people further and further toward "optimal" functioning, rather than dealing with a situation of "impaired" functioning.  "Optimal" functioning, after all, is a big part of the Alexander Technique.  However, we have to see the absurdity of the concept.  If you are what you are at every moment, you are functioning at your best.  There is just functioning going on, now seemingly good, now seemingly bad.  The example of Patrick Macdonald, great prodigy of the Alexander Technique, illustrates this clearly.  Near the end of Macdonald's life, full of pain and literally bent out of shape because of a chronic degenerative disorder, a former student asked him when in his life he thought he had really been at his best.  Macdonald replied that he was at his best right then and there!  A wonderful Alexander koan, if people would look into it with care.
    At the same time, we understand the metaphor of “optimal" functioning, and stories like this reveal the truth of the metaphor as well.  We get in our own way, and so we can’t function optimally.  The former student asking that question was not able to function optimally because the idea of optimal functioning was interfering with him.  Nothing “physical.”  Just thinking, concepts, habits, reactions, judgements.  It is beautiful to work on these weeds.  However, in any area of specialization there will be people with injuries and illnesses.  Some of those people, explicitly or implicitly, hope the Technique can help them regain their health.  It may be the only reason they come for lessons in the first place.  What are the odds that someone would take lessons in the absence of serious pain?  World-class athletes and performers may seem to come for lessons without pain.  However, even in those circles, pain is a big motivator.  We’re back at the dichotomy again, back in the illusion.  Many “physically” healthy people suffer a great deal from the pressure to perform, to be the best, to get just a little more of an edge, to feel more confident, to look more poised, to have more presence.  Similarly, what are the odds that someone knocks on the door of a monastery in the absence of serious pain?  Maybe very well-balanced people with highly developed concentration suddenly feel inspired to understand the nature of life and so they seek out a spiritual teacher.  For most of us it doesn’t work that way.  Moreover, even if our level of suffering seems relatively mild, it often takes a state of crisis to open us to real growth.  If we can stand our pain, we simply go on.  We perpetuate the patterns we know.  When we begin to have pain we don’t think we can handle, we start to look for help, and we become more inclined to leap into the unknown.
    At any rate, these kinds of naive thoughts keep an Alexander teacher caught in the duality of sickness and medicine, and the teacher remains as materialistic as the supposedly sick student.  The truth is that every student and every teacher is caught in this duality.  The very nature of the Alexander Technique is to begin to break through it, even in a small way.  This is what makes the Technique rich, rewarding, and challenging.  But to grow from the challenge, the student and the teacher must confront Yumen’s question and begin to cut through the dualism and materialism of the Alexander Technique.  The student is both sickness and medicine for the teacher.  The teacher can become sick with doing, or she can taste the medicine of connection, non-doing, acceptance, and awareness.  The same goes for the student.  The teacher can become his sickness as he wonders: How can I do this by myself?  What is the right way to do this?  Why can’t I get this?  What is she doing to me?  Is this working?  Am I getting better?  What am I doing wrong?
    Cohen describes this dualism and materialism clearly: when we are “sick” (cast a wide net with that word), getting well becomes “just another hindrance to us, just another robber of the time we have to live, just another idea that enslaves us, like enlightenment.”  Here again the weeds grow up around us, obscuring our view.  While they are weeds they are toxic, and they intoxicate.  Among our hallucinations is what Cohen calls “the illusion of progress.”  See straight through that.  Don’t just think of the illusion of progress as having to do with getting healthy.  In the Alexander Technique it is the panicked heart of “endgaining.”  We want to be right, we want to know how to do, we want to control and manipulate.  Fear and desire provoke us.  We let go of the means, our life in the here and now vanishes, we stand in the weeds of ideas, weeds as high as our whole body, our whole existence.  Our life is gone.  Only our ideas of life remain.  But we feel comfortable there.  Even if it hurts.  What an odd thing.  That we would rather hold on to the pain . . . because we think we know it, we think we know how to succeed at life, we think we know what we desire, and we are totally frightened of the unknown.  As the pain builds, or by some other act of Grace, we become more inclined to leap, but we will hold on by our toenails if it’s possible.
    The student of the Alexander Technique is sick with one thing: these ideas.  No matter what they think their sickness is, they have it all wrong.  This is so awful a truth that one can never speak it to one’s students.  It must be discovered.  The depth of the discovery corresponds to the depth of transformation the student can realize.  Can you really tell someone with MS that MS is not a sickness, that it is just what the universe is doing right now?  Can I tell you your pain is not a good thing, but also not a bad thing?  Do I myself have the strength to see with Rumi how “A craftsman pulled a reed from the reedbed, cut holes in it, and called it a human being”?  Can I as a teacher of the Technique let the music come through me without so many distinctions?  Can I let it come through me not only when it is a joyful tune, but also when it becomes, “a tender agony”?  Can I see that my only sickness is not letting myself be the song that is playing at each particular moment?  A poem comes to mind:

The Impossible Symphony
by Aiden O’Shea

A work of proportions
too large for the word
“Epic.”

Beyond everything,
the score,
had one the mind to comprehend it
even in part,
looked perfect,
the greatest mystery to grace the planet,
a sublime coming together
that broke through the intimidating veil
of the sublime
like a phoenix,
psychedelic feathers ablaze,
winging through a cloud
of cool mist.

One critic said, “If only
it didn’t have didgeridoos in it.
They grate the ear.”

Another said, “I could do without
the sitars,
and I had enough listening to chess
when John Cage
played with Marcel Duchamp.”

“Yes,” said the first, “I
quite agree.  Moreover, the gun
shots, grass blade whistles,
and sparks from a Tesla coil
strike me as gratuitous.”

Another, drink in hand, questioned the banjos
and the tambourines.

Yet another, an odd one perhaps,
said, “Why violins?”   

Why MS?  I don’t know.  But then again, why laughter, why fresh figs, why bowling?  As Cohen points out, “Even if your body is weak or painful, it’s still your home, it’s how you’re manifesting this life.”  Moreover, that home is the place where the Guest will enter, the place where we discover the interpenetration of all things, the place where we resolve all our doubts.  Instead of treating it as holy, we think of it as profane, problematic, pitiable, and poor.  Why do we impoverish ourselves?  The Guest who demands gold from us secretly slips it into our pocket.  Instead of checking, we wring our hands over our poverty.  
    “When we pluck wellness out of the void, illness always comes with it,” Cohen writes elsewhere.  All the ideas and ideals motivated by fear and desire just create problems.  We constantly measure, compare, bemoan.  We don’t want to manifest in this way, or we want to hold on to this way of manifesting.  We imagine what we think we used to be, we imagine what we think someone else is, we judge what we think our own condition is.  When do we have time to live?  Cohen suggests that we can let go of or bodies.  What does this mean?  Isn’t this a book on embodiment, on respecting the gifts of the body, acknowledging that wisdom and compassion come through this human body?  What it means is letting go of all our ideas about the body.  In its place, practice: “Your health habits can be more reliably based in daily practices which do not change with feelings about your body.  You can decide how to best take care of your body, your life, and you can do it dispassionately.”  
    At first, we may not always feel like taking care of ourselves.  Students of the Alexander Technique have all sorts of reasons why they can’t follow its principles, which are simply the principles of living a balanced human life.  They are not faith-based, opinion-based, or merely philosophical.  They are scientific.  They have to do with how human beings function.  But they also have to do with wisdom and compassion.  Taking care of ourselves, living life in accord with our own nature, is the most wise and compassionate choice.  Cohen gets at this from several angles, but she sums it up in a statement that captures the heart of the healing potential of the Technique and of spiritual practice: “Healing yourself . . . is living your life.  It is not a preparation for anything else . . .”  That’s it.  That’s why people notice a correlation between lessons in the Technique and experiences of greater health.  The Technique is an education, an unlearning of the ideas that interfere with living our lives and enjoying our basic goodness.  We consume those weeds.  They become medicine.  Flowers begin to grow strong because the soil is healthy.  The gardener did nothing to the flower.  There was no healing.  Just living, functioning, being the music of the moment.
    At this point we have arrived back at our starting point.  I began by saying that Cohen’s path for alleviating suffering is the very path of the Alexander Technique.  This point can now be clearly summarized by Cohen herself:

Intimacy with our activity and the objects around us connects us deeply to our lives.  This connection–to the earth, our bodies, our sense impressions, our creative energies, our feelings, other people–is the only way I know of to alleviate suffering.

I put that in italics because it sums up the work of the Alexander Technique nicely.  The Alexander Technique is about cultivating intimacy with your own life, taking life in your arms and dancing with it, like a lover, a friend, a goddess, a devil.  Who is the friend, you ask?  Is it you or is it life?  Life already has you in its arms.  It already dances with you as if you were a lover, a friend, an angel, an insect.  Stop doing.  Start dancing.  Be the voice box of the earth, the music and poetry of every moment, the body and mind of life itself.  It’s the only way I know of to live a human life.     
    But how?  How do we overcome the sickness that keeps us from an intimate relationship with our own life?  The quote above points, in an intellectual way, toward the relationship between the work of the Technique and Yunmen’s koan.  The four skills of the Alexander Technique constitute path and realization.  They are what we need to do to receive the medicine of the whole universe, and they are what we are once that medicine is received.  Indeed, they just are what we are.  Awareness, acceptance, connection, non-doing.  That’s human life.  When the duality of sickness and medicine exists, we must get the sickness in touch with the medicine.  We become aware that we are living our ideas of life rather than life itself.  We become aware that we are doing our lives.  We connect to the environment around us, to the objects and energies that support and guide our every movement.  We connect to the earth, to gravity, to the integrity and synchrony of mind and body.  We accept where we are at every moment.  We accept our poverty, and we accept the riches placed in our hands every time we open them.  Then we let.  We don’t go to sleep.  We are connected.  So, when non-doing comes it is not not-doing.  It is the highest and most effective form of human action, the most aesthetic, the most wise, the most compassionate.  And it allows the best chance for healing to happen, for freedom to happen, and for suffering to fall away. 
    This may all sound rather abstract.  Outside of practical experience, it is.  But it is completely pragmatic and concrete, even though it is not so easy to learn.  I literally ask my students to connect to their environment.  I ask them to move from outside of themselves, where the medicine is.  The more they touch that medicine, the more the ego and its ideas fall into their proper place.  For those who have seen Aikido demonstrations, there is a close parallel.  To learn to extend ki is a matter of the four skills of the Alexander Technique.  It is not easy.  But when the Akidoka learns it, she is moving in harmony with all of life.  She doesn’t need to worry about throwing someone twice her size.  The whole universe does it.  To extend ki is to get in touch with the medicine.  It is to be what you are.  But this moving from the outside is not so easy to understand.  It is a non-doing.  The self cannot go to the medicine.  This doing is carrying the self forward to realize the ten thousand things.  It doesn’t work.  Instead, the ten thousand things must be allowed to advance and realize the self.  This happens in an active, non-doing way, so that sickness and medicine “subdue each other” as Daido Roshi translates it.  The fierce lion of the universe becomes a gentle lamb.  The hard, knotted self becomes a flexible reed.  Does the universe kick now and then?  Sure.  Does the reed play songs of sadness?  Sure.  It never refuses a tune.  It plays everything with the whole of itself.
    In the end, no amount of words will work here.  If you are reading this as someone who has never tried the Alexander Technique and/or contemplative practice, go and get lessons.  For those who are students, keep practicing.  There is a whole universe of medicine waiting.
    In closing, I want to go to the end of Cohen’s essay.  Even though the key points have been made, the richness of her final thoughts moves me as much as anything else she wrote in this piece.  First she writes the following:

People sometimes ask me where my own healing energy comes from.  How in the midst of this pain, this implacable slow crippling, can I encourage myself and other people?  My answer is that my healing comes from my bitterness itself, my despair, my terror . . . .  I can never give up to it when I first feel it stir.  You’d think after a million times with a happy ending, I could give up right away and just say, “Take me, I’m yours,” but I never can.  I always resist.  I guess that’s why it’s called despair . . . . But I’ve come to trust it deeply.  It’s enriched my life, informed my work, and taught me not to fear the dark.

I think Rumi, poet of the Alexander Technique, gets closer than I could to complementing the beauty of these gestures.  This poem is from The Essential Rumi:

Love Dogs

One night a man was crying,
                                              Allah!  Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
                            “So!  I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
                                       “Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
                                                                   “This longing
you express is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them.


Cohen’s final words are a garnish artistically placed:

It seems to me that when we fall ill, we have an opportunity we may not have noticed when we were well, to literally in-corp-orate the wisdom of the buddhas, and to present it as our own body.

The sprinkle of pepper I dust over this also comes from The Essential Rumi.  Chapter 15 in that collection is recommended for every student of the Alexander Technique.  Read the whole thing, and it will add texture to Cohen’s essay (which, obviously, I think you should also read).  The third poem in that chapter gets its title from the following lines:

    Someone once asked a great sheikh
    what sufism was.
                                “The feeling of joy
    when sudden disappointment comes.”

That is certainly a whack on the side of the head.  We could become like those monks in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and keep whacking ourselves with it over and over until it sinks in.  How many sudden disappointments do we have each week?  How many chances do we get to present wisdom and compassion in the form of our very own body-mind?  You don’t have to wait even one moment longer.


Afterward:

I would like to urge you once again to read Darlene Cohen’s essay.  It would also be of enormous benefit to read “The Whole Earth is Medicine,” a Dharma Discourse by John Daido Loori, Roshi.  The very title of his Dharma Discourse should make it clear, if it isn't already, why this essay is classified under "Sustainability."  But the discourse itself is a treasure, especially for anyone interested in saving the world.