Postcards from Ulysses

    I recently facilitated a workshop which I enjoyed tremendously.  I was blessed by the presence of five fabulous belly dancers.  They inspired me.  They took every bit of straw I gave them and wove it into gold.  Some of the things I saw make splendid examples of the spirit of the Alexander Work.
    One of the things that has come up lately in discussions with two of my most important friends in the Work is what one might call the aesthetics of presence.  This has been an interest of mine ever since I noticed that people sometimes looked poignantly beautiful after getting good Work.  This phenomenon suggests quite clearly that we interfere with our natural beauty.  A reactive, habitual, doing way of being is just not as radiant as a responsive, awakened, non-doing way of being.  At one point I began working with a husband and wife, and we regularly took note that each one looked his or her best after getting good Work.
    One of the women who works with me has been giving me rather regular reports on her “afterglow” experiences.  Here are two of them:

    After our session, I was beaming out some sort of something [because] people kept staring at me in [the grocery store] . . .
    ______________

    So . . . the remnants of today's lesson made this man, who works at [the grocery store], feed me grapes.  And then a slice of mango.  Right in the middle of the produce section. Then, I kid you not, he asked if I was Argentine. . . . And then, to top it all off . . . asked me out.

 

 
I should point out that this person doesn't look even vaguely Latina.  Being asked if she is Argentine surprised her not only because of that fact, but also because we do Tango-infused Alexander Work, which the man in the produce section could not possibly have known.  This is either a synchronicity or a particularly strange coincidence.
    The other person who has discussed the aesthetics of presence with me recently pointed out something very significant: this glow goes both ways.  When you receive good Work, you are more open to seeing the natural beauty of others.  You find them more interesting.  You feel positive regard, you feel Peace and Love.  This too is significant for belly dancers.  A dancer offers her presence as an act of Love.  She has to like the audience enough, have enough Love and Compassion for them, to want to suffer the burden of being on fire for them.  One of the belly dancers confessed that when she really feels her presence filling the room, she sometimes has feelings of guilt for it, and this in turn contracts her presence.  Others nodded in recognition of this phenomenon.  A woman may feel unsure whether it’s “okay” for her to tap into such power.  In the case of a belly dancer, this energy can be very sensual, which only adds another layer of difficulty.  Yet this is her JOB.  She is to reveal the awesome mystery of feminine power.  She in fact can determine its sensual content by the simple choice of how much raw power to let through.  When she truly fills the space, the result can be more sublime than sexy.  As Joyce would put it, the viewer is held in a state of aesthetic arrest in which he or she is united with “the secret cause.”  This may seem somewhat paradoxical when there is an obvious sensual content, but only because we are habituated to experience fear and desire, not arrest, not the still point.  But there the dance is, and not just belly dance.         
    It was remarkable to witness the aesthetics of presence at work.  I noticed it in all five of the dancers.  With two, I was unfortunately standing behind them and was actively working with them.  I still noticed a difference, but it is harder to describe.  With the other three, there was a strong physical experience of the presence, and with the third in particular there was a strong visual experience.  These are loose distinctions.  One SAW something in all five, and one FELT something in all five.  I’ll take two examples then.
    Everyone started out more or less the same.  The environment challenged them, so different was it from the circumstances of performance to which they are accustomed.  We were six people in a small studio in the middle of the day, not a large, dimly lit performance space filled with people.  The music was also not their own.  This tended to provoke their doings.  And it gave a consistent result: presence retracted, the fires dimmed, the movements (even when they looked technically lovely) seemed just a bit lackluster.  Forgive me ladies if you’re reading this.  I say it plainly because, especially now, we all know what you’re CAPABLE of doing.  And let's understand: Alexander "teachers" are SUPPOSED to provoke.  We can't blame the results on the context.  My job is to help people see the doing way of being that is functioning ALL THE TIME, in dancing and in everyday life.  In a dancer, it is usually CONTROLLED.  The beauty of the dance emerges in spite of it.  However, if we can begin to shift from doing to being, then the dance becomes more expressive, more powerful, more beautiful, more profound.
    Fortunately, I did very little.  Which means a lot got done.  Through my non-doing, the dancers began to activate the four skills: Awareness, Acceptance, Connection, and Non-doing.  Calling them “skills” is misleading.  We just ARE these things.  What we are certainly transcends these concepts, but we use them as skillful means, as a way to begin to access what we are.  
    Helping these women access their power had an astonishing impact.  One woman actually GLOWED.  I know: it sounds crazy.  You don’t have to dive into metaphysical waters to accept this.  If you’ve seen a pregnant woman, or seen a woman in love, then you’ve seen something like what I saw.  And I was not the only one.  Everyone else saw it too.  It was stunning.  Moreover, we also saw it vanish.  I wanted to check on this, so I didn’t say anything about the glow.  After recovering my wits, I simply asked her what she thought.  She said that after I worked with her a little the dancing felt much better than on her first attempt.  She said she tried to just “go with it.”  “Okay,” I said, “but at some point did the neurosis creep back in?”  She admitted that it had.  I told her we all had seen it.  This is not easy to bear when you’re first learning to let yourself shine.  It can add pressure to know the audience can sense every flicker of neurosis.  It’s almost like we’d rather not be seen.  But we are.  Always.  Even if that which perceives us is more-than-human.
    Another woman spoke of feeling self-conscious.  Of course, this is common for many performers.  What I find so fascinating is that what we feel in these cases is just energy, and the slightest shift of the glance transforms that energy in a radiant way.  As the glance of the performer goes from within to without, she goes from self-conscious to simply CONSCIOUS.  That’s something the audience doesn’t always get to see: a conscious, powerful woman revealing the mystery of the divine feminine through dance.  In their daily lives, they don’t see many conscious people at all.  So this is an act of profound significance.  Here again the Belly Dancer is willing to burn for the audience.  She is willing to suffer her self-consciousness and be brave enough to fully accept it so she can make that necessary shift in her gaze.  And when she does, the experience can be overwhelming for some.  Have you ever had a conscious Dancer LOOK at you during a performance?  It’s not easy to bear if she really lets that divine feminine energy manifest.  When she truly lets the mystery of Life come through her, and if we are brave enough to genuinely LOOK, how can we call this anything else but darshan?  I won't say that we got this particular dancer to go quite that far, but the results were again powerful and palpable for everyone watching.  The aesthetics of presence works by degrees.  More presence means more aesthetic impact.  But look at what we're really saying here: the dancer becomes more and more aesthetically significant as she becomes more and more metaphysically signficant.
    If you think reference to darshan and metaphysical significance marks an entrance into questionable territory, you can perhaps still understand and accept the psychodynamic importance of what’s going on here.  Because of the condition of aesthetic arrest, the viewer, and let’s focus on the male viewer for a moment, has a chance to allow his anima to mature.  If you immediately leap out of the vessel, no alchemical transformation will occur.  Because of the aesthetic arrest, you can begin to transform.  Even if your experience has a sensual or erotic content, the dancer who can make that energy beautiful and sublime still creates a condition of aesthetic arrest, so desire ceases to function.  You aren’t desiring, you are beholding, connecting.  The grasping ego vanishes in the face of something too big to grasp.  At this moment the belly dancer is helping the viewer, all viewers, to reconcile the problem of opposites.
    I’m not sure how many belly dancers understand the importance of what they do, for themselves and for the viewer.  Belly dance can be a big part of spiritual and psychological development.  The context of the dance can be a vessel for both dancer and viewer.  If the viewer remains still within this vessel, his or her lead can begin to turn to gold.  The same holds for the dancers.  Dance is a profound art, and attaining its highest potentials requires profound Work.  It takes a lot of discipline and dedication.  Dancers who are willing to surrender to it bestow heavenly gifts on us all.  I encourage every lover of dance to seek out belly dancers and receive their gifts with deep gratitude, and I encourage all dancers to keep pushing themselves, compassionately yet with vigor.
    I just want to say one last thing: psychodynamics, metaphysics, and all other "ics" aside, the phenomena described here are concrete and practical.  All of us can cultivate more presence, which means we can bring a little more Beauty and Love into the world.  When you are present, people see it and sense it without any need to refer to "ics."  It WORKS on them, and it works on the more-than-human world.  This is because you become more connected to the world and all the beings in it.  Your awareness opens, and you enter a state of non-doing in which more of what actually needs to get done finds itself getting done.  Every single person has access to this.  It just IS you.  All you have to do is begin to allow it to enter your life.
 

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     What is the meaning of referring to Alexander Work with a capital ‘W’?  This capital letter hints that the activity transcends the ideas we might have about it.  It is a way to try to disrupt the dichotomous mind.  We always make distinctions, and we hold many of them subconsciously.  These distinctions form part of the impulse and structure of our doings and our doing way of being.  Our language reflects this.  When you come to meet with me, I can ask what you would like to do, or what you would like to work on.  While we can acknowledge these grammatical necessities, we have to look and see if they correlate with an unfulfilling way of being.  We don’t want to work on anything at all, just to Work.
    You might be tempted to see this as an Alexander lens.  It is actually an eschewal of lenses altogether.  While we can legitimately ask, “How would one look at this from the perspective of the Alexander Work?” we have to understand this as partly intellectual.  The real answer comes down to Working, not pigeonholing. 
    What does “Work” mean, then?  We can phrase it in many ways.  If you were a Christian I might follow Kierkegaard and say that “Work” means being a Knight of Faith.  That in turn means putting yourself fully in the Hands of the Divine, following the Divine Will no matter how irrational it would seem to your dichotomous mind.  In the Zen tradition we might say “Working” refers to Ordinary Mind, or no-mind, or Big Mind, or doing what you're doing when you're doing it.  In Buddhism generally we might call it Buddha Nature or even Dharma.  In Taoism we might say “Work” means actualizing your Te and letting the Tao Work through you.  Another way to say it: it means being what you are, away from the ideas you have about what you are or how you should be.  We could also call it “being in a state of inspiration.”  Or we might say “Work” means Living your Life, having an Intimate Connection to Life from moment to moment, actualizing the wisdom and compassion that infuses every moment, living Life from our center, letting the energies of Life or of Love Work through us, nurturing the seeds planted in us by Divine fingers, embodying our Myths and Religions, Living Life as Art, or myriad other hintings, pointings, and approximations. 
    Why use “Work” at all?  Why not use some other term?  I ask this seemingly rhetorical question because I haven’t considered it well enough.  Maybe I should pick another word.  Yet there are some nice things about “Work.”  For one, we can understand that we need to Work on ourselves, and we can say that without falling too far into the trap of grammar.  “Practice” offers itself as a viable replacement here.  And, truth be told, we WILL have lots of ideas about the Work.  The term “practice” can remind us that, until we experience very deep insight, we are still at great risk, we still have barriers between ourselves and our lives, we still rationalize and dichotomize and react in all sorts of ways.  Indeed, even after some pretty significant insights, we still need a lot of practice in order to fully embody them.  On the other hand, the universe isn’t practicing.  It’s just Working, functioning, doing its thing.  And we are part of that Work.  We can see there is Work to be done.  Humanity is in crisis, beings are suffering, people are trapped under thick wet blankets of ignorance.  If we work on these problems, we won’t get very far.  Better to Work.  To Work on ourselves, to be what we are, and to Connect to the suffering of the world in a non-doing way.  I don’t know that this settles the question.  For now, I’ll continue to use Work while considering other options.  “Alexander Just Living Your Life.”  “Alexander Joining with the Universe.”  “Alexander Being a Knight of Faith.”  “Alexander Letting the Divine Will Work Through You.”  A bit awkward, eh?
    These formulations do reflect the notion of an “Alexander Perspective.”  Are we going in circles?  No.  Spirals.  Understand that the confusion of “Alexander Technique” and “Alexander Work” lies not only in the issue of having to clarify “Work” and “Technique.”  I often make the analogy that this kind of naming would have us call Buddhism the Siddhartha Technique.  Taken at face value, Buddhism is supposed to be just the way things are.  Skillful means are used to help people access it, but what they are accessing is not meant to be just another way of looking at things.  This is why people from other traditions find Buddhism helpful.  Many Christians and Jews study some form of Buddhism and find it helpful for embodying the teachings of their own traditions.  The Alexander Work is meant to be the same.  The Work is just about what we are.  It relies on a specific set of skillful means, largely kinesthetic, for helping people access it, but what they are accessing is not supposed to be just another way of looking at things.  They are accessing a way of being that is in harmony with Life and with their own unique place in Life.
    In practical terms, the notion of Work should, among other things, act to inform the way we cultivate this way of being.  No matter what we seem to be “working on,” the real Work has several layers.  One of these is Working on what matters most to you: your passion, your highest values, your job, your relationships, your hobbies, your political causes.  We have ideas about all of these things, and Working means letting go of the ideas and instead bodying forth the mystery behind all those ideas.  You can come and work on sitting and standing.  Or you can come and Work.  When you do the latter, you are Working on your Life, learning to live in an Intimate and vitalizing way.  Everything we “do” in the meeting thus transcends itself.  We become part of the functioning of the universe, and the suffering of the planet is reduced that much more. 

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“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” ~Emma Goldman

    I always think Emma Goldman could have made that even more to the point: If you want a revolution, then DANCE!  Could that really be true?  I like to tell people that the Argentinian dictators were more afraid of Tango than they were of Rock and Roll.  Here’s how Christine Denniston describes it:

    This story was told to me by someone who ran a number of Tango dances in the mid-1950s. There were laws banning the presence of minors in nightclubs. These laws were rigidly enforced for Tango clubs, but were not enforced at all for clubs that only played Rock and Roll music. So where before the coup the best way for a young man to meet a young woman was in a milonga, suddenly it was much easier to meet a girl by dancing Rock and Roll. Overnight, young men stopped learning how to dance the Tango. There was no reason to spend three years learning how to dance Tango, when the girl you liked was in a Rock and Roll club instead. The generation that were 18 years old in 1955 learned to dance the Tango well and with confidence. The generation that were 13 didn't learn it at all.

    It seems extraordinary that a repressive right-wing regime would encourage Rock and Roll at a time when conservatives all over the world were trying to stop young people dancing to the wild new music. But it served the purposes of the regime, and it served them well.

She’s right: it certainly seems extraordinary at first glance.  So perhaps we should glance more carefully.  What does this mean?
    We might get a little insight from philosophy, which I admit begrudgingly.  Especially since I’m thinking of a German philosopher––other than Nietzsche.  I’m not the biggest fan of German philosophy.  Rather than being a gateless gate, it often strikes me as the supreme example of a gated gate.  One that often leads to nothing in particular, except a dilapidated garden of bragging rights: you get to tell people you’ve read Hegel.  There are exceptions.  Nietzsche of course stands out as the most significant––a real love of Sophia, and a willingness to dance with her.  Heidegger has some beautiful substance now and then if you can overlook . . . well, let’s not mention it here.  In our own time there are philosophers all over the planet constructing gated gates and putting up signs on the near and far sides of the gated gates that have stood for decades or even centuries.  This has never been exclusive to German philosophy, but so many of its big names share a remarkably gated quality, as if they are certain Sophia can’t be seduced in anything but abstract, anal retentive, and hyper-rational turns of phrase.  
    One of the major German heavyweights of our own time is Jurgen Habermas.  While not quite as arcane as Heidegger or Hegel, Habermas doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and I can’t really imagine Sophia blushing or swooning at his flirtations.  But I must confess that he can be provocative.  I even read one of his books the whole way through––I think.  And it has something worthwhile to tell us.  It’s called The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.  I’m not going to dig it out so I can remind myself of all the details and nuances.  I’ll just give you what I can recall as most interesting.
    The book basically describes the rise and fall of the public sphere.  The public sphere is the place where people get together to intelligently and conscientiously discuss the issues that affect us all, issues of the public domain.  We THINK we do this today, but not so.  The issues appear to be discussed: it seems like we’re discussing health care, and the environment, and education reform, and matters of war and peace.  But Habermas argues that critical structures are missing.  We’re not really having intelligent and conscientious conversations.  The existence of a genuine public sphere seems to be restricted to a relatively brief historical moment, and all we have to do is describe it.  Then you’ll understand right away what’s missing.  Moreover, you’ll understand the role Tango can play in the evolution of human culture.
    Habermas tell us that, by the first decade of the eighteenth century, there were 3,000 coffee shops in London alone.  People met to talk about the issues of the day, and their conversation was supported by a fully independent press that facilitated access to information.  So here we have the critical structures: people had access to reliable information about what was actually going on, then they met to intelligently discuss the meaning and significance of the information, and the possibilities for action based on the their deeply held common values.  This is simply unacceptable to the structures of power.  Those structures therefore exerted pressure on the structures of this vibrant public sphere, and slowly a transformation occurred.  The newspapers gradually became the mouthpiece of the very institutions they should be criticizing.  Consequently, we were left with a mock public sphere in which issues are skillfully evaded and obscured, and those still committed to the truth are divided and marginalized.  I have discussed elsewhere the importance of the Fourth Estate and how it has become a major tool in the manufacture of consent.  But we should see all three of the major structures necessary for a functioning democracy: access to information, genuine coming together, meaningful outlets for political action.  A backdrop for all of this is the kind of culture that promotes intelligent, conscientious, and critical conversation, which is part of genuine coming together.
    It’s nice to see that first structure of democracy getting shifted again in our time.  Thanks in part to the internet, the informational aspect of the public sphere shows signs of waking up.  But it’s not a sure thing.  Lobbyists for the structures of power are hard at work to make changes in the internet that will strengthen the power structures while weakening any hope for a genuine public sphere.  They have had victories in other areas very recently, like the postage hike that will cost independent media a lot of money they don’t have, and that madness going on with the FCC.
    The other two structures of democracy, as well as the backdrop, are very much under the control of the structures of power.  Our elections cannot be called elections.  The schizophrenic nature of our political process has been discussed in another posting, and you will find far more credible commentators by simply searching the web––while you still can.  The genuine coming together is also quite weak.  This relates in part to that backdrop, which includes an education system with no apparent capacity to prepare people for genuine meeting and for intelligent, conscientious, critical conversation.  Did you ever have a class on how to have an intelligent conversation, or what it means to have a critical discussion (not a discussion full of criticisms, but a discussion that tries to probe the root causes of a given phenomenon)?  How about a class on genuine connection, the art of listening, the spirit of being together with others?   
    Given that connectedness is built into our being, given that we long for it, the structures of power have to accommodate it.  This is accomplished by giving the FEELING of coming together.  The principle way of giving the FEELING of coming together while simultaneously circumventing any genuine connection to each other that embodies our highest values is to simply unite us against a common enemy.  When this succeeds, it allows for the exercise of greater control over us.  Not only is genuine connection stifled, but so is rational, creative, and critical discussion.  And this allows the greatest trick of all: we seem united, but we remain divided and more in the grips of the structures of power.
    Marijuana is an interesting example, even if you don’t think it should be decriminalized.  Terrorism is another great example.  What they have in common: “Those people . . .”  The endless fable told as a bedtime story to pacified children, children encouraged to believe in bogey men and monsters in the closet, children commanded to follow the dictates of questionable authorities on pain of finding themselves victimized by these monsters in unthinkable ways.  Without noticing, they become victims of the questionable authorities operating without question.
    Those endeavoring to do some good in the world should avoid this tactic at all costs.  Don’t villainize corporations, politicians, hedge fund managers, war mongers, and racists.  Instead, focus on cultivating compassion.  Structures of power depend on our thinking in the combative, us-versus-“those people” way.  But it will not solve our problems.  Never has.  Never will.  “They” is a way of BEING.  It is an I-It, a breakdown in Interbeing, a form of ignorance.  It is this way of BEING that creates the trouble, not any particular thing done within its narrowing confines.  Rather, everything done within this way of being contributes to our suffering.  Shift the way of being and you begin to DISSOLVE the problems instead of solving them with another limited solution.
    The other thing to understand about the structures of questionable authority is that such structures naturally FEAR our connectedness.  The story of the structural transformation of public sphere illustrates this, as does Tango.  Bars, brothels, and crack houses are not real dangers to the power structures that be.  Neither are racy media and rock n’ roll.  For the most part, these things seem to work to the ADVANTAGE of the structures of power.  Why?  Perhaps because they sublimate our revolutionary energy while simultaneously dissipating the revolutionary concerns we all share.  We FEEL like we have come together and rebelled.  But we haven’t.  We’ve spent our energy to no good end.  We haven’t connected in an effective way, and we haven’t furthered our critical understanding of our situation.  We haven’t fueled a genuine revolution, because that requires more information, more connection and conversation, and more outlets for action than we will likely find in stadiums, brothels, or beer gardens.  Early resistance to rock and roll probably had racist undertones.  But the power structures quickly embraced it at a time when it could have become dangerous.  By now, all of these seemingly rebellious things have become part of the structures of power.  Music is dominated by corporations.  Liquor is just another industry (and Dionysus isn’t the man in charge).  Brothels and prostitution are the same: they serve mainly to help channel the biological and psychological frustrations created by the structures of power.  These structures may like to feign concern, and they may like to encourage our belief that such activities are dangerous and “bad,” but if they really were so, the structures of power would move more vigorously to suppress them.      
    The real trouble comes from coffee houses, alternative presses, and tango dancing (only with THAT did the bars and brothels become a threat––once again, for they were trouble in the age of the Sacred Prostitute as well, but the authorities did away with her and freeze-dried the anima . . . now the waters of Tango, the waters of Connectedness, will bring those energies back to Life and set them free to evolve and reach an ultimate unity on a grand scale . . .).    
    When people CONNECT, their humanity comes to the fore.  Coffee houses have not yet reclaimed their status as enemy of power because most of us go into a mass produced café serving mass produced beverages that exploit the masses in massive ways, and we stay disconnected by keeping our headphones plugged in while we digest the rancid fodder of mainstream corporate journalism.  If we were all going in there with alternative media in hand and actually CONVERSING with one another, new coffee taxes would appear on the House floor in record time (or whatever else they might dream up, including, I’m sure, Patriot Act insanity and Presidential Power abuses).
    Do you get what has Tango to do with all of this?  D.T. Suzuki explains it clearly:

    Samantabhadra's arms raised to save sentient beings become our own, which are now engaged in passing the salt to a friend at the table, and Maitreya's opening the Vairochana Tower for Sudhana is our ushering in a caller into the parlor for a friendly chat . . . we see both the Bodhisattvas and the Buddhas shining in the sweat of their foreheads, in the tears shed for the mother who lost a child, in the fury of passions burning against injustice in its multifarious forms -- in short, in their never-ending fight against all that goes under the name of evil.

 
Our arms reaching out in a Tango embrace teach us to allow that Love to enter the world right where we stand, right in our own bodies and minds.  We allow ourselves to be MOVED, more deeply than ever, by the emotions of the soul that come through the music.  Thus Tango becomes a battle against evil, and thus we understand why agents of violence and oppression would instinctively fear it.  Above all, the structures of power cannot withstand genuine connection, genuine creativity, genuine experiences and expressions of Love.  Not romance or sex, but Love, that thing that Rumi, Buddha, and Jesus demanded, that thing that conquers all.  
    So, come to Tango, you rebels!  Come to Tango, radicals and activists!  Come to Tango, all you artists and poets!  Come to Tango, dear lesbians, homosexuals, lost and found heteros, wild lovers, asexual philosophers, hopeless romantics, sexually inhibited virgins, desperate nymphomaniacs!  Come to Tango, alienated ones!  Come, quieted ones, you with the red dress hidden in your closet––or do you just stare at it in the shop window?  Come to Tango, you wallflowers, you shy ones, you lonely ones standing around your secret fires––why the coldness when you could be heating the world?  Come to Tango you who seek revolution in every color, revolution in Red and Black, revolution in Silver and Gold, revolution in Yellow and Green, revolution in Indigo moonlight, revolution of psyche, revolution of soul, come and embrace it, learn how to WALK your talk, to Dance the upheavals of your dreams, Dance the concrete evolution of the spirit!  Come to Tango, you alchemists, throw yourself into its sacred vessel, let your lead turn to gold in fires fanned by the bellows of a bandoneón!     

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