Doesn’t Peaches look like she’s emerging from the darkness? As in Tolkien. The deep, dark woods…

And yes, that kind of feels like what one small realization meant to me today.

I had this wonderful Alexander technique session with Alice. Alexander technique is something that professional musicians and actors are likely to know about because they often encounter difficulties from the tension of demanding repetitive movement or vocalization. Alexander technique is about how to find the ease so that your body can feel comfortable and supported in various demanding situations. I wanted to find out about it after I hurt my back in January.

But only recently did I meet Alice.

Meantime, in my black and white way of understanding things: I had decided that I had done way too much too fast (all true) and that the solution was to more or less collapse. Not collapse totally, but just – shall we say, give in to gravity. What other option made sense?

Now, I’m not talking here about moment to moment weariness or not. I’m just noticing my mental picture of the good and the bad. Good = sleep. Bad = doing too much.

What Alice proposed was the actual cyclical basis for perceiving the flow of energy in the body. She was asking me to – yes – let the energy drop through the body to sense the floor (or chair). But then, feel how that quite naturally supports the bodies upward lightness. That the relaxation feeds into the upliftment of the body.

As I write this, I think: “Du-uh”. But before I had been thinking only of either up – as in “go go go”, or down, as in “rest rest rest”. The fact that the body itself uses (ideally) both all the time, in all its actions: that’s the key. Relaxing as going. Going with relaxation.

Got that? I love that understanding. Yes.

And now? Time to allow that to inform my body: relaxing as going. And then going with relaxation. Basic. Yet key.