"Respectful Bowing Will Secure for You the Very Marrow of the Way"[1]
One of the essential discoveries of
F. M. Alexander and one that has significance in learning the Technique is what
he called "The Primary Control". This is a master reflex of the body,
and when it is properly organised it can modify all the postural relationships
throughout the body.
In the Alexander Technique allowing the
releasing of the neck is a primary request, which enables a constructive
relationship between the head, neck, and back to follow. Freedom in the neck
releases subtle forces in the brain, spine, and solar plexus. It acknowledges
and renews an ancient contract, which calls for participation in a journey that
needs attention to become ever more subtle and sustained so as to perceive how
these releases reveal deeper movement of cleaner, accurate feeling and
mentation. To bear the full weight of a moment requires a great depth of
understanding borne out of vertical being. What in fact does it actually mean
to be in a moment?
When the neck begins to be released it in
turns effects the entire organism. When the 'armouring' begins to dissolve one
may begin to experience movement, and feelings not hereto encountered. Some may
encounter illness, levels of pain (there is healing and destructive pain — one
comes to realise the difference), shaking, heat in different parts of the body,
physical diarrhoea. Upon shifting at a deeper level one may experience a form
of cathartic, psychic diarrhoea, as loosening, elimination, and purifying take
place. It is best not to indulge or get attached to any of this. Allow it to
pass. If the seeker has been properly prepared, what is needed from these
releases is transmuted in the blood. It is helpful not to confuse purifying
with purity, for this can be a hindrance. Mae West put it well when she said,
"When I'm good I'm very good but when I'm bad I'm better."
For years one may hear these words from a
teacher: "Let the neck be free." One may frequently say with varying
degrees of sincerity the words to oneself; however, it is not until the words
have become internalised and dissolved into stillness that one may receive the
experience of the neck being moved through non-movement towards the freeing of
itself. In the movement itself is the release. When I was first received into a
portion of this movement I experienced something of the gracefulness of the
ancient art of bowing. As I was falling through the vision of the movement, I
perceived that all that I had read and undertaken and would ever read or
undertake of contemporary Western psychology/psychotherapy, however helpful and
supportive to me, was and would always be of an elementary level, for there
exists a sane psychology, the levels of which are incomprehensible to the
ordinary mind.
Miss Margaret Goldie requested that one "become quiet, be still". This call towards becoming empty of self unto utter stillness is a psychological process where every ounce of bone, nerve, and muscle is part of the psychology of atomus, within which the harmonics of the universal spine are perceived,
Vacate et quoniam ego sum Deus[2]
Spring is the first season of the
year, or that between winter and summer, reckoned astronomically from the
vernal equinox to the summer solstice. The first sign of the day is the dawn
and is sometimes also referred to as the first or early stage of a period of
life. Slowly through the ascending dawn, one is enabled to perceive the fact
that you cannot free the neck through any form of doing however subtle and this
includes even the 'directive non-doing' existing below the sense register which
is a necessary part of preparation. However it is possible to cultivate
attention and through the presence of this attention bear witness when you are
ready to receive it of a mysterious supplicatory movement which gently yet
powerfully speaks through the permeable neck, offering a taste[3] of sacred healing.
[1] (Raihai
Tokuzui) Translator's Introduction: Dogen's title, Raihai
Tokuzui, in addition to the translation given
above, can also be rendered as 'Respectfully Bowing to Those Who Have Attained
the Very Marrow of the Way'. See The Shobogenzo or
The Treasure House Of The Eye Of The True Teaching Great Master Dogen Volume One. Shasta Abbey, Mount Shasta,
California, USA.
[2]
Psalm 46.10
[3] Taxare
taste, being related to tangere originally concerned touching, the act of touching something to test
its quality. Mental perception of quality; judgement, discriminative faculty.
The sense of what is appropriate, harmonious, or beautiful. See Oxford
English Dictionary .
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