Genia Gould is an award-winning journalist and publisher, art appraiser, and zen practitioner. She has served as an event producer for LiLY (Lifeforce in Later Years), and is our most recent graduate.
Nan said to me, in the middle of my first year, you probably had no idea of what you were getting yourself into. Because the Alexander Technique is a rigorous practice, it’s a study of human thinking. It’s a study of the human body, and a study of the human spirit. As humans in a civilized world we’re entrenched in habits of tension and prone to collapse and contract into our physical selves. We carry a lot of baggage of tension.
I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I’m glad that I had a notion it would be a good thing, and grateful that Nan never allowed me to give up.
Alexander Technique is a welcome practice in my life which has given me more than I expected.
It’s given me self awareness, health, and community, and it’s taught me how to lean in the direction of self care and consciousness.
There’s a lot of striving to not strive, struggling to not struggle. It’s very zenny – but finally learning to allow such things as the breath, which doesn’t need our interference, to happen on its own, to allow ourselves to be breathed. To allow pathways of weight and natural upward vitality… This is the practice. Learning to inhibit the struggle to not strive, to inhibit the strive to not struggle, coming back to vitality, learning to undo the collapse and contractions, you could say.
It’s consciousness.
I have a seagull metaphor to use here, a tribute to seagulls that happen to fly by our windows in the studio every day. (I may have paid a seagull to do a fly-by as I was speaking, let’s see if it follows through).
I once saw a flock of about 50 seagulls flying in a v formation, above the Hudson river, and I noticed that the very lead bird who was putting out the most energy, tired out, and suddenly fell back to the end of the formation, where it was carried by the updraft or the upwash, it’s called. “This upwash assists each bird in supporting its own weight in flight,”
And if they start to veer off course, they feel the sudden demanding forces on their wings, and body weight, and get back into a formation – a position of mechanical advantage we say in AT. I see the work as learning to be in a kind of updraft, finding the energies within and around us, underneath us and above us, to learn how to conserve our energies, to fly better with ease, to stay on course in our lives better. Not flying up against the wind or being pushed by the wind, but being on the wind. supporting our own weight in flight.
No seagull…
I am thankful to all my principal teachers, to Nan, Ariel, to Lori, Caren, Max, Serena, Nadav, Peggy, Carla, Rebecca, Eleanor, and to all the volunteer teachers, Fanny, Melissa, Susan, Lane, Becky, Steve B, visiting teachers, some who are on the Zoom, like Kecia, and my fellow trainees throughout the training at RIAT, who I consider my teachers too, I love them, spending so many hours with them, they are family, and I can see them evolving and the phenomenal teachers they will be. And a special shout out to Clare, because of the courage we share, in starting the AT practice kind of late, but not too late, I believe that we are redefining the prime of our lives pretty well.
And I appreciate so much all my friends who have been supportive and probably wondering what the hell I was doing these last three years – well, I’ve been mostly undoing habits of tension. And learning how to help others do the same. Thank you.