Resistance and Remembrance

 Years ago, long before I had the remotest idea about The Alexander Technique, I pushed a heavy glass swing door without a thought.It was much heavier than I had anticipated and the result was severe pain in my wrist. It was a week or two before I could use my hand …. for anything.

I have been wary of plate glass doors ever since.

Recently I have been giving thought to the relationship between resistance, inhibition and economy of effort.

There are so many ‘figures of speech’ that exhort us

to ‘shape up’

‘push through’

‘grin and bear it’

‘chop chop’

‘be cruel to be kind’

‘get a move on!’

There in the fast lane, where there is time only to react, it could seem to be true that (here is another one) there is ‘no gain without pain’

These is just some of the deeply ingrained, familiar parlance in the vocabulary memory banks of an English 58-and-a-day-year old. .  Literally ‘familiar’ as I now see in this moment of writing.

I have just noticed a wave of love beneath all my knee-jerk, furious resistance and protests. Now I see that they were among my father’s expressions. My darling father was so very hard on himself.

For many years, almost until his dying day, his greeting to me …. (A shy man’s expression of profound love for his daughter) would be “Hello Darling. Are you improving?”

How I suffered with my misinterpretation. My erroneous belief, then, and for many years, was that he therefore could not really love me all that much…I obviously was not quite good enough … yet….

That one, drip-fed little touch of Victorian humour, was always a telephone conversation. I was away at boarding school during my mother’s ill health, so there were no visual cues of his loving smile. Those brief words acted like a caustic erosion of my fragile self-confidence both then and onwards into my adulthood.

He was rapidly bereaved of his father and then my mother in his early forties, so, I, in my own childhood loss, naturally hung on his every word.

In 2005, during his appalling descent into cancer, his deep love shone from behind those habitual veils and at last we could bath in the unreserved joy of each other’s company.

He knew he was on his way home (athough he was far too much of a gentleman to mention it ) and I knew that I could be exquisitely close to him all the way (without having to force him into recognition).

What an incredible blessing to have lived that transformation and release in his final weeks.

Small wonder I have shed buckets of tears as I deepen my journey in the company of loving teachers and friends in the Alexander world. Each gradual moment of release is beginning to reveal the enormous efforts I have been making. Less is promising be more.

In the moment of writing, I gather this is called thinking it through.

The opportunities for experiment in the outer world are plentiful.

The question “how much”? and “how much less” can point me towards endless little enquiries.

A key reluctant to turn in the lock.

Does my bicycle balance?

Why won’t this memory card ease into the camera?

The tap that doesn’t turn

Can’t get my foot in the shoe (laces still not freed up?)

O-level Latin in my teenaged afternoons, BAH!

my father put his foot down…(but how grateful I am now to have an easy command of anatomy)

Her neck doesn’t turn in response to my invitation

That leg is glued to the table

The kind of “no” said through gritted teeth

The subtle protective barriers in conversation which can make me feel as though I might have started a war by mistake…

Do I really need that new shirt?

A delicate porcelain tea-cup that is perfectly full to the brim with, even more perfect, a piping hot cup of tea…. Poised, is it, as it travels to my lips?

Inhibition these days does save a few sprains and breakages.

In the inner world, where I can be so oblivious to my own self-resistance, perhaps I can allow myself not to berate the protective habit, as it is still unsettling to keep breaking open again. Yet, when I can allow this, as I am doing here, recognition, resolution and peace are often the unexpected gift. Maybe over time, the path of emotional courage will have smooth new tarmac instead of rocks and cobbles and I shall be less wobbly as I set out.

I would like to thank other writers recently for showing up in their vulnerability, as it has inspired me to touch and share mine.

It was my birthday yesterday.

Happy memories.