Chair work

May

So many laughs this morning.

I sit on a foot stool directly in front of her in her armchair.

“Which leg shall I take first?”

At the advanced age of 99, there is often a long gap between thought and speech.

“They are too lazy to argue with each other.”
Laughter releases her torso a bit.

By now her left leg is supported on my lap and my hands are softly rolling her hip in internal and external rotation. The texture is silky smooth.
She is a veteran of this work.

On this side I suspect she may have some residual hypertonicicity (excessive muscular tone)…. perhaps neurological or of slight cerbrovascular insufficiency in origin.
I move to her foot and apply deep compression through the leg to the pelvis and aiming my thoughts towards the head-neck joint. This to simulate contact with the floor and to stimulate deep reflexes in the bone and antigravity apparatus.

” I felt that all the way through my spine”
and her verticality, even in the chair tones up a notch.

“Where is your attention?”

“Nowhere it should be”

More giggles.

I talk about how things like pain or discomfort jump to the front of the queue in our attention.
That those places that are relatively comfortable sit quietly at the back of the queue and so are often excluded from the bigger picture.

“What do you notice?”

“That I don’t feel those places at all”
.
I offer a few suggestions.
Soles of the feet. Behind the shoulder blades. The waist. The armpits. The back of the nose.

“What was that like?”

“The back of the nose was most difficult.”

“If you imagined inhaling a fragrant rose or lily of the valley?”

A moment of delight spreads into our smiles.

I have Rachmaninov going on in my head.
I ask her if she ever has musical melody going in on her thoughts?

“All the time!”

I never know what she will say and it is almost always of the moment and fresh.

“Would you have a particular composer?”

By now I am cradling her right calf. It is very much more heavily distended with oedema than her other leg.

Her eyes stray up to top left as though she is walking down the long tunnel of her memory and to the previous century somewhere in the back of her brain.

Some time later she says
“When I was working all the time in music, I think it would be Mozart”

Freda was for many years an accomplished singing teacher.

I say that I was enjoying watching her think… How I love her thinking.

The sun goes behind a cloud and the room seems darker.

“I forgot to turn the lights on”

I tease her
“The inner or the outer lights? ”

Quick as a wink and with laughter

“Oh I think the inner lights are on all right, just the outer ones.”

“Your inner light is unquenchable”

I talk a bit about Faure and Schubert and Schumann songs.
Of poetry and the camelias in her garden. Of the light of inspiration.

How years ago in a trying moment of my children murdering each other in the back of the car, stuck  at red traffic lights whilst my horn jammed on at full blast… well before I had encountered the Alexander Technique… How Rachmaninov came onto the car radio. How the music transformed my nervous system from scarlet alarm to instant tranquility.
How the lights turned to green, the horn stopped and the children’s mayhem dissolved.
That this was somehow just as relevant as inhibition and direction.

That whatever lights us up nourishes our coordination.

I ask her to come to the front of her chair by rocking her pelvis and walking from one sitting bone to the other.
To notice where her feet are in preparation to stand.
She draws them a little further back.

I ask her to incline forward from her hips whilst thinking of length from the front of her pelvis to her sternum…. this is another  form of “monkey” which I have mentioned.

Then she inclines forward from her hips, and with a light touch from my finger tips to connect her with her crown, she rises light and smooth.

“That felt easy today”

Then in a surprising surge of lively energy, she goes into a deep monkey and sits with control all the way.

This has not been so consistent or easy for her since her fall in the summer.

We repeat this twice.

Reluctantly I replace the deep memory foam cushion (it protects her skin from pressure sores but tends to encourage a wayward tilt in her sitting)
On balance I feel that to protect her skin is more of a priority than her alignment. I wish I could find another solution as she spends long hours in her chair.

We do diaries and say our farewells.

As always, I leave with gratitude and a heightened appreciation that things can change in the blink of an eye.