.A long time ago, my Alexander Technique teacher told me a story of a particularly lovely AT lesson she received in London. After this lesson, she walked to the local cafe, sat down, and ordered a cappuccino. She was in such a balanced state that she took one sip of her cappuccino, sat in the pleasant afternoon sun, paid, and left. She felt no need to finish drinking the cappuccino. She was content with things exactly as they were.

In the Alexander Technique, we cultivate skills in inhibition and direction. (If you're unfamiliar with the work, I could describe these phenomena, but any description I provide would be completely inadequate. If you've had Alexander Technique lessons, you know what I'm talking about.) By practicing these skills in an ongoing manner, we are able to bring about the conditions necessary for a balanced, content state. Sometimes this state is fleeting, sometimes it lasts longer. The important point is to practice the skills so you can bring about this state on your own (more on this in a blog post on “working on yourself,” coming soon).

I have had a few similar experiences of contentment. One was during a lesson with the teacher mentioned above, at her farm house. She worked with me for a while and at the end of the lesson I was standing in the middle of the room, and I had the sense that I could go on standing like that for a very long time. Now, I'm usually a person who is ready to move on to the next thing pretty quickly, so for me to be content to be where I am for a long time is memorable.

There are probably many names for states like this from many other bodies of work. I encourage you not to try to compare this experience to other kinds of work. It may be similar, or it may not. Let it stand on its own, in a room, for a very long time.

The Alexander Technique (AT) is the work of opening doors and windows and tiny cracks in people's habit patterns so they can experience something new. When you experience something outside of your automatic, stereotyped behavior, you can start the work of change - of figuring out what you want and moving toward it. Until you can step outside your habitual pattern for a moment, there's very little real ability to change.

AT is about bringing to light our habit patterns so we can avoid activating them. Only then can we start to have access to something new and different. One of the wonderful things about this work is that you can't quite imagine what the new thing you'll have access to is. It's at the far side of a leap of faith. Alexander referred to this as “going from the known to the unknown.” You can't know ahead of time what it will be like to have a new experience.

I think of acupuncture as the same work in a different form. I use needles, non-insertive tools, cups, gua sha tools, and moxa to make small changes that add up to a new experience of one's self. Once you have a new experience, you can begin the work of nurturing the conditions which allow this new sense of self to flourish.