Lessons from the nursery #4

There are a lot of kanuka seedlings to pot on this year. Not hundreds, thousands. After a few hours at the potting table my arms and hands start to ache.

My daughter, Asia, is twelve and she practises piano for half an hour every morning. After a while practising the leaping chords of a Chopin valse, her left arm aches.

There’s an obvious remedy to both situations: simply rest. Yes, that helps, it stops aching. But the next time I go back to potting and Asia goes back to Chopin, the same thing happens. Again and again. Funnily, this is exactly the same predicament that led the young Australian actor, F.M. Alexander, to develop his technique. He had to find a way of changing his unconscious habits of tension that were interfering with his ability to perform. You can read more about his story here:

Any action we do, whether planting trees or playing a musical instrument, is an action that involves our whole self, body and mind. It is also governed by habitual patterns of thought and movement. Changing our habits is a deep and complex process that cannot be achieved through a simple correction of posture.

At times AT may look like a simple correction of posture. If I cease bending from my upper back, dropping my head and rounding my shoulders as I work, then my arm joints will be less compressed leading to freer movement and less pain. I’ll write more about this in my next post.

I’m glad to say that AT is more than that. When you learn to think into the connections of your mind-body, old conditioning falls away leaving a sense of natural feedom that is much more than physical.