Tommy Thompson part II

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending two seminars taught by Tommy Thompson. He teaches Alexander Technique and is a true healer. The first seminar was just for Alexander teachers and I wrote about in an earlier post. The second was for the general public, and I was one of the few who took both. His approach is relatively unique (I’m told) in the Alexander world, and I found a lot of wisdom in his approach and his style. What follows in this post are some of his teachings which particularly impressed me.

He taught that our responses to the world are often shaped by who we think we are as opposed to who we actually are. When one responds to something, one reaches for who one thinks one is, which may not be who one actually is. We need to be open to what is really going on, not what we think or expect to be happening. His model is the physical body, but this is very true for all of our interactions in the world. It’s very true, I would add, in shamanic or spiritual experience. We have “peak” spiritual experiences and then seek to repeat those experiences, often expecting the next shamanic experience to be the same as the last. But it never seems to work that way. Sometimes there are similarities, but usually the expectations prevent us from perceiving what’s actually happening and make it harder to have shamanic experiences.

Tommy talked about this as “Faulty sensory appreciation”. He explained it to mean that where you are is not where you think you are. Alexander technique is about retraining and activating ones proprioceptors so that our perception of where we are and how our body is acting matches what our body really is actually doing. (A proprioceptor is defined as a sensory receptor that receives stimuli from within the body, esp. one that responds to position and movement.)

He continued that we need to have the experience, not react to the experience we’re having. We can change the quality of our experience by saying to ourselves “This is me having the experience of…”. And in this way, we focus our attention on what we are doing instead of reacting to it. My understanding of this was that by verbalizing what we are doing, we distract the conscious mind much in the same was as the Piazetzner meditation works (I'll write about this in another post). His description was to “become part of the experiences you are already having.”

In discussing his Alexander work, he gave a lesson in how to teach in general. If you try to get a person to conform to what you expect, the person will get an idea of what to do, but it won’t be the awareness that they need. It won’t be the internal awareness that generates the change. We need to meet the person where they are and offer alternatives, not try to force the person to change in the manner in which I think is best.

If one acts on an expectation, one’s own or another persons, or what experience has taught you from unreliable sensory perception and diminished kinesthetic cues, then one is not relating to reality, one is relating to one’s expectations. An example is when you reach down to pick up a suitcase, expecting it to be heavy, only to realize it is empty. You need to divest yourself from being who you think you need to be and you can be yourself.

I would add that it's important to always know that our perceptions of the world are always changing. If we react to things according to our experience, we may be reacting in a way appropriate for who we used to be but not who we are now. And if we continue to react in the same ways, then we actually prevent ourselves from growing and lock ourselves into one way of being. The experience of "dying" is very common in shamanic experience, and it can be understood here as reaching a point where we need to spiritually die and be reborn in order to let go of our old way of relating to the world in order to move forward.

A less dramatic way to approach this problem in to experience our emotions and not react to them in our usual way. In parenting, I find that often it’s best if I am non-reactive to my child and let them work through their emotions without influence from my emotional reactions. My sense from Tommy was that he felt that we should approach ourselves in this way so that we experience ourselves without judgment which allows us to experience ourselves without the weight of our own expectations.

I was very impressed with Tommy’s teachings and with his approach to healing. So much so that I had a very interesting response. I wondering what would have happened had I met Tommy earlier in life, before I went to acupuncture school. Would I have then studied Alexander technique first? Or is it the experiences I’ve had as a result of going through acupuncture school that allowed me to recognize what we was teaching? My own approach to these thoughts is usually to have faith that I am supposed to be an acupuncturist and if I was supposed to be an Alexander teacher, I would have met Tommy before I started studying Chinese Medicine.

I also wondered if I should start to study Alexander technique with Tommy (if that becomes geographically feasible at some point)? I realized that I don't need to study an entirely new system to be able to use his teachings to find wisdom in what I do already.

I left their wondering if there is a way to do Alexander technique on the soul? Is there a way to activate the proprioceptors of the soul, making us more in tune with our soul and inner being. To know when we are in touch with our soul and to know when we are basing our actions on experiences rooted in faulty spiritual sensory perception. I think Tommy’s answer would be that as there is no difference between the body, mind, and soul, that when we do that on the body, then we are becoming more in tune with our souls. Though I’ll have to ask him.