21 August 2006

Finishing

I always sit till I see some living thing; because if such appears, it is sure to be appropriate to the place.

John Constable


I love this – quoted by Ronald Johnson in his The Book of the Green Man. It is so true, of work, of meditation, of perseverance in general – eventually it is all ignited into life by the venturing in of a spark of inspiration stimulated by one's dutiful and selfless efforts. The work then seems to generate its own energy. The difficulty though with most things is how and when to finish. Obviously not when one feels like it – there is no discipline in that. Such feelings are generally distractions – boredom setting in, pangs of hunger or thirst, weariness. In Alexander Technique they have developed a concept called inhibition which roughly means to delay reacting to a stimulus that one normally reacts incorrectly or badly to, and then choosing a more appropriate response. It is basically a way of reconditioning or a way of bringing a little control into a life ruled by urges. And it is control, not freedom, but nevertheless it can be a useful technique to apply when one begins to weaken and feel the ego finding excuses to curtail or finish a practice session. At such junctures just tell yourself – OK five minutes more. And because such times are junctures – passages from one use of your energy to another – the work you do during that five minutes often has a very different character to what went before – it opens out and is less burdened by heaviness and seriousness. This is also the case if you only have half an hour at your disposal for practice instead of the usual two or three. You don't need to pace yourself in the same way through that thirty minutes, which brings a lightness and a charge of energy into the work. However, without the heaviness and the seriousness for your spirit to battle against you wont develop either the gravitas or the grace required for complete immersion into the work or into life, on a deep level. Without discipline life is only, as my teacher points out, passing from one sensation to the next.

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