My present training course, TCAT-NYC, is now officially a year old. Our second year is underway. I’m in the middle of the second year of my Alexander Technique teacher training. At this particular moment, I have found that my priorities have shifted. I am trying to have my training be a real priority in my life. I kind of feel at times that I have gone from merely training just for myself to training so that I can teach the Technique, as well as training just for myself. The fact that I will be teaching feels more concrete.
Up until now, I feel that this second year of my training has been a rocky one. My difficulties have in large part vanished. For now, at least. Now I really look forward to going to class. I am feeling a lightness of spirit as well as a lightness of body.
How did this change come to pass? I don’t know. I spent the winter break in France.
A few days before the barbarous acts took place, I stood, in the Musée du Luxembourg, in front of a a painting by Renoir, Les Filles de Paul Durand-Ruel, Marie Thérèse et Jeanne, and tears started to fall. I couldn’t stop them. For some reason my tears reminded me of the times I well up in tears in training. In training this happens from undoing; in front of the Renoir, well, I was overwhelmed by exquisite beauty and I wondered how such a thing could have been created. It seemed like an ethereal distillation of French aesthetic elegance.
I came back to NYC exhausted both mentally and physically, glad to be safe and soundly home, yet very sad and constantly teary. Traumatized. Every morning as I am sifting through the news from France, I cry. However, it would seem that I went back to training with a sense of renewal, feeling kind of centered. Go figure. Now, training has become my personal haven. I am so grateful to be able to go about this business of my life.
Je suis Charlie: it’s a refrain with many overtones, isn’t it? This slogan has nothing to do with Alexander Technique teacher training, does it? Well perhaps it does for my own, personal training…
View from the big studio at TCAT-NYC…
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