Prolegomena to Sandra Bain Cushman’s
http://www.sandrabaincushman.com/about.html book Mind Body 40 Days
http://mindbody40days.blogspot.com/2011/01/day-9-podcast-post-upcoming.html.
I
Any living practice is creative in its nature.
Creative events reach back from the future and draw us towards them.
Any undertaking that has its origins in past practice is determined, a repercussion and an outcome, and not a creative undertaking at all.
How do we resolve these seeming contradictions within a tradition of established practice?
Perhaps, by being present in the moment and participating in its unfolding.
II
Once we develop an understanding of our particular practice, the practice changes: it has grown, and continues to grow, with and through our engagement in it.
So, a tradition is creatively renewed by its practitioners, those who exemplify the unique quality of Creative endeavour which the tradition broadcasts and makes available through their practice.
III
The habits of our bodies and physical behaviour, our thinking and feeling patterns locked within them, come from past experiences. They are historic. Our thinking and feeling lives are connected to our physical lives. Poor use in any one area has negative reactions and effects in the others.
If our habits are useful, efficient and support our aspirations in life, then they are likely the result of training, an available skill-set.
If our habits are the result of trauma, bad education, misdirected intention, accidental and arbitrary arisings, give us discomfort, pain, distress, and fail to support what we wish for ourselves and hope to become, good to address them.
This requires a beginning.
IV
Whatever our aspiration, level or capacity, is Sandra Bain Cushman’s book / the Alexander technique / any practice or tradition, of use to us?
The good news is, we are each equipped to recognize what we need. We may trust that, even in the noise and confusions of daily living, necessity speaks to us.
Sometimes what we need, and comes to us, is our particular way in life. Sometimes, it is on the way to our way. How to discriminate?
Perhaps, undertake to engage with the material and apply it, as best we are able, for a period of forty days. This is both long enough and short enough.
Conveniently, this book covers a period of forty days and invites a gentle engagement between the reader and author.
Then, if this is not for us, we may honourably put the book aside with the taste of undertaking a modest, but substantial, commitment.
So, good to begin. We begin where we are, but we begin today.
V
A bona fide practitioner engages with their tradition, to the degree that they are able to bear.
A bona fide tradition, in turn, reaches over and takes the practitioner into its confidence.
The tradition is unique.
The practitioner is also unique.
Such is the benevolence of the Creative Impulse that creative insights, invested by the tradition in its practitioner, are shaped to marry the individual and their Individuality to their tradition, and provide a dwelling-place for them within it.
Sandra Bain Cushman is an acknowledged, accredited and recognized practitioner, one who has paid the price of admission and been given something in return.
This gift remains in motion.
Thursday 20th. January, 2011;
Monasterio Nuestra Senora De Los Angeles,
Monjas Dominicas,
Sant Cugat, Spain.
