So, today is Candlemas! Traditionally its when candles where taken into church to be blessed. It occurs 40 days after Christmas, and is known in the church year as The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, when Mary took Jesus to the temple to be blessed.
Snowdrops are sometimes called Candlemas Bells as they tend to open about now. There is a legend about the snowdrop that says an angel took pity on Eve after she and Adam were banished and made a snowdrop bloom as a symbol of hope to cheer her up.
As with many Christian festivals there are echoes of pagan festivals underneath it. Candlemas falls on or around a cross-quarter day, midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. So, the days are getting longer again!
Known as Imbolc (lambs’ milk) because the lambing season begins around now it was also called Brigantia for the Celtic female deity of light. In the Christian tradition we recall St Brigid on 1 February.
In some countries pancakes are eaten at Candlemas.
SOoooooo
Light candles
Make pancakes
Take photos of/draw/look closely at snowdrops. Find your hope for the coming year.
This can be a gloomy, decorations down, back to work/school in the dark time of year. But, celebrating is GOOD for us and the more we do, the better we feel.
So, why not, as you take down the tinsel and cards, celebrate Epiphany, which is when the Magi, (wise men – or women!) actually arrive in the Christmas story?
You could: Bake an Epiphany Cake – google it and you’ll find lots of recipes.
And/Or hold a little ceremony and Chalk the Door as a house/classroom blessing and an expression of hopefulness for the year ahead?
The custom of chalking the door is an old Epiphany custom, one that is still used and is growing in popularity again.
The 20 and the 23 refer to the date, the + to the Cross of Christ and the C M B EITHER represent the traditional names of the Magi, Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar OR Christus mansionem benedicat – Christ bless this house.
So, why not…..
Celebrate Ephiphany by reading the story of the Magi from Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 2 and chalking your door or the door of a friend or relative. Teachers, you might process around your school and chalk every door you can find!
Here’s the reading…
“After Jesus’ birth, Wise Men from the east came to Jerusalem. They asked, “Where is the child has has been born to be king of the Jews?…..King Herod sent them to Bethlehem…The star they had seen when they were in the east went ahead of them. It finally stopped over the place where the child was….
The Wise Men went to the house. There they saw the child with his mother Mary. They bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures. They gave him gold, incense and myrrh”
Then Chalk 20 + C M B + 23 (in any colour) and say, if you wish,
God is love. The infant Christ was born as God’s love on earth. Christ dwells within each loving person, each loving act.
May God dwell in us and in this house in 2023. May She/He bless us richly and may we be God’s blessing to others. Amen
And you might talk before or after about your hopes as a family/class for 2023 – personal or as a community.
And THEN eat more gold coins……….and cake!
With thanks to Mark Earey at the Queens Foundation Birmingham for this idea.
An Alexander Class for Parents and Carers (babies welcome)
Mondays 1.30 – 2.30 £10 per class or £45 for 7 weeks
Learning the principles of mindful movement – working WITH our bodies, not against them. Help yourself to easier movement and learn how to support your developing child as they grow.
Clinical trials show the Alexander Technique provides substantial long term relief from lower back pain. It is in the NICE guidelines for Parkinson’s disease to relieve symptoms, including depression and improve balance. It is relaxing, grounding, stress reducing….it can be life changing.
An excellent talk on movement and why the fitness industry gets it badly wrong from a fitness expert and male model, Roger Frampton. He highlights the ridiculous practice of Western cultures of taking master movers – also known as children – who squat naturally and with ease and then teaching them to SIT for 7 or 8 hours a day.
I suspect that this single practice, the practice of replacing the natural human positions of standing and squatting with sitting on that man made, modern and malign invention THE CHAIR probably contributes more to the epidemic of back pain in the Western world than anything else.
Sitting, slumped over, limits our breathing, contracts our spines, weakens our core muscles and probably much more. We used to squat – Frampton calls it the ‘pre-chair resting position’ – why were we made to stop???
Frampton says we should watch children to understand how our bodies want to move and try to get back our full range of movement – the movement we once had. He criticizes the outcome focus of the fitness industry – constantly measuring time, distance, repetitions, weight – and says we should focus instead on HOW we move – and focus on movement, not looks, not muscles. Work with your body, not against it, he says and prioritize the spine. You are, as a Chinese saying has it, as old as your spine.
So, the Alexander Technique – not about posture but about movement – put movement first, understand how your body wants to move, used to move – find an Alexander teacher or, perhaps better still, watch a small child.
On Saturday, 16 people turned up at St Peter’s Church, Macclesfield to explore the simple, yet complex movement of walking. We all know how to walk. What we don’t always know is how WE walk and how we might walk with more ease, more enjoyment. And that is what we explored together.
And it was immense fun – a really good workshop. And people learned a great deal. And we metaphorically covered a great deal of ground though we physically didn’t walk any great distances.
And looking back on any workshop or group session I COULD pat myself on the back, as the person running the workshop and say ‘well-done, I ran a good workshop’. Or, alternatively, ‘that didn’t work, I must not be a very good teacher’. And in these days of an education system that measures teachers on how well their students do, that is certainly a tendency. But that view, it seems to me, puts TOO much emphasis on the role of the teacher and not enough on the role of everyone else in the room.
It’s not that the teacher has NO role or responsibility. Of course they do. It was my job, yesterday, to ensure that the physical and emotional environment was as safe as possible – that people knew they weren’t going to be judged or criticized. I try to make sure the physical environment is as beautiful as possible too – that tells participants I value them. As does the fruit and treacle flap jack at break time. And it’s my job to be as skillful a teacher as I can be, to keep studying and learning myself and to teach as clearly as I know how. I am responsible for the pace of the workshop, the content of the workshop.
On this particular afternoon I was also lucky enough to have two other Alexander technique teachers to help me, the lovely Janey Goodearl and the wonderful Su Harrison.
But – and it is an important but – the other people in the room play an absolutely essential role in the success of any workshop. Their openness to learning, their generosity to one another, their courage in being willing to change and look at new ways of doing things are things the teacher or workshop leader can encourage but not actually give. Only the participants can do that.
So, as I look back on Saturday’s workshop and reflect on it, I have to pay tribute to the open-hearted, warm, friendly and open-minded participants for the learning that took place. To Janey and to Su, for their invaluable help and to all the lovely people who came together to form a community of learning the Alexander technique together.
If we learn, we change. And at the end of four hours, people had changed. They said,
‘I feel safe and more stable and more appreciative of the ground’
‘I learned how strong my lower body is’
‘when I went for a walk I thought more about the process of walking instead of being in my head’
‘I felt more grounded, more connected with the ground’
‘I felt a lot more stable, I looked up, I enjoyed going for a walk!’
‘I’m taking away a sense of freedom and stability’
‘I’m taking away the need to slow down’
‘I’m going to be a bit gentler with myself about change’
‘I learned that holding yourself rigid is a silly waste of effort’
Well done, those students of the Alexander work. And thank you for a good afternoon’s learning.
Sometimes, running Alexander Technique groups is the MOST enjoyable, satisfying and above all, funniest job I can imagine. And today was one of those days. There aren’t many groups of people where I can picture myself saying, ‘Let’s imagine we are a pelvis, and then paint ourselves a pelvic floor!’ but my Union Chapel Alexander groups are that kind of group so today we did precisely that.
First, though, we began with me deciding and admitting that I need to learn how to teach voice as an Alexander technique teacher and that I need my groups to teach me how to do it. There are singers in my groups and other voice users – that is, other humans! So why would I not use these experts to learn from?
We are language using animals. On the radio today I heard a paleo-linguist say that speech is finely controlled breathing. And the Alexander technique is, first and foremost, a breathing technique. So, with the help of Harriet Anderson’s excellent The Thinking Teacher’s Body we first thought about standing in a quiet, balanced way so that our musical instrument, i.e. our body, was as aligned and relaxed as possible. And while John, (thank you John) read aloud an extract from Harriet’s book I went round and used my hands to help people explore that quiet standing.
Then we did one of Harriet’s ‘Explorations’ and attempted to vocalize in a really good slump. And we explored how that sounded and how that felt. Linda said it felt like a large fat cat trying to squeeze through a small cat flap! And then we explored vocalizing while in a more balanced and open state – and the difference that made.
But it was after coffee that we became a pelvis! Martyn and Linda were the ischial tuberosities, Fiona the pubic synthesis. John was the sternum and spinal column, other group members were the iliac crests. And I painted in a pelvic floor.
When we could stop laughing enough to think about what we had done, we agreed that this was a funny, powerful way to explore our mental body maps – and to learn about and think about the extraordinary miracle that is the human body. So my thanks to one of MY teachers, Bruce Fertman for both the ideas and the confidence to try them out.
We did a LOT of voice work today – and I felt I learned a huge amount from my committed and generous students. And we all felt we had started to explore a way of studying the Alexander technique together – and breath and voice – that we can extend and develop in future sessions. And we laughed – a lot. And I LOVED the session. As always, I feel grateful and privileged to teach this work.
So, here’s to more pelvis building….. and to more tuning of the musical instrument that is the human body.
This week we are going to take some time to consider what the founder of our work called the ‘primary control’ and which others refer to as the ‘primary pattern’ – that is, that the body is an integrated whole, not a collection of disconnected parts, and that it needs to move and work as a whole. What I do with my neck affects my feet – what I do with my feet affects my head. It sounds obvious but humans manage to forget this because we are SO absorbed by….where we are going, the facebook page in front of us, butting into the conversation, pulling up one more weed….etc, etc. And then we wonder how we hurt ourselves 🙂
Those in my groups who are new to the work this term will revise what we have learned so far about standing easily, about sitting easily and we will coach one another (a teaching technique I use a LOT) to remind us what we might remember to make life as easy as possible.
And we will look in our anatomy study at the amazing, incredible structure that is the spine.
Those who have done this work for a while will ALSO revise what we can usefully think about in order to sit/stand easily and then take that knowledge into movement, into transitioning between sitting and standing and standing and lying down and lying down and standing up, while remembering to remember ourselves as well as what we are doing.
AND for the first time I am teaching a shared lesson on Monday afternoon in WhaleyBridge at Riverside Wellbeing. The lesson is full but email me if you would like to be kept posted about future chances to come along.
This week we move from sitting, to standing. And we will think of how we can stand with more ease and more enjoyment. One regular student of mine, after studying the Alexander work for some years said to me, ‘I know it sounds odd but I used to not enjoy standing and now I do’. Being able to stand in a balanced and easy way is a skill and a gift that is often overlooked and under appreciated – and it is good for us.
So we will look a little at the anatomy of standing, at the weight of the head and where and how it balances on the end of the spine. We will observe each other standing and see what we notice. We will observe and explore the act of standing in ourselves, too.
We may consider how we move between sitting and standing – and explore different ways of doing that with grace and ease. And we will develop a gentle standing warm up routine that we can do on waking or at any time of the day to gently wake up the body and get ready for the day or the activity ahead.
And we will discuss when, how and how much we stand on a daily basis and how we might apply Alexander work to all of that.
This week saw the start of new Alexander groups in Manchester and Macclesfield. Some students are completely new to the work, others have attended previous group courses or had some 1:1 lessons. I asked them all what they hoped to gain from our shared study of Alexander and why they had come.
Some folk mentioned improving their posture – how they stand and walk and sit. And we will work on those important topics. Others spoke of reducing pain and stiffness – and many people find that Alexander work achieves those things. Several spoke about movement – they had come because they wanted to move more easily, more gently, more enjoyably.
One spoke movingly of how her work in previous groups had increased her confidence, reduced her anxiety and pain (and medication!) and how this profound work had transformed her life. Sometimes it does that – we come for a bad back, we discover a lifetime’s study that can change how we are in the world. It can go very deep!
And we made a start by looking together at sitting and sitting bones, at sitting more comfortably. We discovered the joy of knowing that sit bones are also called ‘ischial tuberosities’ and resolved to use that knowledge frequently in the week ahead and to drop the phrase into conversations wherever possible.
My regular students and I learned Bruce Fertman’s ‘dolphin’ movement together. There was laughter, learning and, I think, a bit more freedom in movement by the end, for all of us. I was certainly smiling more, less tired, more optimistic. I LOVE working in groups 🙂 My students are a reason to be cheerful.
Jennifer Fox Eades: Alexander Technique Teacher 