For Your Own Good

As a lifestyle choice, I find the strategy of slowing down to be a productive strategy. I've gotten so much benefit from taking a bit more time to do whatever I'm about to do that I fully endorse going slower. Mainly allows me to consider the way I'm about to do it.

Except at my current pace, it seems that I'm slowed to the point of irritating productive, functional people. I've been accused of being passive-aggressively slow, which is not what I intend. A former friend of mine declared I've slowed to the point of becoming a "Walking Stop Sign."

I do feel a bit self-righteous when I'm driving exactly six miles over the speed limit and in Hawaii I will still hold up a line of cars behind me who want to go fifteen miles over the speed limit. I can feel the anger of those who are tail-gating me. Then we pass a cop car and they all fall back, obviously thankful that me driving slower just prevented them from getting a ticket for wanting to speed fifteen miles over the speed limit as they usually would be doing.

I used to feel self-righteous about changing the level that my culture doesn't want to touch each other too - almost to the point of "forcing" or "training" people to allow me to touch them and to invite being touched.

There were many other actions I did that violated people's cultural expectations about autonomy, independence, personal space and respect that I inadvertently challenge by my very nature of not being affected as others are by social constraints.  I've had to learn so much about body language to be able to deal with feeling rejected, isolated and misunderstood. For instance, being near-sighted and not comfortable with glasses or contacts, I tended to stand too close to people when talking, encouraging them to back away from me or flee during a conversation.

When I finally gave in and accepted that it was OK that people in my culture did not want to be touched, I think others lost out on the value I could offer them about the importance of being touched.

Most people didn't seem to want what I had to offer them in that manner anyway. It was only in the expression of friendships that people would tell me later that they had misunderstood my overtures of wanting to be their friend; once they understood being affectionate was how I treated my friends they were happy to count themselves a member of my club.

But I had to be almost manipulative in a teacherly sort of way to "train" people to allow me to touch them. At first I'd touch people only when leaving them - on the upper arm. I'd do it when we were parting to communicate that their touching me back was completely voluntary and not required. It seemed to help if people with whom I'd like to invite closer to being friends with me would see how I treated my friends. I did this by touching those who were already my friends in their presence. Then they could say, "See, this is how she treats people she knows so I need to expect her to do that with me."

I got to experience being on the other end of how I irritated people by pushing their comfort zones recently. I have a friend who doesn't have much experience in social mores. As an unfortunate result, others do not want to be around her because she makes them feel uncomfortable with social blunders. But they can't quite put their finger on what she does that makes them want to exclude her if asked. One of the things she does is to stare at people. She does it because she likes them and is interested in what they're doing, but staring is also how she pays attention to what they're saying. Having her do that to you can really becomes irritating in a strange way. It begins to make you wonder if she's staring at you for her own agenda while she is making own judgments about your actions that she is sure to catchyou doing because she is watching so intently.

I make people uncomfortable because I'm so observant, even if I don't stare. Once people realize you have turned your attention to them, it's a bit unnerving to them how much you can successfully notice that they do not realize they are revealing to you.

There's a strange ripple effect in mentioning things that aren't often discussed too. In my past the mother of my stepson gave me this little talk about how the people closest to children are the ones who are most likely to be sexually molesting them. She got it from the news, so I could have merely cast the mention of the subject off as a media fad. But as time went by, I couldn't help but take what she had said personally. Her paranoia about what was not happening resulted in her six year old son no longer getting to enjoy being read to while sitting in my lap, or hanging out with the family and friends on the couch draped over each other in a puppy-pile. It was as if his mother was, in a roundabout way, trying to accuse me personally of molesting her son by cautioning him not to trust the grown-ups he knew about an issue which he had no clue what it meant at the time. Her actions really made me angry, because she cautioned her son in such a general way without giving him the real information about what was objectionable about it. But it also made me realize how an accusation like she made can so easily become the same as a foregone conclusion.

So I decided to let sleeping dogs lie and stop trying to get people to touch each other more often, along with not touching her son. It was a sad day to have to give up some of the true affectionate pleasures of taking care of her kid. It made me want to leave the situation and stop offering what I'd been doing for the family, but I imagined at the time that what she was saying was a reasonable request that had to be respected at some point anyway in her son's upbringing.

I think my decision at that time was a mistake, in retrospect. I should have negotiated that time in her son's life to do without parental affection to be when he was older, when he could have understood sexuality and how it could be twisted.

All these points seem related to me because how they are "for your own good."

At what point does an opinion or belief in a value (such as the value of being appropriately affectionate) become a coercion or a sales technique or proselytizing?

Tricky to Communicate

 It is so curious how common it is, when you are attracted to study something, what usually attracts you is so seldom the real thing. You can only find out how misguided and naive you were later, once you dedicate yourself to learning about what captured your curiosity.

After reading a few books on better explaination and communication, I decided to apply its message to introducing Alexander Technique. 

 Most of the models that were suggested, (the book that "walked its talk" the best was "The Art Of Explanation" by Lee Lefever) used a "solve a problem" model. Although I recognize that the motivation to change and improve is often driven by a painful or negative problem, it has always seemed to me to be a tawdry appeal. Alexander Technique ends up sounding like snake oil if you list the many ways that it can be applied. We are hit by so much advertising in our culture.

The advantages of learning Alexander Technique are a bit like learning to read. Because the skill is a "how" and not really a "what," it can be applied to any interest. In our culture, reading is essential, but how would you convince a grownup who lived in a illiterate culture that they should invest the time to learn to read?

Of course, I ended up using Alexander Technique to solve many of my own problems. At the time, I was a sales person for my sign business. My "natural" voice mannerisms used to modulate up and down, which meant to prospective sign buyers that I was possibly unreliable so they didn't want to give me half the money up front to make them a sign. Using what I'd learned from Alexander Technique, I was able to change my voice mannerisms. A.T. had other advantages for me in that it allowed me to change how others regarded me in their first impressions. To give you an idea of its many other applications, I've used it to walk without a congenital limp, to learn to juggle, to learn faster to play nine-ball at a pool table, to prevent wrinkles on my face and to stop being petrified about public speaking.

But after thinking about all of these, I decided to select as the motive for my little storyboard the same reason that originally attracted me to become interested at my first exposure. Using Alexander Technique has the ability to change my consciousness, to expand my awareness - to evoke happiness...to "flow." Abraham Maslow had called this state of flow: "peak experience."

"Flow" - I believe that it's a term coined by this researcher/psychologist, (who's last name I can't spell) 
http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html

So, I made a storyboard. It's a sketched outline of how I'd explain Alexander Technique using my idea. Here's my story board... (Click on it to enlarge)

 In my case, my desire to evoke "FLOW" that was what attracted me to Alexander Technique. As I learned and studied, unlike most misunderstandings about the nature of what you're really learning, my hunch about Alexander Technique turned out to be the "real thing." My efforts to embody what my Alexander teachers had me "undo" did not disappoint my initial expectations. My original motive to learn Alexander Technique came from a desire to find a way to evoke an elusive state of mind that made me very, very happy... A state of mind that I'd experienced many times that was "flow" but I couldn't evoke it on purpose.

Bear in mind this sketch is merely a suggestion about how the real presentation would go...

Of course, from seeing a sketches of images on a story board, if you're not the creator, it might be tricky to imagine what the sketches would be indicating. Qualities of the communication might be determined by the pictures that are chose to be used to influence the final result. For instance, here's a picture of a Balinese dance teacher with his arms guiding a younger dance student, his hands entwined and supporting.

But this next one is even better....Because it shows the "embodied cognition" in the teacher's stance who has her hands on the torso to show by example in the moment the way she knows the younger girl in front of her could move freer. The teacher is emulating or modeling in the way she moves at the same time she is communicating what she means to the student. That's the magic part of what makes the Alexander Technique so unique. I racked my brain to find another example of this somewhere in the world, and this was the only thing I could find. But how many people have been to Bali to take dance lesson who would have known about this method of communication?

Can you think of another example where the teacher uses this direct "showing" method of teaching?

What do you think of this style of presenting Alexander Technique? If you're the sort of person who can imagine something from a sketch or an idea, what do you think of this story board plan?

(Also, I'd love to see the results of a story-board to illustrate or plan out what you'd like to communicate that you might have made.)

Sprain

Decades ago in my early forties, I was driving on my way home to Bolinas after dropping the guy I worked for off at a doctor appointment and where he was staying overnight. I hadn't eaten all day and had just picked up something to nibble on the way home. Stopped at a long, level traffic light line of cars at Tam Junction, I had taken my foot off the brake to kick off my slippers and open the container in the seat next to me. WHAM! The drunk pulling out of the liquor store parking lot had assumed that since my brake lights weren't on, my car was going 30 mph. He pushed my car into the car in front of me, causing me a whiplash injury.

I'd never been in this situation before. What happens is the insurance company wants to have their chiropractor look at the damage and access it. So I thought I'd stop doing Alexander Technique for three weeks before the assessment. My logic was if there was anything that was going to go wrong, I wanted to get paid for it. Big mistake!

A day after the appointment came and went, (when I really expected to get some help, but didn't,) I feel asleep after some circus-sex (I'll leave you to imagine what that means, OK?) with a towel underneath half my hip. I woke up with a hip sprain and sciatica. Ouch!

If you know anything about Alexander Technique, we believe that the head and neck relationship is key for every coordinated move in the body. Having a problem there and not using Alexander Technique to stop it, meant something likely to go wrong.

This sort of sprain wasn't the sort of thing you can use rest to recover from, because resting stiffens it. So every morning you must move to get some relief from pain. It takes about six to eight weeks minimum to recover. I wasn't. The way I was twisted when I learned to walk funny as a baby happened to feed into the likelihood of how the sprain had happened.

Because I knew Alexander Technique, I could mitigate staying in pain and move out of what was hurting me. But it didn't work to prevent the pain from returning, and I had no idea why. Later I learned that many women who are in their early forties gain mass in the bones of their hip area, so that may have been a factor.

Eventually, I did find out why healing wasn't happening. One thing I did discover is that going to a sauna and cold plunge helped. I was socializing in a public sauna, and a guy there said I didn't sound like most people who had chronic pain, so he thought maybe he could help me. He was a hypnotist counselor. I told him my story, (which included breaking up from a ten year + relationship, partly because of being injured - good riddance!) He said that he thought I was hanging onto something; for most people that was a recent breakup. I didn't think that was the case for me. He gave me some breathing exercises that I practiced on the long, windy drive home over the Fairfax-Bolinas back way home form the sauna.

Having spent about three hours at the sauna, I pulled over to shut my eyes for a bit on the way home, because it's not good to drive when you're about to fall asleep. I draped myself over my pile of laundry in the passenger seat next to me and had a nice snooze. When I woke up, all of my pain was gone!

I got out of the car and walked around a bit to think about what had happened. I felt around in my hip and back area with my hands to see what was going on that I hadn't been able to feel on the inside. There was some strange pulling on the inside of my pelvic bone that I hadn't noticed before, because of surrounding background tension. It turned out that many moons previously, I had unknowingly developed uterine fibroids, which caused my belly to pooch out on one side. Being vain, I'd trained myself to hold in the side of my abdomen to even out my appearance that nobody else probably noticed. That's when I put into place the habit of tensing my hip that was preventing me from recovering from this hip sprain. Of course, once I figured that out, I used Alexander Technique to quit that. In a little more than a month, (after being in chronic pain for a year and a half) I had an almost full recovery.

I learned a few things from the experience. From my past, already I knew what it was like to be limited and hurt and imagine that it was going to last my entire life with no solution. But this time many people had a well-meant solution that I could try. Now I understand how discouraging it will be to try and fail when it comes to chronic pain. Rather than blaming yourself, you tend to get stubborn; most of the time this leads to discouragement against trying anything new. This is why my rescuer said my attitude didn't resemble most people in chronic pain.

So - what was it that I was "holding onto" that I had been thinking about before I fell asleep? The last time I had a mysterious problem with my coordination, I stumbled on Alexander Technique...and it was a really amazing ride. Since I had gone through all that pain, I wanted another benefit on the other end of it like my roller-coaster ride with learning A.T. dammit!

Later I realized that I did get a benefit that I could pass onto others from my experience. It was in the form of a sort of "reset button" that interrupted my hip tension pattern that intermittently caused sciatic pain. It was based on the ideas of an osteopath named Jones who originated a technique called "Strain and Counter-strain." But that's another story...

Free Won't

What is the relationship between opinion, the interpretation of experience, conviction and Truth?

Well, pure science tries to prove what's true whether people believe in it or not.

Empirical reasoning and personal observation seems to be at odds with subjective observations. For me, personal research is the Truth - but of course, it's an operational truth that can always be updated.

So - what is "proof" of reasonable, operational truth? Why - it's the sum total of your ability to integrate the conclusions and insights you've gathered and how you are making use of them. Sometimes it's the collection of assumptions you've decided to believe that other people have told you, you've read, and some of what you've decided to believe purely because it sounds like a good idea to you.

MRI brain research comes out and declares that before we know we've made a decision, our body has already prepared itself to execute it! Turns out because of this background preparation, we only have 1/64th of a second to veto what we've already prepared to do.

We don't have that "free will." Instead, we have "free won't!"


Describing reality "seems to be" one of the irresistible assumptions inherent within the structure of English...and the nature of reality will differ depending on perception/attitude/conditioning.
... AND culture!

Well - let's take the saying "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth."(For those in ESL, it's an expression implying that carefully equal revenge is justice, even if violent.) But now Wolpert has proven that a judgment handed out of what is equal violence isn't going to be perceived as fair.

This scientist Daniel Wolpert, (self-described "movement chauvinist.") proved how perception mistakes levels of intensity.  He says people hitting each other are going to escalate the payback, all the while intending to deliver "an eye for an eye." How the brain interprets relative force depends on if you're doing it to someone else or if the force is getting it done to you.

Apparently, relative force is just one perceptual misconception that got measured - there are many more that haven't been measured...yet. Here's another one:

http://theconversation.com/fake-finger-illusion-pokes-holes-in-body-ownership-18508

This makes me sort of feel like I'm watching MythBusters... I'm on a roll.

Most of us think in our language. (Actually, that's another way I differ from most people. I don't...think in words all the time. Sometimes, I think in images. When I think in words, they are randomly shifting phrases of words, poetically intermixed and remixed, depending on shifting priorities. I'm a person who intermixes prepositions, the tiny little relationships words.)

I observe one of the culprits for rampant miscommunication is that English doesn't have an adequate way to indicate subjective experience and frame uncertainty. English has... "seems to be," "from my point of view" or "IMHO," but these are examples of qualifiers or frames that attempt to serve this function of describing subjectivity. But these "frames" are scoffed at by the writing professionals. There's a reason for that.

When using those phrases, there's danger that a person's motive will be too easily misunderstood for why they did it. These qualifiers are touted as indicators of uncertainty by editors. Writers will be admonished by editors to come out and dare to boldly say the declaration. But, without these qualifiers, a writer's motive of an open or scientific mind won't be adequately conveyed.

What if the subjective attitude is not meant to be considered a rhetorical point delivered with uncertainty, self-effacement or as a disclaimer? "From my point of view" is not necessarily another way of saying "I haven't taken a poll or conducted my research properly."

For me, using a subjective qualifier is a proud expression of conservatively stating my own open uncertainty toward the possibility of discovery and being wrong.

Readers have reacted to my using language in this way as if I'm obligated to talk this way legally. Because otherwise I'm "making claims" that could be proved false. They imagine I'm afraid that I might be sued for making promises I can't keep.

Huh?

Why Teach?

One of my standard questions I like to ask strangers that is designed to tell me something about a person is, "Did you have especially interesting or memorable teachers during your school years?"  What is really sad is when the person cannot think of a single teacher during all their schooling who stood out as memorable or interesting! Those who have had no stand-out teacher in all their years of being a student makes me feel exceptionally lucky. These teachers below are only some of the highlights...

There was that Spanish teacher who put up with me sleeping in her class in first period in middle school who did not mind that she had to repeat her question to me once she woke me up. She began by teaching the class songs, which had my heart right off. It was also OK with her if you came up with a different way to say the same thing on a language test, which isn't allowed these days.

Then there was the middle school art teacher who, after teaching me how to enter art contests and win them, sat me down and said, "You could be a great artist, if you wanted to do that. Not just a popular artist, not just a famous artist, but a great artist." With his help, I won $4000. in art contest awards  - a tidy sum in 1968!

There was the high school history teacher who, by assigning me an event in the Civil War era and then having me research that one event in multiple history books  - he taught me about point of view, bias, inflationary language, how a conqueror changes history documentation, how persuasive language works in newscasting, advertising, etc. etc. I'd have to say that was the most useful class of any I ever had, with the exception of learning how to read.

Then there was the college professor scholar from Taiwan who, after giving me credit for a class he was teaching in the I Ching, decided he would see how I was at learning Chinese - just for fun - in the three weeks left of the quarter we had left. He strung together the broken apart elements of very complex Mandarin characters by telling a story about how the history of the meaning of the parts of that character were related. It was only later that I realized he had been teaching me at a breakneck pace of 100 characters a week - and he made it completely easy to remember! (Of course, I've forgotten all of it forty years later.) It was one of the regrets of my life that the temptation of a full college scholarship I had received made me unable to travel back to Taiwan with him to teach English and complete my studies of Chinese. When I met him I observed that he seemed to change himself around to reach specific students, who were so self-involved that they never realized what a shape-shifter he was or the apparent inconsistency of how he presented himself. In one afternoon, he presented himself as a joking fool, an authority, a political refugee, a data mine, or a friendly, grandfatherly, absent-minded professor. At that time I was about to choose a particular affectation of how to present myself, being afraid that it was some form of character dishonesty to present myself inconsistently. When I told him what I'd observed in his shape-shifting ways that afternoon, he replied, "It must be that you have this characteristic in yourself, which I believe is the rapport of good teaching."

A Chinese saying: "The best compliment to an excellent teacher is to teach another." Have taught upwards of 3000 people how to juggle three items when I used to have a business making juggling balls. I still teach people to juggle. The way someone learns and unlearns says quite a bit about who they are. So I teach people to juggle partly in order to get to know someone. Sometimes I'll use the process of learning an unfamiliar skill such as juggling to draw parallels in learning another skill - Alexander Technique - which is part of the way I make a living. Alexander Technique is a subject I teach for the love of it, and because of the value I've gotten from it. A flexible attitude of continual learning can be a form of enlightenment.  I never tire of giving people that first lesson in Alexander Technique - because even though it's a skill akin to the devotion of learning a musical instrument, I keep wondering if someone in that first lesson could get the whole thing, in a flash of epiphany.

Another reason I teach is the same reason I love to listen to improvisational music - I love to be around discovery when it's happening.

As has been mentioned, I also teach in order to know my subject better. Using my sharpened and sensitive observation skill has got to be another one of the biggest thrills for me - especially when I can making someone aware of something about themselves they never noticed previously that turns out to be extremely useful for them. Some of learning is uncovering what the person senses they already know innately, but have somehow forgotten and have become dulled to sensing from habitual repetition. Learning to unlearn what is unnecessary has the most delightful effectiveness - and it's so elegant.


It doesn't matter to me whether I'm the teacher or the learner, but sometimes it's easier to play the part of the learner. I once put a relationship back together that was on it's way to falling apart by choosing the most enjoyable and conflict-free situation as a "standing date." It was being the learner and my partner being the teacher at a skill we could do daily.

But the most enjoyable part of teaching - for me - is to simplify the subject, to not merely repeat the way I was taught. I LOVE to innovate ways to communicate the subject so that my students can learn it faster, easier and more thoroughly than I did.

Language for Perception

How do you perceive? Well, you just do it. That's an inadequate answer, so I decided to do some thinking about this.

Perhaps the way I teach people to observe themselves would be relevant to making up a language for perception. It's my business to be teaching people to perceive what they take for granted by teaching Alexander Technique. I use the often ignored kinesthetic sense as a medium, rather than the visual or auditory...but maybe we can cross-pollinate with it. Maybe we can use the same process and apply it to perception in general - say, the visual sense.

In Alexander Technique classes, students walk across the room and try to describe how they are walking. They can't, usually. So I introduce them to categories to form some questions for themselves. These categories function like thinking tools to organize and focus their point of view.

The categories are:

• timing
• sequence
• quality
• direction
• relationship

Once they have these categories, their ability to describe what they're experiencing for themselves gets unleashed. Their new ability to observe and describe what is happening works so well they can later design, on the fly, inventive ways for getting past some pretty serious self-imposed limitations.

So perhaps we could do this with perception in general. We could make general categories to help people ask themselves specific questions. Answering these questions would give us new perceptual information out of what we usually take for granted.

We're talking about the raw perception, not the content. So - how we direct attention to say, the visual sense with these categories? If I were to apply the same categories I just mentioned, I'd get something like:

• Quality: attention can be focused, like a searchlight, or diffuse like an overhead light.
  

• Timing: depending on when you pay attention, different things will be happening. A frozen image will show you stuff that you would miss in a movie, for instance. Bits and pieces do not have the same effect as the whole. Timing will influence the figure-ground relationship of what you can see. If you're moving fast while traveling, you'll have a whole different experience compared to moving slowly.
  

• Sequence: chains of paying attention to one thing after another bring different results; and mixing up sequences actually has an associative emotional effect. It's easy to mistake sequence for cause and effect.
  

• Direction: Where we are oriented contributes to Point Of View. POV and motive about what you want others to do, react and agree with you will color how you describe what you see.

Anyone else want to try one or more of these four categories about perception that I made up and apply them to help generate a new language for perception?

This is using your Thinking Skill bag of tricks!

Thinking While Angry

I have taught myself to creatively problem solve while angry. It was a very strange skill to learn, not a skill which I'd recommend to others. Better to not to get to this level in your ability to have to manage anger in the first place!

Twenty years ago, I had a relationship going with a person who was quite skilled in being manipulative. When I entered into the relationship, I observed that he also possessed ethics on when and where to apply his considerable skills in argumentation and debate. Ten years into the relationship, he eventually used his superior memory recall and debate skills to fight with me - something which I did not anticipate would ever happen. I had to firmly establish my boundaries and keep them in place as he decided that all things we had established and agreed upon previously were renegotiable. It was a trying time, but I managed it.

He came to expect me to do so. Had I not groomed the ability to creatively problem solve possible options of what to do next in spite of being angry, our relationship would have ended immediately. As it became clear later that staying in the relationship had become a toss-up whether it was good or bad for me personally, I was relieved when the relationship fell apart for practical reasons. I'm sure that the demands for training the skill to be able to problem solve while angry mitigated unpleasant reactions and effects; but perhaps it also prolonged the inevitable conflicts that later ended the relationship.

A more common situation where this skill would be useful to model would be during the parenting of teens - who again, would come to believe that everything should be renegotiated.

There were some prerequisite skills to make this ability possible. These were the ability to stop, pause or interrupt one's own habitual reaction. This can be best practiced when one is not in the throes of an intense emotion. It requires quite a bit of practice concerning the ability to surrender one's goal. There is a short window of time, (a quarter-second,) available to veto an action. You are already preparing to act as soon as you think of doing so, long before you realize you "want" to do something. It's quite telling when people around you believe you have first gotten angry - usually this is quite a bit further back before you realize it yourself.

Because of this lack of awareness, it's very difficult to veto a reaction that has already begun. This skill implies sophisticated exploration of expectations. Also useful during the learning process are pointedly specific observations of how a specific person's anger routinely works.

I learned this skill through the study of Alexander Technique. I'm not sure there is any other forum to learn such a thing, but I imagine anger management class would have these elements. Most commonly, this skill is usually described negatively as "poor impulse control." As far as I know, there is not any place suggested where "good impulse control" is taught - other than very early in life by parental guidance.

There is recently a field of study that seems to teach this skill specifically, but it's tailored toward adults. It's in the negotiation field, ( "Appreciative Inquiry,") the field of mediation or arbitration. Also, at www.newconversations.net there are free e-books on communication tools that seem quite useful. Some interesting books on this are classics in negotiation by Ury and Fisher. It's a series that started with "Getting to Yes." "Getting Past No, dealing with difficult people" More recently Fisher wrote a book with a guy named Shapiro dealing with how to manage emotions during negotiation called "Beyond Reason, using emotions as you negotiate."

Most of these contain stories and philosophy, but some of them provide practice suggestions. It's those offerings of practice that are most effective.

In an ongoing relationship, it is a good thing to make the general agreement that only one person in an argument is allowed to be "out of control." Obviously, it's best for the longevity of the relationship if safe expression of anger can happen as this role is rotated. It has been documented that women in particular suffer quite a bit in their health more than men if they do not speak up and make their "not very nice" concerns known.

I did hear about a study where four year olds were told that if they waited to eat something yummy, they could have twice as much of it when the grownups returned. Or they could eat the smaller portion that was in front of them now. The study afterwards followed the kids as they grew up who managed to wait compared to those who did not. It was found the ability to wait possibly resulted in a significant difference in general achievement.

My own mother was also a great model for how to deal with anger. She and my sister used to fight when I was a kid. By the time I became a teen, she had learned a few things about anger. She told me that people do not bother to get angry if they are not concerned about the relationship. She also modeled "cleaner" ways to fight. She never brought up "the kitchen sink" i.e: unrelated issues. She never tried to wound intentionally, retaliate or say things she might regret later. She would never accused me of being stupid and managed to resist telling me to do what she did not want me to do. But she would yell when she was upset, "I thought you're smart enough to think ahead about how your actions affect others."  Her words were quite carefully selected. This instead of the classic name-calling angry routine of: "You thoughtless, selfish, cruel complainer. Why should what you want come first?"

She also made it quite clear to me that people who are out of control while angry say things they don't mean. She said this is mostly because people get scared - fear is a big component of anger. She gave me ways to calm myself down when I got angry and left me the time and place to do so. Then she modeled the ability to talk out the concerns that made us want to get angry with each other, once we were calmed down enough to figure out what we really thought and wanted.

So it was this fortunate, firm foundation, along with learning Alexander Technique, that led me to be able to manage to learn later to creatively problem solve and actually think while angry. I believe it's a rare thing. It should be more common.

Why Did I Do That?

Do people do things for negative reasons?
I used to imagine they do. I used to think I did. But now as I have come to watch myself and others, I don't think that is the case.

What someone chooses to do, their choices may have negative consequences. It can be argued in many cases that people are a product of their conditioning - their own, environmental and parental, etc. So they don't really have a choice. But, (as far as I can tell,) everyone chooses an action (or lack of it) because of its positive aspects, not the negative ones.

Often the choice is not so wise, or the selection doesn't take crucial things into account that should have been obvious to the person. Even more commonly, the person feels as if they "must" make the choice for various justified points that they are aware are negative. Such as choosing between two evils, such as what we have to do so often when we vote. Sometimes people are aware of the negative aspects, but they decide the costs are "worth it," possibly because sometimes the costs are deferred until "later." Some people like to gamble and play the odds, imagining they won't be the one to suffer the common consequences.

I quipped lately, when in the presence of a friend of mine who is a confirmed drinker, (alcoholics go to meetings) that has more time than a smoker to change her ways, because drinkers live much longer than drinkers who smoke.

Most often, I think what happens when people make what later turns out to be a "negative" choice -- it's that their priorities changed somewhere along the line. They got trapped. Sometimes they forgot to consult all the priorities, or to even realize they might have had priorities at all.

It's as though, sometimes, we are a multitude of shifting priority. Not every priority is present at every moment. So it's possible to make a decision that caters and answers to one particular member of the multitude of priorities, and forget a crucial one that got left out. Guess this is where the ideas of the subconscious came from.

Some of the time, nobody can anticipate the sum total of how things will turn out. So it's not possible sometimes to know how a particular choice will affect things on down the line. You just have to find out, and change things as you go.

Right Brain "Baby Mind" Learning

Definitely there are occasions in adult life where it is useful to go into "direct absorb" mode and not filter learning through language.
Take for instance learning any movement skill, such as juggling...playing on a pinball machine, pool, golf, the directing of Alexander Technique, or a skill that involves another language such as playing a musical instrument.

What I prefer to determine, as an adult, is if this person I might be learning from is "worthy" to be absorbed in this completely open way. Then I deliberately open myself to them - as wide as possible and - take them and the skill in. There is no dividing line.

It actually happened not long ago for me. I was visiting a fellow collegue of Alexander Technique to trade work with him. He showed me this x-ray of his lower back; evidently four months previously, he had gotten into an unfortunate auto accident. The seat had come apart and crushed his tailbone so that it had to be removed. Usually when this must occur, the rest of the vertebrae above collapses into the empty space occupied by the tailbone. But here was the x-ray that showed this was not happening. He believed this condition of affairs reflected his discipline of deepening his work in Alexander Technique. I agreed. When he did table work with me, I was most happy to reinforce the sense he had of direction, as he encouraged me when it was my turn to move away from old patterns concerning how I had learned to walk from doing something funny to myself in the area of my hips. The effect was superb; for only the second time in my life I was able to completely move out of the twisted way I had learned to walk as a child.

Now I would say that my ability to absorb this information had to occur on a pre-verbal level, possibly because I had learned to walk incorrectly before I learned to talk. It's a common experience in learning Alexander Technique that the teacher will indicate a motion at odds with the student's established assumptions - and this was no different. It was such a surprising direction, which yielded an amazing result that I had to ask - what happened there? To which he replied - "think of that as dynamic opposition."

Anyway - in my life this "baby-mind" ability to absorb beyond language is still happily an occasional event.

How To Define Alexander Technique?

Lately, I've had great success explaining that the Technique is about the behavior chains of building habits, which is how we adapt and learn. Building habits are what makes skill possible. Trouble comes when a person forgets the habit is there, or trains a short-sighted building block of habit, which is a "pitfall" built into adapting & learning. The building blocks of skills are usually designed to disappear and become innate. If things aren't working out as intended, people assume they need to train themselves to do another thing "opposite" to an already innate habit they forgot that they're already doing, instead of training themselves to stop. With repeating a nuisance, most people see how handy it would be to stop, but they don't know the first things about how to stop.

People also do not realize the problems that old conflicting habits can create over time. People know whatever a person practices, they'll get better and better at doing. In this case, a person can be practicing unintended habits that pull themselves apart. Their normally sensitive ability to sense what they are doing becomes flooded.

Alexander Technique shows a person how they can change the way they practice and learn, as opposed to having to give up any particular troublesome activity. How useful it can be to know how to subtract what is in the way, to prevent habitual conflicts from running the show!

So when beginners want to describe what they are studying, I have them describe it as something that teaches how to uncover and undo innate, out-of-date habits that have turned into self-imposed limitations. Most people who hear that immediately remark how useful that would be to know. There are many innocent situations where a need to unlearn habits becomes obvious:

1. The self-taught who get into doing counter-productive
foundation habits from learning without a proper teacher;

2. Those who learn skills or movement compensations with
built-in pain, fear or stress from a challenging teacher;

3. Someone with arm pain who has had to train
themselves to hold up a cast; they then hold onto
the compensation indefinitely.

4. A kid who never figured out their unique size and
shape, or how that shape changes during growth.

I'm sure you can think of more of these!

Franis Engel

>
> --- John Coffin wrote:
>
> > Unfortunately, trying to describe the Technique
> in language the non-student will find attractive is
> an immediate paradox. How do you interesting someone
> in changing something they don't know exists, and
> whose influence they cannot imagine?
> >
> > John Coffin

Alexander Class Coming Sept. 24th- Oct 25th Soon

This old guy in the picture here is the guy who invented Alexander Technique. Mr. Frederick Matthias Alexander was his "Nicholas name." Merely the initials "F. M." was his nickname.

In these past few weeks, I managed to make it down to Hilo, (about an hour and a half drive) to trade work with the only other Alexander Technique teacher I have met on the Big Island named Michael Joeseph. His work with me was very much like Patrick MacDonald's work (MacDonald was one of the last students of Alexander's, he was nicknamed "the mechanic.") Michael Joeseph had never actually met either character, having been trained after the death of both of them, but one of Michael's other talents was in mechanical engineering. Because of this, it is very curious to me to experience how the quality of Alexander's work is being passed on so accurately.

I'm happy to announce that near the end of the month starting on Monday evening Sept. 24th at 6pm and continuing on Thurs at the same time and place, I am teaching ten twice weekly classes on Alexander's principles through www.waimeaeducation.com The classes are a real deal if you have never studied Alexander Technique before for reasons of the cost of private lessons which cost from $65 - $100 each; these introductory classes are only $10. each! Because Alexander Technique takes some time to learn, required attendance is for at least three weeks of class, (six classes.) So for less of the cost of one private lesson, you can get six classes in Alexander Technique! What a deal!

If you have any questions about the classes and ended up here, please feel free to ask your questions in the comments section. I'll come up with some answers, we can put them together and we'll see if they work for you!

Responsibility Assumption

An idea of "ultimate responsibility" in Alexander Technique fascinates me. It strikes me that this idea of how Alexander regards responsibility makes his work unique. Wondering about this assumption is interesting, because most assumptions are the act of intentionally setting up a given characteristic. Assumptions work like axioms; they branch off and lead down a very specific pathways of action, pre-empting all others.

It seems Alexander jumped to an assumption involving a person's ability to direct their own actions. This assumption states the person is ultimately responsible for what he does, no matter how it feels internally after routines have been adopted and feel as natural as breathing. In Alexander's world, there is no subconscious, only divided consciousness or undivided wholeness. Sometimes I wonder if this is one of F.M. Alexander's mistakes.

We do not really know all of the sophisticated responses that are put into motion in a single order we have given ourselves. Because humans are adaptable, we forget the routines we have installed or been conditioned to repeat as the "standing orders" from our past experience. Are we meant to know the ways they are carried out? Alexander thought we should know, that we need to bring our choices into awareness, but I am not so sure.

To undo the order, it seems more efficient to trace it back to its origin and change it there, rather than to piecemeal the change directly by messing with the whole system. In some ways, it's tempting to mess with the system as you become capable of doing so. But all these adjustments are merely compensations, ...until you find the originating order and the subsequent directives. You would usually only want to bother because these directives have not worked so well to solve the problem, or the circumstances have changed. Once you find these directives, then you may update them and choose different ways of responding, ...and the habit is completely and totally transformed; no looking back. This is where an ideal of "insight" or even "enlightenment" comes from - which I believe is deserved.

I wonder why Alexander did not put together that we are always falling and always uprighting our bodies; I guess he did, but he didn't spell this one out very specifically either. I imagine by the time someone was able to gain this secret for themselves, their coordination was so completely re-sensitized that it was a moot point.



For this reason, I think this assumption of "ultimate responsibility" is very much worth exploring.

How are we responsible for the ways we respond to a desire? How does knowing and responding to a desire work in particular, in me?

What To Do When Noticing Assumptions

What do you do when you notice an assumption?

Part of the challenge is to notice what you usually do. An indicator of something that is "sticking out" that may eventually become some sort of problem is a signal. Usually when people notice this, it more often means they must "shore up" or "justify" the need for their conclusion or assumption, reinforcing the circle and reapplying their "remedies" that are really keeping the circular problem in place.

Because their focus is on the content as being more important, they cannot see the larger picture of how they are caught in a repeating pattern. They only experience that some part of the pattern is working in the ways they intend, when it is really an out-of-control pattern that MUST repeat whether the person wants it whenever the trigger is pressed for the habit to "go off." I would say that there are "endorphin squirts" that occur in pressing the trigger originally, but often the experience of the squirting may not register any more because it, too has become habitual.

If you take away the need, I believe our systems "self correct". You do not have to "do" anything but experience the lack of need, then just wait and watch yourself. What happens next will tell you quite a bit about everything you have been experiencing. If you just get the familiar justifications for your habits, just stop again and wait. Each time you stop, your senses will wake up a little more as you take the next layer of the habitual assumption off. It seems that people are naturally sensitive underneath layers of habits.


That's why stopping yourself when you would have normally started talking is such an effective technique in Dialogue - or in any conversation. Listening will tell you more than talking, for obvious reasons. You merely interrrupt yourself right when you found a need to say something and watch what happens in yourself. You question your motive of wanting to talk, because there will be usually be feelings and needs underneath the assumptions.

So if you don't know what these feelings are or they don't surface because they are the submerged part of the iceberg, you can find out what they are by stopping yourself from going into the habit repeatedly. My experience has told me that there is often more than one need/motive/justification. Sometimes these are tricky to uncover, because the remedy of the assumption is trying to cover it up by answering the need. So this is where Dialogue comes in - you put yourself in a situation where this issue comes up again and again - and you watch what happens in yourself each time you notice the reaction.

Tammy, pictured here is an Alexander student of mine who has the rare ability to challenge her assumptions and do something different about them. Perhaps you have some more characteristics of how to notice assumptions - or you might have more 'tips' of what to do when you do notice these assumptions? I'd love to hear about them.

Thought Proprioception

I believe the way thought and movement work together are quite similar to the way thought works when it has no corresponding overt motion to express its effects. Intention is response, whether it has a word attached to it or not.

Some people translate action or reaction into language before they move, some don't. Sometimes translating intention into words will make their movements delayed.

Decision is the first part of response, but there can also be a habit that recognizes and handles reactions too that can work very fast.

As a technique, if you think any movement through step by step, you'll detour the "trigger" word and the corresponding sets of habits - whether they have words or not. That this works is really handy, because it can point you to a decision you made historically and then forgot.

Can Mindfulness Become Automatic?

In order to do anything reliably, it needs to be practiced. Even mindfulness or cultivating a tolerance for confronting the unknown, or anything else. You could put mindfulness into a "program" of familar habit which would spoil its positive effects, but then there are always going to be those clumsy trip-ups, surprises and nuisances that would be telling you how "unmindful" you really are.

The qualities of some disciplines do not integrate well into our "favorite" ways of doing things, and we must put them aside if we want to learn otherwise. Whether we "match" or sort for "differences," we'll notice something isn't right.
Describing qualities will often avoid cramming new stuff into our old familiar ways, assumming we "have it" if we apply our usual operations or "factoring" processes. If these things we want to "have" do not have the qualities of our former experiences of it, then we know we're missing something.

It would be nice to have unlimited learning be put on automatic, as it was when we were kids! Learning is a big job though, so as adults we're called upon to keep it together more often than open up and learn. Going from opening to learn to consolidating to apply the learning and then back to opening up to learn takes more flexibility than most grownups have. So we need some help from the kids and those who know how to learn easier.

Proprioception of Thought and Movement

I believe the way thought and movement work together are quite similar to the way thought works when it has no corresponding overt motion to express the affects of a thought. Thought has no proprioception built into it, but the judgment of movment does. But proprioception only senses differences, it is not an absolute measuring device.

Intention is responding, whether it has a word attached to it or not. Some people translate action or reaction into language before they move. It makes their movements delayed. Decision is the first part of response, but there can also be a habit that recognizes and handles reactions too.

As a technique, if you think any movement through step by step, you'll detour the "trigger" word and the corresponding sets of habits - whether they have words or not.

An Uncovered Assumption Feels Weird...

Rather than replacing a "bad" conditioning with a "good" one, practicing Alexander Technique on oneself removes conditioning. This requires learning or cultivating a willingness to tolerate and utilize unknown or unexplained results. It also involves how to apply discretion and judgment while selecting for results that will help you. Other than selling effortlessness as a means, goals are usually left to the student.

It has similar benefits to uncovering assumptions of thought which is a goal while in Dialogue. Only with Alexander Technique, you're also studying the ways how you carry out intentions, as well as how you respond and react to what comes at you.

Everyone has built up kinesthetic assumptions about how they should move to direct their actions to answer an intention. These assumptions, expressed in moving, are often quite unnecessarily heavy-handed or outdated. If you train yourself well, habit become innate. This means habits disappear and run automatically without you even noticing. If you has gotten used to being heavy-handed while training yourself - or you forgot what you already are doing, you can be habituated to simultaneously moving in opposing directions. That's why people feel all bound up - because they are.

New discoveries can be applied selectively, in theory. But sometimes in the dismantling process, you can disorient even your self-image or balance. Or you may feel as if you cannot speak or move. What you are getting is weird feelings about experiencing too much freedom. Some people decide this is alarming; all their self-preservation convictions freak out, so the teacher or situation must reassure them that nothing dangerous is happening - when really, the unfamiliar is exceptionally dangerous. The AT teacher knows ways to make it quite safe so that anyone can feel just a little weird - and their habit is always available for retreat. To want to experiment takes some daring and fearlessness, which some people lack, so often that must be trained. But that would be training a new skill of dealing with feeling unfamilarity, rather than returning to a former state that was more essential. Being able to dare to speak or move easier anyway, despite not feeling like yourself, is a new skill that can be "conditioned."

The sensation of effortlessness and weirdness is the signal you're heading into new territory. If it has a characteristic of more freedom, you might be able to make a discovery - but that's a challenge because the state often doesn't have words to formulate the new information. You cannot decide beforehand what the unknown will be "like." Each time you're heading out into new territory.

In my case, my earlier form of conditioning concerning ways concerning the way I learned to walk as a toddler was not "more cohererent." But for most people the way they learned to walk as toddlers was an excellent use of energy. Another common comment would be that more freedom feels like "coming home." So this person would agree with you - they're uncovering a more essential state of coordination that was cultivated and conditioning as a child.

Jugglers and Alexander Technique

Since I'm a juggler, and I've taught juggling, and been to many juggling conventions teaching Alexander Technique to jugglers who were much better jugglers than I will ever be, I wanted to say a few things about what I observed in people who can juggle and who try to be better jugglers.

Juggling and musicianship are obvious proofs that someone may be successful at an unbelievable high level of skill in spite of their personal self-imposed limitations. I believe that following a means of practicing that results in continuing improvement is an example of "good use," merely because it is effective.

First off, most people who do not juggle have no idea how much jugglers practice to perform successfully, just as people do not realize how much it is necessary for musicians to practice.

Practicing itself will teach quite a bit of what constitutes "constructive control". The way that a person practices will determine if they continue to get better or if they "plateau" or practice toward diminishing returns. Most jugglers quickly lose their progress if they stop practicing some of what they used to be able to do. Whereas those with natural "good use" seem to keep the memory of having learned whatever they used to be able to do much easier and longer.

Most jugglers leave out 'conscious' (The Alexander Technique definition of creative constructive conscious control) from their practice, and merely instill their routines into their 'body learning'; mostly because jugglers assume that they can learn faster by rote - or that learning by rote is the only way to excellence. Jugglers who overcome their bad use do it through sheer willpower of more and more practice, in spite of which ever "bad" posture they must overcome.

Check out this video of a juggler who we think has succeeded in spite of his limitations:
Chris Bliss
now compare him to this other juggler, Greg Kennedy: Greg, juggling easier
and here...

Essentially, most jugglers do not know exactly how they can juggle - which is proven in the classic ways they teach beginners to juggle. This common method excludes those people who are not talented with some degree of natural good use and the luck of having had accurate example and instruction from their parents on how to easily toss a ball.

I've explained some of these mystery factors of juggling for those who were not so lucky from my experiences teaching over three thousand people to juggle. You can see an example of the unusual way I have taught people in these pages:short version
For those who really want to learn to juggle, the thorough version: thorough version

If you read the instructions in the first link, you'll see how Chris Bliss has retained some of the assumptions it addresses and succeeded in spite of them. However, Chris Bliss may be "hamming it up" by imitating the common problems of beginners, such as staring & keeping ones eyes on the ball - we don't really know. We do know that the most dangerous theatrical high wire act in the business is the one where the clown up high repeatedly 'fakes' falling off the wire and saves himself at the last moment again and again.

Many jugglers rarely learn anything new, because they will just repeat what they know well to make it better and keep it up to snuff. As an accomplished juggler learns to do something, they then immediately learn to break the habit they previously trained. That's what makes them a better juggler, that they continue to learn. Usually there is no instruction in "how" to actually do these things - only dropping and dropping until they find some way to do it without dropping.

A few strategies do exist among jugglers; one is to attempt things that you believe are not possible for you, then to return to what you do know - the effect is, it makes what you do know completely reliable and easy. Of course, there are many of these learning tricks among certain jugglers that come forward in juggling conventions, but there is no codified pedagogy. I would speculate that those who have what is known by Alexander Technique as having "good use" have no idea how or why they are successful. Because of this, they are lousy teachers to people who have the problems that Alexander Technique can help with.

A juggler who has had some success but has not yet completely learned a new trick calls it, "being able to flash." This means they can sort of do the new trick but they cannot sustain it reliably. I could put my AT trained hands on someone in this situation and suddenly, they would sustain the new pattern... Some were even able to retain this sudden insight. Particularly it was interesting when I was assigned to "launch" people who were learning to ride a unicycle who already knew how to juggle and were trying to do the two actions together.

These jugglers did not know what to make of how that would happen when I would help them -other people who launched them did not have the same effect. Somehow, the people I knew assigned it's operation to making sexual attraction jokes because touch seemed to be required. ;o)

Goes to show you what people will imagine when they don't know why something works the way it does.

Assumption = Reflex & Intention Responding to Meaning

David Bohm: Every assumption is implicitly a reflex and a set of intentions. A person cannot form intentions except on the basis of what the situation means to him, and if he misses the mark on what it means, he will form the wrong intentions.

To restate in my own words, Bohm says that, for there to be an intention and the reflex that carries out an intention, there first has to be an intepretation that is based on assigning meaning.

I'll have to watch situations where that's happening in me. The first example that comes to my mind is from an infant with colic; they form the intention to cry as a response to having incomplete digestive systems, and they cry. Do they cry in hopes of getting attention from the parent? I think they're too young for that. They cry because they hurt and that's how they're little brains are wired to express pain? There's really no way of telling because they can't talk. But this is what I've seen by how they act. If you take away the pain, they stop crying, just as a horse will put it's foot back down if it stops hurting. But a dog who had trained itself to hold it's foot up will keep doing it. I don't think a child as young as that has the ability to be so trained to "call" the parent, even though the parent may assume so. That whole train of manipulation happens later as the child gets a little older.

I imagine this statement of Bohm's comes from assigning a sequence to "all" actions. He's a physicist and he wants to make a "law" of meaning, I guess. Lately, I'm quite suspicious of this idea of "all" that I also seem to want to have. It seems that "gets the wrong interpretation by missing the mark" is the operant part of the quote.

I'm not sure that there is always an interpretation process that goes on. I know that there is not always in place a trained reponse that answers an interpretation of meaning. People often do not know what to do about what meanings and conclusions they come to. The imperative nature of some of these conclusions often leads them to "do something" instead of waiting for more information. Interpretations imply familiarity, and sometimes there is no familiarity and it is obvious the unusual is wrongly interpreted. Grownups can feel uncomfortable around unfamiliarity, but kids learn from it; that's why kids will learn a language faster than their parents can.

Maybe there is "always" a meaning that is coupled with a response that doesn't have to be 'true.' If the person is observant and continues to learn, this meaning can becomes updated or more sophisticated as things turn out to be happening differently from what meaning was first assummed.

I'm not sure about this - because some of us can hang out in a ongoing state of blank curiosity (at least when a child.) People can just pay attention and experience. We can always come to conclusions about what it all meant and what is the most appropriate response to deal with it quite a bit later, when there is no imperative of fear or immediate action. I can have an ongoing intention to suspend, and just "wait and see" for instance. Would what I just described be what Bohm termed a "deep" intention? No, I think this non-judgmental curiosity is an "original" state.

Thought or intention coming before action doesn't really have to happen like that in many people who do not write - as it can happen in most people who write. People can just "do things" without thinking or having an intention - they see what happens. Then they adjust their actions toward what they want to occur, or want to avoid. Some people act in order to "stir up" something so they can have some differences to sense and then have some observations to make an intention with.

Then I come along and write about them... ;o)

Commonly Habitual

There is some bramble of confusion that goes on when human perceptual abilities interpret meaning. Humans seem to imperatively send ourselves a message of a result or conclusion so very quickly. Why so quick and needfully is this done? How does it serve us for humans to be designed to be relentlessly driven? If there is a habit in place that can go into action to respond to our instantaneous interpretations or conclusions (and once the order of "go" is allowed,) humans act so automatically! This sense registers as if the action is "going off by itself," it's such a common experience. We seem to blindly follow an already defined habitual course of what we assume is a suitable response. If it has been conditioned in us, that's the way we stay.

Someone can prevent themselves from making a conclusion or an interpretation, and instead "suspend" this habitual response and the order to now go into action. Then these habitual responses can be put on "temporary pause." Doing this has an advantage; it makes it possible to choose how you prefer to react and definitely gives you more options beyond how your assumptions and conclusions will allow you to react. Once you interrupt this Perception-Interpretation = Response process you can do at least three other possibilities: you can choose to can gain more data before you make an interpretation or conclusion, you can choose to do something else more appropriate or just choose to not react indefinitely.

But this takes quite a bit of training and skill to be able to do, because the justifications that require these habits have often been imperatively shaped and installed under duress. Instead most of us only sense what is bothering us - the negative problems. We don't seem to ask the right questions about how we got to where we are now. Many disciplines and therapies address this lack of questioning, and this lack of good ideas that may need to be updated. Some people don't ever ask themselves any questions!

It seems rare for people to be able to question or suspect our own thinking strategies in this "meta" reframing way, without undermining our sense of self in my familiar subculture. But I believe the ability to question one's own means of carrying out intentions is a sign of a strength of character.

Perhaps this is because we as humans are not designed to sense our own innate habitual programming that is "doing" something - we just use it. Habits are designed to become innate and disappear into skills that we can build on. But I can't believe that we humans have a design flaw that freezes us indecisively as more habits combine with other contradicting directives. But that's what I see happening at this point in my thinking. I know that one's bias selects what one gives attention to - so what I notice everywhere is probably wrong. Nevertheless, I see it so often.

I'm wondering if suspecting the assumptions and content of the original conclusions themselves would be even more useful than going to the trouble of suspending the reaction,(as opposed suspecting the strategy that is being used to respond to it.)