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...

Recluse

There are many reasons why a person ends up being alone. Some of them are negative, and some are positive, and some are accidental, and some of these choices happened "accidentally on purpose."

Sometimes you make choices to do what you think you want to do, and only later find out that you've inadvertently chosen to do it all by yourself after you're entirely committed. If you think about how long it takes to get exactly what you want, how long people work to set themselves up for retirement - it's a long haul. Most people don't know what they're going to do with themselves when they retire because they never had a chance to do what they loved to do - or they're not able to reinvent themselves.

Sometimes it is just that we cannot "sell" to others our desire to have things the way we want. There has to exist someone else who wants share that situation with us, and that is sometimes a tall order if our dreams are unique. Or sometimes, we end up alone because there is something we do that is not socially acceptable to others who would usually want to hang out with us - too much "baggage."

I am overwhelmed with how many of my peers have become alcoholic as they age - probably somewhat because "it doesn't matter now." Some people go through a process of "giving up" (sometimes necessary) without ever coming out on the other side of it to understand what they positively do want. Some just decide not to bother learning anything new and get along with what they have. For them, it's just too much trouble to feel like you don't know what you're doing. This is one example of circumstantial isolation. If you don't change with the times, you get left behind. And possibly disillusioned about what you believe is not possible now.

Relationships teach you about yourself. (At least, that is how they have always worked for me.) In a way, it's expending less effort to be alone. All those character defects that are irritating to someone else don't matter when you're alone. Nobody else is there to accept the consequence except you. If you're OK with what you do, you can have things be any way you want. Of course, some older folks get very "set in their ways." But think of the advantages, you don't have to explain or apologize about the way you are, how you work, why you do what do. There is nobody to answer to. Being alone is both an advantage, and a disadvantage.


Someone asked an old woman past 100 what is the best part of being old - and she said, "No peer pressure."

Lightly skipped over by most is underestimating the power of a significant booby prize that is the strangest feature of being lucky enough to get old. Watching those twenty, thirty, forty year friendships dissolve or suddenly disappear is not for sissies.

I don't know what your experience with death and the process of grieving is, but in my peer group - people do not want to hang around someone who is grieving. Oh, after someone dies, people will gather to console one another and commemorate, but then, they go away. They don't call, they don't make contact again for another...three months or so. Then it's only a light check-in.

Somehow the person who is grieving is supposed to "get over it" or "deal with it." Most of your friends will get tired of hearing about how you feel when you miss someone who has died. This distaste perhaps reminds them of how they have trouble thinking about their own death. Maybe it's just too close to how unpleasant it would be to be the one who is left after best friends and lovers are gone - as you are now. It's as if grief is a state of social quarantine.

There isn't much social support either for accepting each person's unique process of going through their own grief. Instead of recognizing that grief is a special time of self-knowledge, if the process of grieving goes on "too long," it is labeled "depression."

It's not depression, it's grieving - but this is the cloak that society wraps it in. This mistaken label for grieving as "depression," is yet another very good reason for circumstantial isolation. 

Accident Of Birth

Beautiful women must make peace with how others react to them at some point in their lives. Problems coming from other women must be dealt with as well. Lots of people wouldn't have much sympathy for these sorts of problems; like having to deal with being rich. But they are very real.

I speak from experience. Once I was young and stunningly beautiful. I did not need to hear about how beautiful, how skinny, how I looked like a model, how my nose was perfect, my lips were so luscious, hair so easy to manage, how I should just wave my ass to get guys to do things for me, anything I wanted.

Heard it every day of my life from someone, if not in words, in the looks they gave me. Wildly resented being born by an accident of birth and defined as sexually beautiful by my culture. Then the odd looks when I commented that it was very strange to be beautiful and to always wonder if someone was doing something for me or with me merely because they liked looking at me. It was sort of like being rich and wondering if your friends liked you because of what you had or because of what you could give them at some point in the future.

My response when I would get these admiring and sometimes cutting, envious comments from other women was to use humor. I would declare some platitude about the nature of comparison of bodily parts and it's wiser to compare yourself to yourself... in a suitably stupid and lousy Indian accent. I learned to trot this one out by preparing it ahead of time. To finish off the humorous effect, I tell them, Oooops, again I must have been spontaneously channeling Baba Hagen Daas. They will laugh and that will be that.

Now I'm not-so-happily fat while being treated for a hereditary hyperthyroid problem that has swung my weight to the other extreme. It's helping me to remember my reply to other women about how did I stay so skinny: "Probably something WAS wrong with me" - and it turned out to be true! Funny, huh? Not a bad idea to watch how you reply or react in this situation because by making the comment I made, perhaps it was "installing" some program with the reaction. Sometimes I wonder if this was true for me...but that's pretty obviously superstition. I was probably just stating facts.

To make peace with being beautiful by confronting the whole idea dead on, my first idea was to so what people told me I was: become a model. This did not work. Turns out I hated dealing with the sort of people who really were only concerned with how I looked and had no idea that who I was inside. They didn't get how the inside me was connected to what they saw on the outside. With a natural charisma that I had no idea how to turn on or off, when I walked into a room, everyone turned to look at me - and I did not know what to do with the attention. Hated the idea that beautiful women were trained to manipulate to get what they needed. Couldn't get rid of the attention I got, no matter how hard I tried to hide myself. I dressed in the most trashy, bulky, loose clothing I could find. It was an era of my life I would never wish on anyone.

A number of coincidental things happened to me in that era. I read Laura Huxley's "You Are Not The Target." It stunned me. At that point in time I was also learning Alexander Technique by attending daily teacher-training classes. As I learned to see postural expressions of character in other people, I realized that others could see my own postural attitudes and how they expressed who I was on the inside as well. Realized that people were probably responding to my own body language that expressed my internal character on some level - as well as the fact that I was a young, beautiful woman. Even if these guys were not conscious how they could discern this information, they could respond to it anyway. I had to give them credit for that, whether they knew what they were responding to or not.

Suddenly, getting this attention became my fault, instead of being an accident of birth. Learning that piece of the puzzle suddenly made my own attractiveness to be a little bit of my fault rather than just an accident of birth. Voila! A turnaround. I was so relieved.

Upon examination, I realized that men seemed to be handing women the power to make or break getting attention. In the past, I didn't want that power. Now that I knew what was going on, I could play with the energy handed to me when my natural charisma was turned on. In the past I was desperately trying to hide my own beauty and the power and interest it generated. I realized that I was making myself responsible for their story. Once I realized men were handing me power and then getting mad at me for having it, I could let that go. I could hand back the energy. It was OK that my interest in them was going to be construed by them to be a sexual interest - that was their business. All I had to do was to make it clear that wasn't what was happening for me on my end and move on. It had been essentially a virtual question posed by many men that I was refusing to answer. Now I could answer it.

Another interesting piece of the puzzle for me was a book about the differences in the way that men and women use language to establish rapport or trade information. She's written quite a few - the author is Deborah Tannen. Any one of them will do, but the one called "Talking 9 to 5, Power and control in the Workplace" is the one I'm thinking about that would be relevant to your situation.

In my life, I had hung out with men mostly in your life and probably adopted their speaking style to a great extent. Because of the company I kept I misunderstood what women are doing and why they are doing it. Women are so often looking to do the "trouble-telling" approach in order to establish rapport as a ritual. They are expecting another woman to say, "Hey, I've got other problems as serious as your weight stuff, check this out." Perhaps they are curious what you will do since you do not have their same complaints or objectives that are so obvious with them...

Anyway, interesting topic. Although many people feel that the question of women's liberation is a "been there, done that" subject, it's still very operative in our culture. Currently the topic has receded into the background - which makes it even more important to remember its cultural influence and power.

Make Time: Sleep Less

Sleep less and you'll have the time to be creative, make more money at a second job or whatever you want to do. But don't just deprive yourself of sleep - get smarter about it.

When I was going to Alexander Technique teacher training school and had to pay for it myself AND live an hour commute away, I came up with the brilliant idea of a split sleeping schedule. Went from nine hours a night sleep to a daily total of five hours with no ill effects. After around three weeks to get used to the schedule, it worked beautifully. I had no trouble keeping it up for over a year - so my experiment stood the test of time! Now whenever I want to stay up late for music or dancing, I can switch into that schedule without having to "get used to it."

I've become a "happy napper"! To my mind, the ability to nap is one of life's secrets.

The best schedule was a split sleeping time. Heard this hint from learning about a study with college students where the minimized sleeping schedule of 12 hours apart was the most common cycle tolerated by the most people. Decided to be sleeping 12 hours apart. For most people, how long to sleep two hours apart would be determined by the timing of their own sleep cycle. After experimenting with how awake I felt after sleeping certain amounts of time, I observed that the best sleep cycle for me turned out to be 1 1/2 hour plus a little time to get deep into falling asleep. So two hours was a good minimum cycle for me that gave me much more sustaining energy than a random "nap."

Rather deliberately because it worked into my schedule, I chose the actual times from 4am-7:30 twelve hours apart, which gave me two cycles each. It turned out that I could get by with the afternoon cycle being only two hours; from 4pm-6pm. It worked elegantly in practice. I would go to sleep at the end of the day and wake up, having all night to be awake...then go to sleep at the end of the night and be awake to have all day.

The only thing I missed is that I never got to see the sunset during the winter.

The trick to start the routine is to pick a time when you want to take a nap anyway. Turn off the phone, lock the door, make the room dark if possible - and it also helps to go through your nightly "routine of going to bed" rather than just treating it as a nap.

With this schedule, you could have two jobs, have more time for the internet or for doing your creative projects, have time for yourself while the kids are sleeping, etc.

Warning: don't let friends who show up from out of town talk you into skipping your sleeping times. You can't "catch up" later once you establish these times. You'll have to sleep ten hours if you get knocked off your routine; or at least I did the two times this happened to me.

Why Surrender?

We're talking about the idea that, in order to observe, the nature of observation needs to be free of the quality that you are in the act of observing.

I can think of exceptions in my own experience for this statement. Granted, it's tricky to do, but these characteristics are not mutually exclusive. Otherwise how would we use the mind to observe itself? How
would be be able to observe at all if we could not articulate some of the differences that make a difference - no matter if we are trapped within them or not?

Why is being free a prerequisite? The ability to observe, creatively problem solve or to stop or replace a habit that you don't want for whatever reason is a skill. The nature of skills is that these abilities can be learned and sharpened. Granted, it takes practice. Practice is more effective in the context of when and how you would like to use a skill. It takes the capacity to imagine an advantage to go to the trouble of bothering to train the skill.

Now, the next question that begs is: what could be the advantages of surrendering continuous self-referent activity - in that it may even be a pleasurable activity that someone would want to continue?

For me surrendering self-referent activity is a social advantage. I'm able to imagine what someone else might experience and become able to establish rapport and connection with them.

For someone else who is not particularly after personal connection, perhaps this ability might be the ability to act as a channel for art or psychic prediction. The ability to surrender self-reference could mean to the person some sort of livelihood advantage related to the cultivation of a skill.

For instance, if for some reason you thought you might like to surf, it wouldn't do you much good to think that the ocean is out to punish you and how dangerous it is - it's more constructive if you realize that there are factors of balance and skill to uncover that you would need to practice and learn about the nature of what it takes to surf. Of course, you would have never learned to swim because you have to surrender fears generated by self-involvement...unless you have a good teacher.

This implies that there could be an attraction coming from the lack of something - perhaps the ability to turn off repeating nuisances of internal talk that spin someone into depression would be a great advantage? These are the benefits - the payoffs. Different strokes for different folks sorts of things.

I'm sure people could think of more of these - and I'd like to hear 'em.

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.

Tacit Agreements

Like my musician friends here, tacit agreements coming from a shared subculture can sometimes give the conviction of bonding by how easy it is to “read” each other's intentions and needs in the context of circumstances. The challenge in tacit agreements is to make ways to determine how much it matters if the agreements are or are not done, so another tacit agreement can be substituted or created to take the place of an outdated one.

It is this feature that can make tacit agreements can be tricky to manage. Often they are made below the awareness level of their long-term effects – as if the people involved are playing a role that may or may not fit who they really are – or who they are becoming or have become. In a sense, being able to do this artfully will avoid the ritualistic ways of fulfilling the expectations of a relationship that most people must fall back on. Instead, by being able to make these agreements purposefully, the people involved have delightful surprises and potentials that change with the times.

With the context of your every action concerning the other person, it's easy to evolve a tacit agreement of how people are supposed to treat each other. Problems come when you tacitly agree to match slightly different cultural standards, causing what could become endless confusion where these differences overlap.

At some point, you'll want to find out how it matters to the others involved in proportion to how much trouble it is for you. Tacit agreements may require you to do more than you really want to continue doing, or to accept or assign a meaning that you don't want your actions to have. If either person can't make changes for implied or expressed agreements with their partner, it’s not good for either of them or the longevity of the relationship. Either way tacit agreements can lead to big disappointments when people figure out that the deal they thought they were making or definitions of bonded love was quite different for their partner than they expected.

If you could foresee a problem coming about tacit demonstrations, it would be handy to know how to avoid problems.. Something you will do, have already done or are about to do for each other could become troublesome, (or the business you have together. These ideas can be applied to any close partnership.) It would be an eventual problem to be expected to continue or indefinitely expand your intention to do for your partner or with them. The problem for the demonstrator, is you wouldn’t really know how much it matters to them that you do those demonstrations of for them. (Or in the case of a business partnership, they may not acknowledge or agree on the need for what you might think should be done to expand the business to make more money.) Because you don’t really know, you can’t tell if it makes any difference to them how you continue to expand your demonstrative actions, or change them. So this can become a real puzzler for the later stages of the relationship, and make people who are perfectly suited for each other go their separate ways.

New Changes

Was feeling really geeky today because I spent lots of time tweaking my website at
www.franis.org

My ISP got maliciously destroyed, so I was really thankful that I had backups for most of the different parts of my websites. But I did lose all my webmail for my .franis.org address, as well as my address books.

So, if you have written to me there, please write me again so I may have your email address that I do not have any more. One good thing is sending out bounce-backs got rid of some spam that I had been getting.

One thing my geekiness has gotten me: I found a really cool widget today that scrolls original artwork. Check it out; it's a little lower in the sidebar... I guess now that I have a specialized Alexander Technique blog, I'll be getting more personal and casual about what I post here. Here are some wisteria flowers that I drew on someone's window that I thought you might enjoy. More of my artwork is at www.franis.org/holiday

My new blog specializing in Alexander Technique is at wordpress.com
Come by and check it out and make a comment!

I'm also thinking of starting a blog about window painting, since so many people talk to me about it from my website. It would be an easy way to show off my more recent work also. Would anyone here enjoy that?

Relationships Can Be Completely Unique

This dog used to pick up this kitten in her mouth to help the kitten jump up onto the bed so they could hang out together. Obviously, the kitten seemed to enjoy her attention. The arrangement seemed to also be acceptable to the kitten's real mom too.

I believe that as you change yourself, you will completely change the dynamic of the relationship for whoever is involved with you, because you are changing your part of it. Of course it's much trickier to be in charge of yourself when you are the only one is willing or able to experiment to determine criteria of what is valuable, making changes & improvements by yourself. Some believe relationships are shared responsibility; that each person must rely on the other if they are to accept that they are in relationship and both must agree to change. Some people believe in the equally valid idea of a percentage split, that each person is responsible for a certain part of the relationship. Whatever you believe, it will probably influence exactly how you will act to work it out to continue to be in relationship – so it is an interesting point to discuss.

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.

Magic Words

Today I'm thinking about the "evoke experience" strategy that many people use. This is where someone notes a state of mind by using a phrase or a word the experience evokes. Then they seem to attempt to create a sort of internal filing system or anchor for the experience. When they would like to re-experience what they had experienced before, they say those "magic words" and the state comes back - sort of like a hypnotic suggestion that is designed to trigger this part of their brain to engage and give them the experience, or like a filing system. You might have to say the "incantation" or phrase in a certain sequence, coupled with a motion, etc.

In Alexander Technique, they have a word for this activity - "end-gaining." Meaning, going for new results with this "evoke" or other habitual strategy, rather than following the newer steps that will actually get you there. It's something to be avoided, mostly because it doesn't work so well when applied to new experiences and an unfamilar process.

I'm not making a value judgment on how this works or it's effectiveness with my next observation. I've just noticed that as people use this process and get some results, then they use it in places where it could be wildly useless and somehow they "believe it's working." It has the effect of a superstition. They say it can be quite a powerful example of "positive thinking" for them. I think the reason this works so well is there's actually a part of the brain that begins to do something as soon as you think of it - and this is why visualization works and why you can "practice" doing something by merely thinking about it.

I've also watched people do this by telling me what something is "not." Their idea that if they don't really say what it is they want, whatever it isn't will be allowed to happen on its own. Without their specifying exactly what it's not, they hold it up as a sort of superstition that if they specify it, it will be limited and thus not a surprising enough sort of experience for them.

Recording Your Choices

I've spent quite a bit of time learning to decipher the I Ching, and using it to decipher my intentions...since I was 12. When I was in my twenties, I decided to keep a journal over the years and ask the I Ching every time I made a major life decision. In the beginning I had NO idea what the symbols were saying of course. But just by writing the questions down, a very consistent "catalogue" of what questions I had asked emerged over time - with the corresponding answers. Strangely enough, some of the questions and corresponding answers from the coin tosses were EXACTLY the same, even when the same reoccuring question was asked over a period of years.

I still keep that journal of questions, and add to it.

So eventually I learned quite a bit about what this Chinese symbolic language meant, because the book helped me remember what I tried last time I got that same symbolic answer. Trying something else in the now similar situation gave me another option to try out. I could recognize that this was a similar situation from getting a similar answer from the I Ching the last time it came up in my life. Otherwise I would have never noticed any similarities because too much time had passed in between what turned out to be very similar, virtual questions. I would have never connected the
two circumstances if I hadn't had the I Ching to draw the parallel.

So literally, the dangerous Hexagram # 29 says to "Be like water, follow your true nature to emerge from the ravine." What I found that meant to me was much more practical. It meant that I'd already imagined in the past about what I was going to do in this rather precarious situation, so I'd better not change my mind now about it. Make a new decision about how to proceed when I'm out of the danger, not when I'm in it. Not bad advice, under those circumstances, no matter what the means of getting the advice.