Now we are two weeks into the new year, with (perhaps) our resolutions firmly in place, with our holiday indulgences behind us (and, hopefully, most of the bills paid), and then along comes a Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, that arrives as The Morning from Hell.
It goes like this: In the night, there's a wrong number (or, if you have a teenager, it might be the right number, which could be worse), the dog has to go out, a child is sick and needs medicine and comforting. You are awake and don't get back to sleep until four, or maybe even five. Six-thirty comes, the alarm rings, but you keep sleeping.
Then you wake in a panic. On the way to the shower, you bang your leg on the edge of the bed (expletive deleted), while hopping around on one foot rubbing your bruised shin, you drop some of your clothes.
After your shower you can't find your shirt. No problem, you'll wear the blue shirt instead. Back to the closet for the shirt, then to the kitchen.
The toast is burning! You're yelling at your nearest and dearest. Finally, you are in the car, but your keys are in your other coat, your coffee is still on the counter.
(How are you doing? Even reading this are you holding your breath? Clenching your jaw?)
You're running now, into the house to search for your keys, to grab your coffee. (More yelling?) Back to the car. Coffee spills on your blue shirt. You only have time to swipe at it with your glove. You're going to be late for your first appointment!
Finally, you are out of your driveway and into traffic, which is backed up behind a school bus. Even if you get to the office on time, what state will you be in when you get there?
What if you break the habit of a lifetime? It can be done in a moment. What if you don't sit at the stoplight saying to yourself, "What a bad day!" "I'm a wreck!" "I'll lose my client!"
What if,at the stoplight, instead of sitting there seething at it for making you later, you return to your body. You take charge of organizing yourself internally.
Back to "Staying Together." We'll print it here again, so that you can make a copy for your car:
Here I am.
I am sitting in my car.
I sense my feet on the floorboards.
I sense my sit-bones on the seat.
I sense the base of my spine against the seat back.
I sense my spine connecting my pelvis to my head.
I sense my head balanced on the top of my spine.
I sense, or wish to sense, the flow of life and reflexive activity within my body.
I wish that my thighs will release out from my hips along their natural length.
That my lower legs and feet will release out from my knees and that my feet will rest gently upon the floorboards of the car.
That my elbows will flow naturally out and down from my shoulders.
That my wrists - via my lower arms - will flow out and away from my elbows.
That my hands and fingers - following the natural form of their long and delicate bones and muscles - will flow out and away from my wrists and from their gentle grip on the steering wheel.
I wish for my limbs to direct out of holding me in and gripping me.
I wish for fluidity and freedom in my structure, in a general way and in these specific ways.
Now my spine (helped along by another wish) may release lightly and easily up out of my pelvis.
I wish to inhabit the natural breadth and depth of my torso all the way from my sit-bones and hip joints to the top of my head.
I wish for my head to balance freely in a gentle, delicate, nodding, looking-about-spontaneously kind of way, up and over the top vertebra of my spine. I see the cars, and the road, and the sky, and the people in the cars and on the sidewalk.
I notice that I am breathing.
F. M. Alexander said: You can do what I do, if you'll do what I did. What he did was break the habits of a lifetime and learn to organize himself.
We can, too!
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