Having just returned from a stimulating (if sometimes exhausting) time of teaching and learning with young singers and experienced teaching colleagues from across the country and the US, I have been thinking often about the time spent with Alexander Technique and Yoga teacher, Holly Cinnamon, whose work I had the opportunity to witness. Holly’s teaching intersects beautifully with my own (and we will do some work together online over the next weeks to discover how this can happen even more meaningfully), and the article she sent me to read about embodiment only deepened my respect for her perspective.
As a Body Mapping Educator, one of the guiding principles is a quote from founding director and Alexander teacher Barbara Conable, who reminds us in her writing to “paper the world with the truth”. By this she means the truth about the body: its size, the locations of its parts, and they way it moves–its function. The idea being, that if we know the truth about our body and come to know its wisdom, we will be able to build our musical technique on a firm foundation of this bodily (somatic) knowledge and understanding.
Holly’s work around “teaching presence” takes this understanding to another level, because she looks at the ways in which we visualize and experience our own bodies, particularly in a time when we are continually encouraged to see ourselves primarily through the lens of a smartphone or a computer screen–in two dimensions and usually not below the solar plexus. In a nutshell, she makes a solid argument for the vital importance of feeling and knowing our bodies in three dimensions, of finding our depth of being. She also argues for the consideration of our bodies as Tensegrity structures, not “compression” structures, ones that–under ideal circumstances–are fully integrated between their disparate parts, and also in relationship to their surroundings. Thus, our bodies are not confined to their own boundaries, but in fact interconnect with the rest of the physical and natural world and are in relationship to these in profound and even spiritual ways.
This may sound esoteric to some, but the more I learn and know, the more it seems like essential truth. Our bodies are wise. We are all interconnected–much more similar than we are different–not only all humans to one another, but each of us also to the earth, the plants, the animals, the water, the air. These are also, incidentally, ancient teachings from Indigenous peoples since the dawn of time. We’d be wise to listen, and even more importantly, to feel, to sense.