Alexander Technique Lesson

Luke Ford says:

I’m reading a terrific book addressing this question — Freedom to Change by Frank Pierce Jones, a professor of Classics at Brown University and a teacher of Alexander Technique.

From page two: “For the Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new to do. It teaches you how to bring more practical intelligence into what you are already doing: how to eliminate stereotyped responses; how to deal with habit and change. It leaves you free to choose your own goal but gives you a better use of yourself while you work towards it.”

“Alexander and his brother, A.R. Alexander (1874-1947), developed a way of using their hands to convey information directly through the kinaesthetic sense. They gave their pupils an immediate “aha” experience of performing a habitual act — walking, talking, breathing, handling objects, and the like — in a non-habitual way. The technique changed the underlying feeling tone of a movement, producing a kinaesthetic effect of lightness that was pleasurable and rewarding and served as the distinguishing hallmark of non-habitual responses.”

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Believe Women?

Luke Ford says:

The rabbinic commentator Ramah said about accusations of adultery that women are believed (if they confess to adultery). The assumption is if the woman says it, it must be true, because it would be too embarrassing to lie about.

That’s no longer true.

Twenty years ago, a public accusation of adultery would end a rabbi’s career. Now people are more skeptical of such charges.

If the rabbi fights back and says it is not true, then people tend to hear him out. If the rabbi quits his job and leaves town, then they tend to believe the accusations of sexual impropriety.

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Love On The Rocks

Donna Burstyn says: So what happens to a blended family when the family doesn’t blend? It’s hard to imagine people raised in different atmosphere getting married. I think it’s more of a miracle that people stay married than not. Given that people grow up in different countries, different cultures, different religions, different viewpoints, different personalities, and usually in the years 20-30, they choose to marry and vow to commit to one another for the rest of their lives, it’s fascinating. Those that stay married to the end are quite remarkable given that life brings so many surprises. People grow and change and want different things. They demand different things at different ages. Life throws some hardballs. Yet there are people who survive as a unit after 50 or 60 years. That’s a miracle given our divorce rate of about 60%.

 

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Seeing The End From The Beginning

Luke Ford says:

“You see the end of things right from the beginning,” says his therapist.

He’s jolted. “My previous therapist said that,” he says. “Not the one before you, but the one before the one before you. She said I was always prepared for loss. That I always expected the teat to go dry. That I’d just suck away for all I could get because I felt sure it would go dry.”

“Your writing comes first for you,” says his therapist.

“Yes,” he says. “It’s number one. That makes decision-making easy. Everything else in my life, everyone else in my life, is subordinate to my writing. It doesn’t matter if I am lying in the gutter or davening at shul or standing on a porn set. They are all opportunities to write. Each perspective is but raw material in my artistic hand.

“I’m all about the work. I’m ready to sacrifice everything for my art.”

“That sounds very lonely,” says his therapist.

“Yeah, it can be,” he says. “It’s good to have your priorities.

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Lila Says

Luke Ford says:

I know what you’re thinking. The Moral Leader, he could never relate to a sinner like me. The Leader lives on such a high plane, he’s achieved such a resounding victory over the Satan, he could never understand the struggles of a wicked creature such as myself. The Leader, he lives his life by G-d’s immutable moral law, while I just struggle on, doing the best I can, I’m only flesh and blood.

Please don’t think this way. The Leader understands.

The Leader just watched the French film Lila Says and was deeply shook up.

This film has propelled me to my Bible to look up verses about wanton women and to paste them in between these photos from the film.

According to Wikipedia, the novel Lila Says was first published in France in 1996: “Lila Says is a narrative of the protagonist’s — Chimo, an Arab boy living in France — interactions with a catholic girl named Lila. Lila befriends Chimo and tells him very provocative and somewhat troubling incidents in her life and shares her experiences with him.”

The French film came out in 2004. IMDB

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End Of Jewish Blogging?

Luke Ford says:

I have not noticed a change. When you write something that affects people, you will get feedback and pressure in direct relationship to the importance of what you write. I started getting death threats in 1997.

I found that over the years, people got smarter in how they reacted to me. It became more and more rare for people to call me up to yell at me. People probed for my weaknesses and when they found them, they used them to get back at me.

It’s been many years since people bothered me about my blog. I find that few people are willing to confront me directly. They either reason with me very nicely or they leave me alone.

I’m not married. I don’t have kids. I don’t have one shul that I hold sacred. I don’t have one source of income. I’ve created a life where I can pretty much say what I want on my blog.

Here’s an amusing excerpt from my Jewish Journal profile in 2007: “Multiple rabbis contacted by The Journal declined to comment; not only that, they didn’t even want to be named as having declined comment.”

Heshy Fried of FrumSatire.net talked about this stuff in our recent interview.

John emails: “People don’t mess with you because you fight back hard. Remember that rabbi who is a convert from a few months ago? He kept sending you threatening e-mails and you kept posting them to your blog, making him look increasingly foolish the more he threatened you. That only works if you are willing to alienate the people who are complaining. If you aren’t, you have to balance their concerns with your own prerogative to blog honestly.”

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Seeking Validation

Luke Ford says:

There’s one genre of movies that always turns me on — underdog sports dramas. I love them.

I watched The Rookie (about Jim Morris) tonight (about four years after I watched it the first time).

I was struck about how it plays on common movie themes — the need for the protagonist to be validated by his spouse and father.

This is a pathetic need if you give in to it. You don’t need others to validate you. You can validate yourself by making the right decisions (or making peace with paying the price for bad decisions).

Over the past 15 years, I’ve often had nobody to validate my most important decisions.

I can’t think of anybody close to me who told me the following were the valid decisions:

* To convert to Judaism. This came solely from within myself.

* To use singles ads in Jewish publications in 1992, 1993 to meet girls to help me recover from CFS

* To abandon shomer negiya (not touching the opposite sex) and start sleeping with women in 1993

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