Flat or Fat

“People are flat ! “ she flatly said.

These words, from an experienced Alexander teacher training Alexander teachers, didn’t fall flat.

What does she mean? I wondered.

Thinking about it, we indeed spend many hours in front of flat screens for work and for entertainment. We walk or roll on flat grounds. Sometimes we walk in flats. Even opinions or conversations can become flat. We repeat what we have heard or read somewhere, in resonance with our beliefs. And as I write these words, I see them aligning themselves in a linear fashion on my -flat- screen.

Even as some of us teachers and students direct ourselves for more lengthening and widening in our backs, our hands, and feet and legs... a flatness emerges. The good news however is that as they come together the horizontal and vertical lines crisscross thereby creating depth. A diagonal is in fact a bit of both: it has a horizontal and a vertical dimension within it.

A diagonal in movement becomes a spiral. Spirals are everywhere in nature. Rivers, trees, air currents. Our material world is a 3D one: a table, a bowl, a lamp, a knitted scarf.

People are filled with spiraling bones and muscles, contradicting thoughts and emotions.

Look out for depth and spirals.

Everything that is full and beautiful about life is multidimensional and has depth.

Take your breath.

It’s the tree inside of you and not the straw. Is your breathing flat or shallow? Are you breathing as if through a straw? Are you breathing “flat” or “fat”? When your breathing frees up it connects you back with your tree like lungs. They fill up in all directions, up, down, front, back, side to side, in and out, all around.

We breathe in what the trees breathe out, they breath in what our lungs breathe out.

And round and round it goes.