Whenever a crawling activity comes around in Alexander Technique teacher training, I become perturbed. I cannot crawl. My knees are too damaged, and in fact, my surgically repaired knee has been tentative these days…so much so that often enough I have to prop a pillow under it when I do a lie down…I cannot get that leg into semi-supine. Hey…I guess this first blog post written for, and appearing on, this new website of mine is a look back to the torn meniscus surgery that provided me with the impetus to start writing about my training in the first place. Cool and fitting timing…this latest crawling activity and the need to examine my feelings around it…are making for a recapitulation to the very beginning of this blog.
So my co-trainees crawl. I observe them crawl. Then I do “the same” walking…
Walter Carrington talks about crawling, or creeping as he calls it, in his book Personally Speaking. You can read all about how crawling in the Alexander Technique developed on pages 37-39 in the book. Here’s a passage: “Common sense indicates that people who did not learn to creep at the appropriate time can still benefit enormously by learning it properly as adults, and thus improve their co-ordination. I might add that it’s also a tremendously powerful tool in opening up the hands and shoulders.”
Well I am such a person. I never learned how to crawl. I was born with my hips out of the hip sockets, so I had to wear a big black brace for the first two years of my life to correct this congenital condition. My older cousins tell me that I would pull myself and the brace around, and that I was quite the sight…little me, with my shock of bright red hair, pulling myself around with this big, black brace. Crawling it was not. How I wish I had a photo of this! I only have one photo of me in the brace, and in it I am sitting. And now I am such a person who cannot learn to crawl, due to my wonky knees.
Do the subconscious memories of my first two years (in Brooklyn hey hey!!!) make for the agitation I feel when I watch the crawling of my co-trainees? I don’t know. I do know that I have to put this all in perspective. I know that crawling is not crucial for my personal Alexander Technique teacher development. Me, I’ll continue my explorations of all permutations of hands on back of chair…and everything else that I am able to do! 🙂
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