The Siren's Call

I'd been trying to write a blog about the Siren's Call for weeks, and words just seemed to fail me. 

And then Pedro de Alcántara came along to Montevideo and wham! he beautifully put into words and exercises what I'd been rumminating for days. So thank you Pedro; and here it goes...

It had all started several weeks before during a Somatic Experienceing session. At one point I could feel in my whole SELF (body, mind, emotions, everything) this intoxicating pull, this hard-to-resist urge to go down a well known path. 

It was my Siren's Call and it took every ounce of consciousness and faith I had not to give in to it, to stay were my feet were still firmly grounded, to remain tied to the mast as Odysseus, as the sweet luring call resonated. It was so vivid I couldn't help laughing out loud, delighted at the fact that I could hear it, feel it, sense it, and yet not be trapped by it.

This realization, (this knowing because I experienced it in my whole being), has remained with me ever since, and I've been observing it in its relationship with the Technique.

The Siren's Call is my habit, it is the reason I end-gain; it is this ever-present desire to repeat a sensory experience, a known quantity. It has an inner-momentum that is powerful and which catches me unawares most of the time.  In fact, most of the time I am living in mermaid-land, she has sung and I have listened, and in listening she has bewitched me and I no longer know myself other than how she defines me. 

The Siren says: "Let's try to gain this end this way once more, perhaps this time we'll get it right". And despite having over thirty years of experience of it not working that way, I give in once more to what I feel is "my way" of doing things (as F.M. Alexander would call it in Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual).

But sometimes I have enough power to resist her. I can hear her song but know it for what it is; so I inhibit my desire to live life spell-bound. I am not sucked into my habit, I remain in my back, in my mast, I can feel the pull of the habit, but I know it for what it is.

Once I've resisted her call at least once, I am free. Yes, she may catch me again, but some part of me keeps the memory of the mast, and IT sings too now, luring me back to my back, to my SELF. The Siren cannot define who I am anymore; even when I'm halfway caught in her spell, her way is not my (only) way, and I know that now.