In this short story the main character will be you…
The Mirror
Imagine that you are alone walking in a forest, far from any village or town. You love to feel free exploring places, taking pictures of the beauty you find in nature. You’ve been camping for a couple of days, carrying a back pack full of things, which many of them, maybe you won’t use. You are following the route of the National Park and you feel safe that you can’t get lost.
Enjoying the landscape, smelling the green fresh air of the forest. Birds flying across the path. A rabbit notices you and as your eyes meet, he jumps away and disappears.
This is magical! You think.
You continue walking for a couple of hours and suddenly, something shinning, few meters away, picks your attention. Closer to it, you see what it is, it’s a standing mirror.
Once you are in front of it you observe your own reflection, you look first at your face, ”I’m tanned and my arms too”, you think. Then you look at your entire reflection and realise that the back pack you are carrying might be too heavy for you, because it pushes you forward. So you take it off and observe yourself again, ”ah! this is nice”, you think, ”my legs feel lighter”. You stretch your arms up and take a deep breath looking towards the sky. When you bring your eyes back to the horizontal, the reflection is looking at you while bringing the arms down too.
Standing still and viewing at yourself on the other side of the mirror, another thought comes to your mind, ”looks friendly” and waving to the reflection, it waves to you back. Then you smile to it and it smiles back to you. After a few seconds, both, at the same time, start to extend one arm forward trying to make contact, touching each other’s fingers.
As you keep observing the encounter of the fingers, the contact, with the hard surface of the mirror make your attention shift to your hand and then you continue looking along your own arm like you’ve never looked at it before.
You loose interest in the mirror, so you turned and look out into the view of the forest while with your other hand caress that arm. You take your shoes off and accept your own weight, how you are. Your bare feet are in contact with the grass and as long as you keep looking out towards the forest, your head finds a new balance on top of the spine. This new balance creates a new sense of wholeness from your head to your feet. A delicate and soft stream of energy runs down and up along your legs, hips and spine, lengthening and widening your back, expanding your chest and making you bring the fresh air into your lungs. This stream spreads along your entire body head, neck, back legs, feet arms and hands. You look around, with your neck free and your head floating up away from your pelvis and you prove that this stream runs both ways, from bottom to top and from top to bottom. Like an endless loop. This experience makes you feel more present, confident and balanced not only with your physical body but with your thoughts and emotions too.
´´What is it?´´ you ask.
It’s you.
Note: I wrote this story as my graduation talk at ATCA (Alexander Technique Centrum Amsterdam)
This last talk should reflect what is The Alexander Technique in your own words. And this is how I ended up with this short story called ”The Mirror”. I hope this can help others to find out what they can learn through this amazing technique.