I love FM’s books.  Every time I re-read them, I find new ideas, things I had forgotten, new ways of understanding the work.  Why do many of us find them difficult? Is it because we’re not teaching what’s in the books, and therefore, maybe, not teaching what FM was teaching? If we teach what’s in the books, they make sense.

What’s not in them?
There’s not much about posture, or movement, or release of muscle tension.  Nothing about poise, or alignment, or stretching fascia, or becoming aware of how we use our body.  There is very little about freeing necks – perhaps, not surprisingly, as discovering the H/N/B relationship wasn’t the solution to FM’s voice problem.

What is in them?
In Use of the Self  he says that his Technique is based on mind/body unity.  He says in Man’s Supreme Inheritence, that the centre and backbone of his theory and practice is an enlivened conscious mind. In Universal Constant in Living, he says that his technique is based on inhibition, and is primarily a technique for the development of control of human reaction.

He talks more, in these books, about the mental and spiritual benefits than the physical ones.  Things like expanded consciousness, self-awareness and self-control, and getting off autopilot and making new choices in all aspects of our lives.  He says it is a means-whereby to happiness. It enables us to change and improve our behaviour.

In these workshops we’ll learn how we can bring about unity, with all the resulting physical benefits we know and love, and also the wonderful mental and spiritual benefits he wrote about.  We’ll do it without freeing any necks, simply by teaching two things: inhibition and an enlivened conscious mind.

We’ll experiment with the step that finally solved FM’s voice problem, and we’ll go away with a better understanding of what he wrote about.