We already have within us what we need to solve our problems and transform our lives... We just have to learn to use it ! This is where LearningMethods comes in...

An Interview with David Gorman

Broadcast live on KFAI Public Radio,
in Minneapolis MN, USA on April 30, 2001

  
Copyright © 2001, David Gorman, all rights reserved world-wide.
The LearningMethods name and logo are trademarks of David Gorman. 
Transcript from the original recording, by the Queen of the Desert, 2001

   

NOTE: This is a transcript of a one-hour live radio interview from April 2001. It has been slightly edited to make the spoken words read more easily in print.

Kinshasha:
Good morning. This is "Health Notes from the Heart of a Natural Woman" and of course you are listening to Fresh Air Radio, KFAI, 90.3 FM in Minneapolis and 106.7 FM in Saint-Paul. We’re your community radio station and we are moving into a new way of looking at our learning methods… learning methods, isn’t that funny, because what we are going to be learning about is LearningMethods and the things that is so interesting is that we have the founder, David Gorman on the line from the south of France and we have Elizabeth Garren and Rebecca Frost in the studio here and we are going to talk about this method of learning and as I was looking at the… but anyway, first off, Good Morning, David.

David:
Good morning.

Kinshasha:
I am so glad that you are able to be a part of this conversation with us as opposed to me trying to introduce your work. Let our listeners know, what is LearningMethods?

David:
I am very happy to be here too, calling you from across the world. So, what’s LearningMethods? That's a big question. How much time do I have?

Kinshasha:
Actually you’ve got an hour.

David:
Well, I won’t take up the whole hour with this, but I sometimes find that the easiest way to give a sense to people of what the work is when they aren’t coming in to explore it themselves is just to give a little bit of an idea of where the approach came from for me. So if it makes sense for me to take a few minutes and just talk about the evolution of why I stated to work this way…

Kinshasha:
Oh please do.

David:
I have a background in anatomy and physiology from many years back and out of some of the discoveries I was making about the way we function, I got interested in some of the practical techniques that were evolving in the early 70’s to help people change their habits of tension and pain—techniques like Feldenkrais and the Alexander Technique.

And at one point—I was living in Canada then—I was turned on by a friend in Toronto to the only Alexander Technique teacher in Canada. I went for a lesson and within a few moments in that lesson I had the most amazing experience of changing from a very awkward-feeling person whose parts didn’t seem to fit to this incredible experience of wholeness and ease and effortlessness along with a sense of vivid presentness and just a complete change of way of being.

Now, that kind of experience is not just unique to the Alexander Technique, but I thought, "Whoa, something is going on here! Something that can change us into such a revolutionary reorganization from the day-to-day heaviness and problems we have."

Aside from wanting to learn more about this for my own use in my own life, it just intrigued me what could possibly be going on anatomically or physiologically in our systems for that change to happen? What changed? What is it that suddenly happened that can make us feel, and actually be functioning, so completely differently?

So while I carried on having lessons, I began to bring my anatomical knowledge to bear on these questions. What is it that could be happening physically to create such an experience? Over a number of years, I came to a number of explanations, most of them using the kind of standard physiology and kinæsiology ideas of coming to a state of balance where the actual work we were doing was the minimum needed in gravity and through minimizing forces we then felt a minimum of effort.

But it never quite satisfied me because there were just something so dramatically different about that experience and not just about the experience, but also about the actual ways one ended up thinking and seeing the world when the change happened.

At that point, I was so fascinated by the implications and possibilities that I decided to do the three-year training to become an Alexander teacher at the same time as I also carried on with my researches.

The more I saw of how deep these changes went, the more I realized that I really needed to put together all the current state-of-the-art anatomy and physiology knowledge and rethink exactly how muscles functioned in posture to see if I could get some other insights. Out of all this research came my book on our structure and function, "The Body Moveable".

Then, it all came together and I remember very clearly that day. I had been working to put together what I had learned on every level, from the most minute level of cells right on up to this lovely entire-being experience. And then, that day, I had the sudden insight that what was going on was that our very instability itself in gravity was organizing us.—that the instability itself actually activates the tonus in our system needed to support and integrate us.

And I saw it as an entire instantaneous gestalt. It suddenly came to me that when we come into that wholeness, all the separate little tensions and conflicting parts let go and come together into a web of evenly-spread activation like a muscular suit that creates a kind of elastic suspension where we are charged up and spring-loaded, ready to go into activity.

I also realized that this was what happened when we stopped all the other interferences. That is, it was an insight that we have an inherent or pre-existing integration of our whole being with the whole world around us. It suddenly made sense of the experiences I had.

This was during the period when I had just finished training as an Alexander teacher in London, England and I was starting to teach others about what I had found and to travel and give workshops all over the world.

The years went by and in my teaching I got better and better at being able to facilitate that wonderful change in other people. They would come to me and I would be able to get them free and released—get rid of their tension or their pains—and they would go out feeling like totally different people.

Anyway, my student was standing up and sitting down and I was helping him and I said, "Do you notice how you tightened your back when you sat down?"

And he said, quite definitely, "No, I didn’t!"

"I can show you in the mirror how your head pulled back and your back tightened," I replied.

And he said, "I am sure you can show me in the mirror that this happened… but I didn’t do it!"

And it suddenly struck me that he was absolutely right! He wasn’t pulling his head back. He didn’t even really know it was happening until I pointed it out to him. It definitely was happening, but he was not doing it.

Normally I would have gone ahead and convinced him that he was doing it unconsciously as a habit and he could learn to more consciously direct himself, but it suddenly struck me that, if it was happening but he wasn’t doing it, what was he actually doing during the time when those things were happening?

It was an amazing moment for me because, you know, I had simply never thought to ask the question about what the person was up to when those ‘physical’ things happened? What is the person up to when they end up feeling all strained and tense? What are they actually doing? And it sounds so obvious to me now, but at the time I didn’t have a clue. So I began to question people about what were they actually up to when their symptoms appeared, when they were feeling very tense from frustration?

And, of course, they began to describe what they were thinking and what they were feeling and how they were interpreting the situation they were in. Maybe they were a performer and feeling nervous or they were rushing at work to meet a deadline or whatever…

What it really started to open up for me was that the problems that people have weren’t really so much about their physical state or functioning. the problems were more about their interpretations, their way of seeing things, their beliefs, and their ideas.

And as I observed more and more what was actually going on physically and then began to correlate people’s described inner experience with what I was seeing from the outside, it started to make much more sense to me why people were having the problems that they were.

Out of this I saw that I needed to find new ways to uncover and work with the way the person saw their own reality, their own way of interpreting life and situations. And the new work of LearningMethods was born.

Perhaps it would make more sense at this point to give you an example?

Kinshasha:
I want to clarify something for me first and I want our listeners to know that we are talking to David Gorman this morning… We were talking about LearningMethods. And the one thing that I… The things that you are saying are fascinating.. What I want to do is that I want to take it in little pieces to make sure that our listeners are able to follow. So I want to go back to the thing that I got stuck on.

So I am thinking of your work… From the little that I understand about it, one thing that LearningMethods will do is to help me to get unstuck and so often times when I think about the whole issue of stuckness, to use my language, from what you said at the beginning is that we will go to a seminar or have a experience… I have Rebecca and Elizabeth here and I can be in conversation with the two of them and just have this profound experience for today, and then tomorrow go back to being stuck like I was yesterday.

So one aspect of your work is that once we begin to get unstuck, we don’t go back into that entanglement again. I think that you called it kind of… You use all those beautiful words like web… But we don’t go back into those things, we actually get free of that. You know, I guess when I think of it visually I think of going down a certain road and every time I go down that road I always hit the same pothole. But this time, I go around it as opposed to going in it. This time I know that it is there and I don’t keep on doing that same thing over and over and over again. Did I get what you have been saying so far? Have I heard you alright?

David:
That’s actually a very good image because when you look at that kind of situation where people have a certain problem and they end up hitting the same pothole each time, you really have to ask, "Well, why would somebody keep going down the same pathway if they keep ending up in the same pothole?"

Kinshasha:
Well because I know that it’s the only way I know to go, of course.

David:
Well, it is certainly partly that, but when you look really closely at what is going on for somebody you’ll see, of course, they are not setting out to go down that pathway in order to hit that pothole.

Kinshasha:
OK…

David:
They often don’t even know that the pothole is there. In fact, more from the way that they see things, it’s almost something they have to do. They don’t really know ahead of time that they are going to hit the pothole again, they just know it sort of makes sense to do it the way they do, and then bang, somehow I end up with this symptom again. How did I get that symptom?

Kinshasha:
Laughing…

David:
Maybe again a little bit of an example here would help, but I’ll just say one general thing. In a way, this work is not so much about getting people unstuck. In a sense, with the Alexander Technique and what I was describing before, I could get people unstuck, but then somehow they got stuck again.

Kinshasha:
Right…

David:
And it dawned on me that what we need is not so much a way for people to get unstuck, but a way for them to find out why they are getting stuck in the first place.

Kinshasha:
Aha!…

Rebecca:
That will do it.

David:
Because, of course, there are many, many different methods on offer today that can get people unstuck, but unless somebody really knows why they are getting into it each time, they just end up getting back there again and needing to get unstuck again.

Rebecca:
David, this is Rebecca Frost. Hello…

David:
Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca:
I’ve had a little bit of experience with this work and I think what might be helpful in terms of context in my experience is to hear a little bit more, as you say an example is useful, and for you to describe for our listeners the methods involved in this work..

So if you could get very concrete in terms of elucidating how this work looks and sounds, for example, tangibly. And how that might contrast with traditional approaches that you’ve mentioned, like the Alexander Technique. I know for myself, coming to this work having been trained as a dancer and a body-worker and now working as a movement educator and artist and therapist, the shift of focus that you just mentioned in terms of the distinction between getting unstuck and learning what it is we’re doing that keeps us getting stuck is such a key distinction.

So if you could, both in terms of tangible description and example, give us a little more information about that. I think that would be helpful.

David:
OK. Well, maybe the best way to do that is by an example because by the very nature of that shift there isn’t really a repertoire of tools or mechanisms to get somebody unstuck in this work. It’s more about finding out why they are stuck. That’s where the answer is.

People come into the work bringing any issue that they feels is problematic for them. Some problem that they run into in their lives and have not been able to solve. This can be any problem whatsoever, whether it is a physical problem—pain, strain or tension—or something more emotional, or even phobia kinds of things like fear of heights or fear of flying, as well as relationship problems. It doesn’t really matter what the issue is.

In this process what we are doing is helping them not so much to solve the problem but to learn how they could go about solving the problem. It just so happens that in the workshops we will use the problem in front of us as the medium, as the example, so that they can be learning how to use their own intelligence, their own perception and their own awareness of their experiences to explore and navigate and uncover just what is going on that causing this problem. And, of course, often we do solve the problem in the process, but they will have learned something more important that they can take out and apply to any other problems they have.

Rebecca:
Yes

Kinshasha:
Hmm. You know, when I was listening to Rebecca’s question and I was observing your answer, the thing that came to my mind is that, first, what amazed me is that it never occur to me to ask myself the question why I am stuck!

And the second part is that when I think about the challenges, the presenting problems that I have today they seem to relate to the presenting problems that I had yesterday which always seem to somehow go back to when we were children and the foolishness that adults gave us and how we end up trying to recover from those things.

It sounded that your process was completely intellectual instead of emotional… Can you speak to any of this that I just said?

David:
Yes, that’s something a few people have said before. I think because the LearningMethods process is largely done though talking. But they are mistaking what we are doing.

In order to understand the problem and solve it we need to get at everything in their lives that may be part of the problem—the situations and events, their emotional responses and reactions, their fears and all the feelings, thoughts and ideas and actions they have taken. They have that information, I don’t. And words are simply the most direct and best way to get at it all.

This isn’t intellectual instead of emotional. Though it is certainly helping people to learn to use their intelligence so they can correlate their emotional and physical feelings with the way that they see things—the way that they understand their concepts or their constructs. The work is there to help somebody understand how their problem works. So that they can connect that when they get into those situation which they see from their usual point of view, those are the reactions they have and those are the emotions they experience and that is what their habitual ideas tell them it makes sense for them to do and this is what the outcome is—the symptoms and the problem.

I start every workshop with a little introduction that gets right to the core of the work. Maybe if I can say this now it might help your listeners understand.

In a sense, the LearningMethods work is about learning to solve our own problems. To do that successfully we would need to have certain properties in our human nature. What are these necessary properties and we all have them? So there’s a question and the work is based on that question—in fact, it is a somewhat multipart question.

The first part is, do we, as human beings, have innate in us or built into us the sensitivity or the ability to perceive through our own channels the information we would need in order to know what’s happening? By channels I mean our own experience, our own senses, feelings, emotions, whatever it is that you can perceive or be aware of on your own without going to an ‘expert’ or using a machine. So, number one, do we have the channels of information we would need to work out what’s going on?

The second part is do we then have what I like to call the intelligence, that is, the ability to understand that information, to make sense out of it, to appreciate the significance or the meaning of the information for ourselves? Do we have the ability to understand what’s going on with the problem so we can go, "Oh I see what’s happening. Now I see why I am caught in that problem, because every time this happens, I do this or I see it this way…"

And we not only need to understand why we have the problem, we can we also understand what the solution might be?

And in addition, since we as construct-creating creatures are always coming up with some sort of understandings, do we also have the ability to detect when our current understandings are faulty or misconceived or when we may be fooling ourselves?

The third and final part of the question is do we then have the ability to take those new understandings and actually put them into practice in our lives by making different choices or taking different pathways such that we no longer have the problems and our lives work better?

Thus, the LearningMethods work is a way to answer those questions. To help people see what information they do have in their own lives, in their own experiences, from their own emotions and responses. To see clearly the ways that they have already understood those experiences and whether there are any misconceptions or misperceptions in these understandings and then how they can come to a better or more accurate understanding. And then to help them see exactly what it means to take that new understanding and really make a change on very deep level and be able to live that change in practice in daily life.

Elizabeth:
You know I would like to come in here. This is Elizabeth Garren. Hello everybody.

Rebecca was asking for something really concrete and I think after what you have said, David, maybe I can fill in a little bit with my experience.

I have been to three LearningMethods workshops in Canada now. That’s about 15 days of actually doing this work altogether and the main thing that I have noticed about how I tried to solve a certain problem before I did LearningMethods was that I was always asking the question why. Why do I have this problem? What’s in my history? How did I grow up? All of that…

But LearningMethods and the workshops that I took were always focusing on the specific moment in your current reality that the symptom arises and the problem comes up. And the question then is, what is actually and precisely going on with this problem? Not so much why is this happening. That insight might come in the process, But what is actually happening now?

To tell you the truth, I had never been asked the kind of questions that would lead to such a precise, specific sequence of what was actually going on for me. Not having somebody tell me what should be going on or what was this wonderful new possibility that I could be experiencing, but actually saying here I am with this real-life problem.

I don’t want to go too much into my personal stuff, but it was a problem of losing my voice. That was one of the symptoms. Also getting very nervous, incapacitated almost, in front of a group. So that’s the problem that I worked with in LearningMethods and the first thing I noticed is that I was being asked to describe my problem and the very words that I was using led to the next question to find out exactly what was going on and we quite quickly found precisely that.

So in the LearningMethods workshops when you come up with problems, see if you can find something specific. Not "all the times I lost my voice" or "all the times in general in my life I am always doing this, I am so bad"… But pick one specific time that you can go back to.

Or it might even happen right there in the workshop that the symptoms come up, which is even better because then you have your experience right there to be gleaned and looked at. So go back to one specific time so that you are getting out of generalities like, "this always happens and I’m sure it is because of this…, or it is probably because of that…". And instead just get right out on the table what actually happens. For instance, "I thought about having to talk in front of somebody and immediately I got this terrible feeling in my stomach and I wanted to run away." OK? So picking a specific time to work from.

Also, you know when you have a problem and you look back on it and describe what happened, it is often more from the eyes you have looking back, the hindsight with all of your assessments and your judgments about what happened. But this work is really saying, can you take yourself back to that moment as you actually were then? And recall how you are when you are going to be in front of that group and you are very, very nervous and you are afraid you’re going to lose your voice and say what was happening for you - at that moment.

Sometimes you don’t recall exactly, in which case the next opportunity to learn all the details will be the next time the problem happens. But it is amazing what comes out when we can look closely at what actually happens.

Kinshasha:
Taking off of what you have said and I am really learning this method as we are talking about it… So with the example that you gave, Elizabeth, when I find myself in situation like that I do what I call ‘going brain-dead’, I mean, or maybe a language that somebody else might understand as "going into a fog". I’m gone. I’m someplace else and so asking me to find out where I was will be hard because I am just gone. I probably leave my body. I am not even present with that because I don’t want to deal to whatever that particular fear is.

How do you get to that first moment? Although, I guess I am presuming that coming to that first time is where the "Aha" experience comes so that I can make that shift and do something different.

And if you just tuned in we are talking about LearningMethods with David Gorman and learning how to be different.

Elizabeth:
David, do you want to take that?

David:
Yes. That’s a very good one. Especially with that issue about fear because at a certain point when the fear comes in or any big reaction comes in, to speak more generally, it is often overwhelming enough that there isn’t really anything anybody can do at those moments if it has gone that far. This is particularly true, of course, with fear and phobias where the panic is so great that it is simply not possible to do anything.

But usually with problems like that when we are working with it in the workshop it is not actually happening at that moment, and so we are able to take a specific time like Elizabeth said and look closely at it, almost second by second if necessary to find exactly what happened.

Take, for instance, a stage-fright problem when somebody suddenly gets nervous just before the concert. But if you look really closely, they didn’t just suddenly get nervous. They will find, for instance, that just at the moment they have gone into a particular way of thinking or imagining that is almost so habitual and familiar that they don’t really even register that these thoughts happened.

For instance they might suddenly think, "Oh, there are two critics in the audience tonight! I didn’t know that! Oh my god, now my performance better be really good or else…". And, of course, at the very moment that they begin to think those thoughts, in comes the fear and the nervousness. Depending on how they react to the fear and what they do next, it can quickly become overwhelming enough that they will end up having a hard time coping.

It is important that they take in that they have been reacting because they have a belief system that their nervousness is caused by the critics in the audience and how those critics are going to judge them—probably badly. But when we are able to take the time and look closely, we’ll uncover that it was actually their own thinking of the bad reviews that is causing their fear. The moment I start to think about bad things happening in the concert or what the critics are going to think, I am reacting to my own thoughts—my own imagining, in fact.

That puts a entirely different light on it when someone can see the situation more accurately and see that at the moment of going into those habitual thoughts they are stirring up their own emotional system and their own reactions. This gives them the clues to see clearly that if they let that reaction get going, then of course they will be overwhelmed and go brain-dead. Then they will be stuck and simply not be able to take any other steps except hopefully to have some way of decreasing the symptoms because they do have to perform so they will be looking for some sort of ‘unsticking’ technique.

Kinshasha:
So what you are talking about is when people do the things that we are talking about it is pretty automatic. We don’t go though a thinking process and then end up at that place of being in the fog or being terrified by a group or whatever. For most of us, we experience it as a pretty automatic thing. And so if I understanding correctly, what you do in a workshop is break down that automatic process so that it is like a step-by-step thing so that we see actually what we are doing in our minds and how we are tripping ourselves up.

David:
Yes, exactly. To keep on with that example for a moment… You are right, normally it is very fast and seems quite automatic and so people don’t really connect that they are imagining. They think that it is really about the critics sitting out there.

So the first thing you would be learning is that you misconceived what was causing the nervousness. That it isn’t the audience or critics; it is your own thinking and projection of bad things that might happen. This makes a huge difference when you realize that it is no longer something outside you that’s causing the problem—it is your own thinking and imagining.

That’s one thing. So first of all that literally you are coming to a more accurate way of seeing what’s happening. Then the second part is really back to your earlier question about making a shift and therefore being able to do something different.

Once you can see this clearly—that the problem is actually your own kind of thinking, and also see clearly exactly how it happens—then you have a chance to catch it as it first begins so you have a chance to take a different path. However, to catch it early enough before the reaction is overwhelming you need something to alert you enough so that you wake up right at that moment. So we need to work a little bit on identifying the earliest experiences that happen so that you can use them as a wake-up call that will let you know that you’re starting to think that way and beginning to stir up your own reaction system.

Once you can wake up early enough and catch the kind of thinking going on that normally would lead to feeling nervous, you will have a choice in what you think and not get automatically caught off into a trail of thoughts that stirs up your reactions and has you reacting to your reactions. You can then choose to come back to the actual moment so that you can see things clearly as they are instead if being in a fog of reaction.

By going step-by-step and understanding all the details, it is actually surprisingly easy to get out of those problems and solve them so that you don’t have them anymore.

Rebecca:
David, this is Rebecca and I am wondering if we might approach the same point from just a little bit of a different angle without going into a full-blown session on air? I wonder if I just give an example. Let’s say I was in a workshop right now and I said to you as the facilitator or teacher, "Well I don’t know, I just go into a fog. I got into a fog, that’s all I know about it". What might you say or ask to help us beyond that moment?

David:
Well, I guess here is where what Elizabeth said about needing to have a specific situation would be helpful. So we would first of all find out whether you have one specific time when this happened that we can focus on, preferably either a relatively recent time or one where you have as many details about it as possible.

Then we would need to look closely at what was it that happened just before the fog. What was the situation? What was going on? Did something happen, some situation, some thoughts, and then you go into a fog? So we would be getting at the entire context.

Rebecca:
Yes.

David:
That would be the first thing. These kinds of reactions don’t just happen as in, "There I was walking down the street and suddenly I was in a fog". Something always happens that the ‘fog’ is the resulting response to. And we can find it usually quite quickly by being systematic.

Kinshasha:
But you know, it seems to me that in that process, David, before I got to the fog, that there is, for me anyway, before I am getting ready to leave I will go into a fear state. So I am wondering, as I was listening to everything that you were saying and I was trying to find out what’s going on with me in terms of my thoughts processes, I was saying to myself, well I can feel the fear coming up my legs or something. So will I have a conversation with my legs in terms of the fear that’s going into my muscles? And where is the conversation at? Am I staying in my head with that? How do I have this discussion with myself so that I can get to that moment and realize that I can in fact do it differently and that I am creating this myself? Which seems that there are a lot of things going on at the same time.

David:
Yes, of course, there is a lot going on. But it is usually not hard to sort out if we could get specific and see in the actual situation you are talking about whether, in fact, you are doing this fear to yourself or whether you find it happening to you as a response or reaction to a situation you find yourself in. There are many different situations that become problematic for people so one of the first questions, when you say the fear is coming up, is to find out "fear of what"? Is it just an experience that you are having which you label fear, or is there any situation or thoughts occurring where you are going, "Oh that, oh my god!"? So is there an actual content of the fear?

Kinshasha:
Well, we can say that it was fear of being on the radio for example. And that I have to be perfect while I’m here… and…

David:
…If I just stop you right there at this moment we can do the process. Notice with one or two questions we already have the actual context—"fear of being on the radio"—and a construct or an idea that you appear to have that "I have to be perfect". When you look at that idea—I have to be perfect—the next question is, "Well, are you perfect?"

People laughing…

David:
Because if you can actually say, "Well, you know, actually I am perfect!", then why were you afraid of anything?

More laughing…

David:
But, of course, that’s not what somebody says, because another part of them knows that they are not perfect in the way they are conceiving ‘perfect’.

In fact, here we have one of the tools that Rebecca and Elizabeth will recognize—what I have come to call "red flag words". If we can hear these words, they can run up a little red flag for us to alert us to something we have just said. In this case it is, "I have to be perfect". The red flag words in this case are "have to be".

If we are alerted and we look closely we find there is an idea that something "has to be" like this. But when we look closer, notice that it isn’t like this—I am not perfect. So there is an idea about being perfect that’s at odds with the actual reality. I am not perfect, but I have to be perfect. And so think of the situation that a person is in who is carrying around that kind of idea "I have to be perfect" in an actual reality where they are not perfect according to that idea. If you were carrying around that kind of idea "I have to be perfect" when you know that there is a pretty good chance that you won’t be, what kind of emotional reaction might you be experiencing?

Barbara:
David, this is Barbara and co-host of this program with Kinshasha. I have a question, and that is does your method allow people who are not consciously aware of the fact that the issue of perfection is the barrier? That’s that is what is prompting the fear? They don’t even know that they are in fear. They are people that are completely disconnected with themselves because they are out in that fog and moving and experiencing and as a result many times they have psychological issues or physical issues, you know like my back hurts. Why does my back hurts this time of the month? Does your system allow the person to have the types of tools that would then give them access to a method of processing after they leave the workshop? Regardless of what those issues are?

David:
It is a good question, because as I said before, the work is not about solving that particular issue and it is one of the reasons why I mostly do this work in a workshop format with a group. So that it’s not just privately with one person’s issue because the point of it is that by exploring the particular issues that the various members of the group have, people see over a number of days just what the tools are that we are using. Over that 4 or 5 days, the patterns become clearer in such a way that they can take that clarity out and really begin to recognize those kind of red flag words, those kind of ideas, those kinds of reactions in their daily life.

Because of course, it is one thing to have the ideas and the understanding all there in the workshop situation. It is another thing to actually catch them when they happen in the moment and be able to meet that moment with some sort of recognition and some sort of different response.

Barbara:
Right.

David:
So, to go back to the other side of your question. Yes, it doesn’t really matter whether someone already has an awareness or not of the kind of ideas like feeling they should be perfect, because it will tend to get uncovered pretty quickly in the work. In fact, it is my experience more often than not that within the first 10 or 15 minutes of questioning up will come all those underlying beliefs just in the way it did there with Kinshasha.

But it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t because as Elizabeth said earlier, we are just kind of exploring to see what is really is going on. If it isn’t obvious in the first moment of working, the other side of the work is to teach people the tools of exploring so that they can meet those moments when the problem does happen again and begin to find out what is going on if they don’t know already.

So, in other words, just to use the example that Kinshasa brought up, if she wasn’t aware or if we weren’t to find those kind of idea at this moment it doesn’t really matter because if she is never afraid again, well, there is no problem. And if it does happen again, well, there’s the moment to wake up and go, "Ah, here it is now. What really is happening? What were my thoughts? "What did happen?". And then the information we want is almost always there.

Barbara:
I should say that what you gave me in your answer that people leave with tools. That’s what I was looking for. So people leave the workshop with tools that will assist in their daily life as they just live and come in contact with issues and problems whether it is in a conscious level or subconscious level, right?

David:
Yes, on a conscious level, because you certainly can’t really have a problem that’s subconscious, can you?

Barbara:
I do if my back hurts and I’m not sure why it’s hurting…

David:
You may not know the reasons why your back is hurting—yet. But the problem is showing up as your back hurting and that’s definitely conscious. But that’s not the problem, that’s just the symptom of a problem. If we can use those symptoms as wake-up calls to wake us up and go, "Ah, something’s happening here, but I don’t know what it is. How am I going to find out?"

As opposed to something’s happening in my back. How am I going to get rid of "the back problem"? Then somebody, of course, will be only looking for a tool to get rid of the symptom, but they really don’t know why it is happening. What it is a symptom of.

Rebecca:
This is Rebecca. Just to piggy-back on what Barbara was saying.

A couple of things. One thing in my experience of this work that is key, from my point of view, and what makes it exciting to me—and I always look for things to have the potential of being a revolutionary vehicle so I pay attention at that level—is the transparency that is involved in the deep transmitting of the LearningMethods work.

So for example, you do leave with a set of tools. It is not like a traditional clinical psychotherapeutic model in which you are investing for a long time in a process of one-on-one. A heavy investment that has to happen with a certain person with certain transference with certain anonymity. It happens in a group setting and the way that I have experienced David’s transmitting the work is that he was constantly letting us know through words, though body language, through telegraphing his thoughts verbally what it was and how we might then use these same methods in our life at large. And then how I might go about telling other people about them so they don’t even have to be in the room.

Kinshasha:
That’s empowering.

Rebecca:
Yes, so there’s an empowering component. And the other thing that I just wanted to say briefly is, I don’t know if it is fair to call it an assumption, David, but how I think of what I understand about some of the assumptions of the design of humans that might feed this work is that a symptom, for example my back hurts, is in fact viewed in this context as something in a way to celebrate. It is viewed as our system is working because it is letting us know. It’s something to pay attention to. And that shift, that framing, is helpful to me as I go about thinking in terms of "problem solving".

Elizabeth:
This is Elizabeth. And I agree, Rebecca, that for me was the most revolutionary aspect, using your word, of this work—that I completely shifted from what do I do about my symptom to "my god, this is a message!" And I get to have the fun—after you have done some of these workshops, it is fun, I can’t wait to have a problem now—of doing the sleuthing work that comes from your very own words.

You can write it down if you are alone. You sit down and write and describe your problem and there will be something there if you have got some of these tools at your beck and call that you can begin to unravel and begin to see what’s actually going on with the problem and what are some other choices you might have, not only in how you frame the problem or understand it, and if you can be clear about that the next time it comes up it is amazing how it just busts it wide open!

Kinshasha:
I am just wondering if you could use this work in something like I continue to attract to myself relationships that don’t work and could I use this LearningMethods for something like that?

David:
Yes. Oh, definitely! Again we have those words that Elizabeth just used—"how we frame" things—and this is so important. There is a way someone has framed things—"I attract to myself"—as if I am doing something to attract it. But in effect when you find out more clearly what somebody is doing you find, for instance, they are somehow getting involved with others presumably because they are attracted to them in certain ways and then get into relations that don’t work for them.

We would need to sit down and really look closely at what is it that you get attracted to? What is it that somehow draws you into a relationship? When does the "not-working" thing happen? Is it only afterwards? Are there any signs of that before that you are not looking at because you are looking at something else, for instance, the attractive bits? And all that sort of thing.

Kinshasha:
So in that process I would look at from the beginning when I am telling myself about the experience that I am having?

David:
Well, in a sense we would be looking at what really is happening? How does someone get into relationships that then don’t work for them? How exactly does this happen?

I think in one way underlying the tools in the LearningMethods work is that when we can learn how to look clearly at what happens in our lives, we can really start to see why the problems happened. But in order to do that we do really need to look closely at what really is happening here. How do I get into such relationships? And that’s a question, of course, I can’t answer because they are not my relationships and the only person who has that information is the person who actually gets into the relationship.

What really does draw somebody in and why don’t they notice the problems until afterwards? This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. We really need to find why they don’t.

Kinshasha:
Mmm…

David:
In fact, one of the things that intrigued me the most when I began to explore things this way was that I had always had the background of being the expert; being the one that had the answers that people came to me for. They would say, "Use your method to fix me up". And I began to realize that I was going though a very fundamental shift where I really didn’t have any of the answers for people. I can’t know what they are going through. They are the only ones who know that. And I can’t know what’s best for them. They are the only ones who will be able to determine that.

The one thing that I did have though was a way to help them find the answers in their own experience because they have all the information. They just usually don’t know how to look for that information and they don’t know how to explore, often simply because they are just looking for a way to get rid of the problem.

Kinshasha:
Mmm… We’re talking about LearningMethods with David Gorman. It’s starting to make sense. It’s taking me a while to understand this process but it seems, certainly as a radio host, I am fascinated at your questions and your listening and obviously the listening and the questions seems to be the foundation of this work.

David:
Yes, yes, very much so. Really what anybody who is coming to the work is learning is how to perceive and listen to their own experience so that they are not just having their experiences but missing the meaning of them, they are actually understanding the significance of their experiences.

It is really from that direct seeing it in action I think that makes sense to people, but could I just mention something for your listeners? If someone is intrigued and wants to find out just a little bit more, there are quite a number of articles up on the learningmethods.com web site and anybody can go there and read them and that will give you an idea of some of the process.

Elizabeth, Rebecca and others there in Minneapolis are helping organize things for me to move there and begin a training course to train them as teachers, as well as to give public workshops. Any of your listeners could contact Elizabeth for more details.

Elizabeth:
Yes, this is Elizabeth. If anybody wanted to call locally to find out about the fall 2004 workshops or about teacher training call 612-375-9142 and we will be glad to talk with you over the phone.

But also David has a wonderful web site—the best web site I ever have visited, actually—with a lot of information and also the details as they come up about when workshops are happening, not only in Minneapolis but in other places around the world. So that would be another place to check, learningmethods.com, for information.

Kinshasha:
Did I understand David has a book? What’s the title of his book?

Rebecca:
David is well-known for books from long ago, "The Body Moveable". You may want to answer that, David.

David:
Yes, there are several books. There is my big, fat anatomy and function book, "The Body Moveable", 600 pages with tons of illustrations about how we are built and how we move.

There is also a book of articles and essays, "Looking at Ourselves", mostly from my Alexander Technique teaching days, that shows my thinking and early evolution of this present work. There is a lot of material in there about the physical and functional model of our elastically-sprung system.

Then there are also all the newer articles about the LearningMethods work that I and other teachers have written and that are all published on the web site.

The details of availability and so on for all these books are on the web site.

Now, I'm currently working on another one that’s putting together the overview about the LearningMethods work. But, interestingly, I have actually found that I can’t write about it in the abstract. I think as anybody who reads any of those articles which are mostly narratives of pieces of work, you will appreciate how the methods and principles of the work emerge from an actual person’s real, concrete, real issues.

Rebecca:
Yes, as we come in for a landing with these last several minutes here, I wonder if Elizabeth would like to say those phone numbers again and I will also float this question. Anything you would like to say David… I know you have been teaching this work around the world and that’s intriguing to me because I know you have been in a lot of different settings and I wonder if there might be anything you would like to say about observations about how this work is the same or different in different cultural settings, but first Elizabeth maybe you want to say that phone number again.

Elizabeth:
Yeah, I’ll give the number again. Locally you can call me, Elizabeth Garren at area code 612-375-9142.

Rebecca:
Thank you. Back to you, David?

David:
Right, globally… No, it really did surprise me when I began teaching in many different cultures and many different languages that not only were people everywhere running into most of the same issues but a small handful of central issues kept coming up over and over again. Issues about fitting into work, about stress and strain and trying too much, about relationship, and one’s own sense of oneself in relation to other people, and all those kind of things seem to be pretty much the same in every culture. I’m not sure if it says as much about us as humans as it does about the spread of a global culture, but there it is.

Rebecca:
I think it might be interesting for a listeners to hear a few of the places that you have taught.

David:
Well, I am pretty much teaching regularly in most of these places. I go to Sweden—Stockholm, Malmö and Göteborg at least 4 or 5 time a year. Also to London and here in France we hold many workshops in Provence in the south were I live and up in Paris. Also Switzerland and Austria less regularly. I come over several times a year to teach in Canada - Toronto and Edmonton among other places.

So the work is expanding and growing not only as people want to have workshops in their area but also in the number of people now training to be LearningMethods teachers which, of course, will help more so that the more teachers there are I don’t have to keep rushing around the world as much.

Kinshasha:
David approximately how many participants attend your sessions?

David: I keep it quite strictly limited to no more than 8 people because we really need to spend the time to get into depth and I want to make sure that everybody who comes can bring up one or more issues and explore it though as far as we can go in that period of time. It is very important to keep the numbers so that everybody is participating at a deep level with the time available for their learning.

Kinshasha:
That’s understandable.

David:
It takes quite a bit of time to explore systematically though these things and then do a follow-up a day or two later when people have had realizations and insights and results from their explorations and so on.

Elizabeth:
We don’t have much time left, right? This is Elizabeth and I have a quote that I would like to read. I gleaned this from a tape from one of the last workshops I attended in Toronto and I am just going to read this because I think it gives again the kernel of the process of the work.

This is something that David said in the context of somebody being amazed of how rigorously the information, rigorously, in order to get this really crucial and wonderful information about a problem.

"What we often find in front of us are sloppy, vague and unsystematic ways of using our thinking and our awareness, driving us into reaction and problems. A great part of what we are doing in this work is to get very clear and precise and systematic about how we can use our own perceptions and our own intelligence to understand the significance of all our daily experiences. When we can do that, over and over we see that what we need to change is ALL THERE in front of us!"

David:
Gee, I couldn’t have said that better myself!

Kinshasha:
When I hear that you know what it makes me realize that we have to be conscious. We have to stop being lazy as it relates to what we are doing and the way that we are doing our lives and instead of allowing life to just happen to us somehow be real deliberate about our lives, real conscious about it.

Elizabeth:
That’s beautiful!

David:
Yes, when we really explore into this, we have this incredible heritage of sensitivity and intelligence and we really have not had a way to learn how to use it. When you can learn how to use it on your daily lived experience with all those people around you it enables us to just completely change our lives and get rid of these problems that we have been laboring under for years.

Kinshasha:
I just want to thank you so much. As I told you, you had a whole hour to talk about this work and you have done such an excellent job. I am so looking forward to meeting you in the next couple of weeks. It is awesome and it fits everything that makes sense to me at this point in time. I would also presume that what you’re probably noticing is that more and more people are attracted to this work and more and more people, for a lack of different language right now, want to wake up and want to come out of the fog.

David:
Yes, yes. And they want to find their own way of doing it, not just by someone else’s system is the thing that I like so much about it.

Kinshasha:
Powerful, powerful.

David:
To learn to navigate their own lives, shall we say.

Rebecca:
That’s the key.

Kinshasha:
Well, I want to thank you, David, for this conversation and maybe you might want to give the number one more time so that people will be able to reach you, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth:
OK, 612-375-9142, that’s Elizabeth. or check the web site: www.learningmethods.com.

Kinshasha:
Thank you David for your time and explaining this work to us, I appreciated it so much.

David:
Well, thank you, Kinshasa and Barbara. We could go on for another hour or two if we had the time, but I’ve enjoyed myself too.

Rebecca:
Same here.

Kinshasha:
Thank you now. Bye.

And I want our listeners to know that you were listening to Health Notes from the Heart of a Natural Woman and it is 11: 01. You are listening to Fresh Air Radio, KFAI, 90.3 FM in Minneapolis and 106.7 FM in Saint Paul. We’re your community radio station. Stay tuned because conversation with Elle MacPherson is next…

  

   

 
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David Gorman developed the LearningMethods work out of over 30 years of research and teaching experiences. He has a background as an artist and a fascination with exploring human structure and function. In the mid-70s he spent many nights dissecting in the lab and drawing furiously. In 1980 he published an illustrated 600-page work, The Body Moveable and a collection of articles and essays, Looking at Ourselves in 1996.

He studied the Alexander Technique since 1972 and taught that work from 1980-1997 becoming well-known worldwide for his innovations to the work and notorious for challenging the orthodoxy of the profession. He has been invited to teach all over the world in universities, conservatories and training colleges, at conferences and symposia, and with performance groups and health professionals.

In 1982, his teaching was revolutionised by his discovery of a new model of human organisation with its profound implications of our in-built and natural tendency toward balance, ease and wholeness. He extended these insights into a new way of training teachers of the Alexander Technique and from 1988 to 1997 in London, UK he trained 45 teachers, assisted by Margaret Farrar until 1994 and then by Ann Penistan.

However, further explorations in his own and other training groups made it clear that the greater part of our problems lay not in the 'body' but in our consciousness and way of seeing things — our underlying belief systems and how we misinterpret our daily experiences and then react to these misunderstandings. At this point it also became apparent that his discoveries and the changed teaching methods they implied no longer fit under the belief system and pedagogy of the Alexander Technique.

Recognizing the need for a new and more effective approach to help people uncover and liberate themselves from these circular traps, David developed the LearningMethods work to teach people how to gain command of their exquisite in-built clarity of perception and powerful tools of intelligence so they can successfully navigate their lives.

Since the beginning of the work in 1997, David has completed the training of a growing number of LearningMethods Teachers, many of whom are now teaching the LM work in universities and conservatories, and continues to evolve the Apprenticeship Teacher Training Program. He continues to give workshops in Europe, North America and Asia (click here for David's teaching schedule) as well as writing about the work and raising another young son.

DAVID GORMAN
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