Lessons with Miss G: #6, “My Way”
“Quiet throughout, with particular attention to head, neck and back” came the familiar mantra from Miss G, as she gently tapped the back of my head with one finger.
After a minute or so (one’s sense of time was very different in her teaching room) she asked me, somewhat incongruously – and almost in a tone of curiosity, as if we were chatting over a cup of coffee, “Have you heard of an American singer called Francis Sinatra?”
“Yes Miss Goldie,” I replied, wondering where she was going with this.
“Then are you familiar with a song he recorded entitled ‘I Did It My Way’?”
“Yes Miss Goldie”, my attention dancing now between the anticipation of what might be coming next and the call back to the quiet energy that flowed, under her touch, between my head and spine.
“Well …” she said, stepping back so I no longer had that external reminder to ‘not interfere with head, neck and back’, her voice rising now in a crescendo “… he got it quite wrong you know! It’s not about doing it your way. It’s doing it your way that’s got you into the mess you’re in today.”
I’m saying to myself, “Don’t react! Stay quiet! Head, neck and back……”
“You want to stop doing it your way. Not your way”, her voice quietening now, her hand coming back to my head/neck area. “Not your way, but Nature’s way.”
I began to see that inhibition and direction are two aspects of a way of being; they are inextricably linked.
© 2013 John S Hunter
Lessons With Miss G: #4, The Table
In one of my early lessons she asked me to take my shoes off and get on the table. This was a narrow couch up against the wall in one corner – and there it stayed.
There seemed to be several telephone directories under my head. Miss Goldie sat at the top of the table and I had the impression that she was just pulling my head. But unexpectedly at some point my back came with it and lengthened out.
“Do you see?” she said. “Head forward and up and back lengthen and widen are part of the same thing.”
I didn’t see, but I felt a new sensation in my spine.
Then something quite odd happened. I had by this time become deeply quiet; my body almost in a meditative state but my mind still alert. She had a finger lightly touching one knee. My eyes were half closed so I couldn’t see her, but while her finger was still on my knee, as if by an act of simultaneity, both hands arrived at the back of my neck. The sensation in my knee was still so clear that I was, for a moment, very confused. How could she be in two places at once?
After about 15 minutes she asked me to get up, reminding me that it was “still part of the lesson” and to put my shoes on.
It was the only table-turn I received in twelve years.
© 2013 John S Hunter
Lessons With Miss G: #3, Arriving Late
I always experienced a degree of anxiety when on my way to a lesson with Miss G. She seemed to take away all the little “tricks” I relied on to have “better use”. What I thought was the application of the Technique, was now being challenged as actually another set of habits.
Certainly one of the most inadvisable things to do, for a worrying sort of person like me at any rate, was to arrive late.
After an agonising wait for the lift there was that extra flight of stairs to negotiate to get to the fifth floor – but all of that paled into insignificance compared to the dramatic confrontation that was about to ensue: not, I must in all fairness add, with Miss G – but with oneself when, standing in front of her chair and with her calmly looking at you or placing a finger on the back of your neck, all the inner mental turmoil and over-stimulation of the nervous system – aggravated by, but certainly present anyway, the last-minute rush – came sharply into one’s field of awareness.
This was not a phenomenon limited to arriving late, of course; there was even something to be gained by the hard-won struggle to find – perhaps only at the end of the half-hour – a moment of real inner quiet. But it was arguably more productive to arrive early and allow some time to “settle” before the lesson. The distance between her and you was then slightly shortened and some of the subtleties of the inner psychic processes might better be glimpsed.
Besides, arriving early one might be fortunate enough to have a “waiting-room experience”.
Because the stud-walls separating her teaching room from the waiting room were so thin, one could hear more or less everything that was going on. Miss G would usually be putting someone through their paces; occasionally one might hear a pupil making some kind of doomed objection to her critique, though it was more usual to find them agreeing with her. “Yes, Miss Goldie!”
One wondered, of course, who it was she had in there with her and on more that one occasion I was very surprised to see a familiar face coming out of her room – though with perhaps a very unfamiliar expression on it.
© 2013 John S Hunter
Legacy Project
Lessons With Miss G: #2, Decisions.
In I think my second lesson with Margaret Goldie she said, “Now I am going to ask you to make a decision, and it will be the first decision you’ve ever made.”
At the time I found this a very strange thing for her to say. Had I not been making decisions all my life? Had I not decided that very day to get out of bed, to get on the tube and to come and have a lesson with her?
We assume that because we end up taking one course of action rather than another that we have made a decision. But is that the case? Perhaps we have merely acquiesced to impulses following the path of least resistance. The evidence was that I could not decide to not get out of a chair, in fact decide not to do, so what decisions could I make about my life…….?
Miss G’s assertion opened a question for me about what decisions really are, a subject to which Erika attached a great deal of importance (see Tips4Teachers – “…not to do…”).
© 2013 John S Hunter
Legacy Project
Upward Thought 
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