reading

Printed in the United States of America.

Cover Design: Willie McElroy

Copy Editing: Joe Radziszewski

Illustration: Jill Eng, Maya Eng, Willie McElroy

Author Photo: Willie McElroy

Anatomy Photo: Microsoft Word 2003 Clipart

ISBN-13: 978-1492776406

ISBN-10: 1492776408

ISBN: 9781483509273

For my children

Praise for Body Over Mind

“A beautifully written explanation of why people suffer from the pressure of having to do something to fix their life circumstances. An approach that after years of searching for relief was amazingly helpful. I’ve suffered from anxiety most of my life, and this book helped me to see things in a new and different way!” -Maria Tzianabos, M.A. Family Practice Medicine; Dance Faculty, University of Southern Maine

“Eng’s book lights a path for freeing ourselves from the clutter of obligatory, guilt-ridden, and assumed or projected thoughts that are essentially irrelevant and distract us from taking effective action in the here-and-now. We learn to accept and be guided by the unique thread of events that concretely define us and set us apart as individuals in our journey through time.” -Michael Moser, Student of the Alexander Technique and Mindful Reality

“Ms. Eng offers us a wonderful synthesis of respected visionaries as well as an intimate look into her own process observing the field of the body over decades. Her continual refrain that we cannot be doing any other action than what is already occurring is highly valuable as we look into what it means to inhabit the present moment. Eng deftly weaves esoteric principles into a helpful framework for our everyday lives.” -Katie West, Founder and Director, The Levity Institute

a mindful reality check

attaining psychological freedom by confronting thought with reality

Images

Jill Spiewak Eng

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction: The Illusion of Effort

Chapter I: The Involuntary Body

Our Physical Reality

The Present, the Past, and the Future: The Flow of Action and Time

Thoughts are Physical: The Non-Importance of “I”

Thought and Action: No Cause and Effect Relationship

Recognizing the Wholeness of the Body

The Whole that is Moved

The Issue of Fragmentation: The Mind-Body Connection

One Organism, One Comprehensive Action

A Review of Involuntary Functions

Born Into Our Life

Chapter II: Thought and Reality

Thought as Image

Our Dependence on Time: The Issue of Waiting

Real Time vs. Thought Time

Proof of Action: A Personal Reality Check

The Trouble with Planning

We Cannot Follow Ideas

Goals as Myth

Our Attachment to Fantasy

What We End Up Doing

One’s Truth

Chapter III: Relieving Emotional Pain and Anxiety

There is No Such Thing as Inaction

Feeling Pressure to “Do” Something: The Physical Reality Principle

Countering Should Thoughts

Here, Now, Doing This: I Can’t if I’m Not

Action is Always Correct

Ambivalence, Regret, and Retrospect: Some More Exercises

Disregarding Thought

Telling Ourself to Do Nothing

Conflicts: Nothing to Figure Out

Confusion is Correct

Action Does Itself: The Body Leads

When Good Things Happen

A Concrete Example

Connect the Dots: The Story of Our Life

Others

Conclusion: The Tube

Postscript

The Findings of Benjamin Libet Neurophysiologist (1916-2007)

Bibliography

Notes

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for all they have done for me in relationship to the production of this book: Chloe Wing, for training me to be a teacher of the Alexander Technique; Tommy Thompson, for first introducing me to the Alexander Technique; Susan Tohn and Jordan Oshlag, for exposing me to meditation; my parents, Helene and Kenneth Spiewak, for all the dance training they facilitated, and for sending me to graduate school, where I acquired the skills to write and assimilate the material in this book; Maria Tzianabos, for appreciating my work from the very beginning; Ron Botting, for always believing in me as an artist; Clay Taliaferro, Zvi Gotheiner, Richard Schoenberg, Christian Polos, Dena Wortzel, and Lauren Como, for their support, education and inspiration; Michael Eng, for his love, and for bringing me to NYC; my children Maya and Kobi Eng, for their perfection and love; Joe Radziszewski and Katie West, for understanding my words; Jo Rogers, for pointing me toward Benjamin Libet; Carol Welsh and Willie McElroy for their generosity; and finally, everyone I have ever studied with or performed under in my dance career, as they gave me the opportunity to express my body.

Preface

In my early 20’s, I found myself suffering from anxiety. I was dating someone at the time who exposed me to readings that embraced themes like effortlessness and inquiry, in particular Stephen Levine’s book, A Gradual Awakening. Levine’s book presents concepts from the Buddhist vipassana meditation practice, which I found to be comforting and easy to grasp. At the time, I was living in Boston, where another friend directed me toward the Cambridge Transcendental Meditation Centre. I thoroughly welcomed this mode of meditation which has remained with me until this day. It allowed me to see my thoughts, not attach to them or push them away, and somehow manage some of the anxiety I was experiencing. What I came to appreciate in Levine’s book was the comparison of life itself to a meditation, where there is no need to attach to events or experiences as we would not thoughts, as they are like clouds in the sky, no one being more important than another, and all consistently coming and going.

At this time I had also ventured into the field of modern dance as a profession. (I had studied dance my whole life, but had most recently spent time pursuing academic educations at Tufts and Boston Universities, the latter where I acquired a combined Masters degree in International Relations and Communications.) My new dance focus brought me to a summer workshop at Jacob’s Pillow called, A New Vision for Dance (headed by Lynn Simonson), where I was introduced to the Alexander Technique via teacher Tommy Thompson. The overall purpose of the workshop was to expose dancers to the fact that movement could be approached from a place of minimal effort and tension, a move away from traditional practices of dance training. I was most impressed, however, with the behavioral element of Alexander’s work, and specifically Mr. Thompson’s remark that this work was about “who we take ourselves to be in the world.” It addressed personal habit and this interested me very much.

About five years later I moved to New York City where I ended up training to be a teacher of the Alexander Technique under Alexander Technique International (ATI), my training course taught by Chloe Wing. In NYC, I also had the opportunity to study dance techniques that similarly promoted the stripping away of habits, most notably Zvi Gotheiner’s ballet class, and the Klein and Limón Techniques. These all informed me that the body has a natural, effortless way of moving that does not require muscle tension or inner preparation.

What was most profound for me about Chloe Wing’s training course was the way she brought to light the commonalities between Alexander’s work and eastern practices such as Hinduism (Swami Muktananda’s teachings presented by Robert Rabbin) and Zen Buddhism (expressed in Zen in the Art of Archery), as well as Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now. I found there to be an easy connection between Alexander’s practice of “inhibition” (the dislodging of mental and physical reactions to everyday stimuli), meditation (non-attachment to thought), and the dismantling of mental effort reflected in Rabbin’s sensibility that we do not need to muscle up to life. Ms. Wing topped this off with her assertion that “thinking is the biggest muscular contraction in the body.”

I will also mention Barbara Conable’s influence on me in her work as an Alexander teacher and a founder of Body Mapping (a method of awareness that clarifies where joints exist in the body). In general, the Alexander Technique draws attention to where one’s body is in relation to his or her environment, an individual’s presence inside of his or her activity, and the reflexive nature of musculo-skeletal movement (in particular the head-spine relationship). Alexander believed that the delusion of a person’s movement awareness stems from a faulty sense of perception, or what he called “debauched kinesthesia,” while Conable further attributes one’s physical misuse to “mismapping” (an inaccurate understanding of the location of joints). For me this consideration of reality is powerful, as it has always appealed to me to decipher reality from fantasy.

In 2007, while going through a divorce and undergoing many changes in my life, I started writing what Julia Cameron (author of The Artist’s Way) calls, the Morning Pages, a free flowing journal which is basically about getting something down on paper every day. At this point, I was also introduced to Byron Katie’s work while randomly stumbling upon an article of hers in Ode Magazine. Somehow, her message, which discourages people from arguing with reality, provided the final link to writing my book, as it tied in more language for me about fantasy, illusion, and the reasons we should not believe our thoughts. All of this also served as a personal therapy for me during these confusing and unrecognizable times, especially as my predictions regarding the events in my life were often incorrect, and I would frequently be surprised by unexpected occurrences. The simplest reason I can give for not believing thoughts is that in my experience they do not lead to answers.

Inside of all of this, I came to see that in my own life I had no choice but to be where I was, doing what I was doing, steeped in the situations I was in. This was especially noticeable with the difficult ones when my mind would be telling me what I was going to do, or what I should do, when I would end up doing very different things.

It was the combination of this uncanny observation that on the one hand, my thoughts were so convincing, and on the other hand, my actions would often not follow suit, that led me to see that it is my body that acts, as it is the only actor available to me. And, so, while I was immersed in these teachings that were telling me my thoughts were not to be trusted, it became plain to me that I can only ever do what my body does. Consequently, I started to notice that it is my body that leads my actions, not my thoughts. Furthermore, the fact that I could not account for the surprising things that were happening, both good and bad, reinforced for me that I was not the one in control. Beyond that, I gained relief from the knowledge that because things can only go one way in my life (the way they go), I cannot make any wrong moves.

I hope this book brings you something valuable. My findings do not need to be received in the ways they speak to me; this is simply an offering to those who are drawn to it or who have explored other related insights.

Jill Eng

“What we do is dictated by what we are doing.” -Jill Eng

“Who we are is not reachable by thought.” -Robert Rabbin¹

Physics