Announcing the publication of my book:
Touching Presence
Throughout my years when teaching, people have consistently asked “When are you going to write a book so we have something to refer to when we are on our own?"
Well glory be, I did it! I wrote a book... and now you can read it… in English and translated in French and in Japanese!
The book is available for purchase in my office and whenever I give workshops. It is also offered on Amazon. In due time you will be able to find it at your local book stores as well.
Scroll below for Book Reviews…
“You will understand what it means, when you become what it means”
BOOK REVIEWS
“The writings are transformative, resonating with who I am as a person beyond my habitual use, touching into the deeper current of my true self” by Eliza Mallouk
Touching Presence is a very personal account of Tommy Thompson’s perspective on the Alexander Technique. It is an invitation into the classroom at the AT Training Center at Cambridge, MA. In fact its origins come from a compilation of class notes of Rachel Prabhakar who trained at the Center from 2010-2013.
One could say it is a quick read (114 pages) that takes a lifetime to fully understand and appreciate.
It has tremendous value and depth of meaning especially to AT teachers, teachers in training and those familiar with the Alexander Technique. It will also resonate for anyone interested in an exploration of the truest meaning of the SELF.
Spoken in his own voice, each chapter is an account of themes and principles that Tommy has taught in his training. The many stories are from Tommy’s personal life and are interesting, thoughtful, honest and often quite moving. Within the stories and experiences, principles of the Alexander Technique are clarified and explained. The stories speak to the depth of who we are as human beings and how the Alexander Technique facilitates our ability to be more fully human.
Touching Presence is a book that you can pick up and open to any chapter or page and learn something useful and thought provoking. I come away from each reading as though I have just been given a private lesson. In this sense, the writings are transformative, resonating with who I am as a person beyond my habitual use, touching into the deeper current of my true self.
Chapter titles alone are provocative and intriguing drawing us in to want to read more. Here are just a few examples:
On the Beauty of the Person
On Being and Doing
On Compassionate Teaching
On the Personal Narrative
On the Moment as a Movement
On Withholding Definition
And these that are more familiar AT themes:
On the Primary Control
On Directions
On Monkey
On Habit
There are three pages of Aphorisms. One could take any of them and treat them as a thoughtful lesson, reflecting on them throughout one’s day. Here are some examples:
“Notice when in your thinking you think you know what will happen. Then you will miss all the other possibilities”
“You can’t not have an embodied experience, but you can behave as if you are not embodied”
“If a person is tense, often the only way she will be aware of the tension is when she experiences its absence”
To quote Debi Adams in the introduction: “This book is a gem. It brings to the Alexander world the language and thinking of a master teacher-one who never tires of exploring the principles of Alexander’s discoveries, and who seeks to teach them in the clearest and most honest way possible”
- Eliza Mallouk, AMSAT Teaching Member, Boston, MA
Review found in Alexander Technique International’s newsletter, The Exchange
Fieldnotes: Gleanings from the Life and Work of Tommy Thompson, by Bruce Fertman
Reading Tommy’s book, I hear Tommy speaking primarily to trainees and teachers and to advanced students of Alexander’s work. Given that, I will address this same audience.
This book is not so much about the Alexander Technique as it is about how Tommy uses the Alexander Technique as his vehicle through which he guides his students into living more compassionately conscious and self-embodied lives. Use is too narrow an arena for Tommy. He is interested in personal transformation.
In our profession, thankfully, we have many gifted teachers doing research into different aspects of Alexander’s work. Some of us are reductionists. Some of us are more physiologically oriented and want to zero in on the precise physiological mechanisms involved in bringing about improved use. This is exciting. At the same time, some of us, like Tommy, are what I would call expansionists. Tommy wants to expand Alexander’s work beyond the workings of the body into the workings of the heart and soul. That is where Tommy’s work lives. This too is exciting. For Tommy, Alexander’s work is a spiritual path, a way of life. I think this is true for many of us. Tommy is as much a healer and secular rabbi/sheik/priest as he is a teacher.
I am fine with this because when reading, Touching Presence, I feel in the presence of a person who is entirely himself, who teaches through who he is. He’s not imitating anyone. He teaches through his own personal ethical framework, expressing his own truth. He teaches through his own language. He teaches out of his own experience, sometimes painful experience. He’s real. He’s authentic.
Tommy often, like a Hasidic rabbi or Sufi sheik, teaches through story. He’s a good storyteller. He shares deeply moving stories with us of his birth, of growing up in the segregated south, of the love for and death of his wife, Julie. These are not just stories. The key concepts which Tommy holds dear about the Alexander Technique are clearly elucidated within these stories.
What are some of these key concepts? Here I will not go into detail; for that I suggest reading Touching Presence and if possible, studying with Tommy.
1.) Perhaps the deepest and most far reaching of all of Tommy’s key concepts is that of “withholding definition”. This is his way of talking about Alexandrian Inhibition, of a radical sort, one that allows a persons’ fixed sense of identity to become unfixed, fluid, changeable. Tommy’s work revolves around the issue of identity, how we define ourselves and by doing so, how we limit ourselves from experiencing who we are and what we might become. In the words of James Baldwin, “Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned.” Tommy work seems to be about loosening the garment.
2.) Seeing a students’ beauty. Appreciating a student for how and who they are and letting your lessons unfold from there. Tommy’s work is profoundly non-corrective.
3.) Restoring a supportive sense of being as we do what we are doing. Remaining a human being rather than turning into a human doing. Our culture judgmentally demands: “Don’t just stand there, do something!” Tommy’s advice might be: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” First get a sense of where you are, what you are in relation with, how you are being, what you are experiencing and then let your doing arise out of this fullness of being.
4.) What most influences our students and allows them to change depends not so much on what we do but on who we are when we are with them. Ram Dass says, “The only thing you have to offer another human being, ever, is your own state of being.” Maybe Ram Dass heard that from Tommy! Sounds like Tommy.
Touching Presence does not read like a novel, or a textbook, certainly not a manual. Reading Tommy requires some work and some time. I found myself reading just a paragraph or two and then having to stop, become still, quiet, and just think, reflect, meditate before reading on. Touching Presence reads more like a Buddhist Sutra, or like the Cloud of Unknowing, where something important is said over and over again. Humility…is nothing else but a true knowledge and experience of yourself as you are. (Cloud of Unknowing). Or, The word is not the thing. (The Diamond Sutra). Or, Form is emptiness, and emptiness, form. (The Heart Sutra). Ideas not for thinking once and then forgetting, but rather ideas you sit on, like a mother hen, until one day, CRACK, your mind opens, your heart opens, and new possibilities you never could have imagined, present themselves.
If you are training to become an Alexander teacher, or if you are an Alexander teacher and if you are interested not only in The Use of the Body, but are really interested in The Use of the Whole Self, if you wish to go beyond teaching about the body and about movement, if you are interested in your physio-spiritual life, then this book may help you along your way.
- Bruce Fertman
STAT Teaching Member, Alexander Technique Teacher and Trainer, Denmark
“At this time when the world is falling out of touch, Touching Presence is an antidote and reminder of its importance.” by Penny O’Connor
Touching Presence is a gift – literally. Rachel Prabhakar collated all the notes she had made from her training with Tommy in Cambridge and presented them to him as a graduation gift in 2013. She and Tommy have worked together to augment and develop it for publication. Tommy was apprenticed to Frank Pierce Jones, co-founded ATI, travels the world giving workshops and lessons, as well as continuing his own practice and training back home.
The collection of notes are arranged thematically, so for example there are chapters on Using the Hands , Monkey, The Self, Desire, on the Role of the Teacher , but all of them revolve around the fundamental practice of how we connect to our students : by with-holding the definition of who we think we are and who we think they are, so we can touch not the person’s habit or use pattern but beyond this to the beauty of the person within.
Written in the spoken register, I can hear Tommy’s voice and conjure him up out of the page into my world, here and now. He is a great raconteur and I met some of his old stories like old friends, my guts singing with delight to be reminded of them again. And then are are the new stories, or those I had not heard before, his new discoveries and new thoughts, to ponder and receive and be excited by. If you’ve not come across Tommy’s teachings before, this is a great introduction to his thinking and way of working. He offers you his insights honestly, openly, fluidly.
‘What do I teach? Practical consciousness – applied.’
I also like the dimensions of the book, a slim volume full of nuggets that begs to be read again and again. It is easy to carry round to refer to when seeking inspiration and compassion on our teaching journey.
Right now we are faced with not being able to touch our students or receive theirs. But we can see beyond the screen and touch someone’s heart with our attention and our presence, receiving them as a whole being, in a safe space. At this time when the world is falling out of touch, Touching Presence is an antidote and reminder of its importance. I commend it to you.”
‘The touch we want in Alexander is unconditional. We don’t want anything. Instead we want to touch someone while letting ourselves be touched.’
- Penny O’Connor, STAT & ATI Teaching Member, London, England