Saturday, March 16, 2024

 Saturday, March 16, 2024

    I left at 7:30 to get to Hawi and the second Gokhale class. I made it without losing any electricity. I must have accidentally pressed the power mode button when I pressed the seat-warmer button. It was cold last Saturday.

   I made it to the class just in time. I got a great deal out of this class, too. Lisa encouraged me to write up my complaints about the teacher of the Elements course. It was 18-13-minute online private sessions at the rate of $200 an hour. It was terrible. If I hadn’t had a previous encounter with this program, I would have reported it to a law enforcement agency as a scam. It was that bad.

    Today, the main objective was the pelvic position. I was the poorest performer in our class of three. I have no movement in the lower part of my spine. What are the causes? 

  Some of it is from the instruction I received in my dance classes: tuck your spine. From what Esther discovered in her anthropological research, that is the opposite of what we should do. Our waistbands should slant down from the back to the front, not the other way or parallel to the ground. Besides my dance instruction, there’s my spinal curvature. It gets in the way of everything. It was so bad when I was younger. I can do certain moves I couldn’t do when I was in my twenties and taking several dance classes a week.

    I was tired during the class. Lisa allowed me to nap briefly. She is a lovely lady. When she lived in California, she hosted Sunday potluck dinners at her house for whoever wanted to come to share in music and storytelling. She’s a vet who graduated from Tufts Vet school. That’s quite an impressive accomplishment. It’s harder to get into vet school than med school because fewer of them exist. She sounds like an incredibly relaxed person. She is moving to Hawaii and taking over the vet practice of a woman who just retired. She has an entirely relaxed attitude about it. She floats with the tide. Wow! She is as unassuming as it comes.

  I’m a little uncomfortable with the group. They’re perfectly nice to me; it’s just that they’re all so California, and I’m so New York. Lisa commented on my New Yorkness, but I didn’t take it as a compliment. I feel I’m not with my tribe. They tolerate me but don’t embrace me. I find myself acting out a bit out of my discomfort.

  The ride home went smoothly. I didn’t worry about how much electricity I had.

   I met with Adolescent D during the afternoon. He is recognizing words more rapidly. More importantly, he doesn’t zone out anymore. He hasn’t for quite a while now. I asked if he was still doing it at school. He said he didn’t think so. His response confirmed my impression that his zoning out was a fear response. While my main response when scared is fight, his is freeze. This change in him is wonderful news.

   There is an ‘however’ here, too. While D recognizes words much more quickly and accurately, he continues to resist/refuse to do what I suggest that would improve his weaknesses and enhance his strengths. I recommend he analyze words he can correctly for their phonetic structure. I did that when I created my recording of the 5 Stories I had written to help my students learn to read. I had no idea what its impact would be on them and less what its effect would be on me.

    After recording a 90-minute cassette, reading the individual sounds and all the words in the text, and after saying the word normally, I found a dramatic difference in some of my skills. My reading speed increased. My ability to listen to someone else speak improved. That happened because I became more sensitive to the individual sounds within a word,  increasing my sensory data. My speech changed; it became clearer, and my rate of speech slowed down somewhat. Most surprising was the change in the way I listened to music. Music had always been linked to dance; it was what I danced to. I spent most of my youth dancing in my living room to classical music to entertain my grandfather. 

I was sensitive to the rhythms and emotional intensity of the music but not the melodic patterns or the interaction of the instruments. My ability to focus on the latter was altered. This is not to say I was anywhere near what someone with a lifelong rudimentary interest in music had. I attribute all this to changes in my left brain resulting from my immersion in phonics. There is evidence that backs up my theory.