Alain Allard, Moves into Consciousness - To Thine Own Self Be True

The psyche, self investigation, trauma, transformation, movement, dance, the journey, discipline, silence, music, love, partnership, relationships tips, God and time - join Alain Allard, co-director of http://www.movesintoconsciousness.com and Philip Bateman, for an insightful, deep and revealing discussion, at the end of an 8 day movement retreat, from the Greek island of Corfu.

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Transcript

- Philip Bateman from The Interview here with Alain Allard, one of the co-directors of Moves Into Consciousness, and we're here at the Bardis Hotel on the Corfu Island in Greece. And we're at the end of an eight-day workshop we're going to talk about Alain's work and his philosophy and, generally, a whole bunch of other stuff, and see what comes out of it. Your background includes being a woodworker, a shepherd, martial arts teacher, a clinical therapist of 30 years, motorcyclist, 5Rhythms, your own movement-modality teacher, had your first child at 23, computer programmer was in there, father of five as a family, music maestro.. How does all that land for you hearing it? What comes up for you?

- There are some people who have a clear idea of what they want to do in their life, and I have a really good friend who knew from very, very early on that he wanted to be a sculptor, and he was uncompromising in his refusal to be a carpenter. He had a family. He was uncompromising in his refusal to do anything but attend to what his art was. I know somebody else who was very, very clearly set on being a violin player from an early age. Until recently, I would have said that my life was an absolute series of accidents, just a series of accidents. And I think I've got more generosity towards that now in the sense that I have had the good fortune to in the sense that I have had the good fortune to have the kind of childhood where it was very clear that what I was being told and what I was feeling, seeing, sensing didn't equate and so I very much developed my own sense of checking things out if I believed them to be true or correct. And I saw that the so-called desirable things in life which because of a certain propensity I had for being able to pass exams, adapt to situations, again because I had a difficult, difficult childhood. I found a way of being fast-tracked within a system that would have rewarded me by giving me a certain kind of status in the world and, therefore, a certain kind of salary. And it became very obvious to me quite quickly that this was nothing that interested me. I wasn't interested in buying and selling things for a living. I wasn't interested in the process of academia, which demanded that you had to kind of eat a load of rubbish before you could ask the real questions. So I became, possibly because of fear, possibly because of mistrust, possibly because it was divine will, I became very independent quite early on and followed what fascinated me. And at the beginning, I came from a family that didn't know anything about manual work, looked down on manual work. I had a father who left when I was relatively young. I had a mother who really wanted me to pursue the possibility of academic success because I had, like I said, this propensity for passing exams. And I just dropped out of the whole thing pretty early and one thing led to, I just interested. I wanted to know how you made things. I wanted to know how things put together. I wanted to really feel like, at the end of any given day, there was something tangible that I'd achieved and most of the people that I really respected were people who, if I want a better way of explaining it, were very down-to-earth. And so, what I was getting from them was something that equated with my idea of true or real or honest. And yeah, so that's how I got into that and then traveling meant that I had to do certain jobs for certain jobs. And then, by the time I was just 23, I had a baby. And the reason I did that is because up until then, I'd been like "I'm never going to learn to drive. I'm never going to learn to", and that was a car because I already had a motorbike thing. But "I'm never going to learn to drive a car, I'm never going to own a house, I'm never going to get a mortgage, and I'm never going to get married and I'm never going to have any children". And by the time I was 23, I had broken all of those rules. Yeah, so, yeah.

- Yeah.

- Accident, design, who knows?

- In your experience, how do people use trauma?

- How do they use trauma?

- I'm not exactly sure I understand the question. If we can take one step back in that, into what are the various ways in which people seem to create a relationship with trauma?

- Yeah.

- Then I would say it can both be a place where it becomes a convenient reason for giving up, which sounds very harsh, but I don't mean it in a judgemental way. I mean it in a very practical sense, that there is every reason to give up in life, and what I mean by giving up is kind of colluding with the whole notion that somehow life is this thing that one has to get through as much as possible, and so that that spark of real connection with anything, it takes a certain kind of application to really stick with it and a willingness to look at things that are uncomfortable. At the same time, this is not to undermine the fact that, as I understand trauma, that we get some real shocks in the system. And those shocks in the same way that if you fall off a motorbike and you don't pay attention, as I never used to, you'll find that years in later life, actually there is an impact of something stored in the body and there are things that get stored in the psyche because we never get damaged. Things get frozen. But what we have to train ourselves to do is to recognize that the beauty of having this third brain, this neocortexian way of approaching things, that we have the capacity to reevaluate, rework, reframe, shift perspective. And that's why, oddly enough, I believe that this therapeutic process works. And by a therapeutic process, I mean finding somebody who is willing to accompany you on a journey of shifting perspective, of looking at this thing that you call trauma, which was a shock, a kind of a , and saying, "Okay, let's breathe around this. "Let's look around this. "What's the opportunity here "to move into a life with greater consciousness?" Something like that.

- Add that you just perfectly outlined what Moves into Consciousness is, is that a reflection, a true reflection you'd say of the work you do?

- The work I do is a sharing of my own practice, and my own, again, the name Moves into Consciousness came to me by happy accident. It was just, that's when I, there was this thing where you had to get websites, and it was like, okay, it's time that I get a website, and it was like I had a client, as it happened, who was a computer person, and he said, "I can make you a website easy, "but you need to buy a domain name, "and what's your work?" And I go, "Whoa, it's something "about moving into consciousness." And he goes, "All right, that would get you "a website movesintoconsciousness," and that's how it began. And that's a reflection of what I've been trying to do probably since the age of six or seven where it was really clear that, although I wouldn't have been able to articulate it like that, but where it was really clear that most of the people around me were moving around in the kind of stupor of unconsciousness, almost like their life would begin at some point, yeah. So that's what I tried to share with the work is to create the conditions to get a little bit free of the emotional stories that keep us trapped, and be able to step back from them and see them a bit more consciously for what they are, with all the protection that they offer, with all the kind of stuckness of the strategies that have been useful at some point, but don't really, or no longer fit the purpose as we mature. And I've been trying to not try. I've had the grace to keep moving towards greater consciousness, and have said--

- Any standout teachers for you in your time? Everybody and nothing, any core people you might?

- My personal teachers, as it were, the people who saved me, Ian Gordon-Brown and Barbara Somers, I met them. I went to do an introductory course with them, when I was quite in my builder days, and I was at the place in my life where I recognized I had a major chip on my shoulder, that I was just kind of angry about most things, and I was very used to working in people's houses 'cause I did manual labor, very used to people assuming I was an idiot. I was feeling more and more pissed off about that. And somehow, there seems, when I talk about things being frozen, there seems to be a natural trajectory to the journey of the psyche through a lifetime, and it was clear that, oh okay, I went to Oxford when I was 16, 17, and it was like I left after my first year because it was really clear this whole formal education thing wasn't going to work for me because the structures around it were part of a system that was too difficult for me. It wasn't really, I was thinking it was going to be like the glass bead game, like I was going to meet a lot of people who were really, really interested in this fantastic capacity that the mind has to look at the world, like this extraordinary patterning of things and notice patterns, and it wasn't like that. So, but when I said that the psyche seems to have a natural trajectory, it was like, oh we're late, and then something put me through the open university. And at that open university, you get again, I did a first year, and I got a distinction in what I did, and therefore it was again to me like, mm, these people, it's too easy to get this. I need to be kind of challenged by people who can recognize that it's not enough to just learn and regurgitate stuff. I went to this weekend, and Ian, a very, very beautiful man, and Barbara, who was the first young female Jungian analyst in Britain, they, at the end of this weekend, they said, "I would like you to train with us." And I'm like, "I'm just the builder," and they said "Well, yeah, we need people like you." So they stand out for me as teachers. Gabrielle stands out for me as a teacher in the sense that when I met her, again, it was somebody kind of try try to sell me a book. I was like, "I'm not into gurus." They said, "Well, I think I need to give you this book," and she was in London. I went to work with her, and I burst into tears around her, and I hadn't cried for a very, very, very long time, not in my adult life, and it was really clear that what this woman was saying was, "You don't have to fit into anybody else's shape. "You don't have to wear anybody else's costume," and it's ironic in terms of my own journey with the rhythms as, not as a practice, and as a business now, that it got to the place where it seems to be saying the opposite, that you have to fit into a particular shape, and you have to take a particular form. And so, it was time for me to leave, but I have a great, I have a great deal of good fortune I think in having worked with her in the early days. And I really feel that she is somebody who opened, pointed at a door for me, and said, "Be yourself, "just be yourself." And she didn't take bullshit lightly. She was just like, "Cut that." And now I have a personal teacher, who, for the first time ever, I would consider to be a guru, which means dark and light, and I'm very, very, very blessed. But on a bigger scale it's like there's been loads and loads of elders, ancients, who have really inspired me, whether that's the Buddha himself, whether that, you know, I had a really weird thing where one day I saw a photo of somebody who was the teacher of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and I never met this man but there was something, it's like I know him. So he now lives on my computer, laptop. He's my screensaver. I don't know, there's funny stuff going on. I don't know.

- Yeah.

- I really don't know.

- What do you see transforming the people who step on your floor, into your spaces? True to say those who maintain an investigation as an ongoing thing?

- They are open to themselves. They are open to themselves. They develop willingness to see that what is in, what the obstacle in their path, is as it were,

- Yeah.

- Their own relationship with themself. And that somehow, what my job is to create enough safety, trust, care, security, openness that they feel safe enough to keep looking even though it scares to share out that, I have a huge respect for my students. I've been incredibly fortunate, really, really fortunate, yeah.

- The path, the journey, where are we all going? Where do we even begin?

- Joseph Campbell said something or wrote something years ago, which either was his or he took it from someone else, he didn't trademark or copyright his work, or register it, or do any of that. So I don't know because there are these fundamentally universal truths that we move across, but I know what he said, or read that I heard, I think, by him was that, "If you're in the forest, "and you see a path, it's not yours." And so the path is what you walk. The path is what you create. The path is where you meet the bush, where you meet the difficulty, and you traverse your way through it, and in that, what it does, it encourages other people, I'm coming back to Gabrielle in this sense, not that is how she expressed it, but in the sense that you have to find your own dance, and you create your own path. But it's not enough to create it, and then put concrete over it, and say, "This is it," which is what I meant earlier when I alluded to the kind of enlightenment industry and the difficulty of trying to make a living, a career opportunity, from the thing that is your path because unless you keep walking it, if you look in nature, if you look at trails, it's only the ones that I kept walking that the sheep or the goats or the animals that stay there, otherwise, the grass just covers over. And if you cover it with concrete, it becomes dead and stale, but you have to keep, you have to keep going. You have to keep going, so yeah, you create your path by finding it, following it, and you inspire others by following your own path.

- Music is your tool, your trade.

- Yeah .

- How do you talk to how you see it as a resource, and how you use it to move individuals and yourself?

- I'm a herbalist. I mean it's done, believe me, accidental, in having stumbled across it, but I think, I picked up a hitchhiker years ago, and he said he was an inorganic chemist. And I was like, "What is that, what is that? "What is an inorganic chemist? "What do you do?" And I still don't remember, but it was really fascinating 'cause I was crap at chemistry and all of that, and so and stuff in school. And he said to me, "What do you do?" And I didn't go, "Oh, I teach through it," and I kind of sat there for a moment, and so I was driving, and I was like, "I'm a philosopher." And now how philosophy, which is the love of wisdom, that's what it means, yeah. And what wisdom, it's non-tangible. It's not solid. It's all patterns, and shapes, and clouds, and things that keep changing, and I have the good fortune that I accidentally found the tool that really works for me. And so, I use music, and I think in the way that a herbalist uses herbs or a homeopath uses their tinctures or whatever they're called, their potencies, is that somewhere in this space, it becomes clear, a kind of frequency of energy, or something that is needed, yet even now what I've said is kind of mistaken because I said, "I use music in that way," and it's not correct. It's more like the music or the energy that is needed makes itself known to me. I remember in an ongoing group in Norway, years and years and years and years ago, I was trying to understand the process of what was going on, and when I really got it, and it was like, okay, there is this circle that is happening, which goes something like, I hold the space. The space holds the dances of the students. The students or the dancers hold me, and I hold the space. Now, where that begins, and the space holds them, and then they hold me, where that begins, I don't know. I don't think it has a beginning or an end, but it's something in that when that channel is open, it's much more like the Greeks used to talk about, like the muses, and when I teach, I used to teach emotion a lot. I used to talk about the gods of emotion because it's a far better way of describing it than it's, "I feel this, and it's my anger." It's not like that. We get visited by these forces, and music is part of a certain type of energetic, and the whole world is conspiring for us to open. It's really, really clear to me. I did seven or eight weeks on a motorbike with a couple of friends in the Himalayas some years ago, and it wasn't an organized tour, and it wasn't a thing with a load of people, but it was mostly we were just kind of exploring. And two or three times, really kind of hairy stuff happened, and in that kind of hairy stuff, being the kind of guys they were, it always seemed to happen to my bike, which I got a bike, and the number plate on it was 666. And it was a devil bike. It was a devil bike. I just kept going wrong at the most awkward places, and so, a couple of times, these guys said to me, "Look, it's too dangerous here. "We'll just leave you here, "and we'll come back tomorrow morning," or do this, and I'm kind of in the middle, and I think I'm going to get raped, or I'm going to get murdered, and I'm going to get this. I could see all of that, and then it was kind of like, well, these are just stories you've created. Just be with what's happening now, and three times, in different circumstances, when the bikes wouldn't work, and all logic defied the bike working, some kind of miracle occurred, and I think it's because something in me did not get in the way of the natural order of things, and life is basically benign. Life is basically benign. Look at it. You know, you drop seeds in the ground, and they just grow. You put a load of stuff in the ground. It's just like the wisdom of this planet is beyond our culturally conceived intelligence to understand. And again, my current teacher, my guru at the moment, she talks about inner-standing, and that when you stand inside the knowledge that is innately in your DNA cells, makeup, you get this inner-standing, and it's like the more you can get out of the way, as with the music, as with your own career, as with these really difficult circumstances, miracles happen. And if the ego lays claim to that, guru, I'm a miracle worker, I'm a shaman, and I'm a this, I'm a that, there may be a paradigm in people's lives when that works, but that isn't my paradigm. And it's really, really clear to me the older I get, that yes, there is a personality. Yes, there is a me, and that person has got an amazing propensity not to avoid the truth of things, and to work hard, and to look at it, but in a way that part is irrelevant because all of that is like there's a really beautiful Rumi poem where it's about like tanning leather, you know, that you have to keep kind of rubbing it and beating it or whatever. We do that kind of work around our personality, but in the end, that the natural grace of our own being will come through, then how we got there, but--

- Yeah.

- I think it might be an answer.

- You know, and the silence, the last eight days we've been here on retreat, and we began each day with an hour of sitting practice. Why do you bring that structure to the group?

- I could answer that question with a question, which is why on earth are we so afraid or do we make it such big deal to sit quietly with ourselves. And it's like, what it brings up is like Kierkegaard or Heidegger's idea of dread, that there is a basic fear that we have to confront, which seems to be part of the journey of being, and we project that fear outside onto others, and circumstances, and political regimes, and onto food, and onto telegraph poles, and to all kinds of shit, but actually, we have a basic fear of sitting in our own stillness and silence, and meeting the enormity of what we are. If you kind of go back to the Bible, and there's this, to the Old Testament and this stuff where it's like, you know, people kind of freezing in the presence of God, and it's that kind of thing. I think we meet ourselves, and we completely freak out, and this ego mind, this ally that's turned into a bit. Did you ever see those Peter Seller's film, Inspector Clouseau, and it's kind of like he's got this Japanese guy who jumps out from a cupboard at any moment, and he's like overprotective. It's kind of like that, "No, no, no, it might be dangerous. "No, no, no," and it's kind of like, no, you're just sitting in silence. And I think there's a basic necessity of being willing to meet ourselves that silent sitting gives us.

- Yeah, I have it written here that I skipped over that Kierkegaard. There's a quote, "The goal is to arrive "at immediacy after reflection," and what did you have to say to that, and you just had what you had to say about that, so, that's good. You spoke about discipline, and you shared the etymology of it, simply meaning to go towards, and I clicked in my brain. It's like, oh, being a disciple, disciple, discipline. What is there to know about discipline that enriches a life?

- Okay, I come from a generation where the distinction between the kind of masculine journey and the feminine journey was quite strong. And I think that as I followed a kind of path within the woodwork that I studied, the cabinetmaking that I studied, that joinery that I studied, there was a certain disciplined approach that needed to be learned. And I'm learning from the coming generations that that very yang way of approaching discipline is a kind of gross form of how to lead oneself towards a desired goal or outcome. And as I'm seeing it with a more non-binary frame, or with a more androgynous frame, with a more balanced, the yin and the yang, the sacred masculine and the feminine, the right brain and the left brain way. I'm seeing that ultimately, what we are leading ourselves towards, is love because love is the fifth element. Love is the element that binds everything together. In the old days, they used to go into this massive darkness, and in a way love is invisible, but it can be felt. And so now, how I reframe the whole idea of discipline is that you lead yourself towards what you love, but we have a very mistaken notion of love based on Hallmark cards, and all kinds of sentimental tosh, whereas love is really presence. It's really to be meeting the moment without judgment and with an open heart, yeah.

- I want to be very careful of your time. Could I take five more minutes of your time?

- Absolutely.

- You co-facilitate with your wife Sarah. What does she represent to you?

- The divine feminine, like without any question, without any question, a certain quality of yeah, the goddess, a certain quality of what is meant by Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kali. There is some resonance, some attunement that she has with the transpersonal world, and she represents the other, the other in a way we have the good fortune that it's just so happened, we almost fit into stereotypical models from our generation or what a man is and what a woman is, but I think what we're very good reflections for each other is of our own contra-sexuality, and I feel like the deep groundedness that I have is something that she has seen of herself reflected in me, and I think this deep, vast trust of the invisible world, which I've always known about but I've judged in myself as being kind of airy-fairy, not for a real man is going to be. I just, from the moment I met her, I just knew. It hasn't been an easy journey but it's been a very real journey that I feel that our capacity to stay true has both been shocking and enlightening for me. Yeah, she's a gift.

- Any tips on how to make a relationship last?

- There has to be a glue that binds. There has to be a glue that binds, and we've been through all kinds of stuff, but it's kind of, yeah, yes, in meditation, meet yourself. I think it was Gandhi who said, "If you can't love the person you're with, "you can't love anybody." And my grandparents were very happily married. There were married I think for 60 years. They were an arranged marriage, so in a sense, it's like make that. Sarah and I in the first seven years of our relationship, we were just too opposite. We are opposites, astrologically. We're opposites to the degree. We are in opposition. We are in each others' face, and at the same time, any opposition means that you're on the same pole. You're just different ends of it, which means there's a very, very, very deep understanding of a world view or a universal view, or there's a deep, deep knowing that we both share, but we came at it from opposite edges, and it was just like seeing the complete opposite reflected at you. You know, Sarah's seems, like, she's kind of little, and I'm kind of big, but this woman is a warrior and the same way that I'm a warrior, and she doesn't back down. I don't back down, so it was very uncomfortable, and there just came a place, and I think that's the big thing in relationship. There came a place where it was like, okay, I'm in this for the long term, where I really had to make that, yeah, decision to cut away the option of leaving. And give each other space. The big clue to a relationship, take space when you need it, give space. Yes, take responsibility for your own shit, yeah.

- Final questions, for people in society that are looked up to as successful in terms of material wealth, houses, cars, executive careers, those people who kind of have it all, why bother showing up to dance? Why bother to do this kind of work?

- Don't . I mean it's kind of like I want to straighten something out because it's perfectly possible to have those things, and be really wise, being that some people have the good fortune to have that particular journey. Again, my current teacher, she was sharing a story of how she was getting a really bit pissed off with certain spiritual teachers who have vast fortunes. And, in the end, she decided to confront that in herself, and she asked God why do these people, why have I got nothing and these people have got all that? And he said, well she said, I don't know. I'll not genderize it, and God gives people exactly what they need , and it's like, you know, maybe that's what it takes. It's not up to me. My job is to work with who shows up.

- Yeah.

- And my, to go bacK to Ian Gordon-Brown, my psychotherapy teacher, it was really clear that there's a certain kind of magnetism, thought of attraction, the right people will show up. And where I've had the good fortune because I am so capable of surviving, whether it's washing up, cleaning toilets, making things, building houses, repairing things, it's like I'm blessed. So, I've never made this practice a career opportunity for myself. So it's never been an issue whether people showed up or not. And over the last 10 years, I've really opened to the fact that it was okay that I received money for this because I'm sharing my studentship and people are paying me to enable me to show up and keep sharing them because with five children, and blah blah, but where Sarah and I are definitely working towards is our children, you know, now adults, and it's working towards a place where I would really, really, both of us would really like to work by their nature. That's how I would like. But again, it's like the very first thing that kind of turned me on to stepping away from the cynic in me was working with an astrologer, and I said, "What's the big deal about money? "I don't have any problems spending it, "buy why is it so difficult to earn?" And she said, "Money is a symbol of self-worth." And I don't want to go New-Agey on that, but I just know for me, it had a huge meaning. And I also know that even though I do have a quota of people I work with for very, very cheap, and we never turn anyone, we've never turned anyone away from a workshop because they couldn't afford it. We've always just worked with that. I do think that the way our culture and society is is that if we don't pay something, we just don't value it. It's a really strange thing, and I don't know whether that's good or bad, but I notice it, that there has to be a certain cost. And if you go back to these kind of archetypal stories, and oh, many, many myths, it's like there has to be some kind of sacrifice. And to sacrifice means to make sacred, and it's something because money is such a symbol of self-worth, of worth, that it becomes some kind of sacrifice. And I know that place. I know that place. I know it in myself. I know where it's like, 'cause I grew up with, well, with little money. I was very, very afraid of money. And again, Sarah's been a huge teacher for me on that one. It sort of like don't get attached this stuff, something like that, so these people, I don't know, if it's the right path for them, they'll come to dance. And that for me, the reason that dance is very, very useful is because there is not a single cell of us that is not intelligent. This thing that we call mind is every single part of us. Every single cell of us is replete with the wisdom of the universe. And that, whereas in the early days of psychology, psychotherapy, where Freud came up with this idea of the unconscious, and all the various forms of consciousness, as being something out there. It's really clear that the unconsciousness is held in the body, in this stuff, and to get back to what you talk about as trauma, it's like where it is too difficult for us to meet consciousness 'cause there's only one universal mind, and how we are in terms of what we call our own mind is really our own relationship to that universal consciousness. And, there are many ways to meet that, and mine is my, you have to get into the physical body, but we don't know anyone else's journey. You know, we don't know, I'm really open to this idea of reincarnation. I simply have no idea, and it may be that we're all on parallel journeys that maybe there's only one of us here. Maybe I'm an old man cackling in a room all by myself, imagining the whole thing. I have no idea. I have no interest to me, but I know that in the same way that when my motorbike broke down, and I didn't approach it with fear, and something happened, so too, that we get, that if we open to life, we will find the teachings that will take us the next step. Sounds great, Biblical, and I can feel the slight judge in myself, but there are these simple aphorisms, and a simple aphorism is God provides, you know.

- Thank you so much for your time.

- Huh, well that wasn't so painful, was it.