Back from Austria

I have just spent three weeks in Austria, Vienna. It is one of the most beautiful European cities, and I am just so glad to have had twenty years of visiting, twice a year. It always gives me a great feeling when I give myself time-out to wander through the center, dwarfed by elegant buildings, traipsing through cobbled squares and overlooked by statues lining the porticos of the old empire built houses and grand maisons.

Unfortunately this time, one of best pals was moving to London permanently whilst we were visiting. Alicia and I transferred from our new house in Portland with its myriad boxes and half unpacked state to a similar situation in Vienna with Hussein. We slept on mattresses with boxes all around, and then watched two slight yet very strong Czechs remove all his gear into a large truck carrying much of it down five flights of cold, echoey stone steps. It was sad to say goodbye to him, having spent the better part of our lives together, albeit in stretches of three or so weeks twice a year. We have watched our children grow and develop - he has five, and watched as lives change, situations alter, loves lost and fortunes upend. His departure will give us reasons to go back to England more often!

Vienna was hard also as we are arranging our workshops with a new organization, WiFi Wien, who have not got the marketing quiet right, so we were at the mercy of others and their respective competencies, and so I feel in a hiatus, but with patience and refining our tactics, will see my contribution in Austria again climb. I have been teaching here for twenty years. We have several teachers independently teaching the work in much of Vienna through the same organization, and that has become very good, efficient and paying off for them.

I popped into one of their cranial classes, sorta un-announced, and gave a demonstration of the forces in action when we palpate, and how differing arrangements within our own being changes the rhythm of the cranial system. THe class of 17 were thrilled to get first hand attention from me - a new face and I guess, also the originator of the work - and then was asked to show them how I would conduct a session in CFD - cranial fluid dynamics. I believe I was successful in helping them to see the breadth and depth of the work, and what can be accomplished with a few modes eliciting a sophisticated dialogue with one of the participants, which touched many of the women there, as it was also pertinent in their lives.

Alicia and I conducted a small Being Human workshop with Faustina Ramos the head teacher and owner of a Montessori based school in Modling, outside Vienna. Faustina had got all her teachers in the school to participate, and all had come willingly. It was, I believe, a very successful workshop, enabling the teachers to see and recognize their state whilst teaching or interacting with students, or indeed whilst making decisions and engaging with life situations. We provided the tools, if you like, to help them change their state, realize what gets in the way of efficiently, creative teaching and also helped them to see what may occur within the state of children that they teach. This gives the teachers the inner nous to help them set up environments that help children change their own internal order and arrangement of their inner selves.

So I am back, and enjoying our new abode, and wanting to engage in the local community and get the feel of what is new around here. Everyone eyes our house as they walk along the leafy broad road and cross or turn round this corner lot that we are on. Many stop and chat, most smile, we have made passing remarks to many .. gosh, what a difference to our past two houses and their respective environments, which gave back little except isolation. When we moved from our previous house we realized there were only our two neighbors that we cared for or knew, to say goodbye to. Hopefully this new city life will begin a new change in our or my life style and how I interact locally.