I know that my role in the "Enable Me" project is personal trainer / exercise lady. However, I have been switching hats a lot lately -- mid session and discreetly taking my personal trainer hat off and slipping my conductor hat back on, barely stopping to notice how comfortable it feels, but noticing the change in my tone, the way sets and repetitions of exercises give way to rhythmically intended tasks, the subtle stylistic changes in the way the session is delivered. The people I work with in this project are in their eighties -- if they notice the hat change they don't react though they certainly respond. Whether what I am doing would look and sound normal in a CE group but seem a bit odd in the gym is irrelevant to these people for whom the concept of a personal trainer is as foreign as that of a conductor.

Don't get me wrong -- I am passionate about how valuable exercise is for people of all ages and abilities and firmly believe that exercise helps people stay strong and healthy and can actually intervene with what is often presumed to be an inevitable part of the ageing process. But there are times when what is needed and what is more appropriate in a given moment or over a few weeks of working with a particular person is Conductive Education -- the learning, the structured approach to problem solving, the way of breaking complex movements into manageable segments, practicing them, and stringing them back together as fluent, purposeful movement, the use of speech and rhythm and intention and motivation as facilitation -- in other words the unique tricks specific to the conductive trade.

Mr LH's file says that he has had a frozen shoulder, has had a few falls, and has mild cognitive decline. In reality Mr LH's movement and cognition is characteristic of something in the Parkinson's plus family of conditions -- I of course wouldn't try to guess or diagnose, that is certainly not my role, but I am pleased that the case manager and physiotherapist accept my experience based hunch that there is something neuro-motoric going on and have written a letter that Mr LH can take to his GP recommending further investigation. I am even more pleased that Mr LH has spontaneously started rhythmically saying tasks and counting with me (it is often hard for me to get people to count and say tasks in individual sessions, especially if they have not experienced the power of rhythmical intention in a CE group); I am even more pleased that when he counts he can walk and swing his arms and get up from a chair and coordinate complex movements. I hope -- as I often do about my 'hunches' -- that I am wrong and that there is no neuro-motor disorder creeping in. Without my training and experience as a conductor I would have no entry point for working with Mr LH -- I wouldn't know where to start.

Mr GL had a major stroke 15 years ago -- at the time he was fit and healthy and his stroke baffled his medical team and shocked Mr GL and his family. The 'Enable Me' case manager wasn't sure if this was something a personal trainer should be involved in and called to chat with me about how frail Mr GL was and about his increased risk of falls. I reminded her that I had many years of experience working with people after strokes in my previous life as a conductor. Today Mr GL and I had our first session -- within minutes it felt like we had been working together for years. I knew right away which tasks would work and what tricks to start him with, where to put my hands, where to push him, what it must have felt like for him to have his posture and symmetry and weight bearing corrected after 16 years. I saw his eyes light up when he conquered a task that moments ago had seemed impossible -- a few moments and a little conductive magic make a big difference when those moments are spent practicing and learning to apply nifty little CE tricks.

There have been a lot of people in the 'Enable Me' program that have been deemed too frail for personal training and who have instead received physiotherapy only instead of a combined approach -- there are a lot of people in the 'Enable Me' program that I would have been able to help if I had been given the chance to work with them. I got the contract with the 'Enable Me' program because of my work as a Conductor -- somebody whom I used to work with at the local cerebral palsy centre referred me and people involved with the program saw me working at the gym with people in wheelchairs. But I am contracted as a personal trainer, and what I bring to the table as a conductor is not fully understood or recognized, and therefore opportunities to help people as a conductor have been missed. At this point I do not believe that Conductive Education will even get a mention when the reports about the 'Enable Me' project are written up. I hope I can correct this but I am just not certain it will happen. I wish that when the contract was negotiated I had had the guts to stand up for Conductive Education instead of just being glad for the opportunity to take part.

Over and over and over again I hear people relate the advice they have been given by well meaning professionals -- 'you have CP / MS / PD / stroke / old age / whatever, there is nothing that can be done, accept it'. That is just not how we think in Conductive Education -- because I am a conductor I have a place to start and a unique bag of tricks and conductive magic, but more importantly I have a conductive attitude that makes me believe that there is always something that can be done, something that can be learned, that it is worth trying, so I do start, and start again, and try something new if one thing doesn't work. I'd like to think that I am the same when I am wearing my personal training hat -- and I know that if I am it is because that conductive attitude is so much a part of me now, or because no matter what role I'm in, I'm always wearing my conductor hat.

http://195.122.253.112/public/mp3/Beatles/14%20Let%20It%20Be/The%20Beatles%20-%20Let%20It%20Be%20-%2010%20The%20Long%20And%20Winding%20Road.mp3

I have always loved the start of my adult CE sessions; the exchange of sincerely warm greetings and chit chat of friends catching up on life and the real world events from one session to the next; 'how are you's?' where the question is genuine and the response listened to; transferring or getting settled and ready to start; the tension of expectant silence before the first task which I always let linger for just an extra second or two so that we can all clear our minds, come together mentally, and prepare for the physical work at hand; and finally the first task delivered and repeated with rhythm so deliberate, connecting and uniting us, setting the tone, tempo, and mood for the start of the session. I have learned that these moments are so precious, even if the session is not going to be a traditional session following a formal task series, and especially when the participant(s) are accustomed to formal CE.

AR -- my partner in crime (as well as in business an in life) -- is lucky enough to be the person who gets my unedited and often exuberant monologue response to 'Hey, how was your day?'. A couple of weeks ago he said -- "...this rhythm thing you are always talking about, I don't understand it". And I sort of froze. Not because I don't know, but because I haven't been asked to explain it in such a long time, and because over the years it has become so intrinsic to what I do that I had to work out my response. So, what exactly is this rhythm thing we talk about and how is it used in CE? I wish I could explain it simply -- I can't -- but I can try to exemplify how I use it, as a traditional CE facilitation and otherwise, in this instance as a meditation.

For example, CW is an adult with mixed tone athetoid cerebral palsy who has been doing CE with me on and off for the past 7 years and who has accomplished some phenomenal things. She is fearless and adventurous, quick witted and mentally agile, always open to trying new things, always working out ways to make something possible despite a relatively uncooperative body, particularly over recent years where suspected cervical myelopathy has wreaked havoc on her body. We are working intensively at the moment to regain CW's leg strength following a hip operation, and she is awaiting major neck surgery. We have agreed that our work will be more like 'physio' / rehab / training' for now -- focussed on regaining leg strength and nothing else, avoiding anything upper body because of the risk of doing further damage to her neck; repeating very specific movements several times and then resting and repeating; more like a gym session than like CE. She is understandably anxious and frustrated. I see it in her face, hear it in what she voices; when I arrive we talk about updates from doctors, and changing neuropathy, and how things have been since I've last seen her. And then that pause; that expectant silence, and the first task, the tone, the deliberate rhythm, the counting. I see her face relax as she counts with me; the familiar rhythm washes over her, the worry and anxiety and frustration shelved for later, the mind cleared and focussed and ready to take on that body. For CW the rhythm is a meditation of sorts, powerful and soothing, without it I'd just be working with her legs, not her mind.

This meditative use of rhythm CW utilizes reminds me of a woman with late stage MS that my conductive mentor AB and I worked with years ago in Toronto who used rhythm in a very similar way. I used video footage of this woman for a conference presentation years ago in South Hampton. The video was of a session where this woman was working with myself and AB, all three of us verbally intending and counting over and over and over again, trying to coax a leg locked in extreme and painful spasm to relax millimeter by millimeter. A senior conductor at that conference, in fact one of my university lecturers and the person who had taught me how to work with rhythm, challenged me on the use of repetition and counting in such an intense one on one situation. At the time, I only knew that it felt right, and I was too intimidated to defend my choice. Looking back, and I remember that session and the work with that participant so clearly, I recognize the same meditative thing happening that I now see with CW. The familiar rhythm washing over her, giving her a way to use her mind to shift away from the pain of the spasm, to relax her mind so she could relax her body. I remember that it was hard for her to count when the spasms were violent, but that when she 'caught the rhythm', breathed, counted that her face changed, softened; that her eyes were no longer squeezed shut, that her body stopped bracing, and if necessary tears could flow uninhibited. The rhythm was not part of the task solution, but again the way in to the body, the body mind connection.

You have to be able to focus, to control your energy. You need to make it your ally, instead of trying to harness it, to muscle it. That wastes energy too. There has to be a harmony between you and your body. Your mind and your body, and your soul have to connect in order to move forward. And this comes through relaxation.

~ Elvis Stojko, Canadian world champion figure skater

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