I · Coming into the Space

Words 1 · RF@80 Series. Keynote Accompanying Notes Part 1 of 7 – Alexander Technique Congress. August 4th. 2025. Dublin.

Here we are.

We’ve moved from the outside to the inside. The outside world is outside. It has no hold on us, no demand upon our attention, no purchase on our feelings. It is outside. This is inside. This is our world. To move from the outside to the inside we cross a threshold, an in-between space, neither outside nor inside, and which has a distinct quality of its own: this is the Liminal Zone.

The Liminal Zone. The quality of liminality may be found in places, times and people. NYC between 1975-83, Berlin in the same period. A generation coming of age, feeling adrift and apart from the dominant values and aspirations of the culture.

The three prime characteristics of liminality are ambiguity, hazard and opportunity. One opportunity is to re-orient the trajectory of our lives. That is, to refine or re-define our aim in this life. The intensity with which we experience liminality is proportionate to our necessity to be present, to be who we are. To be real. This sense of necessity may take the form of a Burning Question.

What is a Burning Question? A Burning Question is a matter of life and death. It comes from personal necessity. The heat of a Burning Question may be measured by how much we are prepared to pay for an answer.

Liminality may also be found in processes: too far from the beginning to go back, too far from the end to go forward. This is the Great Divide, where Burning Questions are mostly found

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