Mainly for Alexander Teachers:

During my 22 years of teaching, I have naturally made many mistakes. Some of them are my own, others are common errors that Alexander teachers often fall into. Some seem to be almost universal.

This page will be devoted to helping other teachers and their pupils from falling into some of these traps. With a bit of luck, writing them down will also help me to avoid falling into them again. I've not tried to organise this material: just a jumble of thoughts that will be added to from time to time — in no particular order. I hope you find them useful.

• Inhibition
• Slumping
• Faith

Inhibition

The basic need is to learn to inhibit one's habitual reactions. Often, much too much emphasis goes into the concepts of direction and of a conscious working out of the correct “means whereby”.

I believe all Alexander teachers will agree that, without inhibition, all other considerations become empty and pointless. What we forget, is that complete and totally effective application of this basic principle rarely, if ever, occurs. The inexorable logic of this, borne out by my own practice, is that, to whatever extent our attention to the other principles takes our attention away from this one, to that extent we are wasting our time and energy.

On the other hand, my experience is that, once we really pay attention to that basic need to inhibit, all the rest falls into our lap almost of itself. As we are much more easily aware of these other matters, it is easy to believe that our success was due to our attention to them. It is not. On the contrary, our attention to these other matters very easily draws us away from the original inhibition and so puts a stop to our progress.

Slumping

Most of us, teachers or not, have a horror of “slumping”. As a result, we make all kinds of habitual reaction to any suggestion that we may be slumping.

In fact, a “slump” is simply a non-doing reaction to our habitual “pulling down”. As such, slumping is an essential element of inhibition: directing without slumping amounts to directing without inhibiting — a total nonsense in fact!

So (in contrast to “relaxing” or “letting go” — which are a kind of doing), “slumping” is simply refusing to react to a particular stimulus: the social stimulus to stiffen into a more socially acceptable posture. (That's why it's easier to slump in private: the social stimulus is less intense).

Faith

Faith, usually understood according to the classic schoolboy definition: “believing something we know to be impossible” is naturally a dirty word to many of us.

Yet, there is a basic point here that we ignore at our peril: if, as Alexander teachers, we choose to ignore it, we effectively make all our efforts futile. Our problem (and our pupils' problem) is that it seems right and necessary to react and move in ways that, in reality, are far from ideal. It is therefore impossible to believe that those wrong-seeming ways could be effective. So we never use them. Even when we believe we are “inhibiting”, we are really only inhibiting habits that we have come to realise are not so good after all. We fail to inhibit those reactions that still seem good to us. This seriously slows down our efforts.

If, instead, we take these observations to heart and believe that our “good” reactions may in fact not be good after all (as our training warns us), then we can begin fundamentally to mistrust ALL our habitual reactions. Mostly, alas, we don't do this. Why? Because we don't really believe that our particular right-seeming reaction-of-the-moment can fall into this category.

Our right-seeming reaction-of-the-moment is always the exception to the rule. (Or so it seems). The result is that, while YOUR habitual reactions are clearly wrong, mine aren't. Since we believe this in our heart of hearts, we do very little about inhibiting them. Hence, our rate of progress too easily slows down to a snail's pace.

What would happen if, instead, we really believed in the truth of our own basic Alexander working principles? What would happen if we really had FAITH in the Alexander Technique?

If you've not had Alexander Technique lessons and are reading this, please note that you will not get far unless you do. (I really wouldn't be saying this if it weren't both true and very important). So, it's ...

If you live in the UK, start here.
Otherwise, start here.

Come back soon and read some more.