Alexander Technique Articles:

'The Personal Account':

A personal account of a three year Alexander Technique teacher training course.

Part 1 - Chair Work:

The course was not at all what I had expected. As far as I was concerned, I was going to learn how to teach Alexander Technique to others. I assumed this meant I would be taught a series of moves and positions that are physiologically helpful and beneficial to the design of the human body. I also assumed that if I adopted these positions and moves well enough, then any hint of my backache, shoulder pain and neck tension would pretty much disappear. I felt sure I would have to apply these ‘postural techniques’ even more when I played the cello.

Most of my first year I was completely baffled because none of the teachers seemed to be teaching me these manouvres. I felt sure there must be ‘a right way’ of doing things and couldn’t understand why they didn’t just get on and teach them to me.
I also hadn’t bargained on being taught so much about myself. After all, I had enrolled on a teacher training course, learning how to teach everyone else to ‘do it right’.

My first year largely consisted of sitting in a chair, waiting for a teacher or senior student to come over to ‘work with ‘me. They would suggest I do a movement, such as stand up, but hardly had I begun when they would stop me. They actually didn’t seem that bothered about the ‘standing up’ or whatever they themselves had suggested, only seconds earlier. Instead they would say something along the lines of “ Do you realize that you are starting to swing your head back, arch your back, completely stiffen your body and hold your breath?” Normally bewildered at being asked I would confess that “no, I didn’t know that had just happened to me”. I was more interested in carrying out their suggestion, trying to get it right and be a good student. To my mind it was slightly unnecessary and irrelevant to go on about all that because if I practiced it enough for three years, I would inevitably pick it up automatically. In music there is the famous saying “practice makes perfect”, surely it can equally be applied to learning Alexander Technique.

However, on one level I was absorbing the Alexander work. During many of the sessions in the first year, with the teachers’ hands on me, I would be able to move in a way that was previously unknown to me. Things felt easy and I didn’t feel any strain in my back. They refused to tell me how to do it right myself, but kept asking the “Do you know you’re about to….?” questions. The strange thing was that, although I was asked this almost every day, it still surprised me when I was asked. I was so wrapped up in carrying out the activity correctly that my sense of self-awareness was very under developed. Moreover, as soon as I experimented with repeating what I had just done with the teachers, I strained and it hurt. I felt this Alexander work was very similar to playing the cello - completely down to ‘pot luck’.