Alexander Technique Articles:

'The Personal Account':

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

Part 2- Others see us more clearly than we see ourselves:

Little by little the teachers started to teach me what I had signed up for – to teach others how to do it. I started to put my hands on the teachers and senior students, but everyone continued to ask me the “Do you know you’re about to…?” questions, just as before. I still had to admit that I couldn’t really tell if I had just contorted myself in the process and was starting to feel uneasy that people could see patterns in my way of doing things that I was unaware of unless I was shown something in a mirror.

Rather unclear as to the significance of these ‘habits’ within the context of training to be a teacher, I became more and more confused as to what was going on. The teachers and my fellow students were more severe on me now, and often accused me of making them stiff, or holding their breath! It was really frustrating because all I wanted to do was practice moving them around, so I would be really good at it by the time I qualified and started teaching.

It started to dawn on me that everyone kept giving me the same message – pay attention to what you are doing to yourself whilst you do something. I would experience brief glimpses of this, and be aware of the habits that everybody else could see so clearly, but to me they were so familiar, and felt so right that, left to my own devices, I would instantly resort to my old automatic habits to get things done.