Alexander Technique Articles:

'The Personal Account':

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

Part 4 - Straight from the Horse’s Mouth:

A session each week on the training would be spent discussing the theory of Alexander Technique. This usually involved ploughing through a chapter of one of F M Alexander’s four books. Teachers, senior students and anyone else brave enough would debate the chapter in the class. I would sometimes pick up a word or phrase such as “mind-wandering”, “habitual reactions to a stimulus”, “end gaining”, “faulty sensory perception”, “psycho-physical” but without considering why Alexander wrote about such things. I was just waiting to return to the practical work.

In my third year, I was asked to prepare a particular chapter for the class from Alexander’s book “Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual”. I knew my time would come, but I was very reluctant to talk about the particular chapter allocated to me. I was much more interested in a later chapter in the book, from which I felt I could demonstrate in a practical way Alexander’s description of the procedures. To my horror the teacher was adamant that I should talk about the chapter on Imperfect Sensory Appreciation.

I had to read and reread each sentence and each paragraph before I could piece together what Alexander was talking about. As I started to make sense of the text I was amazed at what I was reading. Instead of dread at the prospect of giving my talk, I started to really look forward to delivering it. Alexander was stating what I had been searching for throughout my training. He had clearly written the guidelines here for how to teach his Technique.
In these pages there was nothing I had not heard before, but I had been so missing the point all along.