There are three main reasons people take lessons. Firstly, and by far the most common, is the need to heal: it may be because of a bad back, or a repetitive strain injury of some kind or just plain stress and tension. Secondly, you may have professional reasons: musicians, actors, singers, athletes and others pursuing excellence have found Alexander lessons an invaluable aid to their craft. The third and final reason people come is for self-improvement: they are aware that they lack poise, they feel clumsy and awkward with their bodies and they want to improve their understanding, their sense of confidence.
Your clarity of purpose and strength of motivation are key factors that determine the success or otherwise of your lessons. That, and the teacher you choose to go to. Whatever reasons you have for taking lessons, it is extremely important that you find the right teacher. Not every teacher suits every person for the simple reason that we are all different–can everyone be your friend?
In a later chapter (see CH 6 "Teachers") I have outlined some of the various teaching lineages that now exist in the world–this will help you a little in making your decision but in the end what really matters is the person, not the lineage.
A second important point to consider is that many Alexander teachers came to the work later in life and already have another professional skill. For example, many musicians get into trouble, find Alexander work and end up training as teachers. If you are also a musician, then it makes sense to go to a teacher who speaks your language. I was an actor before I trained, so I "specialise" in the unique problems actors must face in characterisation. Other teacher are also horse riders, athletes, counsellors etc. so it’s always worth asking if a teacher has any "specialty", especially when faced with a choice.
Alexander teachers will give you a first lesson with no further commitment–if they don’t, I wouldn’t go. During that first lesson you will have an opportunity to discuss your situation, determine costs, frequency of and overall number of lessons and possible outcomes. You also have a chance to assess whether you feel comfortable with the teacher and their work. Let’s look in more detail at each of these points.
Alexander work is very personal, even intimate.
The teacher will learn a great deal about you while you won’t learn much about them at all. Not that you are going to be asked to talk about personal things–Alexander teachers aren’t counsellors, their educators–but the nature of a lesson goes to the essence of your outlook and approach to life. You’re there to change the habits of a lifetime, so it has to. It isn’t so much the content of your life experiences that becomes revealed–as it would therapy–it’s your modus operandi towards life: how you go about things, how you deal with success and failure, what makes you anxious and fearful, how you deal with a challenge.
I’ve experienced the work of hundreds of different teachers. Some of them helped me to create an experience of feeling more myself, some of them made me feel how they looked. Some of them had almost no effect at all, while others induced deep emotional feelings normally tucked away from my daily consciousness. How a teacher effects you is dependant upon three factors:
1. Their skill as a teacher;
2. Your receptivity as a student;
3. The chemistry of both your personalities.
It’s worth studying the Chapter on "Teachers" to gain a further insight into the different kinds of lessons you might encounter, but here the simple question is: did I learn anything?
Alexander work is an educational process so it’s not asking too much that you learn something, even in your first lesson. Some teachers will insist that Alexander work is too complicated, too experiencially based and it is naive to think anyone can learn anything in just one lesson. I don’t agree with that–I take the radical position, thanks to my teacher Marj, that the Alexander work is simple. It’s our old habits that are complicated!
However, your ‘learning’ may not be intellectual–it could be ontological. Alexander ‘hands-on’ works affects your ‘being’ your ‘sense of self’. As Tommy Thompson, a teacher in Boston, puts it: you cease being who you imagine yourself to be and become more who you are. It’s a paradigm shift that defies our ordinary concept of ‘learning’.
Of course, not every lesson will be as profound as that. You may just learn a simple thing–like how you pull your head back all the time and that’s why your neck gets stiff. In some ways, that can be of more practical value than the ‘big experience’ approach some teachers take. Either way, your teacher should be able to get something across to you and not leave you completely mysterfied, as I know some pupils can be after their first lesson.
This is more important than you think it is, because the success of Alexander work is in a direct ratio to your own receptivity to it. Although it sure looks like it from the outside, a good Alexander teacher doesn’t ‘do’ anything to you. As I will explain in more detail further on, a teacher is inducing your nervous system to behave in a particular way. For that to succeed, you need to co-operate. If your cynical, looking for fault and wanting to gain evidence for a negative outcome you will probably find it.
Alexander work is so sensitive that some people at first think nothing’s happening and it’s all one great big sham. Because their minds are closed they feel nothing in their bodies and because they feel nothing in their bodies they don’t understand all this talk and ‘new experiences’ and ‘inhibiting old patterns’ and ‘giving directions’. It’s just sounds like so much psychobabble.
I have also had the misfortune to work with pupils who came, not at their bidding, but because some insurance company or office manager insisted they take lessons. Not a good idea–these pupils were the toughest I ever had because they simple didn’t want to know. You’d think, because many of them were in great pain, that they’d be desperate for any help they could get. At least, that’s what I naively thought when I took on such a project many years ago.
There was a great lesson there for me and now I make a point of helping my pupils sort out exactly what they want from their lessons. It’s differs a lot and it affects the way I teach them, so it is important. I strongly suggest you think through that simple little step before you approach a teacher and communicate it to them the first time you meet.
Some people want to be told. Others definitely don’t. Some pupils want to please their teachers, other couldn’t care less. We are all so different and the pedagogy of Alexander teachers reflects this: there are all kinds of teachers and teaching.
If you’re someone who doesn’t like asking questions, just likes to absorb what’s going on and listen, then don’t stick with a teacher that prods you all the time, especially if it creates anxiety on your part. If you feel anxiety during a lesson you are in no state to learn anything. Once I taught in a much more confrontational style–demanding that my students take responsibility for themselves by having them tell me what they thought was going on. Later I realised that exciting a pupil’s fear reflexes wasn’t really a smart way of helping them to take responsibility for themselves, so I softened my approach and gained a little more patience.
Is your teacher patient with you? It’s important to feel you have the space to make mistakes. Otherwise you will enter the frame "trying to please" and that’s fatal to Alexander lessons. In Alexander lessons you are learning to change the habits of a lifetime and to do that it’s important to have a sense of support. Support, however, can appear many different ways depending on your personal outlook.
For example, I like a teacher who calls a spade a spade–my teacher Marj was like that. She’d even smack me if I got out of line! In a playful way but sometimes in dead earnest–I’d get scolded. Now, a lot of people couldn’t contend with that–even ideologically, if not emotionally. They thought such behaviour on the part of Marj was wrong. But I didn’t react that way. First, I realised Marj was born in 1899 and grew up with very different values. Second, and far more to the point, I knew that Marj actions were entirely motivated by a desire to help me learn and I wanted to learn. So, no problem. It didn’t hurt and actually, I thought it was quite funny.
Alexander was known to have literally thrown people out of his teaching room because they wouldn’t pay attention to their lessons. I’ve not heard that happening these days but I would have enjoyed a challenge like that. Maybe you wouldn’t, maybe I’m warped–who knows? This isn’t about judgements, it’s about what works for you right now.
Alexander teachers are human beings and can be as insecure as the next person, so make sure the chemistry with your teacher works for you. If it does–your experiences will deepen with each lesson. If not, you will always be protecting a little bit of yourself, and ‘protection’ is nothing else but a kind of tension. Alexander lessons aren’t quite like anything else and that’s why it is important to get the teacher you can work with before you start lessons.
Your teacher will touch you. Continuously. How will you feel about that?
I tell a story here which illustrates how special this touch is. Over the years I have conducted many experiments putting my Alexander ‘hands-on’ skills to work with horses. Actually, most of them love it–I’ve had them nuzzle me with their heads to keep on giving them a lesson. It’s a heartwarming experience. However, I did observe one curious resistance–they did not like me to touch them with ‘Alexander hands’ at the place of an injury. The strange thing about this is that I could stroke them or pat them in normal kind of way at the same spot, but as soon as I put my hands on with professional intentions, they pulled away. It’s was as if they instinctively knew that those ‘Alexander’ hands could mess around with their insides in a way that a normal stroking or pat never could.
Alexander ‘hands-on’ work does mess around with your insides–it recalibrates the automated programs of co-ordination and, with a skillful teacher, you can it feel happen almost despite yourself. The more skillful the teacher, the less you have to think yourself. There’s a story of Alexander in his later years walking out from a lesson looking at his hands and remarking something along the lines of: "I don’t need my pupils to think anymore–these can do everything."
I regularly help to train Alexander teachers and have done for years. One of the first lessons I give them when they are starting out is to tell them they can use their hands in three ways:
1. To listen
2. To invite
3. To tell.
It will be useful to analyse these in turns for, as a pupil, it is going to help if you understand what your teacher is setting out to do with their hands. It is unique.
Every teacher must train to do this–it is difficult to explain if you’ve never had a lesson but the closest approximation I can think of is this: imagine you are using your hands to maintain an incredibly heavy object in balance through its own axis (fig 4-a). You don’t want to support any of its weight–you couldn’t, it would crush you. Nor can you lean on it, as it would fall the other way. So, in that manner, both you and the heavy object remain an independent balance, neither object uses the other to support it’s weight.
At the same time as there is this independence between you and the object, there is also a continuous, gentle interdependence of balance occurring. For example every time the object begins to fall off its balance, you gently correct it. Every time you feel that you are leaning too much, it begins to fall the other way, so you must correct that too. It is only by ‘listening’ to the balance of the object that you are able to make these subtle corrections. The sooner you sense the change and counteract it, the less effort is required on your part.
Alexander teachers are trained to ‘listen’ to your co-odination in that way. They can pick up an incredible amount of information about the continuously occurring shifts of balance in your co-ordination and, with that information, move to utilise the second aspect of their skill.
If you’ve read Chapter 3 "Anatomy of Movement" you will be familiar with the wide variety of directions that different parts of your body can be moving in the simple act of standing. Standing is an activity, a process of adjustment and readjustment. Sir Charles Sherrington, a Nobel laurent (?) and early century physiologist who made favourable remarks about Alexander’s work, once pointed out that "The human being in the act of standing is constantly at the edge of catastrophy." Watching the first steps of an approaching toddler is testament to that. It’s what Steve Paxton, a modern American dancer, calls "the inner dance".
So the Alexander teacher’s hands are ‘listening’ to that inner dance you are making all the time: your head falling back, your neck pushing down, your rib cage collapsing and bending back, your hips thrusting forward etc. etc. I haven’t even begun to describe all the various subtle variations on a theme are contained within these larger movements.
Having understood the pattern of co-ordination you are currently making, the teacher then uses his or her hands to ‘talk’ to your nervous system directly and ‘invite’ it to make a different kind of ‘inner dance’, one that doesn’t cause so much downward pressure and tension in your body. This can be a quite a complex ‘invitation’, because every second millions upon millions of motor neurons are causing excitation in millions upon million of muscle fibers in response to millions upon millions of continuously changing conditions. It’s a surprise that an Alexander teacher’s hands can get a word in at all! It is why it takes three years of training for an Alexander teacher to have even the basic skill in their hands. It takes a lifetime to perfect.
Why doesn’t a teacher ask you out straight out to co-ordinate yourself in the way their hands are inviting you to? Wouldn’t that be quicker than fussing around with all this hands-on work? Actually, a good teacher will–but only AFTER they have used their hands to induce in you the sensation of co-ordination they want you to experience. That’s the meaning of the quote that heads this chapter. And the reason for this is simple: ‘you’ aren’t the one co-ordinating yourself. I mean, think about it–do you really control, or even sense, all these subtle shifts and changes that are occurring every second in your head, neck, chest, pelvis, arms, legs and jaw while you are simply standing or sitting? You have no idea what’s going on, in fact, as Alexander put it: "…we do not know how we use ourselves any more than the dog or cat knows."
Something is energising this inner dance and if it isn’t ‘you’ then who is it? Well, of course it’s ‘you’ but not the conscious, volition aspect of your ‘self’ that most of us identify with. This inner dance is being controlled by brain centres below the conscious or cortical level–what some people might call the sub-conscious self–in centres with scary names like the basal ganglia, mesencephalon and metencephalon. Luckily these centres are open to suggestion so the Alexander teacher’s hands are ‘inviting’ them to dance together in this new way. If things go well, and you co-operate with this ‘invitation’ you soon feel a change in your body. This is the "sensation" that your Alexander teacher is inviting you to experience.
But if the teacher’s hands can’t engage your mind, you’ll never move. That’s where your co-operation is so essential. There are very few teachers in the world now that possess the skill that Alexander was renowned to have had in his hands. He could take you out of a chair by placing one hand on the top of your head and literally draw you up into standing up by the sheer force of the ‘direction’ in his hands. It felt like (I was told) that he was quite miraculously ‘sucking you up’ into the air despite yourself!
I’ve yet to experience such a thing myself, but when a teacher’s hands are really effective, they do ‘tell’ your co-ordination what to do. You watch the results in amazement as your body transforms without you seeming to do anything. It really is quite the most remarkable thing to feel and it’s why people get addicted to their lessons. It just feels so good. (Haven’t I said this somewhere else?)
But ‘telling hands’ can become ‘pushy hands’ and this is something I warn all my students to watch. It isn’t nearly so pleasant an experience to have a teacher manipulate you into a pattern of co-ordination that he or she feels is the right one for you. You go away from the lesson feeling like they look and it just isn’t you. This can happen if the teacher is impatient, or a little bossy or just too full of their own ideas about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. You have to be the judge of that–after all, lessons need to be giving you tangible benefits. If not–why continue?
The crux of the matter is that a good teacher doesn’t ‘know’ what is right for you–that’s too presumptuous and sadly, there are way too many practitioners of all kinds who think that they do ‘know’. What we, as Alexander teachers, ‘know’ is what isn’t right for you! Alexander remarked: "The right thing does itself. All we ever need to know in this world is when we are wrong." It’s learning how to stop the wrong thing from happening that emancipate the right thing into action.
To achieve this our hands talk to your sub-cortical nervous system, while our words talk to your ‘conscious’ mind, so that together both pupil and teacher can learn how to prevent the mosaic of inappropriate movements that have collectively resulted in the condition of malco-ordination that brought you to the lesson in the first place. "All you’ll get", my teacher Marj used to tell us "is the absence of what you had".
And then there’d be a little twinkle in her eye.
Depending upon the lineage of your teacher, a lesson can proceed in many different ways. As I have discussed these differences at length in Chapter 6 "Teachers", here I will just describe the central components of any Alexander lesson, regardless of the ‘style’ the teacher is working in. Maybe some of these components will be missing from your lesson–well, ask yourself the question: am I learning? If it’s yes, be content. Every teacher has a right to use their own methodology and it may not be the one I have described so neatly here. This is how I give a lesson.
Every lesson has a primary purpose of offering you a new sensation. It is a sensation of co-ordinating yourself in a new, easier and natural manner. A good teacher should be able to give at least a small taste of this experience in the first lesson. However, if that was all the lesson was about we shouldn’t be calling ourselves teachers.
A lesson aims to do a second thing: to put that new "sensation" into a context that you understand. What you are there to learn is how you can generate this "sensation" for yourself. It is the working material of a lesson, the substance of what we observe, experiment and discuss with you.
The classic device around which to centre these observations, experiments and is what is quaintly called "chairwork": we take the simple act of you getting in and out of a chair. I once had an eccentric older man with a big bushy moustache come for a lesson and at the end, as he was walking out the door he suddenly stopped, turned back, looked at the chair, looked at me, shook his head and declared "What an extraordinary way to earn a living!".
It is extraordinary. Where else would you pay a lot of money to learn how to get out of a chair? About this Alexander remarked "It’s not getting in and out of chairs even under the best of conditions that is of any value; that is simply physical culture–it is what you have been doing in preparation that counts when it comes to making movements."
So, actually, you aren’t learning how to get out of a chair–it is a device, a method, not an end in itself. We could just as well be watching you play an instrument, walk, talk or, in fact, do anything. I once saw Marj help a woman put her overalls on! This is another puzzling thing about your lesson: there are no exercises, no set ‘routines’ that you can go home and show others or practice on your own. Try to tell someone what happened at your lesson and their eyes will glaze over, a lesson is about changing the state of your consciousness and, as such, can only being understood through experiencing this change.
So a good lesson consists of a delicate interplay between observation, interpretation and experimentation, centred around the theme of getting in and out of a chair–or anything else you care to do.
My teacher Marj once told me "I don’t teach my pupils anything until they have made an observation for themselves". So, at the start of the lesson, you will be asked to offer any observations you have about your co-ordination as you get in and out of the chair. This may be done before the teacher works on you or after the teacher works on you. Most people are totally confused by this request. what, actually, am I supposed to observe?
They say things like "I felt I pushed" or "It was hard". Of course, these aren’t observations, their interpretations, so begins the first aspect of your learning–to understand the difference between an observation and an interpretation. If you say something like "I felt I pushed"–pushed what? Be specific. Your arms? Your legs? If you say something like "It was hard"–that isn’t an observation, that’s a subjective judgement based upon your experience. What was the actual experience you had–can you describe that? What were the elements that lead you to interpret it as "hard". If we can come to understand these elements, it becomes possible to alter them, or at least experiment with altering them.
A rough definition of ‘observation’ that I use for my pupils to ask them to imagine they are explaining to blind person what they did with their bodies. Could they visualise that if you used words like "hard" and "pushy"? Not accurately–they have to make it up. But if you said something like "I pulled my knees together and lifted my shoulders as I pushed them on my legs and that was why it felt hard" then our blind friend would be closer to understanding what you actually did, as opposed to how you felt about it.
My teacher Marj taught that one aspect of an Alexander lesson is to train you in a whole new language–discovering a vocabulary that will allow you to confidently navigate the terrain of your co-ordination. A surgeon friend of mine once declared to me that a London cab driver knows as much as him: they both need to know the name and location of hundreds of objects so that they can help other people. The principle is the same–its only the vocabulary and their objects that differ. In that way, Alexander lessons consist of defining a new vocabulary–in this case the ‘objects’ are sensations and movements.
Having got thus far it is time to make sense of all these observations, to interpret them in a way that renders them useful.
"This chair is very uncomfortable!"
That simple statement, so often thought by people everywhere every day, has an interpretation at the back of it, an assumption that leads a person to think a particularly way about the problem of feeling uncomfortable in a certain chair. Actually, it is a quite a useless way to think, depriving you of all control over your situation and making the chair more powerful than you! However, I don’t say it isn’t true–it’s an interpretation, so it’s as true as you want it to be.
What’s an alternative interpretation? How about "I do something in my co-ordination when I sit in this particular chair that causes me to feel discomfort!". Now who’s the villain? Not the chair anymore–you just took responsibility for yourself and stop blaming the chair. While that may not so comfortable to live with, it is far more useful, for within that interpretation a different kind of action is available to you.
Now, instead of spending your life looking for the ‘perfect chair’, you can spend the time more usefully discovering what you actually do and learning to stop it. Think of it this way: does every person have exactly the same experience of discomfort that you do when they sit in that chair? Of course not! So that suggests that the discomfort doesn’t really come from the chair’s side of this interaction, even though that may be how you experience it, it comes from your side, it comes from something you are doing. Your Alexander teacher will help you discover what–it is one of the reasons to take lessons in the first place. The way that you discover that ‘something’ is by experimenting with different sensations of sitting in that chair, compliments of your Alexander teacher’s hands.
The proof is in the pudding–personally, I love to take a pupil who is thinking "This chair is uncomfortable" and work on them till they do feel comfortable. Then I casually ask "Oh, by the way, is the chair still making you uncomfortable?" For themselves they realise the shortcomings of their previous way of thinking and start on the long road of taking more responsibility for their experiences. This particular procedure is actually an experiment designed to change a pupil’s thinking.
A good Alexander lesson should be full of such ‘experiments’: where your old idea of doing something is challenged by a new experience of it, thereby leading you to rethink your whole reaction to a given problem and to decide to respond to it in a different way. Alexander: "Boiled down, it all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus. But no one will see it that way. they will all see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that a pupil decided what he will or will not consent to do."
Who cares if you got out of a chair in a ‘better’ way because the lesson isn’t about that–the point is: can you duplicate this process on your own?? Alexander: "If you apply the principle to the carrying out of one evolution, you have learned the lot." In your lesson you will come to understand how to apply the concepts of ‘direction’ ‘inhibition’ and ‘faulty sensory perception’ in your everyday life. Although I analyse these three concepts in greater detail in CH 7 "Alexander’s Story", let me briefly introduce them in the context of an Alexander lesson.
This word can have a number of different meanings, even in the context of Alexander’s discoveries. In a lesson it refers mainly to the four ‘directions’ that are explained at length in Chapter 3 "Anatomy of Movement" as well as to the actual process or how of thinking as opposed to the what (you are thinking about). Alexander teachers also talk a lot about ‘doing’ and ‘non-doing’ in regards to giving ‘directions’. These are subtle shadings of meaning of this word ‘direction’. Didn’t I warn you there’s a whole new vocabulary to learn?
‘Doing’ directions are the kind everyone does when they are trying to "sit up straight", "pull the shoulders back", "chin up"–all that sort of thing. they can be defined by saying they are thoughts that result in volitionally contracting muscles.
‘Non-doing’ directions are inhibitory in nature–they aim to prevent certain patters of contraction, thus they can be defined as thoughts which result in the indirect inhibition of unnecessary contractions.
Notice I used that word in the last sentence "…the indirect inhibition of unnecessary contractions. Just as with the word ‘direction’, ‘inhibition’ has many meanings, even in an Alexander context. In the sense of ‘inhibiting’ muscles it is necessary to understand that this is a positive biological function of certain motor-neurons. It is not to be equated with ‘suppression’ which is quite a different thing. Let me explain.
"Excitation" and "inhibition" are two technical names that physiologists use to describe the function of a motor-neuron–one of the essential components of our locomotive system. Previous to the discovery of "inhibition" physiologists used to think that motor neurons only "excited" muscles to contract. It was quite revolutionary to discover that there were actually motor neurons devoted to the "inhibition" of muscle contraction.
Alexander discovered this long before the physiologists proved it in the laboratory. He quickly realised that if he could ‘inhibit’ one set of reactions, it was not possible to supplant them with another. To do it any other way simple meant he would merely be "layering" one set of actions on top of an older set. Alexander: "You can’t do what you don’t know if you keep doing what you do know". So in Alexander lessons first you discover what the directions you are giving to yourself are at the moment, then learn to ‘inhibit’ those directions and instead give the ‘directions’ that the Alexander teacher’ hands are giving.
There is a much profounder meaning to ‘inhibition’ than this simple ‘chemical’ description of the physiologist, although this is still the basis of any change we make. Changing a simple habit of co-ordination might involve us in letting go of an identity that we have built up of ourselves–all the emotional complexities inherent in achieving this. I explore this in greater depth in CH 7 "Alexander’s Story" but essentially it means that we have a ‘false’ view of ourselves, a view that is based on our ‘sensory appreciation’ and gets us into whatever the trouble was the brought us to lessons.
It is extremely import to understand this concept of Alexander’s and many people don’t, including some Alexander teachers . The key aspect of this concept is that it says your appreciation or ‘interpretation’ of the event is faulty. It doesn’t mean your perception of the actual event is faulty but many people are under the understanding that it does.
The concept is best understood initially in psychological terms that we are all familiar with. If Beatice tells Tony, Ingrid and Sally to be quiet, that is an event. None of those four will dispute that Beatice said that. As far as hearing, seeing etc.–there’s nothing ‘faulty’ about their senses. However, how does each appreciate that event? Well, Tony thinks that Beatice is trying to boss everyone around and has it in for him, so he’s irritated. Sally, on the other hand, is happy, because she perceives that Beatice is trying to help them all. Ingrid is puzzled–she’s just met them all and wonders just why Beatice is saying that. One event, three different perceptions. Who’s right?
That’s where we leave this example for the criteria to assess the answer to that question becomes very complex, even impossible to define. Luckily, as far as our co-ordination goes, it is easy to define what is ‘right’. What is ‘right’ is what is easy. What is ‘right’ is what leads us towards freedom, flexibility and general good health. However, many ideas of people’s ‘right’ for example, is at odds with this. A perfect example of this is that many people feel that a slump is ‘relaxed’. Relaxed? A slump? When did slumping for two hours ever leave you feeling relaxed–so that all the stiffness, heaviness and strain was completely lifted from you body? Think about it and you’ll realise what an absurd idea it is to think that slumping is relaxing. Yet–that is our appreciation of it, that is how we think about it when we slump and, in Alexander’s terms, that appreciation or thinking is faulty. To us, we feel like we are relaxing when we slump, yet all the objective evidence refutes that. Still, even knowing this, we still feel that way. We need to re-educate this feeling or belief. We need Alexander lessons.
Sometimes, in other Alexander books, it might be referred to as ‘faulty sensory perception’ but this is misleading for the word "perception" refers to your interpretation, not your actual perception of the event. It might seem like nit-picking but, as you will, this distinction is vital. Without it, no work could be done alone. ???
Whenever anyone asks me this question these days, I ask them: how many lessons does it take to learn the piano?
Learning the piano is no more complicated than learning how to co-ordinate your body, but essentially: what’s your purpose? Do you want to be a concert pianist (read Alexander teacher) or play a 10 finger exercise (read help yourself)? If you have sustained a recent injury, then even one lesson can be of tremendous help. If you have had a chronic problem all your life, then you may need to be taking occasional lessons for the rest of your life. Most of us come somewhere within those two extremes. In the end it depends on your motivation, your aim and your application, just like learning the piano.
But it is interesting to look at Alexander himself–what did he ask of his pupils? A friend of mine once took lessons from him in the early 50’s, not long before his death in 1955. At that time, this is what he recalls were Alexander’s terms: First, read all his books. (My friend didn’t and Alexander never asked.) Second: a minimum of 30 lessons. Third: for the first 20 lessons, he had to have 5 lessons per week, Monday to Friday. For the final 10 lessons, 2 lessons a week. Alexander’s lessons were of 30 minutes duration. Fourth: pay in advance.
Well, no-one that I know of makes such terms these days, but then, no-one is quite Alexander. However, the 30 lessons is still conventional wisdom amongst most teachers, although very few these days will insist upon it before accepting you as a pupil. However, when you consider that an Alexander teacher spends the equivalent of 3,200 private lessons to gain a qualification to teach, 30 lessons is really nothing at all.
About the same as dinner and a movie, where-ever you live. Alexander lessons aren’t cheap but neither is a visit to the therapist. Of course, Alexander lessons are ongoing for quite a while so they represent an investment in yourself. A full series of lessons is like buying yourself some new expensive luxury item–but lessons are likely to give you far more joy and enduring value for your money.
If you commit for a lot of lessons in advance, some teachers will give you a break. If they don’t offer, ask. No harm in that.
These days you will often find an Alexander teacher working in a centre with a variety of other therapists. I used to teach in a place like this–we had a doctor, a psychologist, a nutritionalist, two chiropractors and me. Less commonly, there are some "Alexander Centres" where you can get lessons or go to groups. (see Chapter 6 "Teachers") Alexander Centres are usually places where a teacher training school operates and if that’s the case, it’s often possible to get cheap, even free lessons, with final year students.
However, the vast majority Alexander teachers work out of their home. This may seem odd at first, especially for a professional person charging professional fees, but, unlike other professionals in the medical and para-medical field, Alexander teacher’s don’t consider them therapists. It’s like piano teachers–harking back to that metaphor–a lot of them work out of their homes too.
However, as they do get healing results, Alexander teachers exist in a kind of limbo. While they insist they are teachers, many of their pupils see them as therapists who are helping them to get better. It’s a constant dilemma for Alexander teachers, for despite their own self-image, they do manage to get mixed up with medical insurance and the like. Perhaps coming to their home helps underline the fact that you are their pupil, not their patient.
When you enter the teaching room, there will most probably be three things: a chair, a table and a mirror. The chair is for sitting and standing, the essence of Alexander’s approach, and the table is for more therapeutic work–although your teacher may not like you calling it that. It’s an affront to their status of ‘teacher’. Alexander politics can be complicated.
The crux of an Alexander lesson is the hands-on skill of the teacher. During a lesson a teacher will use their hand to skillfully guide your body into a whole new pattern of co-ordination and it can feel odd. Pleasant, but very strange. The mirror is helpful for the teacher but its primarily there for you to see that you don’t look at all the way you feel.
Now you know the teacher will touch you (with your clothes on–if they want you to take them off, ask to see their teaching certificate first!) and how important it is that you are comfortable with them–the next thing is to talk about what you will actually do. The overwhelming predominance to-day is still a choice of two things. Alexander teachers quaintly describe them as "chairwork" and "tablework". A third less likely thing you may do is called "activities" in Alexander jargon.
Chairwork involves getting in and out of the chair, looking at your co-ordination as you do so. As has been previously pointed out, this has nothing to do with teaching you how to get in and out of a chair. It is teaching you how to inhibit an inappropriate reaction to a stimulus (in this case to sit or to stand) and redirect it to bring about a condition of co-ordination that is more beneficial to you. Once you have learnt this procedure, you can apply it anywhere, anytime to anything. The actual method of this procedure has been explained at length above.
Pupils love tablework–they lie down on their back, with their knees bent up and their head resting on a book or two, while the teacher gently lengthens their torso, arms and legs. Some teachers will do it silently, while others will chat away about anything with you, some will give you guided instructions as to what to think and still others will ask you to actively participate in different procedures and activities–all as you remain lying on your back.
Alexander himself rarely did any tablework, although he didn’t disapprove or discourage it. He is reported to have remarked to teachers if you can’t get what you want with the pupil upright, then get it on the table. Alexander was so good, he didn’t need to do tablework–I imagine he could get more changes with his hands in two minutes than I can in thirty! We’re not all ‘Alexanders’ so tablework has become an essential tool of an Alexander lesson.
My personal view is that tablework has sometimes become too essential and too liked by our pupils. It is more therapeutic than educational and, while there’s nothing wrong with that at all, Alexander lessons are supposed to be teaching you something, not just making you feel good. I have heard of teachers doing nothing else but tablework and that surprises me. I am not sure how you learn to co-ordinate yourself differently during activities from lessons that consist of you lying passively on your back the entire time, but I know that many teachers argue that you can. If it’s working for you, then good, keep it up. If it isn’t–change teachers.
Chairwork is an activity. Aside from chairwork, most teachers will also explore with you walking, bending and doing things with your arms. However, a large portion of Alexander teachers don’t explore much more than that, but then, neither did Alexander. Remember, it is the procedure, not the activity itself, which is the focus of learning. It really doesn’t matter what activity you do–that isn’t the point of it.
That said, it is often of value to apply this procedure to more specialised activities such as playing a musical instrument, dancing, making pots etc.–an activity that you are involved in regularly as part of your hobby or profession. It is of value because if you examine this in your Alexander lesson, the activity itself will serve as a reminder to apply what you are learning during everyday life. Ask your Alexander teacher if you can do this–while some may not be accustomed to teaching in this way–most, but not all, will be willing to explore this with you. See the CH 6 on "Teachers" for more information on this point.