“Under the ordinary teaching methods, the pupil gets 19 wrong to 1 right experience. It ought to be the other way round.”
F.M. Alexander (Articles and Lectures, Teaching Aphorisms – p196)

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An Unstructured Group of Quotes Related to Learning AT

MB: There’s a ‘still point’ as Elliot would say, where, I don’t say it’s unaffected, but it’s not pushed off its perch – you’re able to keep something going whatever happens to you outwardly. And that’s the secret of life really. You don’t have any say in what happens to you, but you do have a say in how you react and that’s what this work is all about – never mind good use and all that. That’s what this work is about. That’s why I’m still doing it. If it were just therapeutic in the ordinary sense, I don’t think I would be.
(Direction Magazine Vol 2, No 2 – The Barlows p22)

LW: For a person who is attempting to learn Alexander’s work from written or verbal instructions, there are pitfalls at every turn. Alexander himself never learned through words. He learned through a series of experiences. So the pupil, to learn, must be given the experience again and again, so that the experience and the appropriate words will be associated in the pupil’s consciousness. The general semanticists say, very properly, that words are maps of a certain territory, but they are not the territory itself. When one considers the truth of this, one will readily see that there are many things which cannot be learned, much less made a part of one’s mind and body, through words alone.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 13 p144)

WC: The target that we are aiming at is the state of affairs where neck to be free, head to go forward and up, back to lengthen and widen, knees to go forward and away expresses a belief and an attitude toward life that is perfectly natural.
When you have managed to do that, then don’t imagine you have really accomplished very much. All that you have really done when you have got yourself to this point, is that you are in a situation where some accomplishment is possible. This is the end of the beginning; you are ready to begin.
(Thinking Aloud – Knees Going Forward and Away p162)

PM: A pupil of one of my colleagues was once told in a lesson not to close her eyes. She said, “If I don’t close my eyes, I can’t concentrate.” My colleague said, “I don’t want you to try to concentrate.” “But,” she said, “if I don’t concentrate I can’t feel what is happening.” “I don’t want you to try and feel what is happening,” he said. “But,” she replied, “if I don’t feel, how can I relax?” “I don’t want you to try and relax,” he said. That was a wonderful conglomeration of wrong ideas.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p32)

FPJ: One day when I was having trouble understanding the relation between my thinking and the kinaesthetic experiences A. R. was giving me, he said, “Be patient; stick to principle; and it will all open up like a great cauliflower.” I did not understand what this meant but it was somehow reassuring.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 8 p68)

WC: Now with regard to thinking about yourself: What is thinking about yourself? Well, thinking about yourself is above all sorting out what you really want, what you really wish, what you, if you like, believe in, and then constantly reminding yourself about it. Our biggest difficulty all the time as F.M. used to say is that we “forget to remember.” We have simply got to remember. Now, life being as difficult as it is and so much of life being involved with our brains and heads and emotions, thoughts and feelings and all the rest of it, the fact that we have a body, and that the body needs to be mobile and free, comes fairly low down on the list of our concerns and anxieties.
(Thinking Aloud – The Importance of a Teacher’s Use p100)

MB: FM used to say, “Try and think about this a lot when you’re getting undressed, when you’re getting ready for bed. And then when you get into bed, lie for a little while and give your orders. Same thing when you wake up in the morning, don’t rush out of bed and have your breakfast and read the paper because it’ll be 11 o’clock before you think about your neck.”
(Direction Magazine Vol 2, No 2 – The Barlows p18)

FPJ: Ultimately a pupil must be able to make reliable kinaesthetic observations of himself in activity. Such observations, however, cannot be performed by the suggestions of the teacher. The purpose of lessons is to sharpen the kinaesthetic sense and to increase self-knowledge and self-control. The purpose is not to help the pupil develop his fantasy life. To imagine, for example, that your head is a balloon (which it certainly is not) is to get further away from reality than you already are and to reduce your chances of ever observing the head relation for what it is and does. Movement within an expanded field of attention is the means by which change is effected in the Alexander Technique. It cannot be effected by substituting imagination for attention.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 14 p156)

PM: Life usually consists of a series of compromises. You must learn, here, how to compromise between the way you should use yourself, which, to a great extent I can give you, and the old way you used to use yourself, which is utterly wrong. When you leave this room you are unlikely to go on putting into practice your optimum use of yourself. On the other hand, it is important that you do not sink back into your old ways. You will therefore have to compromise, but it is important that you learn to compromise less and less as time goes on. If you see to it that there is an occasional improvement in the direction that I indicate to you, you will do very well.
I would refer those who would carp about grammar of the above to Mr. Badger of The Wind in the Willows.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p4)

MB: The great enemy is fixing, holding, trying to keep it. He used to say, “It’s not having it that matters, but it’s knowing how to get from where you are now to something a bit better.”
(Direction Magazine Vol 2, No 2 – The Barlows p18)

FPJ: When the pupil perceives directly through the kinaesthetic sense and can compare a habitual with a non-habitual way of doing something, he doesn’t need words in order to grasp the significance of the experience. Alexander put it succinctly in a remark reported by Lulie Westfeldt (p. 71): “If we become sensorily aware of doing a harmful thing to ourselves, we can cease doing it.” The key word here is “sensorily.”
(Freedom to Change – chapter 6 p51)

PM: Alexander used to say that when Sir Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravitation, people began to think that in order to move one foot off the ground you had to shift your weight over and down on to the other. “But”, said Alexander, “I was a very ill educated man. I never heard of Sir Isaac Newton. It didn’t affect me!”
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p)

WC: The way we teach and present the Technique, the emphasis is so much on non-doing, on inhibition. That is tremendously important, but if you are not careful, people start to look upon the Technique as something that is done to them, not something they can do or make use of. In fact, the Technique gets rather caricatured in this way, when people begin to think they can’t really do anything to help themselves, apart from lying down. They can’t lie down very often, at the most perhaps once a day, so the rest of the time, there is nothing they can do, no way they can help themselves. This is getting off on the wrong foot altogether. As F.M. used to emphasize all the time, the Technique is a matter of self help. It is a means of helping yourself.
The active participation that is required is not muscular activity, but is the active participation of thought and awareness.
(Thinking Aloud – Advice to Teachers p43)

MB: After all, the only thing we’ve got to help us is to do it wrong, and then learn from it. I realise, of course, that this is not the attitude of most people who think that they’ve got to be right all the time. Which reminds me of something FM used to say to us: “You are right – there’s nothing wrong with any of you. You’re all quite perfect, except for what you’re doing.” That’s rather wonderful, isn’t it?
(Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules – part 3 p128)

WC: We don’t teach people to walk, any more than we teach people to breathe. What we teach in connection with breathing are the particular snags and traps that you’ve got to look out for, the particular things you’ve got to avoid, so the breathing mechanism is free to look after itself. It is exactly the same with walking.
We can’t teach people to walk, because we don’t know how walking is done. But we are going to draw attention to the particular things that interfere with the reflex pattern of walking working properly.
(Thinking Aloud – Walking p151)

LW: I remember an instance in which a young pianist who was having serious difficulties with his technique began thinking ‘the whole back upwards” as he played. Previously, he had split the back into two sections, making a false joint in the lumbar spine. (This is a very common fault in pianists. Even a layman can observe the great mobility in the upper back of a pianist and the frozen immobility of the lower back.) And directly he stopped using his back as though the upper and lower parts of it were unrelated, there was a vast improvement in his playing. He could get over the keyboard with much greater ease and flexibility, his tone was much better, and the follow-through of his tone was less clipped. When the back does not fulfil its proper function, the arms are obliged to take on more than their proper function. Of necessity they develop strains, and this affects the tone and power of the pianist.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 13 p141)

WC: FM always used to compare the Technique to gardening, which is a good analogy. There are no satisfactory shortcuts in gardening and it’s the same with the Technique. I would say though that a good dose of manure can work wonders.
(Personally Speaking – Part 3 Teaching p134)