“I ask you to do nothing, but you act as if I had asked you to do. I have got to train you to act according to your decision where the habits of life are concerned.”
F.M. Alexander (Articles and Lectures, Teaching Aphorisms – p196)

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An Unstructured Group of Quotes Related to Learning AT

FPJ: When I knew F. M., he had very little to say about “directive orders” or “thinking.” I assumed that he was satisfied that I knew how to “order” and that I was giving him the cooperation he needed. He seemed to be getting the effects he wanted, at any rate. In this regard, A. R. was quite different. He was always stopping a pupil and telling him he was “feeling, not thinking,” by which he meant that the pupil had become either stiff or heavy and was not responding to the direction of his hands. It was very easy in a lesson to let your mind wander and be unaware of what was going on, but A. R. never let you get away with this for very long.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 8 p68)

MB: And as I have said previously, he [Alexander] was always telling us how to use our time constructively. For example, you’re waiting for a bus, and it’s late. “Now, there’s no point getting frustrated,” he used to tell us. “Do a bit of work instead.”
(Alexander Technique: The Ground Rules – part 3 p101)

LW: He examined me by watching me walk, stand, sit and get up. He placed his hands on me during these activities and noted what was happening. No undressing took place-l discovered later that men pupils never even took off their coats for an examination. I spoke to him about the contrast between his examination and that of the ordinary doctor. ‘Certainly’, he said. “We are after something quite different. In a case like yours, doctors would be interested in the functioning of individual muscles. I do not handle individual muscles. I affect their functioning, of course, but indirectly through the Primary Control.
‘I am not interested in the particular manifestation of a pupil’s wrongness’, he went on to say. ‘I do the same thing for everyone, whether he comes to me with flat feet or nervous tension. I help him to get his Primary Control working again, and when this happens, the pupil will be on the right total pattern and his use and functioning will be at their potential best. A pupil does not have to undress for you to know what his total pattern is.’
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 2 p22)

PM: Do not forget that right and wrong change, and should change as your body and co-ordination change. What is right for you today should be wrong for you tomorrow. Do not, therefore, try and fix a picture of a specific co-ordination in your brain as the right one; it will have to be modified, perhaps many times, over a long period. You must learn to think in trends and tendencies, and not in fixed positions. Everything (so they say) is relative, not least the proper relationship of the neck to the head, the neck and head to the back and neck, and the head and back to the rest of the body. If you can learn to think in tendencies (which is the way I teach you) you may continue to teach yourself.
Remember, you are slowly eliminating the wrong. Finality, for most of us, and that includes me, is not in sight.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p2)

FPJ: “Don’t trouble yourself about going slowly,” he said; “it is necessary to go slowly.”
[In a letter from AR to FPJ, on teaching.]
(Freedom to Change – chapter 9 p81)

MB: I should emphasise that FM was always very friendly with new people and was very good at putting them at their ease. He’d say, “Now, come and sit down in the chair.” And he’d allow them to sit down by themselves, although of course he’d notice what they were doing as they did so. Then he’d ask them to stand up again. This gave him a beginning, somewhere to start and he would go on to explain that he wasn’t going to teach them what to do right, but that together they would find out what was going wrong and creating misuse. He’d say: “Now, you’re doing yourself harm because you’ve developed certain habits in the way you use your body which are actually destroying it.”
(Alexander Technique: The Ground Rules – part 1 p59)

WC: The pupil is sitting or standing there simply directing, wishing to lengthen in stature, knowing the process involves the freeing of the neck, the head going forward and up, the back lengthening and widening, focussing their thought, intention and wish on that. The pupil should not be bothering about what the teacher’s hands are doing or how they feel. The teacher’s hands in guiding, moving, freeing and taking up, are facilitating or giving expression to the lengthening process the pupil is wishing for.
As the pupil goes on directing and the teacher goes on working, a result is achieved because the teacher’s hands make it easier for it all to happen than it would be for the pupil alone. It is essential the pupil directs, but the teacher’s hands open up possibilities of response that perhaps weren’t there before. So it is very much a matter of focussing on the primary directions, leaving the rest alone, and not doing anything.
(Direction, a talk on July 5, 1985)

LW: In solving this problem of maintaining his new head, neck and back pattern in speaking, Alexander had evolved a new form of control. He called it ‘control in process’, or ‘control throughout the process’. He said that when people spoke of control, they most often meant control by elimination, that is, the stimulus to go wrong is eliminated, as when a drunkard is sent to a sanatorium and all liquor is removed. But in the kind of control he developed, the stimulus to go wrong was always there, meeting you at every turn. He said it was as if you brought a drunkard into a room where there was whisky and said to him, ‘Here, taste this, smell this, and then do whatever you have rationally decided you want to do about it’.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 15 p153)

PM: Pupil: “I’m sure that these exercises I’ve done are very good.”
A. R. Alexander: “Oh! Who for?”
Most people love to do exercises; they save thought and inner struggle. Exercises, particularly those calculated to bring about relaxation, will, in nearly every case, exaggerate the unwanted condition. Only those whose use of their bodies is extremely good can do exercises with impunity. The reason for this is that exercises make no fundamental change, they only promote what is already there, and if what is already there is bad, it is folly to accentuate it.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p3)

FPJ: During my early lessons with A. R., getting in and out of a chair was a regular ritual. I always knew that at some point during a lesson I would be asked to get up and that if I inhibited my response to this stimulus and “thought my way out of the chair,” it would be a remarkably easy and pleasant experience; but that if I “tried to be right,” I was in for a long argument which could be ended only by admitting I was wrong and did not know how to think. The procedure was a kind of laboratory exercise in the cause and control of anxiety. I could feel myself becoming anxious during the course of the lesson. I remembered what a pleasant and desirable experience it was to move up against gravity without effort; I remembered that I could not have the experience unless I could inhibit my habitual response to the stimulus to get up; I remembered that if I did not inhibit I would be a dead weight in Alexander’s hands and that he might not be able to support me. All of these memories united to produce a marked state of anxiety, which was further heightened when I remembered that I had driven all the way from Providence and was paying dearly for a half-hour lesson. It was this final consideration that turned the tide. I decided that if I was going to justify my expenditure of time and money I must try to inhibit as best I could even if I did not understand how it worked. The best place to begin, I thought, might be to stop being “anxious about being anxious” and to find out what I was actually doing. In this way I would at least learn something about myself even if I did not get out of the chair. This was an intelligent rather than an emotional response to the situation. The level of my anxiety was reduced as soon as I was able to look at it objectively. This change from my habitual behaviour was immediately reinforced by the freedom and ease with which I found myself moving. I do not now believe that it is necessary to heighten a pupil’s anxiety during a lesson in order to teach him how to control it. This was A. R.’s way, however.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 8 p71)

MB: For pupils, he simply explained that the chair was a very useful vehicle for learning – it’s something that in our culture we’re doing all day long. He’d say, “If I can teach you how to avoid those habits in this simple activity, you’ll be able to extend it to other areas of your life – even to your emotional reactions, which is the hardest task of all.”
(Alexander Technique: The Ground Rules – part 1 p65)

WC: What you are going to do is something that is utterly and totally different. If you can make this inhibition really effective in that way and stop off the old habitual pattern, then you have got the possibility of being able to generate a new pattern and get things working in a different way, in a way that you have chosen and a way that you want.
Of course, this will take time. It will not be quick and it will not be easy. There will be a lot of uncertainty in it because the new way is going to be unfamiliar. Until you actually try and get into it you haven’t got the experience to know what it is really and truly like and what it involves. It doesn’t solve all the problem – you have effectively choked off the old but you’ve still got a tremendous lot to deal with to generate the new. What Alexander is saying and what we all find in teaching is that until you have effectively choked off the old, until you have really learned what inhibition means in that way, you’re not going to get any further and make the change that you want.
(The Act of Living – Saying and Meaning No p137)

PM: When I was a boy I was taught how to box by a well-known featherweight professional boxer, Mr. Fred Merryweather of York. He said to me in the ring one day, “I can teach you to do this, but I can’t learn you. You will have to learn yourself.” This is applicable to all learning, not least to the Alexander Technique.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p11)

FPJ: “Only the man whose habits are already good can know what the good is.”
[Frank Pierce Jones quoting John Dewey]
(Freedom to Change – chapter 11 p102)

MB: As I’ve said previously, FM was a very practical man. And although a lot of people got the wrong end of the stick, he always emphasised that this work wasn’t about getting in and out of chairs. It’s about paying attention to how you’re using your body whatever you’re doing – even standing on your head if that’s what you want to do!
(Alexander Technique: The Ground Rules – part 1 p66)

WC: I also mentioned previously, but it’s worth repeating, that FM used to say that there’s no set of exercises for people to go and practise “sitting” and “standing” and things like that but that he was teaching something that can be put into practice from the moment the pupil goes out of the door at the end of a lesson.
(Personally Speaking – part 3 p99)

MB: Really, this is the magical thing about the Technique if it’s properly taught. The teacher doesn’t merely point out to someone what’s wrong, but instead shows them how to prevent it happening. In a way it’s predictive. In effect, a teacher is saying to the pupil: “If you do this, this and this, then this will be the outcome. However, if you approach the matter with a bit of intelligence using inhibition and the relevant directions you can achieve a different outcome which will be of lasting benefit to you.”
(Alexander Technique: The Ground Rules – part 1 p63)

PM: The causes of an individual’s mal-coordination are many. They may be attributed to fear, to shock, to imitation in youth, to instruction, to working conditions, to heredity, to mal-nutrition – in fact, to any number of causes stretching back into the past, perhaps for generations. All this notwithstanding, a pupil should accept personal responsibility for the mess he is in. And what is more important, he should accept responsibility for getting himself out of it.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p17)

FPJ: What makes a good pupil? It is not suggestibility. The person who sits down, relaxes and prepares to have some kind of novel experience may get what he is looking for, but it will not be the Alexander Technique. A healthy scepticism is much easier to deal with.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 14 p154)

MB: Every time you clean your teeth or wash your face it’s an opportunity to go into monkey. Every time you’re in the kitchen making a sauce or gravy and you’re stirring it, you should be in a little monkey too. It’s all very obvious and sensible when you think about it.
(Alexander Technique: The Ground Rules – part 2 p96)

WC: I always take it from lesson to lesson and hope that, as a pupil becomes more aware of what the problem is – how every time they go to get out of the chair they stiffen the neck and pull the head back – it will gradually dawn on them that they do the same thing when they do all the other things in their life.
(Personally Speaking – part 3 p 106)