“I don’t think teachers can change people: the change is up to them. I think if teachers try to make people change they will revolt eventually. People have various ways of resisting.”(Taken from a “Personally Speaking” Part 3 p 120)
“Don’t trouble yourself about going slowly, it is necessary to go slowly.”(Taken from a letter from AR Alexander to Frank Pierce Jones as quoted in Jones’ book “Freedom to Change” – chapter 9 p81)
Thinking, directing, “giving orders”, or however you wish to describe it, is not an end in itself. It has value and meaning only as it is applied to the pupil’s own life.(Taken from “Freedom to Change” – Appendix D p193)
The next point I think I should make here is in regard to position…A position that is right today, cannot possibly be right tomorrow if you have improved. How can it be? It must be wrong tomorrow, and it will be wrong again the next day if you have improved, because it will have changed with the rest of your changing conditions.(Taken from “Articles and Lectures” – Bedford Physical Training College Lecture p171)
In 1924 a child whose parents were in India was sent to Alexander for lessons. He was nervous and excitable and Alexander felt that he needed daily help in employing the new use of himself in his schoolwork. Other parents who were themselves having lessons asked for the same kind of help for their children, and a class was set up to provide academic instruction for them, “upon the principle,” Alexander wrote, “that the end for which they are working…
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…
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…
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.Frank Pierce Jones (“Freedom to Change” – chapter 14 p154)
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…Remember, you are slowly eliminating the wrong. Finality, for most of us, and that includes me, is not in sight.Patrick…
I remember an old pupil of mine who was in quite a high position in an insurance company. He was known for being very conservative, very, very staid, very conventional. I was giving him a lesson one day and he said, “You know, a groove is a very comfortable thing.” And he was expressing, quite obviously, a deep feeling that he was having. He realized that in the work I was doing I was trying to winkle him out of…
It was all great fun and was never allowed to be serious in the studious sense, F.M. saw to that. If we were looking solemn in class F.M. sent us out for a walk, “come back when you are smiling again!” We hastened to obey and took ourselves once round St. Vincent’s Square, naturally putting our heads forward and up to walk.Erika Whittaker (“Alexander’s Way” – The Alexander Journal No. 13 Autumn 1993 p5)
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?Marjory…
I don’t see how it can be hurried. 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.Walter Carrington (“Personally Speaking” – Part 3 p134)
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.”Frank Pierce Jones (“Freedom to Change” – Chapter 6 p51)
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… The best a teacher can do is to give them the opportunity to learn…
A Student’s Perspective When I first heard about the Alexander technique through a newspaper article, it made intuitive sense to me. In the interview, Christine talked about changing the way we moved in everyday activities in order to manage pain and injuries. I had experienced back and neck pain at times, I had been to physiotherapists and osteopaths for recovery from injuries in the past but could see that these sessions did not support the real and lasting change I…