Luke Ford

Robert Rickover tells Harriet Anderson: “When learning a foreign language, there are pronunciations that are usually foreign. I wish I’d had Alexander lessons when I was taking French in high school. It would’ve saved me a world of grief.”

Harriet: “First, as learning to learn. Learning a transferable skill. Learning to unlearn and learning to relearn. When we learn a foreign language as adults, we’ve been imprinted with our mother tongue. So it is important to unlearn the muscle patterns which make for specific pronunciation.

“The Technique can help us learn new muscle patterns to make new sounds.”

In this podcast, Alexander teacher Amy Ward Brimmer talks to Robert Rickover about how the Technique can help with boredom.

Robert: “One aspect of boredom is not being in the moment and self-aware but being in some other state.”

Amy: “Whenever I’ve been aware and in the present moment, there’s always been a whole lot going on. Boredom is being disconnected from the present moment. Boredom is the way we shut off.”

“Whenever I’m bored, I’m collapsing. I’m pulling down and in on myself. Alexander work gives me the opportunity to wake up and to notice how am I breathing?”

Robert: “I notice kids fiddling in a bored way with their iPhones or electronic equipment. They’re trying to find something to engage them. They often exhibit the worst aspects of their posture at that point. Curled over.”

Amy: “Kids lying around the house will say, I’m bored.”

Robert: “Just look at their bodies when they say that.”

Amy: “Just completely slumped. Almost defeated.”

“My response as a parent to that ‘I’m bored’ complaint is to offer activities. That never works.

“Boredom is a form of resistance to what is.”

Robert: “If you look at Fred Astaire in movies, he’s totally present. It would be interesting to ask Fred Astaire if he ever got bored.”

When I started taking Alexander Technique lessons in 2008, I became frustrated that change was so slow.

I remained frustrated for a couple of years until I finally felt at ease.

In this podcast, Alexander teachers Robert Rickover and Eileen Troberman discuss the rate of change.

A 20 year old kid asked Marj Barstow why did he have to keep coming back to workshops. Why couldn’t he just get it more quickly? And Marj told him, your body couldn’t take it.

Eileen: “People can not change fast.”

“We recognize ourselves by our tension. Our tension patterns are what feels like us to us. Without that, we don’t feel like us. It takes a while to realize that that is not us, it is just tension.”

An Alexander teacher emails: “Alexander Teachers Spend Raucous Afternoon Validating Each Other” is really excellent writing. How the hell did you keep this kind of righteous commentary stuffed for three years of training? Did no one suspect that they had a “suicide bomber” in their midst?

Jennifer Mackerras writes the popular Alexander blog Activate You.

She’s from Armidale, Australia and now lives in Bristol, England. She has a PhD in Drama.

Here are some highlights:

Jennifer: “Most students when they walk through the door want to be given things to do to make whatever it is that hurts to stop hurting. What I want to do is to teach them the Alexander Technique, which will give them the tools to stop doing the things that caused the hurt in the first place. It’s a matter of finding the intersection between those two points.”

Luke: “I was shocked in my first lessons when my teacher [Julia Caulder] asked me, what are you thinking about? I was not thinking my directions. I was shocked that she could tell.”

Jennifer: “I learned early on that I shouldn’t teach friends. Friendship is a different transaction from a teacher-student transaction. It’s a different relationship. Some people don’t make the transition so easily.”

“I also learned early on to not give cut-price lessons. They’re either full-price or they’re free. When you cut the price of the lesson, you’re giving the message that you don’t need to take it so seriously because you’re not paying much for it. We are professional dealing with psycho-physical unity. We have undergone training. We know what we’re doing.”

“What I do is not medicine and is not related to medicine. The Alexander Technique does not cure anything.”

Jennifer blogs:

It is a common experience of Alexander technique students to feel more ‘alive’ after a lesson. They often report feeling more awake, more alert, lighter, and somehow more able to concentrate on tasks. So why does this happen?

The secret lies in the stuff we do to ourselves – unnecessary muscular activity.

FM Alexander noticed in himself, and subsequently in others, that it was something that he was doing in the way he went about activities that was causing his problems – the problems that led him to create the work we call the Alexander Technique. He noticed defects in the way he was using himself.

And in his first book, Alexander noted that when defects in the poise of the body are present, “the condition thus evidenced is the result of an undue rigidity of parts of the muscular mechanisms … Which are forced to perform duties other than those intended by nature.” In other words, if we are experiencing problems, it is likely that some of our muscles are working far too hard, and probably in ways that they are not designed to do.

So it makes sense that if we are using more muscular activity than we need, and using the wrong muscles anyway, that we would start to feel fatigued.

This is why feeling an increase in energy is a common experience in Alexander Technique lessons. Students not only decrease the work done by their muscles, but they work out for themselves (with the teacher’s assistance) the most effective way of carrying out the activity they are working on. They work out which muscles they need to use, and then experience using just those muscles, doing just the right amount of work.