I’m at the JConnectLA party tonight. About a quarter of the crowd is nominally Orthodox. Many of them dance with the opposite sex. Many of them are my friends. I watch them swaying with their yarmulkes and I notice that they tend to dance the same way they daven. Those who are stiff in shul are stiff on the dance floor and those with weird extraneous movements in davening have the same movements while dancing.
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Richard: “I wanted to be a doctor first, then a teacher.”
“I couldn’t do the chemistry to become a doctor. I took a few years out to travel. I got a job as a driving instructor. Ended up doing it ten years. I got incredible back problems sitting in the car all day. I just happened to bump into an Alexander teacher and he offered to help me.”
“My father used to say half-jokingly, if you want a day off work, just say you have back problems, because nobody can say you have or have not. And even if you have, nobody can do anything about it.
“That turned out to be the case when I got back problems. At one stage, I couldn’t work with it. I tried pretty much everything. The orthopedic surgeon wanted to operate and take the three lower discs out. My father said don’t. The physio made everything worse. Then it was the chiropractor and osteopath. I tried about 50 different therapists, including metamorphic technique, reflexology, massage. Nothing sorted the problem out.
“Then when I did the Alexander Technique, they looked at how I was sitting and found I was sitting way over to the left, because that’s what you do when you teach people to drive. When I realized that and corrected my sitting, the pain started to leave. Within three months, I was pain free.”
Luke: “How were you able to make a living from the Alexander Technique?”
Richard: “I was trained in Devon, in the UK. There were maybe 8,000 people there and there were about 35 teachers because there was a big training school of 36 people.
“So I came out and everyone said, you’ll have to move away. You’ll never get any work here. I didn’t want to move away at that point. So I just went around to every single adult education center in the vicinity, about 12 places, and they all said, yeah, we would like an evening class.
“Within two months, I was working more than full-time.”
Luke: “How did you learn to teach group classes?”
Richard: “I soon learned that you can’t just get somebody up and teach them the Alexander Technique in front of a room full of people. That just doesn’t work. I divided people into fives and had them watch how each one of them would get up from a chair. And then show them how much the head was going back and the shoulders were coming up. And then gave them a demonstration of how to get up for themselves without the head going back. They were impressed and a lot of their neck and back problems started going away.
“Another session I would teach them lying down in semi-supine. Another session we would go through breathing and I’d do the whispered ah. A lot of people who came for a six week course started coming for individual lessons. I saw the adult education not as teaching them the Technique but as advertising and showing them the possibilities of what the Technique could do.”
“I don’t use jargon. I don’t use words like ‘inhibition’ and ‘direction’ and ‘primary control’ because people don’t really connect with them. It’s like a computer expert talking to a layman about gigabytes and the rest of it.
“People are talking about posture. In the Alexander world, we don’t like to use that word because it’s just physical, but you do have to talk their language and use words like ‘posture’ but then explain that posture is much more than physical, it’s also emotional and mental.”
Luke: “So how did you come to start a teacher training course?”
Richard: “I’d been teaching for ten years. I saw a lot of teachers coming out of the training courses without the confidence to go out there and teach. They were just using Alexander jargon and confusing people. I wanted to do something different. I felt that the teacher training courses hadn’t changed that much since Alexander taught his own course. While I’m quite conservative and I want to keep the principles Alexander taught alive, I wanted to teach people in a more modern way. Pretty much everybody I taught is out there teaching.”
“Because of all the problems out there in the Alexander world, I’m organizing an international conference on how to promote yourself and to teach better.”
In 1976 Richard developed painful back problems and sciatica while working long hours as a driving instructor. After several years of pain, and having tried various orthodox and complementary treatments, he eventually found relief by having Alexander Technique lessons in 1984. He found the Technique so effective that he soon decided to undertake the three year full time teacher training course in Totnes, Devon, UK, approved by STAT, the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique. He qualified in 1989 and joined STAT.
His work as an Alexander Technique Teacher
Richard established his first practice in Totnes, Devon, and began lecturing and teaching around the UK and Europe. He began writing his first book about the Technique in 1991, and since then has written six more books, and is currently working on his eighth.
Richard travels around Europe and USA, giving talks and courses on the Technique. He has taught the Technique at many educational centres, including Galway University, Limerick University, Middlesex University, London, and Dartington College of Arts. He was a guest presenter at theAmSAT annual conference in San Francisco 2009.
Books and Articles
Richard is the author of four books on the Alexander Technique which are translated into eight languages, and a further two books on the topic of stress. His new book on posture, Change Your Posture, Change Your Life, is due for publication in January 2012. He has written many articles on the Technique and has published a CD, available in MP3 and cassette form.
Richard has featured in several newspapers and magazines including The Irish Times, The Sunday Tribune, The Irish Examiner, Cosmopolitan, Hello and Home and Country. He has appeared on BBC 1 & RTE 1 and has been featured on BBC Radios 4 & 5 and on local radio around Ireland and the UK.
Approach
Richard has a practical approach to helping people find their own solutions to problems such as pain, stress, and obstacles to performance. His greatest personal satisfaction comes when he can help others to get out of pain, especially when all other attempts have failed, just as he himself was helped after years of struggle in the 1980s by his Alexander Technique teacher, Daniel Reilly.
Richard aims to make the Alexander Technique accessible to a wide audience. He has been a pioneer in helping to make the technique accessible to many thousands of people.
In his part two lecture on Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer for Torah in Motion, Dr. Marc B. Shapiro says: “Congregational singing wasn’t even done in Germany. It was choir singing. It’s an American thing. It might be a development of the Young Israel movement. If anyone likes it and you go to a yeshivish minyan, it’s a matter of principal that you don’t sing. They are the traditional ones. They won’t even sing Lecha Dodi. The chazan sings and you’re supposed to mumble.”
Rabbi Kellerman: “The Rav did not allow any congregation singing in Maimonides… Almost nobody follows it.”
Marc: “The Briskers [the Rav was one] were dour. They did not sing zemirot on Shabbos.”
Jeff* emails: Hi Luke,
Have a look at the following article. It discusses the escapades of Rabbi Uzi Rivlin, an orthodox Rabbi who actually taught religious school at Temple Beth Abraham in Tarrytown, NY, where I went to Sunday school some 15 years ago. I’m counting my blessings that Livkin didn’t go Jerry Sandusky on my ass when I went to Hebrew School!
REPORT: The rabbi of Temple Beth Abraham said he was “shocked” at the arrest on child-molestation charges of a fifth-grade teacher at the synagogue’s religious school.
Rabbi Uzi Rivlin, 63, is accused of sexually abusing two 13-year-old Israeli boys who were staying at his New Jersey home in 2009 and 2010 as part of an exchange program he helped start.
“I’m completely shocked,” Rabbi David Holtz said of the allegations. “These charges are inconsistent with anything we have ever heard or known about Rabbi Rivlin. They’re competely out of character.”
I’m struck by how at age 45, I keep playing out my family dynamics in the wider world. I keep relating to people through the prism of the way I learned to relate to my parents.
Shul dynamics remind me of psycho-analysis. I’ve never had psycho-analysis, but I have had more than six years of psycho-dynamic psycho-therapy, which is the form of therapy most like psycho-analysis. Through connecting with your therapist, you are reparented. You learn a healthy way of relating to a parental figure and that can transform the way you relate to the wider world.
If you go to shul every day, you tend to form bonds with people and the intimate way you relate to your shul family can change the way you relate to the wider world.
People become precious when you see them every day and when you perform holy rituals with them and when you engage together in the study of sacred text.
You will likely get close to anyone you like and see them every day, but when you’re bound together by an ancient tradition that adds transcendent meaning to your life, then you’re transported to a higher realm. You have the potential of a concrete experience of holiness every day, of sensing your life touching the divine through your interactions with your fellow Jews at prayer and study, and this tends to educate the hardest of hearts such as mine into seeing the image of God in people all around you. Others are no longer trivial and you see every day that certain things possess sanctity and can not be treated carelessly.
I talk to a source on FB: The RCA set up a fake singles event at Kutsher‘s, all designed to kick me out
what?
RCC?
No…even bigger than that…the RCA itself
whoa
Yeah…they kicked me out of shul…it was terrible.
So, now I’m trying to get my money back from this Haredi Rabbi who organized the whole thing.
oy, tell me more
Nothing…the whole thing was a setup.
I’m convinced that Rabbi Union put my name on some kind of blacklist.
Also, the yeshivah guys I roomed with were doing things to my property, like sleeping on my bed, and using my toothbrush (yuck!)
…The $300 he pocketed from me (they charged me twice for the same event) is currently in dispute with American Express,
but I may have to take this guy to small claims court to get the money back.
I’ll send you information as it materializes.
The event was Labor Day weekend 2011
what shul did you get booted from?
It was the Kutsher’s shul. Monticello New York.
I’m surprised you haven’t heard of Kutsher’s.
Kutsher’s is the last remaining Jewish Borscth Belt summer resorts.
What they did is this:
As I was walking into Maariv after Shabbat,
someone pulled me aside and directed me to a second minyan behind the women’s section.
There were 10+ people there, all standing, but the thing is that they were all Satmar Haredi.
And one-by-one, they all walked away in the middle of davening, so that I was left standing there by myself, behind all the women.
It was really embarrassing.
I’ve basically given up on Orthodox Judaism at this point.
I don’t mean that I stopped practicing.
I mean that intellectually I’ve been put off by these people to the point where I’ve lost interest in being a part of the community from a social point of view.
So, I’m hoping to meet a reform chick, or maybe an Asian.
I’m listening to Alison Armstrong on the Dennis Prager show.
Dennis: “You have to be politically incorrect or you can not tell the truth.”
Alison, talking about women: “We [sometimes] avoid communicating with you [men], connecting with you.”
“You [men] are so literal. We can’t understand you. We wonder what you mean. We can’t imagine you mean what you just said.”
Dennis: “We assume you mean what you just said. It might’ve just been for effect.”
Alison: “We rarely mean the words that we say. It’s all connotation. It’s all context.”
“If a man says, he’s busy, that means he’s busy. That’s all.”
“If a woman says she’s busy, it all depends on how she says it.”
“A man feels compelled to make [his] woman happy.”
Dennis: “If you’re happy, we’re happy.”
Alison: “If you’re happy, you’re free. Your job’s done. You’re good enough. Some women are unhappy on purpose because they never want to release you. That’s why some women don’t want to get to the point because once you get to the point, you’re [the man] done. You got what you needed.”
“Many women have grown up with sisters or mothers or friends who attacked them when they were happy.”
“When a man is happy, you physically puff up. You’re empowered. And your testosterone spikes. And women can smell that. And a woman is most likely to emasculate a man when he’s happy. We’re afraid of testosterone spikes.”
Alison says to a male caller: “Running your fingers through her hair, oh my gosh, you want bang for your buck, guys, in my family we call this getting the monsters out. You can destress and make happy and bliss out and turn on a woman so quickly just by running your fingers through her hair.”
Danielle Berrin‘s boyfriend, the articulate rabbi David Wolpe, has transformed her writing. It’s consistently good these days. And as for David, I bet he’s having the time of his life with this attractive, articulate, and interesting young woman.
Allison Armstrong talks about the stages of a man’s life. David Wolpe is in his king stage and a man who’s a king needs more recognition and affirmation from his woman than a man who’s building his kingdom. Many men in their 40s and 50s find they are more likely to get this sort of nurturing from a younger woman.
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When I converted to Orthodox Judaism, I affirmed that I would live up to its numerous demands.
When I entered Alexander Technique teacher training, I was expected to live up to AMSAT’s code of conduct.
The following part of the code tripped me up a couple of weeks ago:
B. The Teacher-Colleague Relationship
A member treats all colleagues with the respect and fairness with which the member would wish to be treated:
1. A member expresses differences of professional opinion without attacking other teachers personally or criticizing their work in a way that may undermine the confidence of the public in the profession, or otherwise reflect badly on the Alexander Technique.
2. A member takes care not to start any unfounded rumor or hearsay that might damage the reputation of another member or teacher.
On the face of it, I agree with every word of that code, but the historian in me, or the reporter in me, or the rabble-rousing blogger in me, wants to be able to write a warts-and-all history of the Technique. It seems to me that there have been various schools of the Technique and they frequently did not get along. There are various schools of the Technique today and frankly, I think they have as much tension between them as they ever did, they’re just more polite to each other on the surface.
So I think I’ve learned over the past two weeks that it is not permitted for an Alexander teacher to say anything publicly that could be seen as disparaging another Alexander teacher or casting Alexander work in a bad light. After all, there are only 4,000 of us Alexander teachers in the world and we should take care of each other. Most professional societies have this type of code of conduct.
Even though these rules are obvious, it is hard for me to always live up to them. I’ve worked diligently to create a life for myself where I can pretty much say what I believe. I’ve been blogging since 1997 and doing just that. Now I need to tone myself down so I never say anything that could undermine the public’s confidence in Alexander Technique.
But I’m not an Alexandroid. I’m flesh and blood. I’m terribly amused by the feuds in the Alexander world and I want to write about them dispassionately. I love reading critiques of the Technique and I don’t automatically go into defense mode where any attacks are wrong.
So what is more important to me? Being a good Alexander colleague or being a blogger?
I’m not going to pronounce here because both occupations exert a powerful pull on me. You the reader will decide which is stronger for me.
I love belonging to community and I love my personal freedom and the two are antipodes. I’ve never been willing to live long without community and I’ve never been willing to live long without freedom.
One of the things that attracted me to a career teaching Alexander Technique was that I could do it without having a boss. I could go out on my own.
I have no interest in deviating from the classical ways of teaching the Technique. I don’t know enough to risk anything here.
I’ve been pitching the Technique via personally addressed email to attorneys in Beverly Hills and Century (Dear Mr. Cohen, Dear Ms. Smith, etc). After sending off about 200 emails, I got my first response yesterday! It said, “Please remove me from your email list.”
I’m next going to pitch acupuncturists, chiropractors, psychiatrists, doctors and psycho-therapists.
I went to a business networking breakfast this week. We each had 30 seconds to pitch.
Just before I stood up, my table was accidentally pushed on to me, spilling a great mess.
I said, “Life is filled with stimuli such as collapsing tables, or cars stopping suddenly in front of you, or public speaking, and it is easy to compress and to pull down.”
I demonstrated what that looked like.
“It’s easy to rush your pitch because it is uncomfortable to stand up in front of people. With the Alexander Technique, we can notice our reactions to stimuli, such as pulling down and in and rushing our words, and let go those reactions that don’t serve us.”
Two women with good use came up to me afterwards who were interested in lessons. Many of the guys in the room needed lessons much more severely, but they weren’t interested. Women consistently get this quicker than do men.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
