Patrick Macdonald: #5, “It’s Just Happening”, Lewes, 1990
Patrick Macdonald did not, in those later years, speak very much when teaching, but he knew the moment when a few words could help to either induce helpful self-questioning or make something clear.
I recall two such incidents which took place during my last period of study with him.
I was working on one of my colleagues. Mr Macdonald was watching and reminding me with a gesture of his thumb to “take her up!”. Then something shifted; that recognisable change in state occurred in which everything begins to flow. Mr Macdonald leant over towards me, looked me in the eyes and said, very simply and very directly in a quiet but firm voice– as if confiding something both important and personal:
“That’s right! Never mind about her! You look after yourself!”
Then the moment was over. He changed, stood back again and in his usual voice said,
“Go on then, take her up! Your job is to take her up.”
But I wasn’t fooled. Something that I had already at certain moments tasted was now understood; that experience will always stay with me.
In my last lesson with him I remember asking him, when I felt myself moving freely in and out of the chair,
“Who is doing this, Mr Macdonald? You or me?”
“Who do you think is doing it?” he replied.
“I don’t know”, I said.
A minute or so later, when something had really got out of the way and a finer energy was flowing, he asked:
“Who is doing it now?”
“Nobody is doing it,” I replied. “It’s just happening.”
“That’s right,” he said. “It’s just happening.”
And again, at that moment – something was understood.
© John Hunter 2015
Lessons with Miss G: #11, Now I’m a Believer
“Now you are doing it again!” she said, with more than a little exasperation in her voice. She stepped back so that she could look at me and pronounce her verdict. “John, you are such an unbeliever!”
Well, that was not what I was expecting to hear. All sorts of reasons had been flooding through my head as to why it just wasn’t working: it was because I was doing or not doing this or that, or that she was doing or not doing this or that, but the idea that it could have anything at all to do with my beliefs – or lack of them – had never occurred to me …
And yet, she was absolutely right. Because I didn’t feel what I expected – had even been ‘trained’ – to feel when getting out of the chair, I didn’t believe it was possible. I was used to “keeping my back back”, but this was brought about with the help of a strong stimulus from the teacher who provided the opposition, thereby stimulating the “anti-gravity response”. But Goldie didn’t do that; she was not going to make it work for you, and if the usual signals and sensations were not there, then I didn’t believe something could happen.
So Alexander was right: “Belief is a matter of customary muscle tension”.1 I didn’t see this all at once: it was a gradual realisation, but one that was set in motion by that remark of Goldie’s.
Of all the “master teachers” I worked with, it was only with Goldie that I did not always feel wonderful during or after the lessons. Far from it! Sometimes it all felt very static and pointless. On more than one occasion I could not wait for the lesson to end, swearing to myself that this would definitely be the last time I would put myself through such an excruciating experience. She was, of course, picking up this “resistance” and would sometimes comment that I should not concern myself with whether or not I felt it was working, or give way to an inner criticism that she was “not up to scratch today”, but I should “just go on with the brain-work”. Then, perhaps several hours later the same day – and quite unexpectedly – some new discovery would emerge; a clarity of thought, a more vivid perception, or an unknown part of my spine would suddenly wake up. I was coming to understand that what she called “brain-work” was bringing about changes from the inside rather than through muscles or nerves. Another of Alexander’s aphorisms began to make sense:
“When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won’t want to use it.” 2
1 Some references to belief and muscle tension.
- “Do you know what we have found that belief is? A certain standard of muscle tension. That is all”. (The Bedford Lecture, in Articles and Lectures, p.174, Mouritz (1995))
- I remember one morning his coming briskly into our classroom, looking very pleased with himself, and saying, ‘Belief is a matter of customary muscle tension.’
‘F.M.,’ I said, ‘don’t you mean that belief about what you can do with the body is a matter of customary muscle tension?’ The discussion was on. He kept talking while he worked. Finally at the end of the morning’s work F.M. said, ‘Yes, belief about what you can do with the body is a matter of customary muscle tension.’ Lulie Westfeldt, F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and his Work, Mouritz 1998, p.68 - Was FM’ s aphorism that belief is a matter of muscle tension simply designed to shock people, or was there a more serious element behind it? He was perfectly serious about it, because he equated belief with fixation. In his experience a rigidity of mind corresponded to a rigidity of body. (Walter Carrington on the Alexander Technique in discussion with Sean Carey, 1986, p.45f)
2 Teaching Aphorisms: The Alexander Journal No 7, 1972, published by the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique. Also published in Articles and Lectures by Mouritz (1995).
© John Hunter 2015
Being with Erika and Miss G
Erika Whittaker and Margaret Goldie were really like chalk and cheese. In the early days, as young women, they did not get on too well. Goldie had, said Erika, somehow got into what she called the “inner circle” at Ashley place (by which she meant the Alexander family, plus Irene Tasker and Ethel Webb) and she did not mix very much with the other students.
According to Erika the children at the Little School were a little bit frightened of Goldie; one day when they were all being served with soup, none of them dared to start eating in case they had not “inhibited” enough. Then F.M. came in, sat down and said, “Eat, eat. It will get cold!”
“She had this way” Erika said, “of looking you up and down as if to say ‘what are you doing here?’, and one felt an icy chill. The other students were all a bit frightened of her.”
When, more than half a century later, they re-established contact, they formed a touching friendship. Erika, having found some strange things going on in the Alexander world after an absence of several decades, was very grateful to be able to talk to Goldie and be re-assured that she was not alone in her critique. While Erika was staying with me on one of her London visits she was invited to Goldie’s for lunch. She came back delighted.
“We had smoked salmon, Stilton cheese and champagne; my favourites.”
Goldie also valued the contact with Erika. When I told her on a later occasion that Erika was coming again to London, she became quite emotional.
“Oh Erika!” she said. “When we were at Ashley Place she was always so light, so joyful and so free. Mr Alexander was always sending us off to go for a walk, saying we were too serious.
‘Why can’t you be more like Erika,’ he would say. ‘She understands.’
But we couldn’t. We didn’t know how.”
I only went to Miss Goldie’s house in Richmond once, and that was to take Erika to visit her. I dropped her off and went a few hours later to pick her up. I went in and spent half an hour or so together with these two old ladies who had influenced my understanding of Alexander’s work so much over the last twelve years. It was the only time I was to see them together and it was the last time I saw Goldie before she died.
Goldie was sitting at her little desk under her bookshelves, full of fascinating titles. You really got the sense that she was a thinker: someone who reflected on subjects which had concerned mankind throughout the ages. She looked very fragile and had bruises on her face after a recent fall, but with Erika’s clever and considerate questions and prompts, the conversation was lively and Goldie reminisced happily.
She told us the story of her first lessons, when she was having each day one from FM and one from AR. She said she loved her lessons with FM, but hated the ones with AR. In desperation she wrote to her father who was paying for the lessons, and said that she thought it was not right that he should be spending all this money when she was only benefiting from half of the lessons. His response was that he was paying all this money so that she could learn to face and deal with any problem that life put in her path, and this was one of them. Later, she said, she became great friends with AR.
Erika asked her, for my benefit really, how was it that FM could see and work with so many people in a day without seeming to get tired.
Goldie laughed. “It was because he wasn’t doing anything” she replied.
“A lot of young teachers nowadays” continued Erika (and by “young teachers” she meant more or less anyone under the age of seventy), “are very concerned about getting more pupils and trying to make FM’s work more popular. What’s your view about that?”
Goldie smiled and said. “It was never meant for everyone. It is meant for the few who wish to evolve.”
© John Hunter 2015
Being With Erika: #14, Munich 1995
My good friend Renate Hoffman, who trained in London – first with Patrick Macdonald and then with Misha Magidov, lived in Munich. She was a pupil for many years of Margaret Goldie and revisited London often to continue having lessons with her. Renate was very keen to meet Erika, who spent many of her childhood years in Munich and still had friends there. Erika had also maintained for many years a correspondence friendship with Sydney Holland’s daughter Mary; Erika and Mary, who ran a training course in Munich, had never met. The conditions all seemed very favourable for organising an “Alexander trip” to Munich with Erika, and so Renate set to work to arrange things while Erika was in Europe again in 1995.
We visited two teacher training courses, at each of which the tea break proved to be a feast, and Erika finally met her correspondent Mary Holland.
There was also a weekend of workshops for teachers. One never quite knew what to expect from these events. Even though I had by now been to numerous such gatherings, they were always different. She never planned what she was going to do. To break the ice, she often began by recounting her own early experiences with her Aunt Ethel Webb (she loved to imitate Miss Webb saying “Keep your length, Dear!”). She was, so to speak, feeling her way into the situation, gauging where people were in themselves , how they might be getting in their own way and seeing what they needed.
It is a curious fact in the AT world, however, that we use the same words to refer to different processes and experiences. Renate told me that she overheard two of the participants discussing their reactions to the first morning of the workshop.
“I think we are doing that already, aren’t we?” asked one.
“Yes I think so” said the other. “I think we’ve already got it.”
“Yes I agree. We’ve got it. We don’t really need to stay for the rest do we?”
“Not really!”
Another participant, let’s call her “X”, who had picked up some crumbs from Marj Barstow’s table at one of her Swiss workshops, came face to face with her nemesis when she insisted on the importance of slumping.
It is true that some Alexander students and teachers fall into the trap of trying to go up at the front (which can lead to a phenomena knows as the “£10,000 chest“) and to maintain such a posture at all times. Marj would often remind people that slumping is not per se a bad thing; it is part of one’s flexibility. She would even invite students to “have a little slump” before directing up out of it and into movement.
The aforementioned participant at Erika’s workshop had latched onto Marj’s point in a distorted form, concluding that slumping was good and that this was some kind of Alexander esoteric knowledge that Marj had transmitted to her. But Erika was having none of it. Although I had heard her say many times something similar to Marj, Erika recognised the misconception in the participant and confronted it (see also Note 2 in Traps, Pitfalls & Culs-de-sacs: the £10,000 Chest).
“Erika was fantastic” Renate told me afterwards. “She was like a Zen Master. She wouldn’t let X off the hook. X insisted that she was right but Erika just laughed and told her she was wrong; she had misunderstood.”
For X this was like a koan. She found herself in an impossible situation. She would have to let go of her misconception or ……… Or what?
In the end her misconception, together with her sense of feeling special, was more precious to her than the opportunity to move on. She decided to leave.
It was touching to watch others, more open, allowing their understanding to be transformed – if only momentarily – especially when Erika put hands on them and they had the experience of a different quality of energy flowing through them. A moment can, after all, be short in “outer time”, but deeply significant in “inner time”.
Yet it was the more informal times that were the most delightful and illuminating. There were dinners at Renate and her husband Peter’s apartment, full of light and serious conversations; there were trips to Munich’s wonderful Konditoreien.
Walking past the Opera House, she reminisced about her childhood, telling us about the “Opera Line”. It seems that in the 1920’s it was already possible to ring the operator and ask for a direct connection to live performances.1
Erika introduced us to Munich’s artistic community at a party. She had kept in touch with people there who fondly remembered her from their childhoods fifty, sixty or seventy years before, It was a sight to behold when they, already themselves no longer young, came face to face with someone from the distant past – but still so full of life.
1. Thanks to Pia Quaet-Faslem for contacting the Bavarian State Opera, who confirmed that the Théâtrophone was in use there until around 1930 when radio broadcasts made it redundant. See Wikipedia: Théâtrophone
© 2014 John S Hunter
Patrick Macdonald: #4, The Ups and the Downs, Lewes & London, 1989
At the time I was going to Lewes to work with Patrick Macdonald I was Chair of STAT, though I kept rather quiet about that as the Society was distinctly out of favour with Mrs Macdonald. There were some complicated issues that had to be dealt with regarding the students who had chosen to continue studying with him after his move to Lewes, rather than staying in the school in Victoria, the directorship of which was taken over by Mr Macdonald’s former assistant, Shoshana Kaminitz.
“They say they can’t give them STAT certificates” said Mrs Macdonald. “That would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it!”
This was the first I had heard about the problem. Indeed it would be ‘pretty silly’, I thought. There was nobody more experienced or better qualified to train teachers. I told her I would try and help.
It turned out that, having retired from running the school in Victoria, Mr Macdonald had not renewed his membership of STAT when it next came due. Because of the Society’s own regulations this meant that it was unable to recognise Mr Macdonald’s students. At our next Council meeting we found an ‘elegant solution’, which was to confer upon him honorary membership; his graduates were duly elected as teaching members. The practice of conferring honorary membership on some of the Alexander Elders has continued since then, though Walter Carrington declined the offer, not wishing to be singled out for special treatment.
There were other incidents related to Mr Macdonald’s condition following his illness in New York (and the way some tried to take advantage of that), but discretion forbids I go into details. Suffice it to say that one member of Council, no longer in the Society, shocked me at a Council meeting with – what seemed to me – the pure political spite he manifested; another member of Council touched me with the generosity of spirit she showed. The former demanded that Mr Macdonald be charged with serious professional misconduct. There was a stunned silence. The latter, Dilys Carrington, came to the rescue – saying calmly and authoritatively that that would be “quite inappropriate”. The person who had raised the matter remained silent…But all that belongs in the category ‘Self-destructive Alexander Politics’ (which may never get written).
“They study anatomy and all sorts of things these days” said Mrs Macdonald. “They make it all so complicated. All you need to do is to learn how to coordinate yourself. Mind you” she added, after a pause, “having said that….. it took me thirty years!”
Allison Macdonald had trained with AR Alexander in the US; apparently Patrick Macdonald didn’t rate her teaching too highly.
He would remind you, in words and gestures, that your job, as he put it, was to ‘take the pupil up’. He fixed you with his attention and as soon as yours even considered wandering away from an upward thought he would show you his thumb and point it upwards.
“Go on then; take him up. Your job is to take him up.”
“How did FM work, Mr Macdonald?” asked one of our party.
“He took his pupil up”
“How?”
“By going up himself. Alexander was going up the whole time.”
© 2014 John S Hunter
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