Tag Archive | #alexandertechnique
March 7, 2023  

Lessons With Miss G: #3, Arriving Late

I always experienced a degree of anxiety when on my way to a lesson with Miss G. She seemed to take away all the little “tricks” I relied on to have “better use”. What I thought was the application of the Technique, was now being challenged as actually another set of habits.

Certainly one of the most inadvisable things to do, for a worrying sort of person like me at any rate, was to arrive late.

After an agonising wait for the lift there was that extra flight of stairs to negotiate to get to the fifth floor – but all of that paled into insignificance compared to the dramatic confrontation that was about to ensue: not, I must in all fairness add, with Miss G – but with oneself when, standing in front of her chair and with her calmly looking at you or placing a finger on the back of your neck, all the inner mental turmoil and over-stimulation of the nervous system – aggravated by, but certainly present anyway, the last-minute rush – came sharply into one’s field of awareness.

This was not a phenomenon limited to arriving late, of course; there was even something to be gained by the hard-won struggle to find – perhaps only at the end of the half-hour – a moment of real inner quiet. But it was arguably more productive to arrive early and allow some time to “settle” before the lesson. The distance between her and you was then slightly shortened and some of the subtleties of the inner psychic processes might better be glimpsed.

Besides, arriving early one might be fortunate enough to have a “waiting-room experience”.

Because the stud-walls separating her teaching room from the waiting room were so thin, one could hear more or less everything that was going on. Miss G would usually be putting someone through their paces; occasionally one might hear a pupil making some kind of doomed objection to her critique, though it was more usual to find them agreeing with her. “Yes, Miss Goldie!”

One wondered, of course, who it was she had in there with her and on more that one occasion I was very surprised to see a familiar face coming out of her room – though with perhaps a very unfamiliar expression on it.

© 2013 John S Hunter

Legacy Project

The Trustees of the Charity for the F Matthias Alexander Technique are piloting what we call a “legacy project” with the aim of recording and storing material about first-generation teachers trained by F M Alexander. The first subject of the project will be Margaret Goldie (1905-1997).Anyone who knew Miss Goldie, either in a personal capacity or as a pupil, is invited to contact the Charity with a view to participating in the project: https://www.fmatcharity.org/legacy-project.html
Email us on enquiries@atfriends.org

March 5, 2023  

Lessons With Miss G: #1, The Beginning.

About a year after qualifying I began to have lessons with Margaret Goldie.  Friends who were already her pupils had spoken highly of this lady, who had her first lessons with the Alexander brothers in around 1927.

For quite some time the question of whether or not to go to her (let alone whether or not she would accept to see me) hovered in the air. In many ways I was rather comfortable with what I already knew; I was assisting on two London training courses and my work seemed to be appreciated; I was teaching at the Royal Academy of Music; I had a private practice and was a member of the STAT ‘think-tank’ that was advising Council on future policy. My new career seemed to be blooming. Nevertheless I knew in some part of myself that there was a very significant gap between what I was attempting to put into practice, for myself and for my teaching, and what Alexander had written about in his books. I didn’t know how to cross that gap. I was already familiar enough with what was going on in the other London training courses to know that, however positive and good it might be, it was not what I was looking for.

What I had learned was extremely subtle, skillful and helpful – both for myself and for others, but it was not connecting with my daily life in the way that I believed it could. I was told by a colleague from Switzerland that some of the trainees on the course where she trained had even left the school after having lessons with Goldie, claiming that what they were doing in their training course was no more than a game. For sure, part of me did not want to be challenged in a way that might expose me as a fraud. Were those fears irrational? All of this was going on at a more or less sub-conscious level until one night I dreamt that I was having a lesson with Margaret Goldie. I had no idea what she actually looked like (nothing like the woman in my dream, as it turned out), nor do I remember anything much about the ‘dream-lesson’ – except that it was definitely with Margaret Goldie and that something quite different was going on. I don’t hold much store by dreams so I did not think that this was some great message from the beyond, but I did think there must be some reason for it. In any event, it was the prompt I needed to ring her up and try to get an appointment to see her.

I half expected to find her in some sort of ‘guardian of the gate’ role when I rang, but as I was able to say that a friend, already a pupil of hers, had recommended I contact her, she readily agreed to see me. A week or so later, off I went to her premises in Soho Square.

The room was at the top of a five storey office block in one corner of the Square.  The lift went up only as far as the fourth floor, which meant that you, and she, had to use the stairs for the last flight; if you were lucky, you might catch a glimpse of her seeming to float effortlessly up them– despite her eighty-odd years of age.

I had been warned not to adopt a wide ‘MacDonald’ stance in front of the chair, but even so I was immediately asked to put my feet closer together. I fell straight into the trap of moving my feet as if the end were what mattered and not the means; it was clear right from the start that everything that happened in her teaching room was grist for the mill, and that I would not get away with any ‘unconscious’ activity.

At the end of the lesson I asked what I owed her. Sitting at her little bureau she looked at me with her extraordinary blue eyes and said that I should think about what the lesson meant to me and how I valued it, then I could tell her what I wished to pay.

“I used to have a fixed fee” she said. “But some people don’t have two stones to rub together and can’t even afford the bus fare; and rich people –  well, they don’t appreciate anything unless they pay through the nose for it.”

I suggested a fee which felt right to me and she said that would do fine. One couldn’t help wondering what she might have said if one had offered her an amount too little. Some years later I found out – but that story belongs elsewhere.

Thus began my twelve year journey of discoveries with Miss G.

© 2013 John S Hunter

Legacy Project

The Trustees of the Charity for the F Matthias Alexander Technique are piloting what we call a “legacy project” with the aim of recording and storing material about first-generation teachers trained by F M Alexander. The first subject of the project will be Margaret Goldie (1905-1997).

Anyone who knew Miss Goldie, either in a personal capacity or as a pupil, is invited to contact the Charity with a view to participating in the project: https://www.fmatcharity.org/legacy-project.html

Email us on enquiries@atfriends.org

April 22, 2020  

Being With Erika and Marjory Barlow, London 1998 #16

I forget the exact sequence of events, but I think it was at the Manchester STAT Conference that Marjory Barlow invited Erika to come and visit her when she was next going to be in London. When that time came Erika was staying with me, so I drove her to Marjory’s apartment near Swiss Cottage and joined them for tea.

After my spell of lessons with Marjory in the mid-eighties I had only intermittent contact with her at various STAT meetings. On one occasion, when I was still Chair of STAT, I asked Marjory to host a meeting of senior representatives of the different “streams” of the Technique at which the question of what to do about a school that was considered by some to have “gone rogue” would be addressed. Marjory had to play the role of “the authority”; the representative of the dharma, so to speak. Whilst the discussion about the various “goings-on” at the school in question was progressing, Marjory at one point gave me a dig in my ribs with her elbow and whispered, “Well you know what old Gurdjieff said don’t you; that sooner or later everything turns into its opposite, and this is an example of just that.” 1

With this in mind, and already by then being quite familiar with Erika’s views on a number of Alexander-related matters, I was anticipating another fascinating encounter. I had seen them together before of course; at Erika’s Memorial Lecture in 1985 (when they had a different recollection about the role of table-work during the Ashley Place training course), at the Brighton Congress in 1988 and more recently at the Manchester STAT Conference, but this was something more intimate. How were they going to interact? Given all that Erika and, to a lesser extent, Margaret Goldie had told me about the development of Alexander’s work and the split between the two groups of students at Ashley Place (see The First Training Course in 1931: a different perspective), I felt that here was an opportunity to gain some insight into the fruits of their different understanding and focus.

Most of the conversation was very light – chit-chatting about people they knew or had known. It was, in fact, at this tea party that I heard Marjory’s story about Margaret Goldie and FM’s ashes (see Lessons With Miss G, 10: Some Meaningful Tittle-tattle). At some point Marjory began to talk about the need to keep Alexander’s teaching just as it had been taught to them. I knew that Erika had a different perspective on this issue, and wondered how she might deal with it. But Erika could always find an angle from which to respond which neither complied with nor contradicted what another person was saying. She just moved the conversation seamlessly along – something at which she was a master. “Well” she would often say, “one has to get along with people.” What I witnessed in her, however, evidenced an inner freedom from reaction. She could allow another person to have their own opinion without it disturbing her equanimity.

Somehow the interaction reminded me of Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund 2; not by any means in the personal details of their lives – the parallel does not stand up to scrutiny as Erika could not at all be described as Dionysian any more than Marjory could be described as Apollonian. No! It was the fact that Marjory, despite the quarrel with FM in the 1950’s, had – like Narcissus in Hesse’s novel – stayed, as it were, “in the monastery” and risen to be the “abbot”, whereas Erika had, like Goldmund, gone out into the world in search of adventure and knowledge, and had a different understanding of Alexander, his ideas and life itself. Marjory had a mission; to look after the Technique and to transmit it in its purity; to not change a thing. Erika chose to put it and herself to the test in the maelstrom of Life, and thereby to hone her understanding on the wheel of experience. Both of these octogenarian “living treasures” were indubitably evolved human beings; not only did they have the wisdom which comes from a long life, but also they were replete with the palpable energies which ensue from several decades of work on oneself. I had and have tremendous respect for both of them.

My personal impression was that whereas Marjory was a very big fish in the Alexander pond, Erika swam free in the sea of life.

1. G I Gurdjieff (1866-1949). In his theory of Octaves, Gurdjieff states that “…we can observe how the line of development of forces deviates from its original direction and goes, after a time, in a diametrically opposed direction, still preserving its former name.”: In Search of the Miraculous, P D Ouspensky; published by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London 1950. See also www.gurdjieff.org.uk

2. See: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/299/299707/narcissus-and-goldmund/9780141984612.html

© 2020 John S Hunter

April 19, 2020  

On Getting in and out of a Chair. “Hats off!”

They will see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. 1

The Chair! For so many teachers the sine qua non of the Alexander Technique. And, of course, we have all seen the little film of the Master taking Margaret Goldie – looking rather like a puppet – in and out of a chair.

It was 1985 or ’86 and I had only recently started having lessons with Margaret Goldie. “Chairwork” had taken on a completely different character. It was never about getting in or out of a chair this way or that way. I began to see that every action or non-action that happened in a lesson was about what was happening in my brain. What Alexander had been at pains to write about in his four books began to make sense in a way that, up until then, it had not.

More than once during this time of coronavirus, Albert Camus’ novel La Peste has come to mind. Set in the Algerian city of Oran in the 1940’s during an outbreak of the plague, the whole city is in quarantine. It is a fascinating, multi-levelled piece of writing. One of the main characters, Joseph Grand, aspires to write a prose-perfect novel but his search for perfection has become an impassable barrier. He explains to his friend Dr Rieux:

“What I really want, doctor, is this. On the day when the manuscript reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up – after he’s read it through, of course – and say to his staff: ‘Gentlemen, hats off!’

Rieux was dumbfounded, and, to add to his amazement, he saw, or seemed to see, the man beside him making as if to take off his hat with a sweeping gesture, bringing his hand to his head, then holding his arm out straight in front of him. That queer whistling overhead seemed to gather force.

“So you see,” Grand added, “it’s got to be flawless.” 2

Not a bad aspiration by any means, you might think, but Grand does seem to be getting lost in the details:

“I’d like you to understand, doctor. I grant you it’s easy enough to choose between a ‘but’ and an ‘and.’ It’s a bit more difficult to decide between ‘and’ and ‘then.’ But definitely the hardest thing may be to know whether one should put an ‘and’ or leave it out.” 2

Rieux persuades Grand to read him the all-important opening sentence of his manuscript:

Then, pitched low but clear. Grand’s voice came to his ears. “One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.”

Silence returned, and with it the vague murmur of the prostrate town. Grand had put down the sheet and was still staring at it. After a while he looked up.

“What do you think of it?” 2

Rieux politely responds that his curiosity is whetted and he wants to know what comes next but, in his search for perfection in the opening sentence, it seems that Grand has not succeeded in getting beyond it.

“That’s only a rough draft. Once I’ve succeeded in rendering perfectly the picture in my mind’s eye, once my words have the exact tempo of this ride – the horse is trotting, one-two-three, one-two-three, see what I mean? – the rest will come more easily and, what’s even more important, the illusion will be such that from the very first words it will be possible to say: ‘Hats off!’” 2

During that period back in the 1980’s I have a vivid recollection of a morning working in a teacher-training course. One of the teachers there confessed to the students that she could not immediately think how to respond when her pupil had asked her, “What happens when I can get in and out of a chair perfectly? What happens then?”

My lessons with Miss G flooded into my mind. “But it’s not about getting in and out of a chair” thought I.

This teacher however, after what must have been a very pregnant pause, had responded, so she informed us, thus:

“Why then, you make an art of it!”

Later that morning there was a coffee-time reading from one of Alexander’s books – I forget what exactly it was – but the contrast between the material in the reading and the practical work taking place was startling. After the reading everyone went back into their routine of trying to get each other in and out of chairs “perfectly”. The precise and detailed feedback they gave each other seemed to differ only in the medium from Grand’s obsession with finding le mot juste.

The procedure had become an end in itself: another example of the medium becoming the message.

The exposure we all get to the daily repetition of what happens – including what is said – in a training course conditions us to accept it as “right”, even to the extent of rejecting what happens in other such courses. As one of my colleagues once said to me, surprising even herself by always going back to the same place for refresher courses, “It get’s into your nervous system.” There are many kinds of addictions to which human beings are susceptible.

And the books? That’s a whole other matter.

1. 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).

2. La Peste, Albert Camus (translation by Stuart Gilbert)

© John Hunter 2020

April 9, 2020  

The Giving and Withholding of Consent: the Secret of “Letting Do”

So you’ve learnt how to direct – and perhaps you experience some expansion, integration and a flow of energy when you “give your orders”.

You can inhibit some of your reactions and enter into a more quiet state. Maybe you can let your head lead as you go into activity. Then now it’s time to explore the world of giving and withholding of consent: the secret of “letting do”.

I had my first real experience of this in a lesson with Margaret Goldie. I was sitting with my hands resting palms-up on the tops of my legs. She took one arm, moved it around – up and down and rotating it in a particular way that she had – and let it rest at my side. Then the brain work!

“Not you doing it!” she quietly insisted.

“You are going to give consent to letting your hand come back up onto the top of your leg, but you are not going to do it.”

I had already been having lessons with her for some years so I was not distracted by “unbeliever” thoughts. I just listened to her and followed her instructions as exactly as I could.

“Not you doing it! You are going to give consent to allowing your hand to move. Give consent and let it do it!”

Then suddenly, effortlessly – my hand floats up onto the top of my leg. How? Not, evidently, by using the familiar pathways I associated with such a movement.

It’s all there in one of Alexander’s Teaching Aphorisms:

“The reason you people won’t give consent is because none of you will give consent to anything but what you feel.

F M Alexander 1

This approach gave me new insights into Alexander’s work, in particular the similarity with aspects of Taoism.  2

Withholding consent – inhibition – is the doorway. Pass through it and experiment with giving consent to what you wish to do – volition – and then “letting do”! Allowing activity to take place using unfamiliar pathways, given that so many of our “identity habits” are embodied, challenges our sense of who we think we are, opening a door to a world which seems to operate under different laws.

 …the Alexander Technique, like Zen, tries to unlock the power of the unknown force in man.

Patrick Macdonald 3

Your early experiments might be simple physical activities – like the one Miss Goldie showed me; giving consent to a very basic movement of some part of the body, getting out of a chair, moving around from A to B or even (and this takes patient practice) making a cup of tea. As you become more at home in this new medium, you could experiment with interacting with other people. Give consent, for example, to chatting with your neighbour about the weather.4

You must learn to get out of the teacher’s way, learn to get out of your own way, then learn to get out of ITS way.

Patrick Macdonald 5

What do you find? Do you become more the watcher than the doer?

If you wish, share your experiences in the comments section or write to me.

1. 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).
2. The concept of non-doing in Taoism – Wu Wei – has been understood in different ways throughout its long history. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei
3. The Alexander Technique As I See It, Patrick MacDonald; Notebook Jottings. Published by Rahula Books, 1989
4. At the time of writing we are all practising social distancing so interacting with others may have to wait.
5. The Alexander Technique As I See It, Patrick MacDonald; Notebook Jottings. Published by Rahula Books, 1989

© John Hunter 2020

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