Tag Archive | #alexandertechnique
August 7, 2013  

Being with Erika: #10, A Lesson in Stopping, London, 1993

Whenever Erika was staying with me I was always keen to get her to talk about her insights into the Alexander Technique and the key individuals involved in its discovery and transmission. Sometimes this became a distraction from actually ‘entering into the moment’.

Erika taught me a lesson, without words and without touch.

After dinner one evening I was washing up. Erika picked up a tea towel and began to dry the dishes. I was impatient to go and sit down and talk about the Alexander Technique. Erika was living it. The more I rushed, the more contrast I sensed between my movements and the freedom with which her arm would appear from somewhere behind me and pick up a plate or bowl or cup. But still I carried on along my furrow of end-gaining.

Then the hand stopped appearing. I turned a little so I could see her in my peripheral vision. She had “stopped”; not ‘frozen’, not ‘paused’ but ‘stopped’. Sometimes when one was with Erika, one became aware of her thought processes. She had stopped, and was giving herself a choice. I felt at that moment that she was perfectly free to put down the tea towel and simply walk out of the kitchen, or to remain quiet and still, or to carry on drying the dishes. She chose to carry on.

By now I had got the message; not only about my own rushing, but more critically about the difference between ‘pausing’ and ‘stopping’. Stopping opens a door into other options.

Even a seemingly mundane activity like ‘doing the washing-up’ could be a medium for teaching.

© 2013 John S Hunter

Other Posts on Being with Erika:

#01, London 1985 – Annual Memorial Lecture
#02, Brighton 1988 – Key Note Address
#03, Melbourne 1991 – “Come for lunch!”
#04, Melbourne 1991 – Tea Ceremony
#05, Melbourne 1991 – Jean Jacques by the Sea
#06, Back in Melbourne, 1992
#07, “Where did you train?”, London, 1993
#08, “It’s all the same”, London, 1993
#09, “Making the Link”, London, 1993
#11, Hands, London 1994
#12, “Yes, but you’re worrying!”, London, 1993
#13, “Nothing special”, London, 1994

August 2, 2013  

Patrick Macdonald: #3, “…at this game for quite a while”, Lewes, 1988

Patrick Macdonald contracted a serious illness whilst teaching in New York in the late ’80’s and retired from running his school in Victoria, London. However, he continued to teach from his home in Swanborough near Lewes, East Sussex and soon attracted visitors from all over the world.

A trip to Swanborough was quite a ritual; meeting two or three colleagues at Victoria Station, a journey of an hour or so to Lewes, then a taxi ride out of the town and into the countryside. Most of the taxi drivers knew where to go if you just said “Mr Macdonald’s in Swanborough”.

His wife Allison would answer the door. Mr Macdonald, if he wasn’t working, and their two large dogs would come and greet you.

Mrs Macdonald liked to chat, but after a minute or so he would say “Come on then, let’s start to work” and lead you into an area of the living room – with a view out into the garden – right beside his aviary, which had a floor-to-ceiling plate glass window through which one could see the birds chirping away. Not that one was there to look at the birds, and if one’s attention got distracted, Mr Macdonald would soon bring you back.

As soon as his hand touched the back of your neck, he knew your level of experience.

“You’ve been at this game for quite a while, haven’t you” he said.

His illness – a viral infection that had got into his brain – had affected him rather like a stroke; some of his mobility was impaired and he did not communicate very much. His hands and his “work attention”, however, had lost none of their force.

It was as well to go with colleagues as otherwise the continuous movement in and out of the chair could become tiring. On one occasion, thinking I might gain some respite, I asked him to do “hands on the back of a chair” with me. “Yes, all right” he said. A colleague brought another chair over, Mr Macdonald quickly placed my hands on the back of it and, with my hands still there, resumed getting me in and out of the chair……

The most rewarding part of the experience, though, was putting hands on each other under his guidance. Then, you were in the crucible  ….. and there was no escape.

© 2013 John S Hunter

July 29, 2013  

Being with Erika: #09, “Making the Link”, London, 1993

I can no longer be sure of the chronology of all the following events as, after such a long time, the occasions Erika stayed with me for one or two weeks, spanning a period of some five years, have mostly blended into one.

It is interesting to record, however, the way she addressed some of the difficulties young teachers were having – rarely related to a technical question about ‘hands-on’ or what we normally think of as ‘use’, but something more existential.

To one she suggested taking up a craft, perhaps even getting a loom, recognising this person’s need for a creative outlet.

Another teacher who came told her of his constant planning inside his head from the moment he woke up in the morning. She got him to sit beside her and watch together in silence the planes flying into Heathrow airport in the distance. He told me later how, at some point, he felt the ground appear underneath him and all his tensions and worries just drain out of him; he ‘stopped’ – and came into being.

Some did come with very definite questions about this or that ‘procedure’; not being open to other possibilities, they missed an opportunity for another level of self-discovery.

One came with a question which was to capture very succinctly a problem which many had. “How do I make the link between what I have learnt in my training course – and do with my pupils – and my own ‘everyday’ life?”

I personally felt it important to pursue this theme of “making the link”; it also gave me some insight into Erika’s comment “all about teaching“.

© 2013 John S Hunter

Other Posts on Being with Erika:

#01, London 1985 – Annual Memorial Lecture
#02, Brighton 1988 – Key Note Address
#03, Melbourne 1991 – “Come for lunch!”
#04, Melbourne 1991 – Tea Ceremony
#05, Melbourne 1991 – Jean Jacques by the Sea
#06, Back in Melbourne, 1992
#07, “Where did you train?”, London, 1993
#08, “It’s all the same”, London, 1993
#10,  A Lesson in Stopping, London, 1993
#11, Hands, London 1994
#12, “Yes, but you’re worrying!”, London, 1993
#13, “Nothing special”, London, 1994

July 27, 2013  

Being with Erika: #08, “It’s all the same”, London, 1993

A lot of teachers wanted to come and meet Erika, so I organised several half-day workshops over a period of two weeks in my apartment in West London. The participants spanned a period of thirty-odd years experience and came from diverse training backgrounds. The interaction between them and Erika was of great interest to me.

Here was a woman whose contact with the Alexander Technique (her first lessons from her aunt Ethel Webb were in 1919) predated anyone else still alive. For all of the teachers who came, their link with Alexander was through their head of training or that person’s head of training – in all cases leading back to the same eight people: Patrick Macdonald, Peter Scott, Walter and Dilys Carrington, Dr and Marjory Barlow, and Dick and Elisabeth Walker.

Erika, however, had distanced herself from what had been going on in the Alexander world after World War 2. For some time she had felt uncomfortable with certain attitudes in Ashley Place 1 and when the training course reopened in September 1945, Erika found the atmosphere very different from the pre-war era. With FM playing a smaller part in the running of the course, the three ‘crown princes’ (Patrick Macdonald, Walter Carrington and Bill Barlow), as she called them, were already vying for who was going to ‘pick up the mantle’. Consequently she saw the contemporary Alexander world from the perspective of what it had been to her in those early experiences with Ethel Webb, Irene Tasker and the Alexander brothers. She was like a time-traveller who had jumped forward fifty years and could see how, over just two generations, ideas and practices had developed in unexpected and sometimes, to her, unusual ways.

Like many of my contemporaries who trained in London in the 1980’s, I was trying to understand the difference between the various ‘styles’ or ‘approaches’ to training. As the different teachers, from those very backgrounds, came and interacted with Erika, bringing with them (just like me) their mixture of ‘idées reçues’, misconceptions, insights, discoveries, frustrations and ‘strongly held beliefs’, it became clear that she had a somewhat different way of seeing things.

Some people came with very definite ideas about what they wanted to ask, but she stepped deftly aside in the face of ‘specific questions’. What she was interested in was people, and what made them tick. Who was asking this or that question, and what way of thinking was behind it?  She tried to get through a person’s outer shell and connect with the individual with whom she was in discourse. Some found this frustrating; they were waiting for when they could start getting in and out of chairs. Some felt the rug pulled out from under their feet; they were looking for a rational explanation of this or that idea or to justify this or that point of view. Others found it like a breath of fresh air.

When she ‘worked’ with someone, she never allowed it to become the seeking out of certain sensory experiences. She brought the person into the moment, into their own presence in the here and now. One could see the scales fall from their eyes as the questions or concerns which had been dogging them, and were preventing them from entering into a direct experience, disappeared.

Speaking for myself, still the old questions fought to reestablish themselves in my mind. I asked her to talk about the differences between the major lineages of the Alexander Technique.

“But they are all the same” she said. “Can’t you see that?”

“No I can’t” I replied. “What do you mean?”

“They are all about ‘teaching‘.”

I still didn’t understand. But my curiosity was piqued now, and I wanted to find out what she meant. This took quite some ‘unpacking’ and involved an exploration of events which took place in London long before I was born.

1. “…there seemed to be a tendency at Ashley Place to have the attitude that we were the clever ones and the people out there don’t know anything……..I wanted to find out what else was going on in the world”. Erika Whittaker, Annual Memorial Lecture, STAT 1985. (… back to text).

© 2013 John S Hunter

Other Posts on Being with Erika:

#01, London 1985 – Annual Memorial Lecture
#02, Brighton 1988 – Key Note Address
#03, Melbourne 1991 – “Come for lunch!”
#04, Melbourne 1991 – Tea Ceremony
#05, Melbourne 1991 – Jean Jacques by the Sea
#06, Back in Melbourne, 1992
#07, “Where did you train?”, London, 1993
#09, “Making the Link”, London, 1993
#10,  A Lesson in Stopping, London, 1993
#11, Hands, London 1994
#12, “Yes, but you’re worrying!”, London, 1993
#13, “Nothing special”, London, 1994

July 25, 2013  

Tips4Pupils – Pausing is not Stopping

A pause is not a stop; they are quite different. A pause implies that one is going to do the thing, but not yet. A stop has no such implication. We are free to do something else.

If you press the pause button on an old-fashioned cassette player, the motor is still engaged but with, so to speak, the brakes on; as soon as you release the button the machine can only continue in the same direction it was going. If you press the stop button, other options become available; you can rewind, fast-forward, record or even remove the tape.

Real stopping means giving oneself real choices.

But take care! With choice comes responsibility.

© 2013 John S Hunter

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