Lessons with Miss G: #6, “My Way”
“Quiet throughout, with particular attention to head, neck and back” came the familiar mantra from Miss G, as she gently tapped the back of my head with one finger.
After a minute or so (one’s sense of time was very different in her teaching room) she asked me, somewhat incongruously – and almost in a tone of curiosity, as if we were chatting over a cup of coffee, “Have you heard of an American singer called Francis Sinatra?”
“Yes Miss Goldie,” I replied, wondering where she was going with this.
“Then are you familiar with a song he recorded entitled ‘I Did It My Way’?”
“Yes Miss Goldie”, my attention dancing now between the anticipation of what might be coming next and the call back to the quiet energy that flowed, under her touch, between my head and spine.
“Well …” she said, stepping back so I no longer had that external reminder to ‘not interfere with head, neck and back’, her voice rising now in a crescendo “… he got it quite wrong you know! It’s not about doing it your way. It’s doing it your way that’s got you into the mess you’re in today.”
I’m saying to myself, “Don’t react! Stay quiet! Head, neck and back……”
“You want to stop doing it your way. Not your way”, her voice quietening now, her hand coming back to my head/neck area. “Not your way, but Nature’s way.”
I began to see that inhibition and direction are two aspects of a way of being; they are inextricably linked.
© 2013 John S Hunter
Lessons With Miss G: #2, Decisions.
In I think my second lesson with Margaret Goldie she said, “Now I am going to ask you to make a decision, and it will be the first decision you’ve ever made.”
At the time I found this a very strange thing for her to say. Had I not been making decisions all my life? Had I not decided that very day to get out of bed, to get on the tube and to come and have a lesson with her?
We assume that because we end up taking one course of action rather than another that we have made a decision. But is that the case? Perhaps we have merely acquiesced to impulses following the path of least resistance. The evidence was that I could not decide to not get out of a chair, in fact decide not to do, so what decisions could I make about my life…….?
Miss G’s assertion opened a question for me about what decisions really are, a subject to which Erika attached a great deal of importance (see Tips4Teachers – “…not to do…”).
© 2013 John S Hunter
Legacy Project
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
Tips4Teachers – “…not to do…”
“When you are asked not to do something, instead of making the decision not to do it, you try to prevent yourself from doing it. But this only means that you decide to do it, and then use muscle tension to prevent yourself from doing it.”1
FM Alexander
How fortunate that Ethel Webb, whose ear was attuned to when FM Alexander said something worth taking note of, recognised the significance of these words spoken by him to a pupil during a lesson and wrote them down so that they could be preserved as one of the “teaching aphorisms”.
FM’s pupil, although he or she might have been saying inwardly the words “don’t do it, don’t do it!”, nevertheless had the intention to do it, and the body responds to intention not words.
One way I explain it to pupils is as follows:
The physical body is analogous to a well-trained animal, always listening to it’s master’s voice, waiting to be told what to do, wanting to obey and carry out what is asked of it. However, the language that we use for our inner and outer talking is not one either the animal or the physical body understands very well. In the case of the latter, every time we feel an impulse to act in some way we begin to stimulate neural activity, and muscles get ready to do work. The trouble is that we are so often very unclear about what we want, or don’t want, to do. The poor body gets contradictory messages and, like the animal in our analogy, begins to get stressed.
By making a decision and having a clear intention, the body begins to respond in a quite different way; sometimes mind and body can, like horse and rider, be as one. We are moving in the direction of greater integration.
This is not easy. Many people avoid making decisions, little realising the psycho-physical consequences thereof. Making decisions means taking more responsibility: it also means confronting the very deep-rooted patterns of so-called individuality to which we are very attached.
Fortunately there is another “individual” waiting to be discovered, but more on that another time.
Erika Whittaker told me once, much to my surprise at the time, that what Alexander really wanted from his pupils was that they would learn to make their own decisions. Over the years, this has come to mean more and more 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).
© 2013 John S Hunter
Upward Thought 
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