Day Eighteen - The Shocking Truth About Feelings in an Alexander Technique Lesson

After I met Marjorie Barstow and started to metamorphose my teaching habits, I began to wonder what my pupils were thinking about. So I asked them. What surprised me most is that they weren't thinking at all - they were busy feeling. In retrospect, it was obvious that they would be doing that. After all, before I met Marj, I hardly ever had my hands off them. I was busy doing my "Alexander-is-a-feeling" teaching technique: I made sure I was constantly giving them new experiences. They loved that - it is almost like a drug - and when they left my lesson, it was only logical that they continued attempting the same thing: feel, feel, feel. However, it was very frustrating for them, because the result they could manage on their own never matched what they had experienced in my lesson. Their refrain: "How do I do this on my own?" was born. I can’t count how many times I have been asked that question. How about you? And the answer is simple: Start Thinking! Alexander talked about "feeling guides" and life would be impossible without them. However: feelings are a record of the past. You won’t generate new feelings by using old feelings, and you can't move into the future while using the past to take you there. As Marj once elegantly put it: “You can’t use your old habit to change your habit - it doesn’t work that way.” The Shocking Truth: Our Students Don’t Think - They Feel Before Marj, I didn’t know how to teach them to think. It wasn’t for want of trying, however they'd come back for another lesson, I’d carrying on touching them all the time, they would feel great again, pay me and book their next lesson. This could be considered a good business model: making them dependent on you keeps them coming back for more. That could be true, but the reality was that I was tired of teaching this way. I started to see my students as leeches: always wanting their table turn, wanting to feel better, wanting that pain to go away. I was sick of being a dispenser of good feelings. It was 1986 and I was so confused about teaching, I was seriously thinking of giving it up. Looking back, I question if I can truly call what I was doing teaching? I think that was where my true confusion existed. I believe now that what I was doing then was closer to therapy: 1. I help my students experience something magically new and different (I love your hands on); 2. they don’t really understand how it works (what was that position of the head again?); 3. however they LOVE the feelings they get (it’s so light!); 4. and they like the benefits that accrue from it (my back is way better, I have more energy - THANK YOU!). Then they ask: “When can I come back for some more?” More what? More feelings is what. However, that is a bit harsh. Ultimately they do learn something. In the end, they do have a means of managing their co-ordination. However, it is a feeling-based method they use. Once these new feeling guides - or conditioning as Alexander phrased it - have been sufficiently installed and reinforced, your students can use them to stop, feel the guide, and continue on. Here’s how they think: “I allow my neck to be free, so my head can go forward and up, so my back can lengthen and widen so I can feel if it’s right.” “Right” in this case being: “how it felt in my lessons.” Here’s the huge problem with that: it’s a method that results in a slow degrading of quality, not an improvement. The standard does not keep getting better, it keeps getting worse - unless you continue pumping in the new feelings. If not, the person doesn’t change, they continue looking back to feel how they felt in their Alexander lessons with you. You hear it all the time: “I must go back for more lessons. I need a refresher.” They don’t have a method to generate their own new feelings, they keep relying on you for that. Group teaching can not be built on this method. Most Alexander Technique teachers already know that, they just don’t have an alternative teaching technology that is sufficiently able to communicate Alexander's discovery as quickly or as efficiently as the method our pioneer developed. No question about it: his methodology is very powerful, but it has it’s limitations for self-sufficiency and autonomous growth. During the next month, I will continue exploring how to get your students to think. This is not about group teaching verses 121 teaching - it’s way deeper than that. It’s about a fundamental outlook and philosophy, a way of thinking about your work as a teacher. I welcome you all to continue with me this next month to study how to grow your teaching technology to include this model - a model that serves your business by giving you a means to leverage your knowledge to effectively teach a far larger number of people (aka group teaching). During the remaining weeks of this year, I will continue exploring how this can be done. How teaching style and business development are actually two sides of the same coin. When you ease people off their dependency on your hands, you open your practise to wonderful new possibilities. [NOTE: This blog usually consists of a paid area where I introduce new ideas to use in your teaching that will build your practise. I also invite you into a Facebook group where 47 members are discussing practical ways to implement what has been described in the paid area of my blog. You can join anytime to be part of their discussions - why not hop for the ride next month?]