Jennifer (Guest blog)

Jennifer Claire Roig-Francolí is an Alexander Technique teacher in Cincinnati, USA and below she offers a deeply honest and clear portrayal of the profound and far reaching effects Alexander's Discovery can have on someone's life. A story like this one renews my awe of the magnitude of this work. It easy to forget that we are the gatekeepers to something extraordinary that simply can't be compared or classed with the methods or techniques it so easily associates with today. Jennifer's story is a clear reminder of that… *** Being MySelf ~ through Music, Spirituality, and Alexander Technique I am an artist at heart. My parents tell me that when I was two years old I asked for a violin. Not too surprising, since my parents are both avid musicians (my father, an English professor, plays mainly viola and trombone; my mother, a Swiss national, plays mainly cello, piano, and clarinet). It wasn’t until I was four that I was allowed to take lessons, though. I had also wanted to be a ballerina, but I quit ballet lessons after just a few months because it was “too hard” - I distinctly remember the teacher having us push each others’ legs down onto the floor in butterfly position, and it hurt. I’m glad I followed my intuition, and I’m glad my mother quickly found me a violin teacher! Soon after getting involved with violin lessons, I was faced with a dilemma: my parents said I needed to choose between group violin lessons and baseball (they both met at the same time on Saturdays). It was a hard decision, because I loved both, but I chose the violin lessons. I remember that day, and recognize it as perhaps the pivotal day when mind and body became split within me. To me, violin playing was a mental activity; baseball was a physical activity. I loved both, but I had to choose only one. So I gradually became the introverted, studious A-student violinist who skipped first grade because she could already read, while my younger brother became the popular soccer player and skier (now he’s a corporate lawyer - we could hardly be more different!). I was always very shy, and didn’t like to communicate with people verbally outside of my family and close friends, but I loved to perform, communicating through music. Close, intimate relationships with good friends were important to me, and I remember first falling in love when I was 6 - I’ve been in love ever since! Friendships at school were challenging, because I found most children to be superficial - meaning, they didn’t seem to really care much about the deep meanings of things, and they didn’t really listen to me. So I stopped talking much to other people my age, except for my “best friend” at the time, and I became the “teacher’s pet” - I am so lucky that I have always had teachers who really care about me. Thankfully, kids were nice to me, too - maybe because they respected my talent with the violin, or maybe because I was always quiet and nice to them, too. My violin became my voice to an extreme degree. I tried to remedy this imbalance in college, but it wasn’t until after about 30 AT lessons that I began to finally discover my true voice from deep within. (I wrote a blogpost about this) I became quite serious about the violin from the very beginning, and there was never any question in my mind that I would become a professional violinist. I was aiming for a solo career, and my parents supported me lovingly in that direction, doing everything that needed to be done to gently guide a talented child towards her goal. We weren’t rich, but my parents made sure that I could study with some of the best violinists around the world, and enrolled me in summer camps where students are expected to practice more than five hours a day (I hated that and soon found ways to fake it by listening to recorded music in my room as if I were studying my part to the music - I was naturally good at the violin, not because I practiced a lot). In fact, it wasn’t long before I was winning local, national, and then international competitions and awards, performing in recital and as soloist with orchestras; and also performing as concertmaster in the local youth orchestra. It all came naturally, and I enjoyed it. I did well at school, but nothing other than the violin interested me in the least. I got out of gym class because my mother told the high school that I “might hurt my hands” (anti-physical, again). To give you an idea of how little I cared about the body, one of the biggest jokes of my life, now that I’m an AT teacher, is that I only ever failed one class - and that was health, because I really didn’t care! When I wasn’t practicing the violin (which was most of the time - once I got caught reading a magazine on my music stand while playing on automatic pilot), I could be found reading a book. I read in the morning when I woke up, I read in the car on the way to school, I read in classes when my work was done, and I read while I walked back and forth to high school. Mostly mysteries and romantic fiction. My entire life was experienced in my head, and largely in my imagination. I hated the loud, crowded public high school I went to, and was all too eager to skip twelfth grade to go to college to pursue my violin dreams. Two wonderful years at the Cleveland Institute of Music, then a transfer to Indiana University because I felt like things were getting too easy and I wanted to challenge myself more. At I.U., I stumbled upon the world of early music on historical instruments entirely by accident, and fell in love with the baroque violin, which opened up a whole new perspective on both the violin and music. I dove in and embraced this unbelievable new world with joy, focus, and excitement. I now had a “double-life” as both a modern violinist and a baroque violinist (it is rare for people to play both instruments well professionally, because they are so different). By the time I finished my Bachelor’s Degree, I felt a bit like I had “done it all” with the violin, even though there continued to be a persistent, very subtle niggling sense that something foundational and elusive was missing from my technique - which I later recognized as the constructive, conscious control that I found through AT. Everything was very much “on track” professionally, taking me in the direction of my goal of being an international soloist – until everything suddenly shifted radically at age 19. That’s when I entered into a relationship with my husband and my entire world-view was turned upside-down and inside-out. Until then, I had always considered myself an agnostic, completely uninterested in spirituality, and I was bold about questioning anything religious. Our family’s “religion” was music and intellect. As a child and teenager, I was curious about psychism, yoga, and mind-control methods, and I tried some of them on my own briefly. But my husband introduced me to a new way of thinking about God and spirituality, which really rang true to me, and I devoured the books he offered me to supplement our conversations. I fell deeply in love with a spiritual perspective on life based on integral metaphysics and perennial philosophy (not “New-Age”) and I decided to get married when I was 20 and to devote my life to spiritual Self-realization. Not only that, but it seemed to me that my music was no longer necessary, since my new spiritual life seemed to fulfil all that my violin had given me at the deepest heart-level, and more. I truly would have quit the violin right then and there, if my husband and others I respected had not urged me not to (which I am very grateful for!). Once I began living a Spirit-centered life, I radically changed everything about myself: my lifestyle, career ambitions (I no longer had any, as I was content to stay at home and be a wife), personal clothing and appearance (I only wore skirts and grew my hair long), friends, home decoration/ambience, way of speaking.... just about everything changed, within and without. In many ways, I became a different person. What was really difficult was that the people who knew me before didn’t understand a thing about what I was doing, and I didn’t know how to explain it so that they would understand. So when I got married, there was a painful loss of closeness in some of my relationships which has taken many years to recover. I spoke before of a mind-body split that happened when I was little; these new events foretold something that felt something like a spirit-soul split (can’t think of a better way to put it) which was to take place gradually over the next 13 years. In hindsight, I think I “threw the baby out with the bathwater” when I turned away from my violin, which had served as a primary source of soul-nourishment for my entire life up until that point. But it was a period I needed to go through; I had a lot to learn! For the first five years of marriage, I was in a personal heaven as I took on my new roles. But I also reluctantly played in orchestras wherever I followed my husband for his jobs, even though I had always said as I child that I never wanted to do that because everyone in the orchestras looked so unhappy. Now I was doing it mostly to make money, even though I didn’t care at all about money. I was always successful - I was the leader or associate leader wherever I went, but I didn’t love it. My husband also urged me to teach the violin, so even though I had an allergy to teaching (everyone in my family seems to be either a teacher or a lawyer - on both sides), I started to do that, too. I liked both activities in the moment, but they were not really in alignment with my soul. I did these things mostly out of a sense of obligation, and there was very little joy. In fact, it was during this period that I first started to suffer from performance anxiety. I was more nervous playing in the back of the second violin section in an orchestra than I’d ever been performing in some of the most prestigious halls in the world as soloist in front of many hundreds of people! I gradually became more unhappy and isolated from people, for a variety of reasons which are too personal to describe here, and I didn’t feel like I could talk about it. When we decided to have children after eight years of marriage, I put all of my heart and soul into becoming a mother. My first son was perfectly healthy, wonderful, and bright, but it was difficult because he wouldn’t sleep; the first year of his life was one of the most difficult of mine, unfortunately! When we moved to Cincinnati for the latest of my husband’s jobs, I hit a real low, and began to pray in earnest for something or Someone to help me out of what seemed like an impossible general situation. It was a very vague, deep, visceral prayer... and very soon after that, a strange series of events occurred, including a car accident in which I was not hurt but was awarded $1000 by insurance, which I regarded as a gift for the AT lessons I thought I couldn’t afford. I have always seen the Alexander Technique as the clear and direct answer to my most heart-wrenching prayer in a time of great darkness for my soul. I had actually tried AT lessons years before, at Indiana University, but found the free lesson I was offered to be totally useless - I dismissed the Technique for more than a dozen years after that first experience. In Cincinnati, I developed a strange pain in my neck, which persisted despite regular physician and chiropractic care. A friend (who is now also an AT teacher) recommended AT to me, so I went to another free lecture/demo, which I loved (I was the happy volunteer on the table!) - but I didn’t like the free lesson that went with it at all. I almost fainted three times, and had no desire to go back. My friend insisted that I just needed to find the right teacher - she was convinced that I would love the Technique if I just tried one more time. So I did, and the moment the third teacher opened the door, I knew it would work, and I was right. My neck pain was gone within the first few lessons, but I kept going back for two lessons per week (I wanted them to be daily, but my teacher wouldn’t do that) because of the whole-body-person changes I was experiencing, which were extremely dramatic because I was totally open to them. I had rarely in my life experienced such complete acceptance and understanding of who I am, along with such a total lack of pressure to ‘do’ something, to perform, or to ‘be’ someone. The incredible expansion of time and space and calm that I experienced in those lessons was utterly otherworldly and miraculous. I fell totally and completely in love with life again, and my soul became light, free, and happy in a way I had never before imagined could be possible. Unfortunately, I had to stop taking lessons from that teacher right after my 30th lesson, and he moved away from Cincinnati soon after. I was truly devastated to lose the support of those lessons, and I knew that I would have to do the teacher training in order to learn how to give this vital support to myself. I was not at all interested in teaching the Technique at that time, but the deal with my husband was that if we were going to invest that kind of time and money into my teacher training, I would have to use my skills after I graduated. I reluctantly agreed, but happily found half-way into my training that I would actually love to teach AT. In that way, I grew naturally into my family’s “teacher-genes”! My AT training was at the same time incredibly wonderful and painfully traumatic. I was overjoyed to finally find a group of people - mostly women - that I could relate to on a very deep, intimate level, on a consistent basis over three years. It felt like the best kind of family one could imagine! Unfortunately, the relationship with one of my teachers became very challenging, and I suffered from it greatly. A pivotal point in my life was when I finally found the daring courage to walk away just two weeks before finishing my training. Thankfully, I also found the courage and presence of mind to be practical and go back to receive my well-deserved teaching certificate at my graduation! Because I did not intend to return to the training course, I knew I needed to create another AT community so that I wouldn’t go through such strong withdrawal pain from missing my AT-family of peers. So I started the Alexander Technique Study Group of Cincinnati, a continuing education group for AT teachers in the area. To this day, we meet every other week, and have a wonderful time learning and socializing together. (I also started the Alexander Technique Guild of Ohio last year, to unify AmSAT and ATI teachers in Ohio and create a stronger online presence for teachers) Right after I graduated, I started teaching workshops at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati (CCM). I was really terrified to teach groups, because we had not been taught to do that, and because I had a history of intense fear of speaking in public. But I did it anyway, and it was very successful, so I started offering them frequently. My goal was to have 15 private students within two years; I had more than that within one year. I discovered again and again that I could achieve things that seemed impossible by focusing on a clear goal, applying the AT principles, and trusting. (Another blogpost on some of my personal AT successes is here.) The Alexander Technique has utterly transformed my life - in fact, I’ve jokingly called it my “second conversion”! My first AT teacher, Erik Bendix, was the first person outside of my closest relationships that I felt safe enough with to openly communicate about my spiritual and musical life, and sharing these most sacred aspects of myself was more liberating than I can begin to convey here. I felt heard, listened to, cared for, and loved in a very new, beautiful, detached, and impersonal way. I was able to consciously unify my mind and body for one of the first times in my life, and I have found new ways to join mind and body with Spirit. Erik also gently helped my soul to find its way back to the heart of music and the violin. Paradoxically, he did that by allowing me to admit and accept my desire to quit...so that I could realize that I really didn’t want to, and why. It was the first time I allowed myself to express and feel the depths of these things, which I had been terrified to face for so many years. Many many tears were shed - both in the lessons and inbetween the lessons and during the training course - so many tears of pain, grief and loss, as well as of happiness, gratitude, and rebirth. I learned to let myself dance and play and feel and move and improvise and wonder (and doubt everything - that was HUGE!)...and a wonder-full curiosity and wish to learn new things was awakened for the first time since the beginning of my spiritual awakening fourteen years before. I learned how to start stepping out of the boxes I had let myself be stuffed into, and I am still in the process of learning how to step out of bigger and bigger ones that I keep stuffing myself into. The personal transformations have been, and continue to be, tremendous. I have learned how to undergo the process of shedding endless layers of ego and personality that are no longer useful, and which obstruct the flowering of my soul into realizing its true purpose. Just as I was no longer recognizable after I opened up to a spiritual perspective on life, AT was the catalyst for another huge change as I morphed into what seemed to me and those around me like a completely different person. Not easy for some of those close to me to handle, that’s for sure! When I was a child, my father wisely taught me to “Just be yourself”. It seems that my whole life has been consciously directed towards fulfilling this purpose: to discover and be Who I Am, and to allow That to express Itself through this body-mind-person that I am, here on earth. At first, I believed that needed to happen through music, so I realized mySelf through playing the violin. Then, when I gave up that belief, I replaced it with the belief that I needed to adopt a particular spiritual perspective, which seemed to no longer have any use for a musical instrument because I could realize mySelf through this human-being-instrument that I am. Since then, explorations with AT have taught me that faith in the universal Self/Spirit is superior to, and not the same as, belief. And AT continues to teach me in a very practical way how to include this body as an essential element of this instrument that I am, and how to make the best use of the mind as it is united with the body. I am incredibly grateful for this gift which helps me to embody Spirit with all of my being. Since becoming an AT teacher, I have been given many opportunities to grow as a teacher – more than I can accept, in fact, because there just isn’t time to do everything! Less than two years after graduating, a research study on AT and surgeons fell into my lap, and I decided to say ‘yes’ despite my huge sense of not being qualified for the task. The study was highly successful, and our paper was presented at national medical conferences and published in a world-class medical journal. My group workshops at CCM helped me to get a job there a few years later as adjunct faculty, and that helped me to get a job teaching at Xavier University, as well. I am very busy as a teacher, and I thoroughly love what I do. One of my main professional frustrations right now is that I believe I could be making much more money teaching AT than I currently earn, yet I haven’t invested the time and energy into making that happen (I am now in the process, happily). The universities pay me very little, and it feels particularly unfair at CCM, where other adjunct teachers are paid twice as much as I am, although I don’t think they are more qualified at what they do than I am (they are paid that much because they are members of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra). At home, I earn more per student, but I end up giving a lot of discounts to students I know have a hard time affording my regular fees. I am also learning through AT to take money into consideration without excess attachment or aversion to it. I’ve joined this great group for AT career success, spearheaded by Jeremy Chance, to help me improve the situation. I would like to see a transformation of my AT practice to include less time teaching at the universities (I will probably continue to do some of it, though, because I enjoy working with the college students, especially musicians, and because the credentials help to give me a certain reputation and so-called “expert” status in the field), and more time teaching high-end clients in some innovative new ways, to bring me a more substantial income. I don’t like feeling so financially dependent on my husband’s income; I’d like to feel more financially independent. In keeping with my life’s strong urge to “Just be mySelf,” I’m happy to say that my teaching style is uniquely and comfortably my own, yet influenced by many AT lineages. I was trained by “Carrington-style” teachers, but I have supplemented that quite a lot through studying privately with a “MacDonald-style” teacher in Cleveland. My first teacher, Erik Bendix, was trained by Frank Ottiwell and the Murrays (lots of Dart), as well as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (for Body-Mind Centering, not AT). In addition, I consider myself very fortunate to have been exposed to an ATI teacher from the very beginning, too, who studied with the Fertmans. Her style couldn’t have been more different from Erik’s, so in order to help myself sort out my confusion, I went to the library and read all of F.M.’s books, so that I could find the common ground between them, based on the AT Principles. This was such a boon, because now I feel completely free to do whatever I want, as long as I can relate what I’m doing back to those Principles. It doesn’t matter whether I teach tablework, chairwork, floorwork, saddle-work, or other-activity-work...as long as the outer form always stands firmly on those universal AT Principles. My own work leans towards the cognitive side of the Technique. I use my hands, of course, but the philosophical questions and discussions of meaning are at the core of the lessons, and this aspect is what excites me the most. In fact, there are occasional lessons in which I don’t even touch my students. To me, these are most definitely still AT lessons, even though I know there are teachers out there who would disagree. That doesn’t really matter to me, though, because I have come to learn through my understanding of AT and of my life’s process that I am truly free to think, feel, and express mySelf as I wish. Being able to lovingly convey this sense of personal freedom to my pupils, along with a strong, confident faith in the Self to put that freedom to good use, is why I am passionate about teaching the Alexander Technique. Through teaching, I can put my artistic heart to good use, connecting with others on a deep level, just like when I’m playing the violin – which I continue to do professionally, but once again as a soloist, on my own terms, as much as possible. Where will all of this take me next? Without a doubt, to my beloved “Land of I-Don’t-Know”! Jennifer Claire Roig-Francolí 10/3/13 *** Jeremy's Comments

Thank you Jennifer - for a person beginning life reluctant to share your Self beyond a few intimates, this article is testament to the huge distance you have travelled from that day to this. That itself makes it a metaphor for those still wondering how public a person they need to be when building a career as a teacher of Alexander Technique? Pretty public, and willing to do so. Jennifer you are speaking clearly to that. Students want to know you - and it was fascinating to read what a pivotal figure Erik turned out to be on your own journey. My sense is that it was his Alexander skills that opened the door to your willing intimacy, yet he was also the kind of person who sought to make his life about this work. The work is the catalyst here, and it makes the reader curiouser and curiouser as the story unfolds. I realise as I read these stories, that I wonder who you intended it for? It would aid me in future to have a memo about this! My guess is that you are clearly writing to other Alexander Technique teachers? It doesn't feel there is any clear purpose, other than being intentionally true to your own story. When shaping your story towards your niche (as that opens up in your thinking) re-engineer the story to build in the teaching points that you want us to know. "Be Your Self" is a clear message shining through this story. Also "embrace adventure" and "follow your heart" are messages that I could be highlighted. Who your reader is shapes these decisions. As you reshape it, let it become a metaphoric manual for the person in your niche. Of course until that is clear, it is not clear. I do wonder why your niche is not clear. If anyone was ripe for the authority and credibility to tackle classical musicians as niche, it is you. I hear that there are not enough of them to make a business in Cincinnati, but I also read you are a willing traveller. Basil is known not just in Tokyo, but throughout Japan. Indeed, Japanese musicians in England and America are also now hearing about him. Perhaps it's time to climb out of the Cincinnati box and find a bigger one to live in? Call it planet earth. It's a business maxim that if you have a hundred students willing to pay an average of $80 a week per lesson, there is going to be 1 person in that 100 who would be willing to pay $800 for something if you had it for sale. Go to Starbucks website and you'll see they sell espresso machines from $149 to $2,999. I'd be thinking upscale, high end services. You are a high-end lady - what is a high-end service you can offer? I don't have an answer to that question because it is a new one for me too. However I am convinced that if we can figure out a high-end, expensive service to offer, there are people willing to pay for it. It must have value for them, and that's the challenge in creating it. Once again thank you for a rich and textured story, with abundant teaching points enrolled within. Now all you need is a clear niche to re-pitch it too!