My Trouble with the 1600-Hour Training Standard - Part I

The growing horror I felt with my Kenkyusain system - its potentially degrading effect on the quality of my training - led me down a path of deep meditation about my training methods - both how I had been trained and how I was now attempting to train others.

When I looked around my teaching room in those days, I sometimes couldn’t help but feel a little ashamed of how my trainees behaved. Gone was the vertical thrust of the righteous that I so often parodied during my STAT-based training in Highgate, London.

Before I met my precious teacher Marjorie Barstow, I’d been influenced by Don Burton and his radical 1980s ATA school in Old Street EC1 London. With his co-Directors Isabell McGilvery and Sue Thame, Don ushered in a new ethic in Alexander education:

At ATA, everyone could slump! 

It was a pendulum swing in the opposite direction from the ‘use police’ approach of the old school and the constant refrain to ‘be up’ all the time. A new generation was tired of that approach. As Don often said: “Bring your whole self to this school, not just the part you want everyone to see.” It was incredibly refreshing - I could write a whole new series of emails about the dramas, revelations and fun I had in those days.

Fast forward to Marj in 1986:

“Now why don’t you all have a little slump? Then see what you can do about it…”

Marj’s approach was less reactionary, more accepting and intelligent - in the space of a week, I dropped my chairwork and tablework style of teaching to replace it with Marj’s simple question:

“What would you like to explore today?”

My regular students were bewildered: where had their old teacher gone?

That first year of teaching after Marj’s workshop in the Snowy Mountains was like being a first-year teacher all over again, even though I had more than a decade of experience behind me. I was clumsy, hesitant and bewildered myself - but Marj’s way was my way, and I was sure of one thing: there was no going back.

Fast forward to Japan in 2004:

Almost two decades later, I was continuing with Marj’s approach, albeit with a little more skill, I hope. I continued to avidly read FM’s books as I (reluctantly) decided it is what a Training Director must do. I was still feeling hopeless about how to develop my school. I finally reached FM’s last book - Universal Constant of Living - and there was my answer!

12 letters. One Word, repeated 22 times.

It made sense of everything. 

It solved my Kenkysuian problem for good. 

And more importantly, it would finally usher in a new epoch of training protocols that continue in BodyChance to this day…

This is the fourteenth in a series of daily emails exploring my challenges in communicating Alexander’s Discovery.