Susannah (Guest Blog)

Susannah Keebler is an Alexander Technique teacher living in Mallacoota, Australia - a small town in Victoria whose population fluctuates between 972 and 8,000, depending on the time of year. Where she lives is odd enough, but the life and work she is creating makes that seem mundane. Her story has the potential to challenge your own idea of what you can do with the work. Are you interested in people who climb out of the box in order to change the world? Then you must be interested in Susannah's story… *** My Alexander Technique Business Story My professional bio reads really differently from the story of my business. I am an artist, a dancer, and I am actually really good at sales. That was my primary "day-job" for many years. However, during my years as a free-lance dancer, I struggled to put myself forward and essentially myself. In my well-being business, now, marketing is my weak suit. So last year I decided to do something about that. I think I have often had trouble connecting with the world in this broader way. In my dance career I was horrible at auditions (I also have had performance anxiety) and I often felt I didn't get to work with some of the choreographers I wanted to work with because I couldn't show my best me quick enough. I ended up working with my friends and peers and people I studied with. In fact my first AT teacher was a choreographer I worked with, Daria Fain. I really fell into Alexander technique. I didn't have any acute injury. Daria offered me lessons as a trade for rehearsals when she couldn't pay me. I don't think I even intended to improve my dancing when I continued lessons. I was just curious and I got totally hooked on the experience as well being fascinated by the fact that I could never really stop bringing my shoulders up around my ears! When I started my training I didn't know the "classical" directions and I remember crying when I had to say them out loud! My teacher was so kind. As I said, AT wasn't a terribly dramatic revolution in my life, but the more I learn about how my body works the more I am motivated to look after myself. I include thinking and belief systems with that too. The more I get to know myself, my thinking, and understand where my beliefs and habits come from, the more freedom I have to change. This is one of the primary concepts behind my teaching. My students are mostly women over 50. They come to me to get healthy. I focus my programming around three specific issues: knee health, pelvic floor health, and spine health. My teaching mission is to help them soften adaptive patterns that block biological health or more specifically cellular regeneration. I seek to do this by educating my students about how their bodies function and by broadening the context through which they experience themselves. I have created a signature, 3-pronged approach: Restore, Nourish, and Optimize. In the last 6 months I have developed a 6-month total-transformation program, three 90-day programs, and three 30-day programs (two of those are "back-end" offerings). These programs help my students change detrimental habits and patterns into healthy ones. Because the main priority is health rather than performance, I am fairly anti-chair and anti positive heeled shoes. They are cultural habits that are in the same category as smoking when it comes to their effect on health. I work to encourage my students (very slowly and gently) to spend less time in chairs and positive heeled shoes. I do teach how to sit in a chair better, but with the caveat that sitting in a chair is not advantageous to health. It's like a healthy cigarette. The chair can be a form of authoritarianism, so I practice broadening our repertory of ways sitting. In terms of pedagogy, which Jeremy discusses in his "Teaching Technology" article, I use thinking and experience…talking and touch. I view touch in a similar light to breathing. Touch is part of our developmental patterning, and like our breathing pattern/primary control, it is a pattern of total body connectivity. So it's less of a tool and more of an environmental fact to tune in to...a biological process. In my group classes I use a lot of self-touch. If I had mirrors, I would use them a lot. I think rather than training feeling, I help people better use their senses to look objectively at themselves. I also use the floor as a tactile input. I also use a wall. I try to give my students different objective experiences of their body that they can practice on their own. I also use simple movement explorations for this same purpose. In one-on-one lessons, I do the same thing, but I might have the student on a table. I use touch. It is not therapy. I am not a therapist or healer. I am an educator and tactile cuing and feedback is part of that. My main "activity plans" are Restorative Exercise™, a biomechanical model of preventive medicine created by biomechanical scientist Katy Bowman based on physics, physiology, anatomy, and engineering. (It's like yoga without the cultural bias and in a format that's accessible to a less mobile population...or you could say, that yoga is a more advanced form of RE). I also have students bring in everyday activities that they do. I've gone from only feeling comfortable teaching one-on-one to loving my group sessions. My group classes have become a creative outlet for me because I think there are as many ways of learning as there are brains in the world and more. One key to helping people become healthy is to help them find out what their motivation is at its core. When we understand our motivation we run less of a danger of "saying 'yes' and 'no' at the same time," as Jeremy put it in "Teaching Technology." My biomechanics teacher Katy calls this, “using the brain as resistance.” Looking into the way I used to market and talk about my work, I think I was doing this: creating tension between wanting to share my work and not wanting to because of deep seeded fear of failure which has previously manifested as perfectionism, shaky hands, and tears of overwhelm. So far my new efforts haven’t manifested as great financial success, but learning how to better market my work has really helped me become a more holistic entrepreneur and have a sense of art in my business practice. The study of movement has been part of my life since I was eight years old. My first love was classical ballet. I was lucky to have solid early training as well as good-humoured, dedicated parents, who delivered me to daily lessons and far-away intensives. At 13, I auditioned and was accepted to a unique “magnet” school, excelling in both arts and academics. This afforded me many wonderful opportunities at a young age to perform and to study dance with master teachers and choreographers. This rich, early experience of integrated arts education in a public school continues to motivate me to broaden my teaching practice. I am a believer in the joy and value of life-long learning and that body movement is a primary pathway to that learning. After high school, I sought a non-traditional course of study and found that at Bennington College, from which I received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in dance. With deep roots entangled in modern dance culture, it gave me a sense of being a part of that history. Often called a vanguard of progressive education, it was my first exposure to designing a curriculum, my own. At Bennington, I learned to be an independent thinker, responsible for my own education. Bennington extended my love affair with dance to a ménage ad infinitum, which included, biology, poetry, and technology in art. I still love designing curriculum for well-being that extends beyond just making a body healthy, but that also inspires independent thinking and enthusiasm for learning about our world and the world of our bodies. After my tertiary studies, I had a career as a dancer working in NYC [Ed - New York] with many wonderful artists. In 2004, I undertook training to teach Alexander Technique. Alexander was my first experience as an educator, which suits my temperament. I feel lucky to have been drawn to it, because I identify more as an educator than as a therapist or healer. I enjoy teaching people to be responsible for their own education and health and to “heal thyself.” When life (well, actually my husband, Padma) led me to Mallacoota in regional Victoria, I took some time to consider in what manner I might contribute to this community and in what way I might continue my life’s on-going passions. One of my friend’s children asked me to teach her dance; I was literally called (by an irresistible six-year-old) to teach dance. I took this request seriously, and began teaching. This, in turn, stimulated further education. At that time I completed two very different intensives: one with the amazingly inspiring Anna Halprin, the other was an intensive training for dance educators taught by Anne Greene-Gilbert, a leader in brain-compatible dance education. In addition to teaching creative dance to various ages, I have also taught dance at Mallacoota P-12 College, private and group Alexander technique classes, as well as restorative exercise and movement education at the Mallacoota Community Mudbrick Pavillion, the Yoga Room, and the Mallacooota Districtrict Health and Support Service Planned Activity Group and Neighborhood House. My dance education work and my well-being work are related in the sense that I aim to promote health as integral to expression. Working in the realm of health and well-being brought me to a great question that guides my teaching practice and that, I believe, I will spend the rest of my life finding many answers to: What is health? What is wellness? What is fitness? What is optimal function for a human? What is comfort? Can dance technique and other cultural practices, like sport, promote biological health? These questions brought me to study biomechanics a field of physics that applies the laws of physics to a biological system, like the body. Last year I undertook a course of study with Katy Bowman, a master’s level bio-mechanic scientist, author, and founder of the Restorative Exercise Institute which teaches a Biomechanical Model of Preventative Medicine, based on physics, physiology, anatomy, and engineering. This year, I certified as a Restorative Exercise Specialist – Certified Personal Trainer (RES-CPT). Katy has sparked in me a serious anatomy-nerd itch that will not soon subside. I am in constant pursuit of broadening my own education and experience in order to enrich my life and the lives of my students. As both and educator and as an artist, I am interested and inspired by transformation, the revelation of imagination and the unexpectedness of both the every-day and the extraordinary. *** Jeremy's Comments I thought I was radical, but next to you I am quite conservative!

I am deeply impressed by your cross pollination of ideas and the originality of your teaching solutions. You are certainly the Keebler Technique, which from my side is the future of the work for many teachers: MAKE IT YOUR OWN. You teach us all to be fearless in expanding our own personal vision to incorporated, rather than by hijacked by, Alexander's Discovery. To go on and develop an expression of the work that is uniquely our own. In my book, "Principles of the Alexander Technique" I devoted a chapter to describing the teaching legacies of the Master teachers, those 1st generation teachers who took their understanding of Alexander's teaching and communicated it to another generation. The styles were so different, but that was routed in personality, not principle. Walter Carrington, one of those teachers, once commented to me in Melbourne in 1987 that styles of teaching often reflect the cultural background of those teaching it. I had asked him why he never let a person rise from the chair on their own? I had recently returned from Lincoln, Nebraska, where I had repeated my first experience of Marjorie Barstow's teaching style… Walter knew it. "In Europe," Walter commented, "People look for experts. They want their problem solved quickly so they can get back to what they do. But in in mid-west America for example, people believe you have to figure it out for your self. They will show you how to do it, then expect you to sort it out." I think Susannah's story reinforces and inspires this approach to the work. Who cares what it is called? Do you promote health? Do you help people? If I had to define what is and isn't the work, it would be quite simple: is the idea that head movements govern vertebral co-ordination part of what you teach or not? If it's there, it's the work. Now that may be too simple for some folks, but my primary interest is not intellectual rigour, but the ability to train teachers and support people who communicate this work with an intention to help others do what they want to do - in the realm of health, fitness, performance and happiness. I love what you're doing Susannah, and I hope you find the financial success that you deserve. As a tribute to you, here's one of my favourite quotes from another maverick who helped change the world:

Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do. Steve Jobs US computer engineer & industrialist (1955 - 2011)