The Fatal Error of Touching in Teaching

When I first started to use touch in teaching, I used to get desperate. I can't deliver, I cried, I don't know how to make a change!

My cousin Peter had come to London on a visit.

He heard I was training: "What is Jerry? The McKenzie Method?"

"Alexander Technique" I deadpanned (sheesh!)

I was still a trainee, and he wasn't in town long. So I said ok, I'd give him some lessons in my apartment in Finchley. Years later, he fessed up.

"You know those lessons in London you gave? At Yonge Park Road…?"

I nodded.

"What were you doing behind me all the time!? It was spooky."

I had to laugh.

I couldn't be offended because he was totally right. In fact, Marj used the same description when she first saw me teach in Nebraska in 1987. "Go away - she said - that's spooky!" I was standing there, thinking about my monkey (bending) and trying to generate enough "direction" to be able to make a change.

Standing behind my mystified cousin - who was sitting in the chair - I waited and worked and stood and thought and bent and waited and directed and waited and bent and waited and lifted my hand and waited and FINALLY - I touched him.

My fatal error was that I thought I had the job to change him.

And I wasn't the only one. Back in those days - in London - there was a weird kind of a way we talked about teachers.

"Oh, her hands are good. I get a lot of direction from them."

"Direction" was an energetic commodity like smelly cheese - the older the teacher, the better consumption experience you might have. But we didn't always like the cheese…

"Oh, I don't like her hands, I end up feeling like she looks."

Conversations like that, as though the teacher was responsible for making me change. For years I bought into this construct. Even FM seems to promote it:

"You can't tell a person what to do because the thing you have to do is a sensation."

I took that to mean it was my job to give that sensation. I now see he was not saying that, he was talking about a result. And maybe he did see it that way; perhaps he did think he was changing THEM?

If so, he got that wrong.

No-one else changes you - that's your job. And it's my job to change me. If a teacher influences me, it's because I let them. I get the credit, not them. And in the same way, I will NOT let my students give me credit for ANY they experience they have.

"That's YOU," I tell them. "Welcome to YOU. You did that, not my hands, not me - YOU."

I can't stress how important that is. And it's one of the essential frames around working effectively with the emotional and psychic issues your student may bring to class. God help you if you think you have the job to change them.

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