Looking both ways: A new teacher’s perspective on uncertainty
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The ASO Newsletter - 10th Edition
Thank you for being here and for your interest in research on the Alexander Technique and its teaching.
For the 10th edition of the ASO blog we are posting an article by Polly Waterfield MSTAT, written in 2006 and originally published in the journal Conscious Control.
Polly wrote it in the space between completing her Alexander Technique teacher training and being on the cusp of starting out in her teaching practice, hence the title, “Looking Both Ways, a new teacher’s perspective on uncertainty”. The article is a thoughtful, deeply personal, yet well researched reflection in which she explores her trepidation about moving into the world of a graduated teacher, carefully considering her training, her reaction to elements of it and how she might apply this in her work on herself and in teaching others.
Looking both ways: A new teacher’s perspective on uncertainty
Polly Waterfield, MSTAT
As a newly qualified teacher I am full of the experience of being taught and of working on myself, but as yet have little teaching experience. Janus-faced, I am simultaneously looking back on how I was trained, and looking forward to the teacher I want to be. My purpose in writing is to reflect on the Technique from this perspective, using the writing process to inhabit fully the delicate transition from student to teacher.
Our work as teachers is based on our own experience of being taught. It is necessary to be as candid as possible with myself about my experiences in learning the Technique, if I am not either unthinkingly to parrot the teaching I received, or to teach a completely different way out of reactiveness. I am left, after qualifying, with many uncertainties. If I can hold these uncomfortable questions open, neither rushing with an artificial “forward and up” into a too-easy resolution, nor collapsing “back and down” into blame of myself or others for limitations I have encountered, then perhaps the questions can provide useful food for my own teaching.
During my training I often felt confused and discouraged by the discrepancy between what I read about the Technique (the miracle stories of recovery, or simply the benefits to be expected) and my own process in struggling to apply it. There seems to be rather more written and spoken about success, or about aspiration towards success, than about lived experience in learning, which must also include difficulty and frustration. I don’t question the principles of our work, but I have sometimes had to wonder about some ways in which they are taught. My discussion is in the context of having received a great deal from the Technique and from training, and of being whole-heartedly committed to this work.
Misuse within the Technique
We think of our misuse as something outside the work which the Technique will help, but the Technique is a tool, and like any tool can be well used or misused. During my training I saw how, if I didn’t take care, I could subtly misuse the Technique itself to reinforce my deep patterns of response. To think that it automatically enables us to move beyond our habits, rather than also considering the ways in which it can contribute to them, is to attribute an unrealistic omnipotence to it, or to ourselves. Along with the great benefits of training comes the possibility of falling into “Alexander habits” and therefore being no freer than before.
Primary control
My favourite description of the primary control is Barbara Conable’s: “the fountain of psychomotor support within”.1 My personal experience of it is a state of openness to myself and to my world. This is a state which enables free and flowing movement, and which is the opposite of a fearful attitude in which I am either over-keen to master this skill or have given up on having any goal at all. The difficult paradox of our work is that it entails a recognisable physical effect which can only be achieved by an act of not trying. This can make us feel vulnerable as we negotiate in ourselves the tricky terrain of working hard at not trying, knowing that a trained eye can perceive our success (or lack of it.) We all know the complexities of this balancing act. My questions here are about how the dynamic of the teaching relationship can affect this internal dynamic.
In Alexander teaching there is a one-to-one teacher–pupil relationship, and the dynamics of this relationship are magnified through touch. During the training I came to recognise how the state of openness which I associate with the primary control is affected in general by the interaction with other people, and in particular by the dynamics of the moment-by-moment relationship with the teacher. In other words, it includes aspects of myself not directly addressed in the Technique: those to do with emotion and relationship. In the process of negotiating unspoken undercurrents in these areas, it could easily happen that I started trying too hard, so that an easy relationship with my primary control became difficult, if not impossible. I wondered, therefore, why of all the stimuli considered on the training, the one least acknowledged was the stimulus of the complex relationship between student and teacher. The student’s responses to this stimulus will later feed into her own teaching as she negotiates the teacher–pupil relationship in her work.
Obviously there will be as many different ways of receiving the work of the Technique as there are pupils, and some people will be more directly affected by the teacher–pupil relationship than others. In my own case, I wondered whether the dawning realisation of its importance to me could explain a problem I had had over many years of lessons prior to starting the training. I always found that the touch of hands brought immediate change, but that I could find little consistency in retaining or recovering this sense of ease. For a period I concluded that the Technique didn’t work, or at least not for me. Finally returning to it, I expected the training to give me reasonable confidence in finding the supported flow which I associate with the primary control. However, this confidence didn’t emerge, despite my work being satisfactory to the teachers.
Teaching the violin for many years, I’ve observed that a sense of confidence and of ownership of the learning process is a positive contributor to a pupil’s ability to “go up”. I ask myself, now, how can an Alexander teacher–pupil relationship help to foster this kind of confidence? Ideally, this should be a confidence which could enable a pupil to enjoy and integrate the experience of an enhanced primary control in a lesson, and to trust that she will be able to take steps in this direction by herself. Alexander said: “If you have something, give it up. Getting it, not having it, is what you want.”2 However, I found on the training course that an emphasis in teaching on letting go of a good experience, combined with my limited ability in the “getting” of it again by myself, exacerbated my particular habits in this area: discouragement at losing the good effects and consequent self-defeating effort. Already one of my pupils is saying: “I wish I could take you home,” and I am wondering how to impart enough self-confidence so that she can explore further by herself in a meaningful way.
Perhaps coming alongside a pupil’s learning process enough to build a sense of internal feedback about the primary control could be part of the answer. In trying to solve his problem, Alexander had immediate feedback from the health of his voice. A musician has immediate feedback from the sound. But in seeking to apply the Technique to our ordinary lives, what kind of feedback mechanism do we have available? It is now widely accepted in progressive thinking about education that people have different learning preferences: verbal, sensory, visual, to name just a few. A teacher’s hands give an experience which the pupil needs to understand in her own way in order to integrate it. Perhaps this integration process could be smoother with support for a pupil’s particular mode of learning. Barbara Conable describes a hypothetical lesson in which she actively encourages and helps the pupil to describe accurately her own kinaesthetic experience.3 I have discovered that I need to articulate my own experiences in relationship with another person in order to digest and learn from them, even when these experiences are difficult to express verbally. If my consciousness is not fully engaged, there is a sense of being worked on rather than worked with, and I find limitations to my learning. Short-term gain, with the teacher’s hands on me, can become long-term deprivation. This raises the whole issue of what are the most appropriate means whereby for a pupil.
Endgaining and the means-whereby
If the pupil is only given an “Alexander experience” through the teacher’s hands, and she can’t, as is normal, achieve anything like it by herself, then there is a danger of end-gaining. As the experience can be intensely pleasurable, it is likely, human nature being what it is, that she will endgain in her attempt to repeat it. It is assumed that the pupil will find her own neural pathway back to it eventually if the experience is repeated often enough. If there are problems in this area the teacher may even be reluctant to discuss them, because of her intention to let the pupil take responsibility for herself.
I found my observations supported by an article by Jeremy Chance. He charts his development as a teacher, having trained in England, as he discovered in Marjorie Barstow’s teaching a different approach with an emphasis on dialogue and the pupil’s own understanding: “I realised that, by overemphasising the experience of a lesson, as opposed to teaching my pupils a conscious understanding of some small changes that they could make for themselves, I had helped to set my pupils off in the direction that Feldenkrais observed about Alexander teachers – we look like we’ve got a broomstick stuck up our backs.”4
We are working with a full spectrum of change from unconscious body-learning to conscious understanding. The mode of teaching where we are told to send messages even if we don’t perceive a result, and to trust the process, is at the heart of our work and has a deep wisdom. It is entirely appropriate when working with parts of ourselves that are not yet ready to surface: that is, such parts which do not appear to respond to the messages, parts which as yet do not provide feedback. Trusting that such messages still have an effect is an intrinsic part of the learning. However, where responses do occur, then engaging with the pupil’s perception of these could help. This could be done through a dialogue in which the pupil’s experience of what has been significant in a lesson is validated and given meaningful direction for the next period of time, thus creating small, but firm, intermediate steps. Without such a process of dialogue I question how this work can be said to be educational, or truly concerned with the means-whereby.
Finding a healthy balance of ends and means is a difficult juggling act. One way of avoiding the difficulty is to view, simplistically, “ends” as bad and “means” as good. However, Alexander himself had a definite goal, to cure his voice. Perhaps it was the very intensity of his desire to become a great actor which enabled him to do the work of genius that he did. His work led to our knowledge that there is indeed something tangible that we are after in learning his Technique, a definite “end”. Barbara Conable writes: “Yes, Alexander teachers, there is a right way to go up – the easy way that liberates you.”5 Carrington writes that “the anti-gravity response is an absolutely genuine thing” which we have to wish for, and that we, “have to see that something happens.”6 The necessity of balancing ends and means is clear in playing music: aliveness comes from a balance between the aim (the sound of the music) and an awareness of the means-whereby. If the musical intention isn’t clear, then there will be poor use, however much attention is given to the means-whereby. Conversely, if the musical motivation is so strong that it precludes awareness of the means, then it results in endgaining. On my training course, I found that the emphasis on the means-whereby, coupled with the open-ended nature of this work, led to my often doubting the purposefulness of the work, as well as undermining my own aims in training. In this way I may have minimised any frustration I had of not achieving them, but I now consider this to be a misuse of the means-whereby principle. I would like to be able to teach in a way that honours pupils’ aims as well as helping them to broaden the context within which they see them, thereby balancing ends and means.
Force of habit
Along with aims, habits get a bad press in the Technique. And yet our habits define us: they are our foibles (endearing or irritating), our idiosyncrasies, our personal signatures. The problem is, of course, habits that don’t help us and that we aren’t aware of. In lessons we have a highly sensitive tool, another person’s trained nervous system, for recognising the habits we are so familiar with that we don’t notice them any more. Lessons help a pupil to become aware of a habit, but not necessarily to resolve it: in this process one is on one’s own. In my work on myself, I am interested in what happens once I know about a particular habit, because that is when the difficulties start.
Alexander writes: “it is essential to understand the difference between the habit that is recognised and understood, and the habit that is not . . . the first can be altered at will and the second cannot.”7 Perhaps there is also territory in between. My question is, how can I work usefully with a habit, once I know and recognise it but am not yet able to let go of it? A habit that is opposed (rather than inhibited) only gets stronger. The more deep-seated the habit is, the more care we have to take, because such habits work at very subtle levels. As I am liable to instruct and put myself straight in general, then I am also likely to use the Technique in this habitual way of correcting habits. Perhaps I need to accept the familiar and unpleasant pressure which I think of as my “primary jam”, rather than opposing it as an undesirable habit. Perhaps I need to allow the habit of my intensive thinking and writing – rather than dismissing it or letting it be dismissed as antagonistic to the Technique – in order to find my way to greater equanimity.
Take two personality extremes: one that is self-indulgent, another over-rigorous. The self-indulgent part of a person would need to bring some rigour into working with a habit, whereas the over-rigorous, with the tendency to impose correction, would need to move into the habit, to explore the forbidden territory more fully. Gradually understanding just how rigorously I treat myself, I’ve realised why I respond badly to teaching which attempts too directly to take me out of habit. Even gentle encouragement out of a habit can join forces, on a bad day, with my own unconscious direction to create a double dictator, and instantly my defence mechanisms are up and running.
A great deal is stated about how the Technique enables one to move beyond habitual patterns. In order truly to move beyond my habits, I’ve found that I have to include in my means-whereby a more subtle strategy. Not only do I need to avoid the temptation to try and change my habits directly, but I also need to go more deeply into them. If patterns repeat persistently, then I need to trust there is something to learn from them, and stay with them long enough to do so. This could be one use of inhibition. Sometimes it is only through the body that a hidden part of the self can find expression. I am curious as to how my experiences in this area will influence my teaching.
Direction
There is a great deal of aspiration in this work. In the first chapter of The Use of the Self Alexander quotes Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!”8 Without aspiration there would be no stimulus towards improvement, but without the counter-weight of an acceptance of things the way they are, there is an imbalance. Idealists can become fanatics, and this can also be a dynamic within the self.
I know at first hand what a difficult force aspiration can be, and how subtly it can take me off balance by making me “seek” at the expense of being present in the moment. Seeking then takes me away from actual lived experience. There are aspects of the Technique which can contribute to this imbalance. There is an emphasis on taking responsibility and being able to change oneself. I find that this, coupled with the instantaneous change brought about by a teacher’s hands, can subtly turn into self-blame when I am unable to maintain or recover the change. This of course is the most effective block to long-term progress. Direction can easily be part of a misguided effort to force change, if it is imposed on top of this underlying dynamic.
The depth and power of the Technique are immense, and so is the experience it can give people. My question is, how can I teach in a way to help a pupil recognise this experience not as an elusive “it” to chase after, but as a resource within herself?
In direction we are talking to ourselves. But as soon as we do this there is a dilemma: we are working towards unity of the person, but in talking to ourselves there is an implicit separation, between the person talking and the self we are talking to. How can we ensure this is a helpful witnessing of ourselves and not an unhealthy splitting? If I have a dictator inside me, it is easy for this part of me to take over the voice giving the directions. However much I understand that the directions are inhibitory (“neck free” really means “don’t stiffen your neck” and so on), however much I couch them in terms of “allow” and “let”, on a bad day when my dictator is out and about, they can sound like intrusive instructions to my more tender self. The result is that I become split between oppressor and oppressed sides of myself, the directions bringing about the opposite effect from the one intended. Direction becomes just another kind of interference, and the more I ask for my neck to be free, the stiffer I become. This I have found my biggest stumbling block in learning the Technique, and it leaves me with uneasy questions about how to teach direction as I begin teaching.
One of the things we do in direction is work with the imagination, with a wishing for the possible. We are told to trust our thinking even if we don’t feel anything, and I have found sense and inspiration in that. The difficulty is that if in doing this I ignore how I actually am in my present state, then my wish for a more expansive state can in fact separate me from present reality. Directions superimposed on a lack of congruence with myself will only breed further disassociation. I have found it important, in working with direction, to take care not to override subtle aspects of the underlying nervous system.
Along with every newly qualified teacher, I am facing the question of how to use words, and to what extent to use the traditional words of directing: “neck free, head forward and up, back to lengthen and widen”. They describe a state to aspire to, or a state of becoming, rather than conveying an acceptance of being in the moment. Moreover, I would describe my own experience of “forward and up” as more like “down and in”, so I have found the normal instructions misleading. And yet without words, and particularly words which link me with the historical continuity of the Alexander work, I can fall into an uncomfortable kind of vagueness. The words can provide a structure, a clarity, as well as a conceptual grasp of the primary control. But at this early stage in my teaching life, they can easily become a substitute for what I am afraid of not picking up through my hands, or for the “up” experience that I don’t yet feel confident in imparting.
I don’t want to assume, when teaching a pupil to direct, that her mind is a blank screen. It would certainly make the teacher’s job easier if that were so! Sometimes, as a pupil, I have wondered if that is indeed the assumption on the teacher’s part, feeding in thoughts without much room for interaction. In this situation I have sometimes found myself so over-stimulated by the collision of what was already in my mind with the newly suggested thoughts, along with the added stimulus of the teacher’s presence, that in retrospect I can see I’ve had no other choice than to “pull down” in self-preservation. Of course teachers will vary in how interested they are in what is going on in a pupil’s mind, and at my stage of teaching it is work in progress to find out how much interaction is useful and how much can cause interference.
Inhibition
There are also pitfalls in inhibition – a lack of engagement masquerading as non-doing, for instance. However, inhibition, both conceptually and in practice, is the one aspect of the Technique where my argumentative self simply cannot find anything to latch onto, and for this I am truly grateful. If direction is talking, then inhibition is listening to ourselves. I find that inhibition is what I am finally brought to, when I come up against the limits of my will. Patricia Boulay, a French teacher, said: “Conscious will is evidently needed, as are desire and goal-setting, yet it is important to know the limits of volition. The well-directed will, imbued with patience and listening, derives its strength from a constant interchange between thought and feeling.”9
Faulty sensory appreciation
For two years on my training I was convinced that my feet were symmetrical in position, only to find on looking that my right one had reverted to its habitual position. More far reachingly, I suspect it is my faulty sense of how much effort is required to run my life that makes it difficult for me to recall the Alexander experience and make it my own. In many situations we find we can’t trust what we feel. However, there are ways in which the principle of faulty sensory appreciation can become undermining and self-defeating.
Knowing that I can’t always trust what I feel, I can begin to distrust my own experience in a way that undermines self-confidence. Of course it is necessary to recognise that our feelings may be unreliable, but we’re trying to re-educate them to become more trustworthy. I don’t believe we can avoid our feelings without absenting ourselves, and given that, we have to work with them. Barbara Conable writes: “Some Alexander teachers avoid the question, ‘How does that feel?’ I do not avoid it because I believe that a student’s experience is her very best feedback.”10 Frank Pierce Jones says: “Ultimately a pupil must be able to make reliable kinaesthetic observations of himself in activity.”11 If teaching does not train perception by actively using the feedback of the student’s experience, then how is one meant to learn “to make reliable kinaesthetic observations”? There is an attitude that faulty sensory appreciation will disappear one day, but this certainly doesn’t happen automatically on graduation. As a new teacher, I am only a little nearer to a trustworthy sensory appreciation than I was when I started the training, and yet I have to be self-confident enough to teach.
As I understand it, this work is about the re-education of sensory experience through a conscious marriage of thinking and feeling. However, teachers often say “don’t feel”, or “don’t feel it”, which creates confusion in me at gut-level – and we are working not just on a rational level, but with deeper levels of experience embedded in the body. As a musician, it is a bizarre experience to be told “not to feel”. What I understand teachers to mean is: “don’t try hard to feel”; “you aren’t trusting your thinking but are trying to check it out”; or “you are getting over-introverted” – or variations on the above. I know that in this sense “feel” is, on the whole, being used to mean sensation rather than emotion, but even if I take this on board, there is a problem. Recovering sensory appreciation should, surely, include sensuousness and pleasure in the body: Alexander’s “grace and poetry of motion”.12 Intellectually I know that it isn’t the intention to cut out these aspects of living, but words have power and speak to other layers than only the intellectual. Alexander himself had no trouble experiencing and expressing his feelings, given stories such as the one of him throwing an ink-pot at someone who had insulted him!13 For those of us finding our way towards embodiment from a more cerebral background, seeing feelings in a pejorative light gives the work an ascetic slant. I find it contributes to my tendency to revert to a “mind over matter” model of change.
I fall into the second category of people described by Barbara Conable: “some say that tensing is an expression of their emotion, others that it is a resistance to it.”14 My tensing, or misuse, therefore being designed to block out my feelings, when I hear “don’t feel” it appears to confirm me in my misuse. In fact my response to these words is to feel a great many things, along with confusion at being told not to feel them. I also imagine a new pupil being told “not to feel” and how incomprehensible that would be on a simple human level. On another level, to be told “not to feel” when in the grip of a powerful mind–body state over which one has no control, as has happened to me, is alienating and distressing. It in fact cements further in place the pattern from the past, which is being reactivated in the present moment and is already causing distress.
How can training help a student towards self-confidence, at the same time acknowledging how unreliable our feelings can be? To me the answer lies in a teacher/student dialogue, which could explore the student’s perceptions in the light of the teacher’s greater experience. Continuing after the training, I am lucky enough to work every week with a friend and colleague, whom I can trust both to support me and to challenge my thinking if I go too far out in my exploration. Without that dialogue I know I could, even after these first few months, be seriously adrift.
Use and function
Wilfred Barlow says that the “Alexander principle” itself is that “use affects functioning”.15 I notice in my response to his book, for all its brilliance, that it leads me towards a mechanistic view of the Technique where I don’t want to be. Yes, it’s true that how we use ourselves affects how we function, but it is very easy, looking at his convincing case studies, to forget that the causes of why we misuse ourselves are rather more mysterious, complex, and deep-rooted than we often know about. In seeing the evident effects of misuse upon function, it is all too easy to become even more determined to redouble my efforts to improve myself. I have needed to find a wider, deeper and kinder way of looking at my misuse than as simple, obstinate habit, if I am to continue to go “forward and up” in this work.
I think there is an organic pace to growth and change which cannot be forced. I also think that the state of openness and balance which a free neck represents is one which touches the very roots of our being and our relationship with our world. It is a profoundly vulnerable state, if we are truly working in a psychophysical way. If we aren’t, I suspect that freeing the neck prematurely can lead to disconnection from ourselves rather than to greater connection. Possibly this explains the panic I have sometimes experienced when a teacher tries to free my neck. Whether this is true or not, I do know that having the will to change our use so that we function better has to be balanced by the knowledge that we can’t control everything about ourselves, however much we would like to.
Psychophysical unity
I feel about this aspect of our work as Gandhi did when asked about Western civilisation: “That would be a good idea.” In the Technique, the part of our wholeness that is not consciously addressed is the emotional. Teachers of course differ in how far into emotional territory they want to take the work, but it seems to me that without at least a conscious acknowledgment of the emotional implications of this work, psychophysical integration remains “a good idea”.
If psychophysical unity is not to be just an idea, what could it mean in practice? To me it means being willing to be present with all of my self, including parts of myself that aren’t comfortable. The Technique provides a structure – certain procedures, principles, and the context of a lesson – within which one can experience oneself, gradually, more fully. However as with any structure, there is a danger that one accommodates to what seems to be expected within this structure. On the training course I observed myself unable to prevent my habit of squeezing myself into structures to my own cost: in my use, I literally squeezed myself, and could easily find myself feeling less, rather than more free to be myself. As I begin to teach, I ask myself how, on the most fundamental level, I can enable a pupil to feel free to be herself while learning the Technique.
To be oneself with any kind of psychophysical authenticity means finding a balance between containment and self-expression. In our work, the emphasis is on containment rather than expression. With my own inclination towards a rigorous self-control, I can easily find this tendency being reinforced by the containment that is a feature of the Technique. If this happens without my awareness, then my attitude to myself, while inhibiting and directing, will be repressive rather than enabling. Also, any teaching will feel repressive. When this dynamic is activated in me, I fall back into thinking the Technique doesn’t work for me and start blaming it, myself, or a teacher. If I am aware, on the other hand, of this danger, then I am more likely to stay present with myself, both in a learning and a teaching situation.
Conclusion
Living with uncertainty is uncomfortable, but probably the best gift I received from the training was being able to conceive of myself as a qualified, maybe even a competent teacher, without needing to know all the answers. I used to think Alexander teachers had all the answers, now I am at least partway to believing it is more important to be in dialogue with the questions. Of course any ability to live with the questions reflects on the open-mindedness of the teaching I received.
My fundamental question, which I need to ask in order to work fruitfully with the Technique, is this: how can I use the structure of the Technique without being unconsciously used by it? With no final answer yet, I remind myself of two basic things. One is that the structure of the work is based, essentially, on the structure of the body: the neuromuscular–skeletal structure which we all have in common. The other is the truth and depth of inhibition. I need to be still enough to listen to what Wilfrid Barlow described in his introduction to The Use of the Self as “the intimate management of our moment-to-moment perceptions of ourselves”.16
On my journey, this intimate management includes gradually correlating, in my moment-to-moment perceptions, my emotional responses with my use. The more I can accept and honour my own experience, the greater my sense of internal structure: this then reduces the extent to which the Technique seems like a structure imposed on me from the outside, either by a teacher or by myself. As I set out on my teaching journey, I am wondering how, without stepping over the line into processing emotional material, which we are not qualified for, I can validate my pupils’ responses to the work and interact with them in a truly psychophysical way.
My most creative and enjoyable Alexander experiences, whether as pupil, teacher, or colleague, have been when there has been a genuine shared exploration, a discussion of what each person is perceiving and thinking in the moment of working together. Perhaps this kind of dialogue can happen more easily, the more comfortable I am with my own territory of unknowing. Although I am sure my perspective on the issues I’ve discussed will change, I hope that I will continue to live with the questions, along with the possibility of dialogue, as I move forward and hopefully “up” into my teaching life.
References
Conable, Barbara, How to Learn the Alexander Technique, Andover Press, 1991, Portland, p. 2.
Alexander, F. M., Aphorisms, Mouritz, 2000, London, p. 84.
Conable, Barbara, How to Learn the Alexander Technique, p. 21.
Chance, Jeremy, “A teacher’s perspective on feelings.” Direction Vol.1 No.2, p. 49.
Conable, Barbara, How to Learn the Alexander Technique, p. 98.
Carrington, Walter, The Act of Living, Mornum Time Press, 1999, San Fran cisco, p. 131.
Alexander, F. M., Man’s Supreme Inheritance, Mouritz, 1996 (1918), London, p. 54.
Alexander, F. M., The Use of the Self, Gollancz, 1985 (1932), London, p. 36.
De Alcantara, Pedro, A Skill for Life, 1999, The Crowood Press, Wiltshire, p. 115.
Conable, Barbara, How to Learn the Alexander Technique, Andover Press, 1991, Portland, p. 21.
Pierce-Jones, Frank, Freedom to Change, Mouritz, 1997 (1976), London, p. 156.
Alexander, F. M., Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, Mouritz, 2004 (1923), London, p. 44.
Alexander, F. M., Articles and Lectures, Mouritz, 1995, London, p. 226.
Conable, Barbara, How to Learn the Alexander Technique, p. 28.
Barlow, Wilfred, The Alexander Principle, Gollancz, 1973, London, p. 11.
Alexander, F. M., The Use of the Self, Gollancz, 1985 (1932), London, p. 3.
About Polly Waterfield: Polly Waterfield trained at the London Centre for Alexander Technique and Training, graduating in 2006. With a previous career as a violinist and Suzuki teacher as well as an interest in other somatic disciplines, she has found grounds for fruitful questioning within her Alexander practice. In 2007 she founded the Alexander department at Uppingham School and she also works with the undergraduates of King’s College Choir, Cambridge. Sharing knowledge and experience and creating a supportive community are important to her: she co-ordinates the East Anglian regional group of teachers, belongs to the Special Interest Group (SIG) Alexander and the Interpersonal, and also is one of the coordinators of the Alexander in Education SIG.
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