The Key to Freedom

by Lynne Cartlidge

As part of my continuing professional development as an ITM teacher, I was fortunate to be able to attend a workshop given by two experienced Alexander Technique teachers - Catherine Kettrick and David Mills. Catherine and David (along with Don and several others) were co-founders, of the Performance School in Seattle, USA. [www.performanceschool.org] and are still based there. They both studied extensively with Marjorie Barstow and are considered to be of “Nebraskan lineage”. Because I had heard such positive things about Catherine's presentation at the Alexander Technique Congress in Oxford, I was keen to attend their workshop.

By beginning the workshop with the phrase “You can do what I do if you do what I did”, Catherine and David emphasised the experimental approach adopted by FM Alexander in “Evolution of a Technique”. Each lesson was an opportunity to design an experiment to test an idea, observe the results and then learn from the outcome. This activities-based approach formed the basis of a fulfilling workshop where we had the benefit of their many years of accumulated knowledge and experience.

I liked their lively experimental approach. Catherine, in particular, shared some interesting ideas including having students put their fingers in their ears to find their atlanto-occipital joints or having students raise their arms while slumping and not slumping to feel the difference slumping makes. My favourite new idea, however, was when she told us that she sometimes asks students to squash a spring between their fingers and then, once they have done this, asks them what they need to do to unsquash the spring. They quickly learn that when they stop squashing the spring, it easily returns to its unsquashed condition on its own. Brilliant.

Interestingly though I was also intrigued by how - during all stages of the workshop - their approach was so different to the ITM.

One of the major differences that caught my attention was what seemed to be an absolute emphasis on the primary control and the giving of the verbal directions. While such an emphasis is not a surprise at an Alexander Technique workshop, at times I felt that my thinking was being 'conditioned' by their frequent suggestions to repeat those phrases. At times, I became concerned that the phrases themselves were in danger of becoming a substitute for the development of conscious reasoning. Sometimes, it was as though Catherine and David thought the power for the changes that were happening came from the repetition of the words they suggested rather than from any change of thinking on my part and I didn't like that.

When I compared my experience in this class to a story told to me recently by a colleague (see Tim Kjeldsen’s teaching story on page 5), I wondered about the relative values of the different experiences involved. When I thought about these differences, I asked myself, “Would the student in the ITM lesson have been better off or worse off if instead of hearing Tim's questions she had gone away from her introductory lesson thinking about the location of the atlanto-occipital joint and phrases like “free my neck”?

While I have no doubt that she would have benefited from the knowledge and the phrases in Catherine's lesson, I wondered if she would be anywhere near as free after that kind of directive introduction as she became in the ITM lesson where she freed herself from the effects of her own bad ideas after being asked to think through some simple, reasoned questions.

Now the ITM way of designing each lesson around the teacher's observations and judgments about the student's current condition was certainly present at times during Catherine’s and David's workshop. And they also made use of reasoned questioning. But it seemed to me that it was not used as consistently or in such a disciplined way as it is in the ITM.

As a result of my experiences at Catherine’s and David's workshop, I also understood much more about the importance of asking step by step, reasoned and interlocking questions that are relevant to the student. This process, that we are required to learn in the ITM, is a vital teaching tool and is a particular skill which takes great mental discipline. As a beginning teacher I am often not satisfied with my level of consistency in this regard, but I look forward to my skill developing over time in a way in which it might not have developed had I been trained in a different teaching approach.

As I reflected on the experience of working with teachers with a different approach to the work, I came to realise that through the ITM my thinking actually had come to be trained in a certain manner, and that by employing this mental discipline in class, I advance my own development as well as serve as a model to my students as they develop themselves. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that this kind of a mental discipline is much more of a key to freedom than the poise of the head ever could be.

Lynne Cartlidge