Concept Corner: Reinventing the wheel
by Don Weed
During the eighties and nineties in America, one of the key goals for many Alexander Technique teachers was to find ways to make learning the work easier so that the benefits of the work could be acquired more easily with less effort by the student. These teachers even called themselves facilitators.
In this book, The Alexander Technique As I See It (pp. 81-2), Patrick Macdonald acknowledges the large amount of mental work Alexander had to go through in learning the work for himself and then claims that with a skilled teacher the desired series of integrated patterns can be established “without the pupil having to undertake more than a tithe (tenth) of the mental discipline that Alexander had to use.”
But what if developing the ‘mental discipline’ rather than acquiring the ‘integrated patterns’ was the more worthy goal for students to seek?
“You can do what I do, if you do what I did” - Alexander’s famous formula for success in his work - has been used to justify a multitude of teaching sins. Quite often the focus of teaching based on this formula has been on the reproduction of desired ‘physical’ outcomes: free necks, forward and up heads, lengthened and widened backs, etc. But what if Alexander’s key task in this formula was the personal development of the mental discipline that Macdonald refers to? What if immersing themselves in the kind of mental ‘drudgery’ that Macdonald seems anxious to decrease is the very thing that students ought to be asking of themselves?
Recently two students reported breakthrough experiences to me.
The first student, seeking to improve the manner in which she walked, spent an afternoon watching thousands of different people walking in order to learn more about how to walk. Her experiment was successful and the changes she acquired were remarkable.
The second student sang the praises of one of her study group’s members who had suggested a revolutionary, new strategy for making improvements in the use of the voice in speaking – one could actually think about the relationship of one’s head with one’s body while speaking!
In the first place, I can confirm the improvements both students reported experiencing. Secondly, I’d like to think that the ‘new’ procedures they had ‘discovered’ – intense observation and analysis carried into personal practice; and actually thinking about how one performs one’s activities while performing them – were procedures that had been suggested to them before. Lastly, and most importantly, I’d like to point out that the reported breakthroughs came as a result of the implementation of these ideas by carrying out primary experiments of known procedures for themselves.
In the ITM, we are fond of saying that ‘you can lead a student to water, but you can’t make him think’. Neither can you make a student carry out these kinds of experiments. In the students’ rush to appear to accept and do what their teachers say, and the teachers’ rush to make things easier for their students, this kind of primary experimentation is often dismissed as an example of reinventing the wheel. Alexander figured these things out; we have learned how to give the experiences directly to the student through the use of our words and hands; why bother? - the argument seems to go.
But what if the real value of the work is enjoyed only by those who do the work for themselves rather than seeking answers or ‘facilitations’ from their teachers?
In her book, F Matthias Alexander: the man and his work (pp. 83-5) Lulie Westfeldt claims that the true success of the first teacher training course was realized only after one of her fellow students suggested that they experiment with what they had been taught by putting in the time and work necessary to learn to do it for themselves. And the fellow who had suggested this necessary drudgery? Patrick Macdonald.
We are all amazed and delighted with the ‘miracles’ of the work experienced in lessons. But what if inventing and reinventing the wheel for ourselves while acquiring command of this process is the Alexander Technique itself? Then reinventing this particular wheel ought to become a goal for us all.