Part three - Becoming the Work
As an Alexander Technique teacher, this way of opening, this non-doing, wordless, mind-body-emotion soul listening is still a practice for me. When I first stepped out of my three-year training in North London, I felt as if I knew nothing. Like I had just passed my driving test, but now had to drive the car out on the open road. It was scary. And yet, during that training I had given everything of myself - to open, to listen, to live this work fully.
F. M. Alexander had said, “Don’t do what I did, do what I do”
Meaning: don’t copy me. Become the principles for yourself. Make the work your own. That is what I did. I learned the Alexander Technique from the inside out. It lived and still lives in my body, my bones, my blood.
At that time, I was a single parent with two young teenage daughters. We lived just outside East London, in a small, rundown council flat. I was on benefits, living hand to mouth. I remember being frightened to trust that I could make a living from this elusive, unspoken, almost un-wordable work.
And then Mary arrived – my first pupil
Mary was a tall, thin woman of seventy-eight years old. Life had carved deep lines around her eyes, as if her face had been gently chiselled by time. She wore black slacks and a brown-and-grey twinset cardigan. Around her neck was a string of pearls, yellowing softly from within the white, worn smooth by age and devotion.
She said,
“I’ve come because I can’t bend down to tie my shoes anymore. I can’t undo my bra. I’m so stiff and old. My back aches, my joints ache. I wondered if this Alexander Technique could help.
Inside, I thought: .” I haven’t a clue”
How could I know?
What I did know was that I had to let go completely of any ideas about who Mary was, or what she should become. I had to release the image of her as an “old, aching woman.” I had to let go of wanting to fix her, to make things better, to get it right.
I explained to Mary that Alexander discovered how we unconsciously tighten our neck and back, contracting the whole body and that this contraction is not just physical. It includes our thinking, our emotions, our history. All of it connected through the nervous system. As if we are not parts, but a whole being.
I told her that with my non-doing, my undemanding, fully accepting hands, I hoped to offer her an experience of release, not relaxation, but release. Because release is different. Our body, mind, and feelings do not live only inside us; they are part of the environment, part of the world, part of life itself.
To release, then, is to expand - wholly - into the life we already have. Including the past, which flows into the present, shaping the life we are living now.
Mary looked at me, quietly mystified.
We stood together in my small studio, an Alexander table, a chair, a few pictures of nature on the walls.
She asked softly,
“Will my pain go? I do hope so.”
She stepped in front of the Alexander chair. I centred myself, as I had learned to do, feet on the floor, awareness returning to my own body, sensing /feeling myself as a whole within the room. No ideas of right or wrong. No image of how Mary should be, or how her posture should look.
With empty hands, I placed them gently on her neck and I waited.
I listened. Not with my ears, but with my whole body. I listened with the room, with the air, with the garden beyond the window. A blackbird was singing outside. Clouds were moving across the sky. I waited.
In the emptiness, something arrived.
I began to feel her neck releasing. Her spine lengthening, like a tightly folded fern slowly uncurling. I recognised this sensation; I had felt it myself in my first Alexander lesson. Now I was sensing her body coming to life. Her back, arms, chest, shoulders her whole torso began to move subtly from within. Balance was reorganising. Her skull grew lighter. Her whole being felt like an opening flower, something awakening in the heart of her. Inside her body I sensed places held tight, as if a river flowed through her and I could feel where each dam had been shut or blocked. She felt like a universe unto herself - vast, intricate, alive.
Warmth rose. Something moved through her veins. Fire, energy, life. Something was happening that I could not name. Information moving on many levels at once. Too much for words.
When the session ended, I said,
“Take a few steps. Look out of the window into the garden. See how you feel.”
Silence filled the room.
Mary walked slowly toward the window. More silence. My small garden, daffodils and snowdrops framed her view.
She turned back toward me. Tears streamed down her face.
She said,
“Ten years ago my husband died. I’ve kept so busy, just getting on. And now I see -I have to remember. I never let him go. I never remembered him properly. I never grieved my loss.” That was all she said.
What had been buried was now alive. What had been held in her body, in her muscles, her bones, the muscles of her heart had begun to move again. The doorway to her life had opened. To her own nature.
Small and vast at once. Empty and full together. What was dead was now alive.
Mary came for sessions for a few months. Her stiffness eased. Her back pain improved. She bought a mini car. She began to live again at seventy-eight years old. Something had changed that was not just about posture or the body. Something deeply human and meaningful had taken place. Something that freed her back into life.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Over the past thirty-five years, I have been offering and teaching the Alexander Technique in many different settings - from children’s hospices and NHS mental health departments, preforming arts in universities, music students, and a wide range of healthcare and community organisations. I have been privileged to work with thousands of people, each one teaching me something about patience, listening, and the quiet intelligence of the body.
Over time, this work has asked more of me than technique alone. It has drawn me into deeper ways of listening - to myself, to others, and to the living world that holds us. Now, I bring this long experience together with the Way of Council and the teachings of the natural world, allowing the work to move through the body as a shared and relational practice.
This feels less like adding something new, and more like a remembering: a meeting place where skill, humility, and presence come together – where what we might call heaven and hell are held within the same human body, and where a path continues to unfold, one honest step at a time.
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