Alexander Technique Career Success

I am in the process of radically re-engineering my Alexander training in Japan. I am sure to have my critics, but I thought it worthwhile to start jotting down some of the ideas that are driving this change - not the needs to meet the market that I have commented on previously, more the meaning of the work as it is for me today. I am developing two courses in tandem, the Body Thinking course to be launched next year - the one most resembling what people call "Body Mapping" these days - and the Thinking Body course, which will launch in 2009 with an identical structure, but different content. I thought now I would elucidate my thoughts on the root foundation of the course I am assembling together. This may make it clearer than I am making a hybrid marriage between simply informational/experiential body mapping, and the deeper aspects of AT work. Remember that my program is actually designed to be the first stepping stone towards the final outcome of being an AT teacher - it is...

The idea of reincarnation for me at the moment is more based on faith, rather than being a belief based on logic - but with the advances of Cognitive Science, that could change. The door began to open after listening to an amazing talk by Lama Zopa Rinpoche (LZR) where the walls seem to flutter and everything melt around me. This talk was on emptiness, but touched on reincarnation. He described the Buddhist logic that, according to the law of cause and effect (which says the result must be of the same nature of the cause - an oak tree will not grow from the seed of a cedar tree for example) our consciousness can not arise from matter, as consciousness is not in the nature of matter. Consciousness is formless, it is immaterial. It is defined as that which is clear (formless) and knowing. Therefore the first moment of consciousness in our life needed a previous moment to come into existence. It would be impossble for it to arise from matter, or from nothing, in the same way it would be i...

As an Alexander teacher, I am always dealing with a person's mental conception. This sits at the core of all movements. I think it is misleading to think of AT as "bodywork". If we must use terms like that, then it would be better to call it "mindwork" where the practitioner also touches your body to support the new conception of movement that you are being guided towards. So I am always interested in finding new information about the mind. However, the 5 ever-present factors of mind is not new information. This was first formulated by a Buddhist philosopher known as Asunga, and it constitutes an aspect of the Buddhist epistimology of how our mind aquires knowledge. There are 54 mental factors (or is it 51?) and the factors that must be present for any mind to function are: 1. Intention: what are you wanting to do right now? 2. Contact: what is the object you are contacting? 3. Attention: not passing by quickly, but maintaining attention on the object (which can...

Just finished Golden Week Residential with Rachel Zahn as the visitor. She has an amazing message for the Alexander community. What's happening in Cognitive Science is totally Alexander. What is Congnitive Science? It's a generic description that cobbles together of a number of different disciplines which all seem to be converging towards the same interests and questions: robotics, artificial intellingence, psychology, philosophy, linguistics and neuroscience. They don't know about us, but the description of what they are looking for matches Tibeten Buddhist mind training (which they DO know about, and are are starting to explore) and Alexander. Which they don't know about - but hey, how do you think they will react when they find that the some of the seminal scientific thinkers who have recently re-gained popularity as laying the foundations of modern Cognitive Science ALL had connections with Alexander: Sir Charles Sherrington (the father of neuroscience who wrote fav...

THE SEQUENCE OF COMING TO KNOW AN OBJECT Buddhist Epistemology Applied to Learning the Alexander Technique In this essay I will take the Buddhist epistemological 5-fold division of coming to know an object and explore its relation to coming to know the object of natural human co-ordination. The process of discovering this object was the work of F. M. Alexander. It stands in my mind as one of the outstanding discoveries of the 20th century, yet remains largely unrecognized precisely because the knowledge can only be understood in its full impact by a process of direct perception. So I think it is quite interesting to explore how Buddhist epistemology can be understood in an Alexander context. In this essay I will explore my own knowledge and experience, from my first lesson in 1969, to my experience today as a trainer of Alexander teachers in Japan. The Epistemological 5-fold division is as follows: 1. Wrong View 2. Doubt: towards wrong view, equivocal, towards correct view 3. Correctly...

Now I am beginning to think about a talk to offer at the next 2008 Congress: Building An Alexander Teaching Corporation - what is meant by "corporate'?: working with colleagues within a financially unified legal entity that carries the "identity" of the group and is run corporate style - history of corporate AT: Ashley Place, ACAT, ATA London, SATA, Bloomsbury Centre, Walter's CTC, other examples - Alexander family tree useuful here. - consumer and non-consumer/Professional market: historically, AT mostly sold to non-consumer, professional market; very little thought to consumer market. - use of brand names: e.g. 1. Art of Swimming  2. EyeBody 3. BodyChance - 1. & 2. above are brands based on tangents of AT; 3. example of one centered on AT, but marketing a distinctive style of teaching - pedagogical and marketing issues: style of teaching matches lesson/group; matching teaching method to the market you are aiming - demographic of audience: using market resea...

Tablework, I believe, is predicated on the idea that the person must be 'restored', 're-educated' i.e. their sensory appreciation must be brought up to scratch (means become reliable). Now, while I don't doubt that when this can be affected, there will be a tremendous increase in health & vitality, hence mental condition, I do doubt that this step is essential, that it is the ONLY WAY a person can return to a good condition. The connection between mental health (which for me means a person who is reliably in touch with the realities of this world) and our 'use of self' is undeniable close. But is it a strictly one-way causal relationship in the sense that - improve your use, improve your mind? Alexander's own pedagogy, it seems, is based solely on this assumption. And there is a tremendous amount of evidence that verifies this assumption. Unfortunately, there is also abundant evidence to counter it. There are many examples of people, who we would cla...