Learning is never constructed on a clean slate, the learner is not ‘a mind’ filled with vacuum or ‘a body’ plastic to the manipulations you gently impart; as soon as the student starts to move on his own, you will see that your input is washed away as a trace on the sand under the waves. His mind and body work together to maintain his habits of mind and body.
The debutant ‘thinks many things” and ‘knows many things’. He has solved problems of his own in his own way long before coming to see you. That is, through a long practice of reasoning based on what he feels, he has constructed ‘pre-conceptions’. Pre-conceptions are naive-physics answers and subconscious directions, which satisfy him for the moment simply because they lead to movements that provide the feeling of being right. These pre-conception do not describe the actions like sitting or standing in details of movements between the parts of the organism, the person has no idea about what she is really doing or not doing with the different parts of the torso and limbs when she thinks or command an action.
The student certainly does not link these pre-conceptions with his problems of posture, limitation of movement or pain that make his day-to-day experiences as well as the basis of his judgments. Nonetheless, everything he does or notices about his movements is immediately deciphered using the filter of his pre-conceptions based on feeling-thoughts…
Alexander calls this habit of mind “the subjective habit” and continues to say (Alexander, msi, p. 53):
“The brain becomes used to thinking in a certain way, it works in a groove, and when set in action, slides along the familiar, well-worn path; but when once it is lifted out of the groove, it is astonishing how easily it may be directed.“
If you get these people to start thinking, they will think of course, but they will think in the groove, and it will change nothing fundamental in the conceptions that are the cause of the problems.
“She let her feeling decide instead of her thinking”. Marjorie Barstow.
The basic problem of teaching conscious guidance and control of the mind is to help them lift their reasoning out of the groove of thoughts that revolve endlessly around sensations and feelings.
Teaching conscious reasoning and reasoned guidance clashes head-on with the root of the pre-conceptions of the learners.
Research on teaching has shown that it is not that easy for the learners to get rid of their pre-conceptions –the first pre-conception in order of importance being the idea that to direct their bodies they have to to reason from what they feel before and after any practice. Such preconceptions, generalised ideas about how the body works, have been part of their representational system necessary to solve everyday psycho-mechanical problems. Feeling-ideas and the representational system they form have a kind of coherence adjusted to their functions of explanation of the world -“If I flex the wrists all the time, then it is natural to do so and unnatural for anyone else to extend the wrist”.
Even if you do not dig in the groove by touching your pupils, how do you help them think out of it in a reasoned way? The dangers of touching have already been brought to the attention of the Teachers of the modern Alexander Technique by the Barstow Branch. There is nothing new here.
This model of teaching (Hands-on teaching) assumes that pupils will find it difficult, if not impossible, to make any changes on their own, especially without a teacher’s guiding hands, and never at a first lesson. In fact, it assumes that it may take several lessons before pupils have skill enough to employ the Technique without a teacher. It also assumes that sensory experience can be given, and that the teacher’s use must be excellent, otherwise a less than accurate sensory experience will be transmitted to the pupil.
There are consequences to using this model. In my observation, I find that when teachers make all the “adjustments,” and “give” pupils new sensory experiences, the pupils by and large have no idea what is happening. They experience a new way of moving, they feel very different but may have little or no idea of how they “got there.” Thus, when they leave a lesson, and quite reasonably want to feel that way again, the only thing they know to do is to try and “find the feeling.” Of course this doesn’t work. They become confused, muddled and frustrated trying to “do” the Alexander Technique. They come back to their next lesson asking you to “put their head in that place again,” or complaining that they “can’t find that place where their head should be.” Kettrick, C., PhD, [Teaching without touching](http://www.performanceschool.org/TPS/art-ck4.html)
Yet, apart from a few shouts in the wilderness, the erroneous ideas are supported everywhere by teachers, yoga and pilates trainers, somaticians of all streaks and it is no surprise that they tend to re-assemble themselves, in spite of the irrefutable demonstrations and formal contradictions given here and there by Alexander (Was he not the one to invent the hands-on pedagogy and to contradict himself in the first place?).
I have noticed that, even after long and successful scientific studies, students with physics knowledge invariably revert to unreasoned conceptions as soon as they are dealing with a problem regarding their own equilibrium, or any problem that involves movements, force, acceleration, momentum of different parts of their body: they want to ‘feel it’ to know whether some law is true or not. This is exactly impossible because we human are not equipped with a sensory system that register the true dynamic values of the movements of the different parts of our system, speed, acceleration, moment of force and counter pulls in distant parts of the anatomical structure. As miss Kettrick explains, ‘the pupils by and large have no idea what is happening‘ in terms of movements of the different parts of their anatomical structure during and after the lesson.
You can put your hands on the pupils until they are blue in the face, it will not make them reason consciously how the essential bony structures of their frame have been coordinated. Hands-on teaching is not in itself a training to reason from objective facts (the Known) to produce objective facts contrary to our habitual manner of use (the Unknown).
To reason out of the groove, i.e. to be able to employ the laws of equilibrium, we need something we cannot feel to base our reasoning and projection of orders: a notation system for analysing the movements of the parts of the torso and limbs (reasoned conception) and for guiding all-together the movements of the parts of the body. My work of the last fifteen years has been to show through a close reading of Alexander’s books, that F.M. certainly learned exactly such a system from Delsarte and employed it, but forgot to hand it down clearly to his own students. This message is hidden everywhere, scattered in his books that stay on the shelves.
All reasoned knowledge about the coordination of the parts of the body as a whole is counter-intuitive, contrary to intuition and feeling. In the sense of ‘getting people to start thinking and reason about objective movements of the parts of the body’, the teacher is bound to be an opponent; he is opposed to the tyranny of sensations and wants to overthrow the old ruler of the mind: he shall open the path from “thinking from sensation” to “detached thinking’ (Alexander, F.M., ucl, p. xxxi).
Till later, I am going to have a baby soon.
Clear and completely logical. Having done hands-on teaching for over 20 years oit is immensely refreshing to now be able to work with greater precision and start by learning to apply conscious control for myself.
It is a challenge to decide how much hands-on teaching, if any, to use with my pupils, and when. But comventional ahnds-on teaching currently seems completely at odds with helping pupils take conscious control.
I read much of ur articole whit pleasure…your path is right….your questioning everything ….i Arrived at the same conclusion.starting from a differenti Point…i would like to work whit you and have some lessons plus i will share whit you My knowledge of the tecnique abd How i used as a Means of selfexpression. Let me know please. Im really loving your effort
According to my long-time teacher, who was trained by Barstow, Marj once said to her, “I don’t think we know how to teach people this shit.”
She used her hands less and less as my lessons continued. (I found this somewhat disappointing.) She would observe problems in my use, and then construct experiments in which I would observe the physiological mechanisms concerned.
Many, many times she told me to “go with the head-and-whole-spine”, and she gave me several experiments in which I was to observe the whole torso moving as a unit, independant from the limbs. These were not concrete enough for me to understand, however.
I just today stumbled across this very interesting set of blog posts. Thanks to Jeando for creating it. As a student of Marj Barstow from 1978 until her death in 1995, including 6 years living in Lincoln, I felt it necessary to comment on Aaron’s comment. Although the sentiment in the purported statement by Marj is correct, I must say that in all that time, I never once heard her use a profane word. To the point of the quote, I recall one evening class at her home that was just after her returning from teaching in several teacher training programs. She was not happy about what she had seen, and let us know that she never wanted to see us trying to teach the same way that she did. She said, as close as I can recall, “I don’t know how to teach this work, I don’t think anyone does.” And she was true to her words: she was constantly trying new ways of communicating the principles, and her explanations were always direct and simple. I recall one exchange during a winter workshop in Lincoln. Several teachers and trainees had come from England, and after a few days one of them asked: “Marj, you frequently tell us that we should take a good look at ourselves. I get the sense that you don’t just mean with our eyes, but that you want us to pay attention to what we also feel. Is that right?” Her reply was “Yes, that’s right.” The student then replied: “But Marj, FM has taught us that our sensory appreciation is unreliable. How can it be helpful to pay attention to what we feel?” And Marj said: “What else have you got”? My words now: it is true, our senses are unreliable. The Alexander work does not cure us of this affliction. But it gives us a process whereby we can become more objective observers of ourselves.
Regarding the dangers of hands-on work: in my lessons with Marj, I quickly learned that she was not showing me the ‘right way’ to do something. What the hands-on work gave me was a direct experience of what is possible if I get out of my own way. I experienced them as something like a movement koan. The hands-on experience was not the answer, it was a question. Her touch was so delicate, that it was undeniable that I was doing whatever the activity was, but in a way that was new. Those many experiences did not retrain me – I had to think about them, and to think in a new way.
I know that there are teachers who believe that s/he gives the student an experience, and the student’s job is to think mantra-like: I wish my neck to be free, so that my head can move forward and up, and my back can lengthen and widen. The idea is that eventually, the student is trained by stimulus/response to associate the giving of the directions with the experience provided by the teacher. When my first teacher (not Marj) explained this to me, I thought to myself: what has that got to do with constructive conscious control of the individual? (I had read several books before finding a teacher.) I agree that kind of hands-on work is perhaps not ideal.