12 letters. One Word, repeated 22 times.

Conditioning.

That was the word I discovered in FM’s “Universal Constant of Living” that made sense of my bewilderment…

Back in my training at Highgate in the 1970s, the highlight of the day was getting a “turn” with one of the teachers. My favourite was Margaret Farrar, who had only completed her training with Walter Carrington the previous year. 

What an amazing touch she had!

I watched other trainees carefully, jealous that someone might snag a turn with Margaret before me. In Alexander’s time, Erika Whittika told me that trainees would angle to get their ‘turn’ with FM just before a horse race on the radio - because FM would not switch between trainees while he was listening, so you ended up with a longer ‘turn’…

Huh!

Alexander finally referred to these ‘turns’ as a process of ‘conditioning’ in his last book.*

This was the reason I was struggling in my school. I was not running a training based on ‘conditioning’ the trainees through hours and hours - 1600 hours to be precise - of “hands-on” work in the chair, on the table** or doing ‘monkeys’ and ‘lunges’ and all those bizarre teaching procedures FM invented. Marj never taught them,†† and today, neither do I

This was a striking difference between Marjorie Barstow’s pedagogy and FM’s.

In Japan around 2003, I received an email from Walter† - beautiful Walter was always a kind supporter of my efforts - where he lamented about the difficulty of communicating the work to others. He went on to write that for him, teaching first involved giving the student an experience and then using that experience to introduce how to think. What was my opinion?

I don’t remember what I replied since I was in shock that Walter had even bothered to ask me. Looking back, I suspect Walter was subtly reminding me how important experience is in teaching. But of course, that’s the problem - touch is SO EFFECTIVE that there is a temptation to give up trying to teach people how to think and rely instead on the experiences you can amplify in your students through your Alexander touch.

Marj would not teach this way - although she had the capacity to, I know.

Instead, Marj would regularly take her hands off and ask you what had just happened. If you couldn’t answer her accurately, that was the end of your lesson. Her teaching philosophy was simple - help a person move to the extent that their cognitive processes can recognise and reproduce what had just happened. It was precisely as Walter had described, but all happening in a minute or less. Marj observed that when you go beyond the point of a student’s comprehension, you start replacing individual autonomy with dependency upon the teacher and cognitive recognition with reliance on sensory recollection.

This was an entirely new way to frame the “hands-on” I had experienced in Highgate. Margaret and I hardly talked; mostly, we just giggled when something changed.

***

Still, I had my doubts. As I wrote previously, I often felt a little ashamed when I saw that my trainees did not appear to be managing their coordination well. They were sloppy, slumpy and often tense. Was I on the wrong path?

And then a minor miracle happened.

Not just one, several. I was gobsmacked - I knew I had finally come out the other side of my doubts. In my heart, I cried tears of appreciation towards Marj for her wisdom, insight and guidance.

I’ll get into what happened next.

***

*I wrote about this in my Congress Paper (2008). ‘Teaching Technology’. In From Generation to Generation: The Congress Papers – 8th International Congress of the FM Alexander Technique, Lugano 2008, pp. 93–106. STAT Books: London.

** You won’t find a table at BodyChance. Today, I don’t do any tablework. None.

† Walter’s email is lost in the archives of an old software service I stopped using in 2005 

†† Of course, that is not entirely true - Marj did both chairwork and tablework in her early teaching days. However, by the time I met her in 1986, there was hardly a whiff of it in her teaching methods - Marj had already innovated her activity approach.