This is an excerpt from a class I taugh at our Osaka studio in Umeda at the start of a ProCourse class on Thursday, December 8th.

Years ago, an American neighbour of mine expressed mild interest in Alexander's discovery –because of her migraines. One day, she asked if it could help her, and got close to agreeing to have a trial lesson…

Then suddenly she blurted out a startling question:

“It’s not going to change my personality, is it?”

And I immediately thought ‘yes’

and re-wrote a little Shakespeare in my head:

Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the hands of change;

That this great deed shall flow around the earth

On July 4th, 1907 Willie Keith stood helplessly in Battle Creek, Michigan watching a fire consume his precious factory.*

Willie was 46, yet he had launched his company barely a year before. He’d already worked for 25 years as the unofficial business manager for a famous Seventh-day Adventist Sanitarium (re-invented from the word ‘sanatorium’) under the shadow of his gregarious and extroverted brother Dr John Henry.

Viktor E. Frankl - in his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning - tells the story of a well-known composer and librettist whose death illustrated a mechanism of hope. One day the man gushed to Viktor that he had dreamt he would be free of the Nazi concentration camp. “When?” asked Frankl. “On March 30th, 1945” whispered back his friend.

He died on March 31st.

Cause? The death of hope in Frankl’s estimation. The loss of his hope triggered a deadly weakening of his immune system, and the man ultimately fell to the ravages of typhus.

In May 2007 I was sitting on a plane on my way to New York. One of the highlights of my visit was to ask advice from Lucy L. Brown Ph.D. at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, on our BodyData project in BodyChance at the time.*

As preparation for our meeting, I was brushing up on her Alexander orientated speculations by re-reading her Paper on Sensory-Motor Contagion† from the first Lugano Conference in Switzerland.

Once at breakfast, I remember being interrupted by a girlfriend pleading with me in an exasperated voice:

“What’s wrong with you this morning?”

I was genuinely surprised (and a little irritated).

“Nothing.” I lifted my eyebrows.

“Fine”, she re-joined “have it your way.”

I was fed up with this.

“What are you talking about!?”

Have you ever noticed how often FM’s work is “discovered” in other methods?

Haven’t you ever wondered about that?

Of course (speaking from my own experience) it can be intensely irritating to explain…

“No, AT isn’t really like Yoga. Not at all.”

…because not only is the listener nonplussed by your response, they also become slightly irritated and defensive too.

It’s like two 5 year olds on a playground: “My daddy’s better than your daddy. There!”

I was in Betty and Paul Collins’ house in Onslow Gardens, N10 in London.

It was 1977 and I was in my second year of AT training. Robert Rickover was waxing lyrical about this American teacher I had never heard of – Marjorie Barstow.

“She talks about the head moving…” I remember Rickover whispering to a few of us in the back room. I was scandalized.

That’s dreadful, I thought to myself, doesn’t this woman understand non-doing?

Once upon a time (it’s a true story) I was learning in a workshop with a respected colleague, and as she was demonstrating how the relationship between head/spine influences behaviour, she commented something to the effect:

“This is just a truth about vertebrates. We haven’t even got into Alexander land yet.”

I was startled.

First, I absolutely agreed with her.

Second, I thought: “If that’s not Alexander land, what is?!”

I know what it feels like to be awake in a nightmare.

Lying in bed, looking into the dark.

Frightened. Wondering. Uncertain.

What is going to happen to me?
Will I make the rent?
Will we be OK?
Can I keep living here?

Are you a teacher who is finding your practise shrinking? Or the influx of new students has slowed down, and you wonder how secure we are?

You are right to be concerned. We are in a new digital world.