First Post

Lessons from the chair has had a long gestation of over a decade or more. Back then I was given one of the better bits of advice I have received. Certainly one of the few which when followed has been fruitful and rewarding. It came from Walter Carrington who had been taught directly by F.M. Alexander and who had taken over Alexander’s original teacher training course when Alexander died in 1956. The advice concerned Alexander’s technique and developing Constructive Conscious Control, which is what the Alexander Technique aims for. It came in three parts, the first two referring to set Alexander procedures and is the best advice for any aspiring teacher of Alexander’s work. The first part concerned hands on the back of the chair. ‘Pretty much everything you need to know about human mechanics is there’. The second concerned the ‘whispered Ah’. ‘Pretty much everything you need to know about breathing.’ The third bit of advice was to read Alexander’s books. I have to confess that I was slightly sceptical to say the least when I heard the extent of the claim but, over the years, I have come to see that Walter – master craftsman that he was - had distilled from these basic procedures an excellence in teaching and understanding Alexander’s work that few others have achieved. All that he claims is there and more in these basic procedures and over the years, from working with them and doing straight forward Alexander chair work, I have learned many lessons with regard not just to human mechanics but about human movement, action and ultimately intention. Along the way, I have become a psychotherapist working with chairs in a different way but still concerned with movement, action, intention and most of all meaning. Chairs though are not integral to my work; it is the people, the pupils and the clients as they look to solve their different problems. They are the ones who teach me most as I work with them to look at aspects of their world afresh, to seek in all cases new ways of moving that are easier, freer – and it is ultimately the concern with freedom that unites them. The freedom to be, the ease of being that goes with this, freedom not just of thought and action but ‘in thought and action’, as Alexander put it. How we might get there and some of the lessons we can learn will feature in forthcoming blogs which will range from the quite technical to the more general – I hope you will come with me and enjoy the read.