Two Things That Will

Elevate Your Teaching

An important question for Alexander Teachers

who despite all of their dedication, skill and

determination STILL don’t have enough

students to achieve an abundant

& sustainable living wage…

If you could learn an easy way to:

Clarify your Direction
Boost your sensitivity
Empower your hands-on
Sharpen your observation
Deepen your intuition
Boost your awareness PLUS
Reach, teach and keep more students

Without ever having to leave your living room!

Would you be adventurous enough to try out two powerful teaching

tools that more and more A.T. teachers are adding to their repertoire?

If you are…
Welcome to…

Add Your Heading Text Here

The Club

The CoachingClub is a “Q&A” style weekly masterclass for Alexander teachers who seek to refine their skills, add new tools to their repertoire or increase their ability to reach more students. TheClub is a recurring membership where members, depending on their plan, meet via Zoom either once, twice or three times per week.

The research I’ve been doing into the viability of a totally HandsFree approach to Alexander teaching has yielded some surprisingly powerful methods & strategies that have proven extremely valuable to Alexander teachers of all stripes.

Informed & inspired by the “Evolution of a Technique” chapter in The Use of the Self, these ways of working harken back to the original methods Alexander created to solve his vocal problems and make his discoveries. These methods will expand the possibilities of your teaching, your marketing and your work on yourself. .

It Takes a Village

TheCoachingClub is super practical and all about problem solving. It’s a place online where Alexander teachers can gather each week to broach and solve the real issues that members are facing day in & day out in their teaching practice.

The Club is a community and a learning lab. A collaborative online space where Alexander teachers from all over the globe can compare notes, share questions and find answers together.

I have been coaching and training Alexander teachers for over 35 years and spent more than 10 apprenticing with Marjorie Barstow. I draw upon that experience to create a challenging but collegial atmosphere in the Club that, even when intense, is always supportive & accepting.

As “Learner-In-Chief”, I lead the charge, but the magic of our meetings is in the collaboration. The knowledge shared in the Club and the feel of the gathering itself has been known to stir memories of the wonderful workshops you’ve attended or the very best days of your teacher training.

New Tools & Études

Primal Alexander™

As a complete teaching system, I call my HandsFree approach Primal Alexander™ (P.A.). P.A. is a comprehensive set of techniques, skills, activities & explorations that I originally developed to meet the challenges of teaching beginning students online.

But…

In the last four years, what’s been especially satisfying for me has been seeing just how valuable P.A. is proving to be for Alexander teachers, especially when it comes to their own skill refinement, group teaching, observation and proactive self-care.

The two facets of Primal Alexander™ that any Alexander teacher can borrow and take advantage of immediately are an awareness process called 3EasyQuestions™ and a collection of home-study activities called TheÉtudes.

3EasyQuestions™

3EasyQuestions™ is the approach to constructive conscious control that I teach to students. It’s based on the fact that when a person directs their attention to places of relative ease in their body, the head/neck reflex is gently facilitated.

When exploring the possibility of easier movement, after inhibiting, in the gap between stimulus and response, instead of traditional orders or directing, you quickly assess these three things about yourself in sequence:

Where you’re currently noticing places of relative ease,
What effect noticing that ease is having on your general Use and finally…
How that general effect is changing as you begin to move.

This gentle, but focused curiosity about the ease you’re currently experiencing shifts your attention in a way that circumvents your usual habit patterns. It facilitates the Primary Control which reorganizes your movement on the fly allowing you to move outside of your habit with increased ease.

As a form of Constructive Thinking, 3EasyQuestions™ allows the actual direction to come from the natural response of autonomic nervous system to a conscious you’re making rather than responding a feeling-based concept of forward, up, head, neck or body that is habitual.

3EasyQuestions™ is a new take on constructive conscious control that is so easy to implement that it can be taught to a brand new student in a first lesson. However, in the hands of an experienced teacher, it also becomes a potent self-healing tool that reveals and erodes even deep habit patterns that usually are imperceptible.

The Études

TheÉtudes™ are the “lightweight” home study activities that students do for a few minutes every day. They form the practice material they use to actualize what they are learning in the group classes.
Like the Études in classical music pedagogy, these are studies; opportunities for students to learn specific skills in a simplified, focused setting. When done regularly the Études

Give students a structure to practice & experiment with their directing.
Keeps them engaged with their studies between lessons.
Empowers them in their own learning.
Provides a way of facilitating the Primary Control on their own.
Proves to them that they can improve their own Use whenever they want.
Teaches Inhibition, Non-doing and Directing quickly.
Improves their sensory appreciation.
Develops the awareness needed to apply the Technique in any activity.

The Primary Concern

In my classes I often reference a concept I call “The Primary Concern” which is the root formulation of an experimental process in the form of a the question:

What’s happening to me as I ____?”

(Where the activity you’re engaged in goes in the blank)

If you can ask and answer that question when you’re in the midst of an activity that’s the beginning of “thinking in activity”. It’s the key to understanding how the “end” you’re trying to gain is affecting your present & future ability to function(the “means whereby”).

Asking that question brings the “end” & the “means whereby” into the same frame so that you can see them both at the same time. That way, when your approach to achieving a particular outcome begins to interfere with your coordination, you become aware of it and can make a change.

In a sense, that’s the big picture of how the Études function in Primal Alexander™ through patient and consistent practice, they quickly teach a student how the”think in activity”.

“Anyone can do what I do,
if they will do what I did.”

Re: Evolution of a Technique

I remember reading that quote for the first time as young, slightly fanatical Alexander enthusiast and feeling like Alexander tossing out a challenge…challenging me to buckle down and apply what he had discovered more seriously.

Did I aspire to someday being able to do what Alexander could do? Yes, I did. Was I willing to sit in front of mirrors for years and years to achieve what he did…Apparently not, because I never did!

However, as the years went by, I came to realize that spending all that time in front of the mirrors was not what Alexander did as much as it was how he did what he did…What he actually learned how to do in front of those mirrors was to…

Experiment on himself!

For me, the key to getting the most out of Alexander’s discoveries is to follow him down the road of self-experimentation. We have a huge advantage over Alexander. Because as a result of his efforts we know, without a doubt, that there truly is gold at the end of that particular rainbow.

Primal Alexander™ is a step by step approach designed to improve your Use by teaching you how to experiment with movement in a way that lessens habitual excess tension. By applying a different kind of directing and a graduated series of self-study “études”, Primal Alexander™ provides students and teachers with a straight forward, easy to follow blueprint for improvement.

It’s a self-healing process that uses Inhibition & observation to create a gap between stimulus and response that allows our native movement intelligence to preempt our habitual way of moving while it reinforces the neural pathways that lead to better Use now and in the future.

In TheCoachingClub with the help of 3EasyQuestions™ and TheÉtudes™ you will learn how to identify and untie the psycho-physical knots that limit your effectiveness as practitioner and teacher of the Alexander Technique.

With those two tools and objective feedback from me and the other members, you’ll be able to enhance and refine your teaching much more quickly and easily than you could on your own.

If you’re interested, you could also acquire HandsFree Teaching skills that will enable you to teach authentic Alexander Technique in situations where hands-on guidance is not optimal or perhaps not even possible.

But, the bottom line is that you’ll discover a simpler way to “stick to principle” more fully and more often while teaching and in your daily life so that you can more deeply enjoy and share this wonderful work with the world.

Choose 1, 2 or 3
classes/week

Saturday 12PM
Tuesday 5PM -Thursday 3PM
Times are Eastern U.S. Timezone

Classes are 90 Minutes

Each class begins with the études. The balance of the class is a Q&A
format master class

Every Class is Recorded

Recordings are available same
day and can be accessed for
1 month after the class

Members Only
Facebook Group

Very active for posting questions, assignments and getting
my video feedback

Daily Étude
Broadcast

Once a day I’ll do our études
live on Facebook & talk about
their form and function

MidWeek
Live Private Talk

Every Wednesday at 4 PM Pacific
I share my thoughts about
recent classes

“Take a Gambling Chance”

Over the 20 odd years I trekked out to Nebraska to study with Marjorie Barstow, it became more and more clear that, like Alexander, Marj was an inveterate gambler. She was always willing to…

Every Summer there was something new. A different twist on an old idea or something completely fresh and unexpected. Of course, as I progressed in my work on myself I heard, saw and experienced things differently, but it was apparent that Marj was always pushing the envelope; trying to help her students more effectively by striving to make her teaching more and more simple and powerful.

Marj put a big big emphasis on gambling…

The Club’s Q&A style, interactive format makes it difficult to lay out the exact curriculum here, but below please find some the key areas of interest that we will be exploring.

I will be teaching the fundamentals of PA

Direction Distilled

Imagine being able to refine your Direction

Improved Hands-On

Like any activity, hands-on work is subject to hidden habits. 3easyQuestions brings more clarity, sensitivity & power to your kinesthetic guidance.

Marketing Hacks

If you could improve someone’s use without touching? Even if you don’t teach that way, imagine how many people could get to experience your skills.