36 years with Alexander’s Discoveries
Week 4: Day 19 – Personal
“I don’t work on the table. I think the Alexander Technique is about movement. I like to work with my pupils in their daily activities.” Marjorie Barstow
When I finished my Alexander training, I thought I knew what “good teaching” looked like. I had absorbed the forms, the sequences, the hands‑on protocols. I had a sense of how a lesson was supposed to go. It took years for that scaffolding to soften enough for my own ways of working to emerge.
I’ve been using this work for thirty‑six years now, and teaching for twenty‑three. That’s long enough to see how the technique grows with me, and how I have grown with it. When I left my job at the BBC in 2000, they gifted me an Alexander teaching table. I’ve used it ever since. It’s firm, it’s tall to fit my height, and wide.
Sometimes it lives in a cupboard for years. Right now it has pride of place in my space. Some clients love table work. Others don’t. I offer it when it’s useful, not because I feel it’s required.
But movement has always been my home ground. I love working with people in their daily activities. I’ve taught in parks with joggers and cyclists, with dog walkers and barefoot walkers. I’ve worked with people brushing their teeth, going to the toilet, kissing. Yes, kissing. Swimming and rock climbing. Every one of these moments is a tiny adventure in noticing, pausing, saying no to the unconscious habit and offering a new possibility of coordination. Something kinder. Something more sustainable. Something easier.
In the early years, though, I was terrified of doing it wrong. For the first decade of my teaching life, I felt as if the Alexander Police were standing behind me, checking whether I could quote chapter and verse from FM’s books. Book learning has never been my preferred way. What I love about this work is that it’s kinaesthetic. It’s movement. It’s sensory. It’s a relationship between thought, touch, wisdom and action.
I realised long ago that I never knew Alexander himself, so how could I claim to teach “his” way? And I will never know what my hands feel like to someone else. All I can do is share what I know, in my way, with the person in front of me, and collaborate with what they’re interested in. And what is ready to emerge.
Over time, something else became clear: the emotional connection and relationship matters to me. Not therapy. Not fixing. Not offering solutions to their gardening or their children or their work. Just finding ways to say “I hear you” without stepping outside the boundaries of the work. That’s where Nonviolent Communication entered my life, and later Resonant Healing Language. After many years of study with the founder Sarah Peyton, I became a RHL practitioner in 2024. I can’t help but let some of that relational language into my hands‑on sessions. It’s part of how I listen and relate now.
And since 2019, I’ve done 3 years of training in Family and Systemic Constellations. This work has given me a wider lens, a way of seeing the systems people belong to and how those systems shape their movement, their breath, their choices. Our brain is a system, our body is a system.
So far I haven’t blended my modalities into one new therapy. It’s more that each approach sits quietly in me like a 3-legged stool. They are always in the background, informing how I see, how I listen, how I respond.
So do I teach “The Alexander Technique” or “The Lucy Ascham Technique”? I don’t think it’s either or perhaps it is both. I teach from Alexander’s principles, I love anatomy, the facts, but through my own nervous system, my own history, my own hands, my own way of perceiving and sharing. The work is recognisably Alexander, but it carries my unique fingerprints.
My way of working has changed because I have changed. I am less afraid of doing it wrong. I am less attached to form. I am more interested in what is actually happening in front of me. I am more willing to follow the thread of a person’s curiosity, their trauma history, even if it leads somewhere unexpected. Especially if it leads somewhere new for them.
The technique has become less of a method and more of a relationship. Less of a structure and more of a conversation. Less about positions and more about possibilities.
And that, I think, is the real evolution. Not inventing something new, but allowing the work to move through me in a way that is honest, alive and uniquely mine. So that you can be more authentic, uniquely you and more alive.