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The
Use and Art of the Teacher’s Hands
By Missy Vineyard
(Reprinted and
adapted from “NASTAT News,” Issue #24 Winter, 1994)
Each time I
watch the short film of Alexander teaching I find it difficult
to listen to the narrator. My full attention is drawn to
watching Alexander and, especially, his hands. I watch closely
hoping to unravel the mystery of his skill. He stands quietly
by the pupil. His hands move flowingly over the student’s
neck, head, and upper back. They come onto the student, they
expand and spread; they seem huge. He contacts the student
with his entire hand, a hand that feels simultaneously firm
yet light. He places one hand on the student’s shoulders,
another on top of his head; there is no sign of shortening in
his fingers or anywhere in his body only expansion. He moves
the student slightly forward in the chair and pauses. The
student seems in a single brief moment to lengthen an inch,
and then rises up out of the chair. There is nothing to warn
us this is about to happen and no apparent effort takes place
in the student or in Alexander himself.
Shortly after I
completed my own teacher training in New York, Walter and
Dilys Carrington came to New York to teach at the school and
give private lessons. I volunteered to handle the scheduling
in exchange for some lessons with Walter. The memory of those
lessons is still vivid in my mind almost three decades later.
I found my attention continually drawn to Walter’s hands. We
talked, a light and breezy sort of conversation, but all the
while at center stage were Walter’s hands drawing me outward
like magnets. His hands were making me bigger, spreading me
like clay yet he didn’t seem to be “doing” anything to make
this happen. He never grabbed me or pulled me yet I found
myself propelled up out of the chair, back down into the
chair, and then leaning forward or backward, again and again.
All the while his hands remained soft but strong, like large,
expanding feet walking on my back rather than hands that are
intended for grasping and holding. The thought that filled my
mind at the time was a sort of stunned, “Oh, I had no idea.”
Then I remember thinking, “How do I get my hands to be like
that?”
That early
experience with Walter became for me the epitomy of what I
think of as the “high art” of the practice of the Alexander
Technique. That is to say, his hands were an unforgettable
demonstration of the skill to which all teachers aspire—the
ability to use one’s hands to shape, mould, guide a student as
he moves in and out of the chair until he gradually becomes
untangled, ironed out, freed to expand--lighter than ever
before and newly mobile. This is what the Alexander Technique
experience is, so fundamentally and profoundly, all about. It
is what separates the skilled Alexander teacher from everyone
and everything else. What is spoken through the teacher’s
hands at a given moment is the sum of what that teacher has
learned and embodied of Alexander’s ideas and principles up to
that point in time, and is the most direct and accurate means
of communicating those ideas to the student. I have spent my
years as a teacher learning to achieve this in my own teaching
and, as a teacher trainer, teaching others to achieve it.
Over the years
since those early lessons with Walter I’ve thought a great
deal about the use of the teacher’s hands, particularly
because of the many dead-ends I’ve traveled in trying to learn
to use my hands well, and the experiences I’ve had beneath
other teacher’s hands. First I’d like to describe some of the
forms of ‘misuse’ of the Alexander teacher’s hands that I’ve
observed at various times in myself or in others.
The ends
justify the means. Frankly, the teacher end-gains. The
teacher has a clear idea of where he wants the student to go
but doesn’t wait—either because of impatience or lack of
skill—for the student to inhibit and direct. Or perhaps the
teacher concludes that if the student doesn’t know how to do
these skills, it’s better to him some sort of experience even
if it’s by pulling. Unfortunately, the teacher inevitably
tightens in himself somewhere and the student tightens in
response. This approach cannot teach the student inhibition.
And the teacher never learns the power of non-doing in his
hands because he doesn’t give it a chance.
Analyzing
misuse. The teacher’s focus is on feeling, or observing,
the student’s misuse. Usually this is accompanied by the
teacher’s explanations and descriptions—in great anatomical
detail--about this misuse. This can be informative but it
teaches the student to analyze his misuse and to try to feel
it, rather than learning to direct. It also keeps the teacher
from attending, first of all, to her own use.
Trying too
hard. The teacher, sometimes on a very subtle level, tries
to do in her own body what she wants the student do in his
body. However, rather than lengthening the teacher is actually
stiffening in order to lengthen. This is a form of “doing” in
the musculature not inhibiting. It often stems from the
teacher’s excessive desire to help the student but it tires
the teacher quickly and may cause her to dread her students.
Crisis of
belief. Less experienced teachers or poorly trained
teachers often don’t have a lot of confidence in their ability
to know when they are inhibiting and directing. They also
aren’t clear about the primary control, what should be
happening in themselves, how to get it, and when they do or
don’t have it operating. As a result they doubt the basic
tenet that what they’re doing in the use of themselves affects
their student. Such teachers sometimes study other disciplines
and add them to their teaching in an effort to fill the gaps
in their skills. They typically use a very light touch,
primarily to give the student a kinesthetic sense of a given
body part. This is useful and informative up to a point but
the teacher is avoiding developing, or is unskilled enough to
know how to develop, her own primary control and how to impart
this through the hands.
Seduction.
The teacher uses the hands to communicate the teacher’s
emotional needs, or to subtly elicit an emotional response in
the student that heightens the student’s dependency on the
teacher. This is not the technique and is an abuse of the
student.
Magic hands.
As far as I can tell, some teachers are gifted in the use of
their hands. However, such teachers often have no idea how
they do what they do and so cannot teach others to use their
hands well. Some teachers like to create a mystique about the
hands and speak of them as something quasi-mystical. They may
be more absorbed with enhancing their own charisma than with
the student’s learning.
If all of this
is a misuse of the teacher’s hands, then what do we mean by
good use? In short, good use of the hands occurs when the
teacher is effectively organizing his head, neck and back to
elicit and intensify the postural reflexes throughout his
entire body. To put it another way, it is when the teacher has
his primary control working. How does that happen? Over the
years I have heard teachers saying that they don’t bother with
directing anymore, that inhibiting is everything from a subtle
form of “doing,” to something bordering on the mystical, and
that they have “gone beyond” Alexander’s teaching methods. But
I become more certain every year that Alexander was completely
correct. The best way to develop the primary control is to
learn to inhibit and direct effectively.
Now we get to
the heart of the problem. Teachers may engage in heated
debates about the correct way to stand or sit or walk, but
there is little discussion on the correct way to inhibit and
direct. To simply abandon these skills is no solution; neither
is asking the student to mindlessly repeat to himself to
“leave himself alone, free his neck, and let his head go
forward and up, etc.” This is at best a hit-or-miss approach.
Just as all students do not move alike, all students do not
think alike. The person who gets stiffer as he directs, or
claims that directing doesn’t do anything for him, has not
learned to direct. The person who cannot let go of his arm or
leg and allow the teacher to take the weight and move it,
unassisted, has not learned to inhibit. There are as many
pitfalls to learning to inhibit and direct as there are to
learning to use the hands well.
My principal
concern as a training director is to teach trainees to inhibit
and direct effectively, and to maintain this as they put their
hands on the student. I believe it is the essential job of the
training director to give meticulous feedback to the trainee
so that he learns to know when he is inhibiting and directing
and when he isn’t—and what to do about it. In this brief
article I haven’t space to elaborate more on how I teach these
skills but I’d like to emphasize that inhibiting and directing
are the all-important first steps that lay the groundwork for
developing the trainee’s accuracy of thought, acuity of
perception, and ability to perceive the student’s patterns of
misuse.
I do not ask
trainees in their first semester to put their hands on
students. This is an emotionally loaded situation and new
trainees often find it difficult to leave themselves alone
sufficiently to think clearly when they’re starting to use
their hands. Instead, trainees are taught a series of
activities, beginning with lying in semi-supine, to help them
practice their inhibition and direction and learn to work on
themselves.
In the second
semester they begin to put their hands on the practice student
in very simple and uncomplicated ways. This begins with Dilys
Carrington’s approach to working in monkey while facing the
table, placing the hands palm down, and transferring a small
amount of body weight onto the hands. If it is done well, the
trainee experiences an expansion throughout the torso, an
improvement in respiration, and greater freedom in the legs.
Once this becomes more familiar, we go on to learning specific
moves at the table and then to beginning chair work.
In my view the
critical next phase is teaching the trainee to maintain a good
monkey—standing with the legs slightly bent, while also
handling some of the student’s weight. If this is done
correctly, by supporting the student’s weight the trainee is
able to gain even more lengthening and stretch in himself.
Trainees begin learning to do this by practicing lifting the
student’s leg or arm while the student is lying on the table.
They then practice supporting small amounts of body weight as
they move the practice student forward and backward while he
is standing or sitting to allow a small amount of weight to
transfer into the trainee’s hands. Next we practice and refine
a myriad of hands-on “moves,” but always with the fundamental
essentials in place: inhibition and direction within the
trainee to enhance his primary control; a good monkey; and
using the student’s weight, or the trainee’s own weight, to
achieve greater lengthening and freedom within the trainee.
This not only gives his muscles greater length, it also makes
his hands soften, open, and strengthen. He can then use his
hands to move the student without gripping, stiffening, or
tightening. The effect of the trainee’s hands is such that it
causes the student’s musculature to free and release without
pushing or pulling, rubbing, or manipulating. The student’s
body lengthens--simply from the trainee’s touch, and the
trainee smiles, always a smile of wonder and delight.
Now the trainee
is launched on a path that with practice, experience, and
patience will consistently recreate the effect Alexander
discovered. It is the effect I never cease to marvel at,
whether it happens in my students or myself, or as I watch the
film of Alexander teaching so many years ago.
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