Why I’m an ITM teacher

by Diana

I have a confession to make: I was never interested in the Alexander Technique. So how did I end up as an Alexander Technique teacher?

Firstly let’s address one of the difficulties about writing about this topic: Too Many Abbreviations. 

• “Alexander Technique” is quite a mouthful, so it is often abbreviated to AT. 
• There are four certifying organisations who train Alexander Technique teachers in the UK (that’s United Kingdom), and each has its own abbreviation:
  • I will mostly talk about my own organisation, the ITM (Interactive Teaching Method).
  • In the AT world we also have STAT (the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique), ATI (Alexander Technique International), and PAAT (the Professional Association of Alexander Teachers).

I hadn’t had any direct experience of Alexander Technique before I went to an ITM summer workshop. All my experience was second hand: my mum, my brother, and my husband had all had lessons and would tell me about their experiences, and I could see the changes they were experiencing with their various difficulties (two cases of RSI – repetitive strain injury – and one of very distorted posture.)

I was glad that my loved ones had found something that was helping them with their issues, and was interested to hear about their lessons, but that was it. I had no personal interest as I had no particular problems that I thought AT might help with. 

It was my brother who really changed things. I could see that he had made remarkable progress in getting over his RSI with his STAT teacher. And then he went to an ITM summer workshop (four years before I did), and developed what I can only describe as an effervescent enthusiasm for the work. 

I still didn’t get it. I didn’t have any physical issues. I wasn’t much interested in the idea of a ‘correct’ way of standing or sitting in a chair. My concept of Alexander’s work was narrow, confined to addressing physical ailments and promoting good posture and movement. It seemed effective, based on my relatives’ experiences. But it didn’t seem interesting.

Suffice to say, after four years I agreed to attend the ITM summer workshop. It was nothing short of a revelation. What I saw was no dry process of teaching people to sit ‘properly’. It was a life-affirming exploration of our ideas and beliefs, particularly our beliefs about ourselves and how they can hold us back by the creation of mental models that restrict us to something less than our full potential.

I spent five days in the company of people who day by day, hour by hour, lesson by lesson, were letting go of unhelpful ideas, were becoming more fully themselves, were becoming more flexible, more energised and even looking younger.

But what really grabbed me was the intellectual challenge. In the ITM we say Alexander’s work is about thinking. We start with a simple teaching definition: 

The Alexander Technique is the study of thinking in relation to movement.

As a student of AT, you engage in a process of reasoning. You ask yourself questions: Where do I want to get to? What is the most efficient way to get from where I am now to where I want to be? Do I have the mental discipline to put my reasoned plan into action?

As ITM teachers, we are agnostic about your goals. Maybe they’re as small as wanting to get more easily out of a chair. Maybe they’re as complex as wanting to perform a dance sequence. Maybe they’re as big as wanting an ambitious new career. Maybe they’re as challenging as performing for the first time without stage fright. And of course, what counts as small, big, complex or challenging varies with each and every student.

For us teachers, the clue is in the name ITM – Interactive Teaching Method. We design an interaction that will help you untangle or discard the behaviour, the movement, or the idea that is getting in the way of you reaching your goal.

And what is different about ITM/AT from any other reasoning process? 

We put it into practice. It is embodied reasoning. That’s why we teach not only with words and ideas and questions, but with hands. It’s why we ask you to pick an activity, to think through how best to carry it out, and then guide you through the process of putting your reasoning into practice to achieve such varied outcomes as a better tennis forehand, a clearer singing voice, a more comfortable use of a laptop, or an easier way to get out of a chair.

Being an Alexander Technique teacher is an endlessly fascinating job. It involves thinking through why we do the things we do. Why this student in front of us does the things they do. It involves addressing the stark reality that when faced with a conflict between a belief and a fact, almost all of us choose the belief. It is a study in how human beings change their mind, and change their behaviour, and how we can facilitate this. And it involves the joy that a student experiences when they break through a barrier that has been holding them back.

I have been qualified as an ITM teacher for almost seven years now, and as a job it holds every bit as much excitement now as it did on the day of my final exam. It has never become routine. No student, and no lesson is ever routine. As a teacher you are thinking and reasoning in the moment, and guiding the way for your student to join you in the reasoning process. 

I heard the actor, Peter Capaldi, on the radio the other day. He talked of being sent to an AT teacher early in his career, and remembers that teacher simply telling him that he was wrong. It was a series of experiences that emphasised to the young actor that he didn’t fit in. He had the wrong background, the wrong accent, and now the wrong ‘posture’. We can’t know what was said during that lesson. But we do know that the impression that young Peter Capaldi was left with was one of being wrong. 

When I contrast that with the experiences of ITM lessons: where you can explore whatever activity you’re interested in, where we will work with you to achieve what you want, where we will make suggestions and interventions to make your activity easier, these experiences are worlds apart. I can only hope that in the future that more new students experience the thrill of pushing past self-imposed limits, of the freedom that brings to be themselves, in whatever way matters to them.