Hello friends,
Welcome to the launch of Expanding Awareness!
First of all, I am thrilled that you’re here. When I put up a hastily-made Google Form to collect email addresses a couple of weeks ago, I had no idea that around 150 people would sign up. I’m grateful and excited to see where this will go – thank you for coming with me on this journey.
This is the very first edition, so consider it context setting and introductions. I cover:
An introduction to who I am and my perspective on Alexander Technique
My journey into Alexander Technique and training as a teacher
The scope and ambition for this newsletter
And some actual content: a brief video on how to fall asleep with non-doing
Introducing myself
Hello! My name is Michael Ashcroft and I’m a teacher of the Alexander Technique (AT), certified by Alexander Technique International. I went through three years of part-time teacher training at the South Bank Alexander Technique Centre in London before graduating in 2017.
I’m a bit different from most AT teachers though, for two reasons:
I don’t teach Alexander Technique as a job.
Surprise! Most AT teachers go through a standard four day per week training that prevents them from doing anything else. I was fortunate to work directly next to one of the few AT schools on the planet where part-time training was the norm.
Because of this, I never quit my job and, to be honest, I never would have. My career is actually in low carbon energy innovation: at time of publication I work as a Manager at KPMG and I’m a co-founder and Non-Executive Director of the Carbon Removal Centre.
I help out at the school as often as I can, working with newbies curious about what AT is and supporting trainees on their own journeys to becoming teachers. While I don’t see myself becoming a full time AT teacher, at least not the way it’s done conventionally, I am very passionate about the subject, consider it largely under-examined, and think there’s huge potential to share it more broadly and more accessibly.
The training I received was as unconventional as it was outstanding.
If you Google Alexander Technique then the second result, at least in the UK, is from the NHS and says:
The Alexander technique teaches improved posture and movement, which is believed to help reduce and prevent problems caused by unhelpful habits. - NHS
To which I say… kind of? It’s not wrong, it just feels woefully incomplete, while also missing the point. Exploring why I dislike this definition, and what it really is about, is what this whole newsletter is for.
Fortunately, my own teacher had a different approach, one that resonated with me deeply. It’s about mindfulness, present moment awareness, non-doing, choice, human connection, unlearning and being fully alive. Or as I ranted on Twitter:
And just to be really clear – Alexander Technique can and does improve your posture. Really, it does! And in normal lessons we work primarily through touch. My relationship with my body has totally transformed through this work.
But improvements in posture and body mechanics are just one of many wonderful effects of something so much more profound: the ability not to respond to stimuli in a habitual way, the ability to have clear intentions and then to trust that your system can coordinate itself to achieve them. You learn not to interfere with the natural way of things and step fully into yourself.
And here I could start talking about Daoism and Zen, but I’ll leave all that for another time. Suffice it to say, the training I had was not in posture training – it was in awareness, choice and being training – but my posture improved along the way.
How I found Alexander Technique and why I trained as a teacher
Despite all that, like most people I actually came to AT because of my body. From the age of 11 I have had extremely bad knees. They dislocate very easily, and after twenty years of recurrent dislocations, I now have fairly advanced arthritis in both knees and my medial patellofemoral ligaments are shredded. I expect I’ll need some kind of partial knee replacements decades before people would otherwise need them.
Obviously this sucks. It hasn’t yet caused any major or chronic lifestyle issues given that I’m young (I’m 32), but I have always been concerned about the long term impacts this problem would have. It was a combination of a patch of bad knee anxiety in my mid 20s and the coincidence of having an Alexander Technique school next to my office that led me to see if it could help me protect my knees.
I didn’t really know what to expect, but whatever I wanted, I got much more than I bargained for. I left my second session of 40 minutes feeling like I had been given the most excellent of drugs. I was high. I floated back to my office in a state unlike anything I had ever experienced. The world seemed more real. Colours were brighter, textures were clearer, moving felt effortless and I was absolutely blissed out. It had an almost spiritual quality to it, as if I had been meditating for days. My life felt special and I was overwhelmed with gratitude and love.
By the way, does this sound like just “improved posture and movement” to you?
This bafflingly wonderful experience lasted a few hours and then faded. And I realised I had absolutely no idea how to bring it about again. No matter what I tried, I felt like my old self. I went back for another lesson, and within five minutes my teacher took me back there again, just by moving my head very subtly, playing catch with me and pointing out the present moment whenever I got lost in my head.
Whatever this thing was it was obvious that I had to go deeper. After about a dozen 1:1 lessons I joined the teacher training, partly because it was cheaper per hour, and partly because part of me knew I would finish it.
For the first few months I just found it confusing and frustrating. I didn’t know why I kept going back, except that I had a strong ‘felt sense’ that it was important that I did. I’m glad that I trusted that voice and have got to know it much better ever since.
Over the course of the three years of teacher training, and subsequently, I’ve gone through the following process:
Learn how to apply this thing to myself
Learn how to teach it to others (in person)
Learn how to teach others (in person) to teach others (in person).
And now, to step 4: learn how to teach all this online and share it with you.
What Expanding Awareness is about
I have apparently become known on Twitter as the Alexander Technique / non-doing guy. This was never my intention, but here we are.
The content I’m putting out there seems to be resonating with people – enough to be engaging with my tweets, enough for there to be 150 of you here, and enough for 50 people to attend a Zoom workshop that I hosted with Collin Morris last week and report that it was valuable.
The problem has become that people are increasingly asking me “where can I learn more?” and I struggle to give a good answer. It’s well-established that AT is hard to describe and suffers from a severe marketing problem, and even then the brand of AT that I’m about is not really the mainstream. There just isn’t a good on-ramp out there, so I’ve been leaning on this thread of threads on Twitter.
I want to be the on-ramp for the online world. We live in an age of Zoom workshops, Teachable courses, private Discord channels and weird/wholesome/meta Twitter communities, and it’s high time to bring Alexander Technique kicking and/or screaming (effortlessly) into the 21st century.
Alexander Technique is hard to describe or sum up in a few words because it deals with the nature of human experience. While I can use the jargon and explain the principles to you, it won’t land properly – you won’t get it.
My task is to go deep into the Alexander Technique, dissect its principles and rebuild them in a way that can communicated clearly to you. That’s what Expanding Awareness is about: a ‘working with the garage door up’ approach to the journey to create that viable, accessible and shareable on-ramp.
I’ll be playing with different ways of presenting the key ideas, connecting to other relevant disciplines, and encouraging you to let me know what lands with you so I know what works.
How to fall asleep: stop doing awake
I’ve recently figured how to fall asleep within minutes of choosing to and decided to make a video on the subject. I think video is going to be a really helpful way to communicate Alexander Technique and I want to get more comfortable on camera.
In short: falling asleep is not something you can do, and the more you try to fall asleep, the more awake you find yourself. Instead, falling asleep requires the absence of ‘doing awake’.
The more you notice this, the more you’ll be able to unhook from the processes that interfere with sleep. Something other than ‘you’ knows how to fall asleep – your job is to trust it and stay out of the way.
Thanks for reading this far! If anything here resonated with you then please feel free to hit reply and let me know.
By the way, I also write articles on my website and run another newsletter called Thinking Out Loud. That’s where I write about stuff like Total Work, solarpunk, carbon removal, sense-making, building communities, creating positive narratives for the future, identity and various other things. I invite you to check them out. (Look at me, mum, I’m cross-promoting!)
P.S. If you were forwarded this letter then you can subscribe to receive the next issues.