Hi everyone!
There are now 450 of you, so hello and a warm welcome to all the new subscribers. Expanding Awareness is where I write about all things Alexander Technique.
If you're interested in my writing on broader topics, with a particular 'working in public' focus, you can subscribe to my other newsletter, Thinking Out Loud. I recently sent out No. 27, which dovetails nicely with this edition of Expanding Awareness.
With that, on with the show! In this edition of Expanding Awareness, I write about:
The online Alexander Technique course I've decided to make
The idea of a 'first lesson' in Alexander Technique, and
The benefits of learning how to expand your awareness (since I've got to start working on my sales pitch...)
How I’ll be pricing and building the course
I'm making an online course!
I find myself in an odd place, a place I didn't expect to be. It started with an ever-growing Twitter thread, which led to this newsletter, which let to me running a couple of dozen introductory Alexander Technique Zoom calls with people from the Internets.
I put out a form on Twitter for people to sign up, because I thought that would be sufficiently transient to not overwhelm me while still getting getting a manageable volume of interest. Still, after about 25 calls and 15 more in the diary, there remain dozens of people on the waiting list.
This experiment has shown me is that there is demand for me to teach something that has exceeded my capacity to teach it on a 1:1 basis. Hence, it's time for a course — something that I can build once, though with continuous development, and that many people (perhaps you! 👋) can explore at their leisure.
The calls have been extremely helpful in highlighting how this might be done. While they've all been conversational, they have largely followed a similar pattern, which you might almost call a 'course outline'. I've long believed that teaching people Alexander Technique is as much a question of "the right concepts, introduced in the right way, in the right order".
So far the call structure has looked something like this:
Set the scene. What is Alexander Technique and how is it usually taught?
Translating it into the online context. If there's no touch element, how can we observe and play with the same effects?
Experiencing expanded awareness. What games and experiments can we run to show you that this other way of being exists? What does this state represent?
Hijacking the expanding awareness. A series of little games to demonstrate how easy it is for your expanded state to be collapsed — what do we learn about how your mind works, subjectively?
Regaining conscious control. How can you notice that hijack and choose not to respond to the thing that's hijacking you? This is the skill of inhibition (screenshot from my Roam Research database):
How this applies to life in practice. Since I'm a coach this is usually where I poke around for real-life examples, since Alexander Technique doesn't really contain any content in itself — it's something that is applied in activity.
What about posture? What is the relationship between spatial awareness and body functioning? How can we activate what Alexander called the 'primary control' and explore the use of 'direction' (another bit of AT jargon)?
A key role of the teacher is to notice where the student thinks themselves into traps. Fortunately, I've noticed that these traps seem pretty consistent, which suggests that, in the context of a course, I can make a list of them and make targeted content to anticipate and defuse them, all in a way that's focused on giving the student the skills to achieve these things for themselves.
The absence of the real-time noticing and back-and-forth iteration will be an interesting challenge, but I feel like that just gives me more motivation to consider all the ways that the student may respond to what I'm teaching, and create material to guide them through that appropriately.
Essentially, what I'm talking about here is an online version of a 'first lesson', or perhaps first couple of lessons…
The importance (and terror) of the first lesson
During my teacher training (at the South Bank Alexander Technique Centre, operated by Peter Nobes) we would have a guest teacher every month. This has been intensely valuable, because it means that all of us trainees have had access to a multiplicity of approaches and ways of thinking about the Alexander Technique.
It was very common for someone in the training cohort to ask the guest teacher to 'demonstrate a first lesson', i.e. how do you teach a totally new person who's never experienced Alexander Technique before? Bear in mind this is because us trainees largely (though fortunately not exclusively) worked on each other.
Why is this so important that we'd ask most guest teachers to demonstrate it? Surely conveying the basics is easy, and the skill is required as things get more advanced?
No! Not even a little bit.
Advanced stuff with an experienced student is so much easier and more comfortable for both teacher and student, because everyone already knows the lay of the land. The 'terror' comes from the actually quite rational thought of "what if they don't get it? They'll look at me like I'm crazy and/or inept!"
Understanding why that is so is crucial to the success of my online course.
The first lesson requires that the new student 'gets it'. That there is this other way of being, of experiencing themselves and the world, and until that thing has been 'got', nothing will work. Some teachers have well-rehearsed first lessons that they've developed over years, because these routines work most of the time. I suspect that the best teachers use a routine as a basis, but are very willing to deviate (play) to accommodate the specific context of the new student.
The challenge of the first lesson is akin to showing someone who is colour blind what red is like, or to show a two-dimensional creature that 'up' exists (this one is actually pretty close to what it's like, subjectively). This is also, of course, the age old challenge involved in most contemplative practices — "There's this thing you're not seeing, just look and you will see!".
The advantage that in-person lessons have is that this new way of being, which corresponds to a subjective experience of expanded awareness, can usually be brought about through touch, thanks to the fact that we are a single 'psychophysical' system (not purely mental, not purely physical).
This means that an online course — which is likely to be targeting brand new people — needs to perform this same feat, only with the extra challenge of not having access to touch. My most important job is to show you that there's a there there, and only then can we start to explore what there is like.
Fortunately, I'm increasingly convinced that this is not only possible, but has a number of advantages that in-person lessons cannot provide, or perhaps simply do not, provide.
What problems does Alexander Technique solve?
Urgh.
Have you ever seen the purported benefits of meditation? It always looks like someone's trying to sell you snake oil. Find inner peace, be happier, improve your digestion, live longer, sleep better and clear up your psoriasis and irritable bowl syndrome, all from sitting on a cushion!
The benefits of Alexander Technique can seem a bit like that. I suspect this is why many teachers go down the posture route for their marketing. It's much easier to point to the couple of medical trials that says that Alexander Technique helps with back pain, and then work with people who have back pain.
In the online context, working with the body is, obviously, more difficult (though not out of reach). There are plenty of things that I wouldn't even dream of recreating online just yet though, so this Alexander Technique course will focus more on the psycho part of psychophysical. Perhaps as I learn more and become better at this, though, we can dig into that stuff too.
So why should people care about Alexander Technique? What is the magical combination of words that would get people to nod their heads, think yes, I have that problem, and huzzah I have stumbled upon the solution, now...
Since this news letter is already quite long, I'll just provide three benefits for now.
Developing a renewed capacity for choice and agency
As creatures of habit, it's our conditioned and unconscious responses that determine a large part of our lives. Alexander Technique gives us a toolkit to notice how we might habitually respond, then choose not to do that, and allow for a new, conscious choice in the space beyond that non-responding.
Accessing ease and play in all areas of life
Modern life has trained us to believe that life should be effortful and strained, that to achieve our goals we need to 'crush it' and shove ourselves around. Instead, Alexander Technique provides a way to be fully engaged in any activity in a way that seems light and easy, while often allowing for better outcomes than if we'd applied 'force'.
Improved performance in and greater enjoyment of previously stressful activities
Various aspects of my life have improved since I trained in Alexander Technique:
I experience significantly less, or no, social anxiety.
I can do public speaking engagements in front of large audiences and have fun doing so.
I am much more assertive and can have difficult conversations more easily such that I am less 'shoved around' by other people.
This is a potentially long list, but you get the idea.
I plan to develop a 'master list' of benefits pretty comprehensively such that I can help potential students understand why taking the course and studying Alexander Technique could help them.
Course pricing, creation process and timelines
I'm a huge proponent of 'building in public' and getting as much real feedback as I can, co-creating material like this as far as possible.
Getting student feedback on the course as it grows will be crucial to help me understand what works and what doesn't, so that I can improve it in real time. Feedback will also show which areas are particularly useful so I can focus my attention on growing the course over time.
Ultimately I would like to develop a pretty comprehensive "learn Alexander Technique online" course. That end goal will be a big job, and one I'm not ready for yet. Re-creating the structure of my intro calls, however, is within reach and something I can do over the next couple of months.
All of the above means the following strategy.
First, I'll create a beta version of the 'intro call' course and open it up to a limited number of people at an early-bird launch price, say 50 spaces at $50 each.
Anyone who joins the course at any price point will have unlimited access to future developments. I'll probably also create some kind of discussion space that everyone will have access to, and keeping the numbers low at first will help create a high quality community.
Then, I'll continuously refine and expand the course content over time, adding new material and improving my teaching methods. At various points in this development process I will i) open up more spaces and ii) step up the price incrementally as the value of the course increases.
In my mind I imagine the final, fully-fledged course costing something in the order of 'a couple of in person Alexander Technique lessons', so maybe $150 - $200 total, but by the time I get to the $200 version of the course I would expect the material to be pretty sophisticated and well tested. Eventually I would offer an uncapped number of spaces.
Why do it like this? Well, honestly I don't want to have multiple Alexander Technique courses for sale with different types of content. I want one good one, though perhaps with tiered pricing based on people's needs.
Anyway that's it for this edition! I'll probably announce the launch of the course sometime in September (the $50 version for 50 people) and it will be to this newsletter, so stay tuned!
Thanks for reading this far! If anything here resonated with you then please 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 building in public, 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.