To blog or not to blog?

Before you dive enthusiastically into my blogs, I need to warn you that they aren’t really “blogs” at all.

For a very long time I have believed, and said to anyone who would listen, that “blogging” about Alexander Technique is impossible.

It seems to me that his ideas form such a complex, interconnected, self-supporting, holistic, constantly evolving system of left-field concepts that a short, easily accessible explanation isn’t likely to help you.

Don’t get me wrong, after 18 years teaching and studying Alexander’s work, I have learned a tremendous amount of valuable information and benefited both mentally and physically through this process, and I can’t wait to share it with you. 

My problem is the nature of the “blog”. As I understand it, the point of a blog is to take a subject within your field and, without using too many words, write something intelligent and informative about it from your (supposedly expert) perspective, and then, very importantly, to give away some of the goods. 

In other words, you give your readers a recipe, an exercise, a chapter from your new book, some practical advice, or maybe a small tester pot of your face cream if they subscribe.

People tend to come to a blog for your top tips rather than your profound wisdom.

But in Alexander’s work there are no exercises, there are no tips or tricks, and there is no cream. 

Definitely no cream. 

I can’t teach you Alexander Technique by writing words at you. I have to be able to analyse your movement behaviours and thought processes before even beginning to design a lesson. And a brief description of one aspect of the work – inhibition, for example – is of very little use to you in isolation.

On the other hand, this is the age of the blog. If you want to communicate important ideas to people, you have to be in the game. So, what to do?

The blog that isn’t

What we have here, then, is a kind of experiment. I’m going to call these things “articles”, not “blogs” (maybe they’re blarticles). I’ve decided to simply write about Alexander and his amazing work. I’m going to throw his ideas out there, just as he did, and see who catches them.

I can’t teach you from the comfort of my keyboard, but I can share with you the things that excite me about Alexander’s work.

I can try to bust some of the myths about the human condition that he himself busted, but which, for whatever reason, still persist today.

I can share some of the revolutionary ideas that he presented and, with luck and a tail-wind, give you a sense of the extraordinary process that he created.

I hope you will join me on the journey. I hope it will be fun. I hope it will mess with your head, just a little.

The blogs

(The views expressed in these posts are entirely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of any particular organisation or professional body)