Shabbat Evening with Yehuda: the Alexander Technique

Saturday, 11 December 2010
Netanya, Israel
with Yehuda Kuperman

Last night we had guests for Shabbat dinner. Yehuda's daughter Shira, a medical school "widow", her four year old daughter Abigail and 14 month old son Jonathan, and Judith. Judith is a theater person and counselor, roughly contemporary with me and Yehuda. After dinner he explained to Judith what it is that is different in his approach to the Alexander Technique. I took notes, my fingers ablaze with typing every word. On this the seventh day in Israel, my dazed confusion is starting now to clear, like morning fog over this eastern Mediterranean sea that is now frothy with the first real storm of winter.
What is different about Yehuda's work is two things. The nature of the teacher-pupil relationship, and the mode of the awake person's relationship to the world all around. And a third: the nature of the touch itself.
Where Yehuda was taught in McDonald's training course and practiced himself for twenty years that the teacher is to take the pupil "up", releasing him from his terrible habits of stiffening and pulling himself down, this new relationship he discovered with so much more joy is one of soaring reverence for the pupil. It is much less "doing" to the pupil. He comes to the pupil to honor her exactly where she is already. He comes without an agenda, his touch is reverently dispassionate, like the touch of the water in the sea all around the fish. Something deep in the pupil recognizes the utter novelty of this encounter and in response, she gives herself into his hands. Similarly, the teacher does not practice while militaristically commanding himself to "take the back back! Free the neck! Take the head forward and up! Lengthen the back and widen it!" None of that. Instead he surrenders himself gratefully to the support of Nature all around, appreciates the pupil before him just as she is, and places hands on her not to change her, but to join with her. The result, of course, is an especially strong and healing Alexander Technque lesson and a grateful, appreciative teacher.

I am helping Yehuda to translate his story about giving an Alexander Technique lesson to a London Bobby in the middle of the night when he was stopped for running a red light in 1974. It is painstaking work, a delicious story, and I am deeply pleased to be of help to him in this way. Perhaps he will submit it to the AmSAT news, the professional journal for the American Alexander teachers.
And from all the copious notes of his poetic words about the technique, I hope we will produce an article or a little book that will serve to share his special vision with the English speaking world.
I'll be back Tuesday morning, no doubt jet-lagged, but full-up and happy.
Hugs, Ellen