Making a living teaching others to live NOW….

I often  ask myself why I teach the Alexander Technique – sure it can’t be to make a living only, I reflect. It must be more, because after all, it is a radical, non-mainstream, underfunded, under-advertised, unknown and a largely unsung area of understanding for most of the population. I’m not mad (probably) or willingly contrary, so there must be another good reason, I assume.

Well, the truth is that I do teach its principles because it is important to do so. Because it feeds into much of what I think has value and because it has helped me enormously in a number of areas. Those of us who teach for a living of any kind will recognize this particular reasoning.

However, recently I have been assailed by doubts as to the sensible nature of my campaign to re-educate and to sing the praises of this most important self- educational tool. The difficulty arises because many of our most needy, potential pupils are simply too bound up in the relentless race to ‘get on’ or  to have a ‘good time’ that the call to come for  lessons: the stimulus to a more balanced self and life  is simply not strong enough.

Or, should I say that the stimulus to make more money (at the expense of many other less definable goals), to enjoy the future is the main overriding interest of many. Again, picking up on the practical financial aspects of life, it is of course a  consideration when deciding to take up of Alexander technique teaching.

One of the things that concerns me and affects me in my own battle with habitual thinking is the seeming ease with which teachers are happy to turn the technique into a business using the same management lexicon that has engulfed-no sabotaged much of contemporary culture. Nowhere, it seems has been spared when it comes to the ‘bottom line’ and ‘outcomes’ mentality. I’d suspect that fitting in or not with this business ‘interest’ provides the biggest stimulus for many AT teachers in their own quest for psycho-physical harmony!

With price indices on various fronts increasing with alarming speed, including those for the basics of life, food and fuel, it seems doubly difficult to rationalize the teaching of a technique aimed at  growth of the self. After all, it doesn’t pay does it? Well, not in the way we might recognize….

However, the main means I use – embody – to assuage my anxiety in this regard and to keep my feet on the ground is simply this: to know that when I fail to inhibit this financial anxiety and fall in with a general siege mentality I do not enjoy myself. It’s a reasoned response to this particular stimulus rather than a burying of the head. After all, I do make a living teaching this work along with another less-than-highly regarded vocation – that of professional classical music.

Indeed, if I were to extend my anxiety and decided to do all I could to make more moolah -  then it might take me so far away from the present moment that I might not be able, when I FINALLY achieve my financial goals, to enjoy it – I would have had much practise in not being present -i.e. enjoying myself, because my whole life, or at least a seminal part of it has been devoted to a future time which is always, NOW!!

I wrote elsewhere about the necessity of inverting Maslow’s pyramid of needs so that we put self realization at the bottom and the achievement of life’s basic necessities at the top. As I now see it, if we neglect this ratio in favor of the imaginary future we will not find a life worth living (when we ‘get’  there) and will be eternally restless.

It seems to me that we can be more effective in advertising the fierce truth of this view of reality so that value becomes, in its own way a less abstract commodity than money, which is in fact a most imaginary store of value – as many of have seen recently – value bestowed by a people beset with attitudes that have not been questioned in this regard, seemingly at all.

There is still much work to do!!

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