This ebook, Taking Care of Yourself and Your Students: Alexander Technique Guidelines for the Music Teacher, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical. It will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to teach with great posture, ease, and comfort.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
I coined the phrase ORDERS OF ALLOWANCE. It grew out of what F. M. Alexander, the founder of the Alexander Technique, simply called ORDERS. Orders are telling your body what you want it to do. If you say out loud or in your thoughts, “My neck is free, as I teach this student”, and if you do this enough times with faith, you will establish a new habit.
Actually, as you’re about to teach, all you need to say before you start, and whenever you notice your neck has locked up as you’re teaching is, “My neck is free”.
I expanded F. M. Alexander’s orders to order(s) of allowance, because I felt that order(s) of allowance was a statement that told your body what you wanted and allowed it to teach music with ease. The word orders by itself connotes a demand, rather than a loving direction to do something.
In truth, we give our bodies orders all of the time, from loving to harsh. Let me explain. Every time you teach a music student, you have given orders of allowance to your body, if you demonstrate what you want with kind intentions. We live by orders to our bodies 24/7, but since they are sent so quickly, we don’t usually register the instantaneous intention and thought.
So, when you are teaching, the intention, thought, and the pivoting your body forward to show the music student what you want, has come and gone so quickly, that your actions seem to do themselves.
When you stop and consciously give an order of allowance, you have chosen to do something few music teachers do. Let me explain. You have truly brought to full consciousness the fact that you are always telling your body what you want from it, but like I said, you usually do it so quickly, that it seems to do itself.
In a sense it does do it to itself, because when you teach music with the movement patterns and postures you’ve always used, then whenever you teach as you’ve done thousands of times, you will do it the same way – consistently habitually good or habitually bad.
The genius behind Alexander’s order of allowance is to consciously tell your body what you want, and that what you order it to do consciously is something new and healing for the body. So, when you order your neck to release before you teach, and as you repeat this order of allowance as you’re teaching, then you are doing something very new in your music teaching technique.
You’re teaching music with a free neck, and this will, in a very short period of time, become a new established part of your teaching technique (if you remember to give this order of allowance).
Here’s why the concept of orders of allowance can be challenging for some music teachers. When you think the order of allowance, “My neck is free”, you are asking for a change in your body that is pretty invisible, except to an Alexander Technique teacher.
But, when you tell an arm to bend, it is very clear that your thought has a powerful effect. YOU BEND YOUR ARM! When you order your neck to release, you may not experience the release the first 30 or 40 times you send the order.
But, what will happen is, if have faith in the process, you will begin to experience the releases in your neck as you continue to order it to be free, as you sit or stand to teach music.
