End of an Era: Constructive Teaching Centre moves out of Lansdowne Road (First published in STATNews, January 2011)
The era of Lansdowne Road as an international focus for the Alexander Technique came to an end in December 2010 when the Constructive Teaching Centre moved out of number 18. It had been a teaching centre as well as a training course for over half a century. Here we take a brief look at how Walter and Dilys Carrington came to buy the house and set up one of the first training courses in the world – a course that has now trained hundreds of teachers. In 1955, after F.M. died and Ashley Place closed, Walter taught and ran a training course in Staflex House, Bainbridge Street. Joan and Alex Murray both had lessons there, and the teachers included Peggy Williams and John Skinner. Around 1958, the house in Lansdowne Road came up for sale. At first it seemed that Walter and Dilys would not be able to buy it, but Ursula Benn and her husband came up with a scheme that made it possible. Michael Aronson, a long-time pupil of Walter’s, acted as solicitor. Walter and Dilys were delighted, not least because they wanted to live and work at the same place. They lived in the flat at the top of the house and rented out the flat on the first floor. Tenants included the BBC TV presenter Derek Hart (best known for Tonight), and Brian Door, who went on to train and teach at the Centre. The four main rooms on the ground floor, of course, were used for training and teaching. The house also had a beautiful private garden which led into a communal garden, accessible only to residents. Initially the training course was small and included Rivka Meshoulam (now Cohen) who, with Joan Murray, had been a trainee in Charles Neal’s class. Tony Spawforth and Edward Gellatly were qualified teachers who worked in the class, as did Peggy Williams.	The front of 18 Lansdowne Road Holland Park, London
During the early 1960s Walter initiated an evening group class. In the late 1960s, when Chariclia Gounaris and Grethe Laub were on the course, a ‘little school’ was started in the basement. Both of these initiatives were relatively short-lived experiments. When Betty Rajna (later known as Betty Collins and Betty Langford) and Paul Collins were on the course, also in the late 1960s, Walter hosted summer week-end courses for musicians. By 1971, Walter and Dilys wanted to make some alterations. The flat at the top of the house was too small, and Walter’s teaching room had to double as his study. Christina Wilton became Walter’s secretary, which freed up Dilys’ time so that she could work with an architect to re-model the flat across the middle of the house. When it was ready, they made the big move from the top flat to the new, much larger flat on the first floor.
In the early 1970s there was an exponential increase in the number of students on the training course. In fact, by 1972 there was a waiting list of several years, partly because the then Greater London Council recognised the course and awarded grants for studying there. (Before that, nearly all young people worked while they trained.) The character of the training course had changed markedly from the early days. As well as housing the training course, 18 Lansdowne Road was also an extremely important centre for private lessons, with many teachers working there and hundreds of lessons being given. For the Carringtons, of course, it was also their home. Their three sons grew up there, and Dilys – with her marmalade, clematis, roses, costumes, and tapestry – lent it a feminine, homely atmosphere. Walter passed away in 2005. Dilys continued to live in the first floor flat until she too passed away in 2009. With the connection between the Carringtons and the Constructive Teaching Centre no longer there, it was time for the Centre to move on. It has found a very nice temporary home at The Porchester Centre in Bayswater. Anyone who trained, taught, or had lessons at Lansdowne Road will find this a poignant and thought-provoking time, and will have fond memories of this remarkable establishment.
	The Training Room at Lansdowne Road © Noel Kingsley, FRPS
With thanks to Alex and Joan Murray and Christina Wilton for providing background information, and to Annie Sayer and Noël Kingsley (http://www.noelkingsley.com/walter-carringtons-study.asp) for the photographs.

                                                               

Inner Voice Plays Role in Self Control
by Malcolm Williamson 
(First published in STATNews, January 2011)

Scientists at the University of Toronto Scarborough have found that talking to yourself might not be a bad thing, especially when it comes to exercising self-control. We give ourselves messages all the time with the intent of controlling ourselves – whether that is telling ourselves to keep running when we're tired, to stop eating even though we want one more slice of cake, or to control our temper. Alexa Tullett and colleagues have shown that your inner voice plays an important role in controlling impulsive behaviour.

The research team performed a series of self-control tests on participants. In one test, participants were asked to press a button if they saw a particular symbol appear on the screen. If they saw a different symbol, they were told to refrain from pushing the button. The test measured self-control because there were more 'press' than 'don't press' cues, making pressing the button an impulsive response.

They then included measures to block participants from using their inner voice while performing the test to see if it had an impact on their ability to perform. Participants were told to repeat one word over and over as they performed the test. This prevented them from talking to themselves while doing the test.

The team found that through a series of tests, participants acted more impulsively when they could not use their inner voice or talk themselves through the tasks. Michael Inzlicht explained, "Without being able to verbalise messages to themselves, they were not able to exercise the same amount of self-control as when they could talk themselves through the process."

Tullett said that it had always been known that people have internal dialogues with themselves, but until now we had not known what an important function they serve. Talking to ourselves in this inner voice actually helps us exercise self-control and prevents us from making impulsive decisions.

Now, I wonder whether the Canadian team's findings have any relevance to our understanding of the mental activity of 'giving orders' – inhibiting and directing to control our own "too quick and unthinking reaction" – known as the Alexander Technique?

I'm sure that using the inner voice – sub-vocalising – is one of the ways people learn to inhibit and direct. Nowadays, it's common to 'speak' silently to ourselves, but not so long ago it was unusual. People thought that voices in the head were those of God or our soul speaking to us – and these voices of conscience were most likely telling us what we shouldn't be doing, not what to do.

Reading silently to ourselves is an ability discovered only in the Middle Ages. The Romans only read aloud. St. Augustine in A.D. 384 gives the first account of someone reading silently to himself when he watched Ambrose of Milan (later also made a saint):

“When he read his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still."

It was not until the tenth century that this manner of reading became usual in the West. It needed the skills of Irish monks to add punctuation marks to written texts so that their meaning could be understood without speaking them aloud. From the earliest days of the first Sumerian tablets, written words were meant to be pronounced out loud. The ancient languages of the Bible – Aramaic and Hebrew – do not differentiate between the act of reading and the act of speaking. Gradually, written symbols representing vocal sounds evolved into symbols representing ideas which could remain in one's head and never be broadcast to a wider world. More and more our culture has developed the mind's ability to chatter privately to itself, as Iain McGilchrist writes in his book (2009) subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (reviewed in the September 2010 issue of Statnews). Left hemisphere over-dominance leads to less communication, social engagement, presence and connectedness. The difference between self-generated mind chatter and 'sense-informed thinking' was brought home to me some years ago by Temple Grandin in an interview for the BBC's Horizon programme. Animals are continually monitoring the here-and-now whereas we humans easily become separated from where we are – less sensorily aware – and 'live' in a virtual world of our thoughts.

The mind is a useful tool for solving a problem or learning how to do something: you talk instructions though to yourself silently or out loud. Think of how you first learned to drive a car and rehearsed the sequence, "Mirror, signal, handbrake". But with practice, it becomes routine (habitual) and then you only have to decide to set off and the sequence is played out automatically. It's similar when learning the Alexander Technique. As a way of working on yourself it is useful to vocalise or to sub-vocalise the directions – ideally both ways, as speaking directions out loud adds qualities to merely running through them in your head. Giving time to speak out the words allows you to relish the resonance and rhythm of the sounds. Try reading aloud from one of Alexander's books and discover how his sentences rise and cadence with the breath, and readily reveal their meaning.

Eventually, though, as Patrick Macdonald (1989) points out, directing becomes something else (p82). That's why it's important, when you're learning to give directions, that you say them in the right order. When all that's entailed in primary control – 'going up' – has become our primary habit, as Dewey called it, then all we have to remember is to 'go up' to take a step (or whatever). 'Going up' creates the advantageous conditions which determine how the activity of stepping is organised. Walter Carrington used to say, "You don’t go around rabbiting on to yourself about freeing your neck and not pulling your head back once you've decided that's what you want."

The Alexander Technique develops a sense of presence and non-attachment – space that gives you time to survey what's happening and your role of involvement: "Given what is happening, if I take that action then that is the most likely consequence – I wonder what will happen if...? Shall I go ahead now or not?" That's when the self-control operates, in the space between receiving a stimulus and our response. We are, then, not so liable to becoming out of touch with our reason (or our senses), or quite so subject to impulsive "emotional gusts".

So, yes, talking to ourselves is a very useful tool for learning and practising self-control – a useful way of working on ourselves, as we say – but it's not necessarily a part of applying the Technique or good use. Once we are competent then our mind quietens and awareness can return to sense-informed observing (monitoring), and we can fully engage with the unfolding of life's rich tapestry.

References
Tullett, A, et al., Inner Voice Plays Role in Self Control Acta Psychologica, September 2010.
http://media.utoronto.ca/media-releases/inner-voice-plays-role-in-self-control/
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, New York: Viking 1996.
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 1922.
Patrick Macdonald, The Alexander Technique as I See It, Rahula Books 1989.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, Yale University Press 2009. 

© Malcolm Williamson, January 2011 

 

Books

Golf Sense Practical Tips On How To Play Golf In The Zone Roy Palmer, illustrated by Sophie Webber, FrontRunner Publications, 2010, pbk, 153pp ISBN 978-0-956259-30-1, available from Amazon. (First published in STATNews, January 2011) Review by Martyn Jones
As a golf coach and Alexander teacher, I was asked to review Roy Palmer’s new book Golf Sense. I have not met Roy personally and, when reading the Acknowledgements, found out Roy does not play golf. So I was intrigued to find out if this book could, in fact, help me find and consistently be in ‘the Zone’, the Holy Grail in golf, a place where one would like to be, but a place so difficult to find that many golfers never find it, and for the few that have experienced the phenomenon, so difficult to return to. I have read many books on the mental side of golf. All have had a chapter on the Zone, all have similar ideas, but none goes into such detail as Golf Sense. I am looking forward to trying to find the Zone and playing in it, after reading the book. The book is nice to feel and easy to read, with simple illustrations which are easy to understand. Alexander wrote, in The Use of The Self, a chapter on the golfer who cannot keep his eyes on the ball. He wrote: “Strange as it may seem, I have always found that a pupil who uses himself wrongly will continue to do so in all his activities”. Golfers are, by nature of the game, severe end-gainers, as they are trying to get the ball in the hole.
Palmer starts by using a table of practical exercises which would be of great interest in a workshop on the Alexander Technique: the chair, head balance, semi-supine, spiralling, walking, and a number of ways to try to find ‘neck free’. Getting into ‘the Moment’ is right on for ‘neck free’. Where Palmer slips up is in mentioning the dreaded ‘monkey’ word, a horror in the golf world. Golfers do not like to ‘do the monkey’. In the world of golf there is the ‘set up’, the position a golfer adopts when preparing to hit the ball. In our world it is ‘the monkey’. Golfers are taught to do the movement, and when they can do the movement, they practise it over and over again to create a habit and put it in their memory banks, using what they call ‘feel’. They try ‘to feel’ the swing. Tom is an imaginary golfer working through the book: his  thoughts in the last chapter are a non-stop check-out of instructions, making the mind totally confused. This is the opposite of what is trying to be achieved, i.e. of being in the Zone, a place of being able to maintain a relaxed concentration on what you are doing. I asked a non-golfer to read the book and give me feedback: she said it was interesting, but it kept going over things in the same way. The book seems to make trying to do nothing very complicated, as we teachers all do, sometimes, when saying too much in an Alexander lesson. Moreover, there is a tendency to refer to pages yet to come and pages which have passed, which interrupts the thread of the reading. Also, at the end of the book, under Useful Resources, there is a reference to audio instructions and videos which are available from Roy’s website, but they had not been set up when I accessed the site. To use technology to your advantage, you must be sure it works. What will be the reaction and understanding of the golfer when taking this book off the shelf? In my mind, they may find it complex and confusing. There are a number of practical exercises, including Playing in the Zone, Body Basics, Seven Experiments – all very complex to the golfer, who is, by nature of the game, an end-gainer. Who would benefit from this book? I think it, and the work which went into it, is of great interest to all of the Alexander Technique community. It is a detailed study of Inhibition, and one I have not seen before in our world. We should all have a copy on our bookshelf, next to Alexander’s books. As for me, I can get into the Moment, and find the book very helpful for that, but the Zone is still a very occasional companion.  © Martyn Jones, 2011   Books

 

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Notices

 

We are sorry to report that Fran Robinson passed away on 18 August 2010.