Investing Time

Someone who comes in for Alexander lessons comes prepared to invest a certain sum of money. But there is something else, something much more scarce that they have to be prepared to invest, if the lessons are to work, and that is Time.
That's what nobody has enough of these days.
Babies seem to be born with watches strapped to their wrists, and a cell phone in their hands. Children's lives are structured and timetabled down to the last nano second. Even having fun has to be productive, and train you to be confident, a better manager, improve your leadership skills, your risk taking capabilities, your decision making abilties...
Along with the shrinking of the open spaces, the spaces in our minds have shrunk as well.
In the middle of all this, along comes the Alexander teacher, who seems to be a relic of the past.
Stop, he says.
Take your time.
Be aware.
Give your directions, but don't push them.
Let them work.
Allow your body to adjust to the totally new situation you have just created.
Let the new balance happen in your body.
I can't tell you how and when it it going to respond.

To someone immersed in an atmosphere of schedules and deadlines, familiar with - 'by the end of 3 months, we would have achieved 1,2 and 3...' this kind of vagueness may sound unacceptably waffly.
It happens to be the truth.
You have to be prepared to invest, along with a definite sum of money, an indefinite amount of time to allow the Alexander Technique to work in you. It would help if you mentally prepare yourself to invest your entire life.
This doesn't mean that you resign yourself to a long hard slog for the rest of your life, and then see the results when you are on the point of departing from it.
You start seeing the effects very soon, but the process never stops. There never comes a point where you can say, 'That's it, I've got it now, I can move on to other things.'
No, it stays with you for the rest of your life, like a benevolent Old Man of the Sea.
This can seem very daunting too, because it seems like you're stuck with all this effort of sustaining thought, and direction, and letting go, and all the rest of it, and it looks like just one more bit of slog added to all the bits you've already got.
But the delightful thing about the Alexander Technique is that it's not about more effort, but less. Not about trying harder to achieve something, but about achieving it without trying.
And it gets easier as you become more attuned to yourself, quicker to catch yourself tightening, quicker to release - until one day you realise you've just gone through a very tense scene, but at the end of it you are still calm and collected...
It all seems so right and inevitable and simple that the only possible response is, 'But of course...!"