Alexander Technique (personal impressions)

2002: Training as Teacher

At first I was so fascinated by the success of Alexander Technique on me (eliminating over 30 years of back pains, specially the last years of permament 24 hours a day - 7 days a week pains, in less then 6 months) that I wanted to show all my friends and family members with any kind of problem specially back pains how to use this.

Naturally, I was not able to show much and when talking about it often heard comments like "it is very interesting", "I try to do something similar but I cannot think about it all the time", etc. I really wished I could show them the way the A.T. teacher could show me...

At one time I seriously considered starting to train as A.T. teacher but the training time was too intensive and my job too restrictive on the work schedule and I gave it up (I actually did not try very hard, just asked for some information and gave up rather fast... I was probably not yet "mentally" ready)

But the idea remained: "one day I will do the training, if not before at least when I retire".

Meanwhile I was active with A.T. on a weekly basis, I was active in Kyudo and saw Kyudo as an application of A.T. and if I did not think constantly about A.T. in my daily life, at least during Kyudo practice I forgot about all my other problems and only thought about my body awareness and (for me, consequently) about A.T..

One day I was thinking about A.T. and how I would like to go "deeper" in the knowledge I already had and thought that with this "one hour a week" meeting or a little more as I was doing it was nice but was no longer enough. I wanted more ("deeper") and the only way to do it seriously would be to train as teacher, regardless of whether I would later be active as teacher or not.

And so it happened that, only a couple months after I described in a long letter to a friend what I did in A.T., what it meant for me and I repeated again "I will one day train as teacher, if not before, at least when I retire", I decided I would train now!

Please send any comments to António Guerreiro. Last updated on 08.02.2004.