WorkshopS

The ‘Pathways to Choice’ workshop is in the process of being developed. Throughout 2024 Tommy is giving the same workshop in numerous countries in Europe and Asia. However, inevitably each workshop will be different given the composition of participants, and because research in both neuroscience, mind body disciplines and spiritual practice is also currently in process and offers seemingly endless possibilities with regard to the freedom to change and the freedom to choose. So each workshop will be tailored to the participants’ views with regard to personal non habitual choice making. One could take the workshop twice in different countries or different cities within a given country months apart and make new discoveries about Alexander’s discoveries.

In each workshop, I cover specific approaches in conveying the depth and meaning of Alexander’s principles and concepts. The workshops are also the ideal place for you to bring up your own questions and issues, either about ways of teaching more effectively, or about how the work might enrich your own life. Most of the workshops are open only to Alexander teachers and trainees, others are open to the public to heighten awareness of the Technique.

While my workshops each have a theme or focus, I’m always guided by the participants’ questions and needs as they arise in the moment. In every context, however, I try to convey my underlying approach to the Alexander teaching, that of working with a person’s potential rather than focusing on habitual use as a negative obstacle to be overcome.

When I teach, I am interested in working with the person’s potential for becoming other than who they are currently committed to being. For me, this approach is preferable to working with a person’s “habit of use” in the negative sense. In the teaching approach I propose, habit is viewed more as a reference point for inhibition. No matter how committed a person is to her habitual patterns of behavior and identity, she is always greater and deeper than her habits reflect.

My attention and my pupil’s attention to the inhibitive moment involves withholding definition of who we are committed to being. Withholding definition enables us to allow in new information that informs the experience we are having. Rather than always managing our own experience, based on past perceptions, we are able to actually live the experience as it happens.

For me and for other Alexander teachers who have experienced teaching in this way, it is a truly wonderful way to communicating with a student. The moment in which we are helping the student to let go of what was once quite useful, important and perhaps necessary to her as she forged her sense of self calls for compassion on our part as teachers. It also calls for self compassion on the part of the student as he lets go of a part of who he has been, in favor of who he might become.

These courses are being offered because a substantial number of teachers have asked me for more in-depth work on a more consistent basis, closely aligned with the content of workshops I’ve given over the past years in Europe, Asia, Canada and the USA.