The Private Lessons Ensemble

What you get each week

The structure stays the same. The results never do.

That's what you'll get. NOW…Is this for YOU?

Who this is for (and who it's not)

You'll know fairly quickly whether you belong in the room.

The reality of drift

Even the most experienced teachers I know drift.

Not because they're lazy. Not because they've stopped caring. Because the sense they're using to course-correct… is the very sense that needs correcting.

Your kinesthetic sense, your sense of movement and your proprioception, the felt-sense of where you are in space, combine to give you information about your manner of Use. They act as a compass when you're working alone.

But we know one of Alexander's foundational discoveries was that this system of self-monitoring wasn't to be trusted. When a compass is wrong about true North, you drift off further and further off course thinking and feeling you're going in the right direction. Which gradually, habitually takes you back into the very patterns of misuse you're seeking to change.

That's why an outside perspective is so consequential. Not to fix you, but to show you, with precision, that your own perception has led you astray. But that, my friends, is just the beginning…

The true beauty of this way of teaching goes way beyond just weekly course correction. Using the NanoLessons™, the observation of other people's lessons, the PrimalÉtudes™ we do during the class, and the "homework" that grows out of your lessons, you are gradually going to learn how to do what Alexander himself did! — you'll be learning how to…

Welcome to Primal Alexander™

PrimalAlexander™ is the first comprehensive Alexander Technique training system designed from the ground up for hands-free teaching — online and off…

This isn't a workaround. It echoes the means whereby Alexander actually taught himself — alone, using nothing but inhibition, imagination, experimentation, and a precise form of directed conscious attention.

I call my version of that directed attention CuriousThinking™ (CT). Combined with traditional inhibition, it lets your natural coordination quietly reassert itself — and the interfering habits dissolve, not because you fought them, but because you stop repeatedly feeding them.

So instead of having to depend upon external course correction, in Primal Alexander you learn a simple, objective method of self-experimentation that uses questions and curiosity instead of the traditional directions.

When you combine that with the ten minute NanoLesson™, the class each week, and 15 minutes of daily "homework", you have a simple, lightweight practice routine that forms the foundation for steadily improving Use and the development of an internal compass that alerts you when you begin to return to old habits.

Here's what the month looks like in practical terms.

Schedule & logistics

Four Tuesdays, starting July 7th

Dates: Tuesdays · July 7, 14, 21, 28
Time: 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM Eastern U.S.
Platform: Live via Zoom
Capacity: Strictly 8 participants per class. Every person in the room gets a NanoLesson.

The diversity of the cohort — complete beginners next to veteran teachers — is exactly what makes the learning move so fast. The beginners ask the questions the teachers stopped asking years ago. The teachers reveal what's possible when the work has lived in a body for decades. Both sides learn from each other in the same class.

Now — choose how deep you want to go.

A bit about my journey

Back to the Future of the Alexander Technique?

Every summer from 1976 onward, I spent a month in Lincoln, Nebraska, studying with Marjorie Barstow. The other eleven months I was home in New York City composing music, teaching A.T., and experimenting with the Technique on my own — quite sure I was making real progress.

Then I'd return to Lincoln. Marj would put her hands on me. And within seconds I'd discover — every single dingle year — just how far I'd drifted off course, despite how carefully I thought I was watching out for drift but also…

Despite all the genuine improvement I'd truly made since the previous summer.

It was confusing!

I was getting hands-on work from arguably the premier hands-on teacher in the Alexander world. Patrick Macdonald himself once said of Marjorie Barstow, "Marj — she was the best of us." And although I tended to be inconsistent in other areas of my life, I was an incredibly serious Alexander student. The Technique had changed my life. You could even say that, in a certain way, it saved my life. I was totally dedicated to it, bringing every ounce of energy and intelligence I had to try to understand it.

This mattered all the more because, unlike most of the people who trained with Marj, I couldn't move to Lincoln, Nebraska to be near her year-round. My work as a composer for dance companies made that impossible — and I was a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker besides. So I knew I only had a month a year with her. I worked hard during those workshops and worked even harder in between them.

But still — I drifted.

Despite the great teacher, despite my own seriousness, I improved and I drifted, improved and drifted, in the same loop. For a long time that puzzled me. Eventually I made my peace with it, but the question never quite let go.

Then, gradually, I began to see why.

The drift isn't a flaw in the student. It's the nature of a habit. Habits are pernicious and persistent by design — we trained them into ourselves through lack of awareness and constant repetition. They're not bugs in the system; they are the system. And here's the part that took me years to name…

Alexander figured out how not to drift, but he didn't teach his students to do what he did. What he did was experiment on himself — using his body as a laboratory and his mind as the scientist — until he understood the mechanism of interference and the mechanism of freedom, which eventually prevented the drift from occurring.

He tried to convey that method in his books and his lectures. But you get the sense that he was frustrated with how the information was received and applied. Early on, I was struck by this quote that was something Alexander apparently said while teaching:

"Anyone can do what I did, but they would have had to have done what I did, and none of you want anything mental."

Is there a paradox here?

For a decade or so, Alexander worked tirelessly in front of the mirrors watching, testing, and discarding whatever didn't work.

But his way of working wasn't just the means whereby he made his discoveries; that process itself was, perhaps, the most important discovery of all. And it had little to do with the mirrors.

It was all about finding a way he could use his conscious mind to detect, prevent, and redirect the unconscious habits of interference that were causing him to lose his voice.

But then when Alexander switched to teaching with his hands, he essentially was able to transport his students to a wonderful destination without really having to teach them how to navigate the journey themselves — and then, at least in this quote, accused them of just wanting to vacation there.

Now to be fair, skilled hands-on teaching does result in some students being able to get there on their own — but if you don't have your own accurate compass… It can take an incredibly long time!

Finally…In a nutshell

Primal Alexander is an effort to go back to the future of the Alexander Technique.

Because if we're ever going to be able to do what Alexander did, we have to find a way to use the method he used — one that depends on a Hands-Free method of facilitating the head-neck reflex in others, an objective method of self-experimentation, and on developing a steadily increasing sensitivity to subtle changes in ourselves. Here's how The Private Lessons Ensemble speaks to those issues:

Hands-Free teaching

CuriousThinking™ is how we facilitate the head-neck reflex in PrimalAlexander. When you get curious about places in your body that feel relatively easy, you shift towards parasympathetic dominance, which releases tension globally.

When combined with Inhibition, the increased ease you experience enables you to detect in a very simple way whether or not the movement choices you're about to make are just your old habits or more appropriate responses.

This allows you to experiment in a way that both leads to more effective movement and at the same time improves your Use — because every time your head moves forward and up, you've gotten better at helping yourself the next time.

Experimentation

The brevity of the NanoLesson helps to shift the focus away from chasing results to using the activity or problem as a doorway to improved Use.

Students quickly learn how to induce ease in themselves and then use that experience as the "before" state of simple experiments that lead to improved Use regardless of the outcome of the experiment itself.

Working this way empowers the student in their own learning and is highly reinforcing. It gives them deep personal experience of how to "do" non-doing and is a tangible example of the process and the power of Non-endgaining.

Increasing sensitivity

The ability to detect differences in stimulation is central to good Alexander teaching and learning. Alexander's healing journey began because he noticed a difference between his voice in normal situations and using his voice in performance.

As he worked with the mirrors, his visual acuity was the key to understanding the specific effects of the different kinds of thinking he applied in his experiments.

When I was first starting to train teachers to teach A.T. without hands-on, I worried whether I would be able to teach them how to "see". Those of us who trained with Marj got pretty good at it because we spent 95% of the time watching and listening to her teach. Well, luckily, my worries proved to be unfounded — because as Yogi Berra, the winningest player in baseball history, famously said: "You can observe a lot just by watching."

It's because of the way we humans share experience — mirror neurons and the like. We see with our whole self (SubtleMovementEmpathy™). You do it by first creating ease in yourself and then noticing what happens to that ease as you observe the student in motion. The detail of that mirroring gets to be quite stunning after a while, and everyone who studies Primal Alexander increases their ability to "know" another person's "thinking" because it's right there in them. That is what makes the group learning so transformative!

In conclusion

If you've read this far, I think you have a pretty good idea of what's up with Primal Alexander in general and the Private Lessons Ensemble in particular.

So…

Come step up to the "hot seat" and take your turn and watch the others do the same. Let's get together so we can see what a little serious fun can really do.

Hope to see you there…

Cheers,

Mio