Patrick Macdonald (1910–1991) was one of the foremost teachers of the Alexander Technique. He had lessons with FM Alexander from the age of 10, having been introduced to him by his father, a noted medical surgeon. He entered the first teacher training course in 1932 and upon graduation became an assistant teacher at Ashley Place. He began to train teachers at Ashley Place in 1956; his training course continued at Victoria and, in his final years, at his home near Lewes. In 1963 he gave the Alexander Memorial Lecture.1 His book The Alexander Technique as I See It2 was published in 1989. This interview with Ted McNamara on the subject of his lessons and training with Patrick Macdonald was conducted by Selma Gokcen.
The causes of an individual’s malcoordination are many. They may be attributed to fear, to shock to imitation in youth; to instruction, to working conditions, to heredity, to malnutrition—in fact, to any number of causes stretching back into the past, perhaps for generations. All this notwithstanding, a pupil should accept personal responsibility for the mess he is in. And what is more important, he should accept responsibility for getting himself out of it.3
Would you share with us how you came to train with Patrick Macdonald? How old would he have been when you first met him?
How did I meet him? By accident, by fate, I don’t know. I was due to return to Australia, and just before I got on board the aircraft I had a strong intuition not to get on the plane. So I remained in London. Then I said to myself, what am I going to do now? During the previous few months while researching traditional medicine in Dublin, I had acquired several phone numbers of people and institutions in London connected with branches of education and medicine and his name was among them. I decided to have one lesson in the Alexander Technique and about three days later I met him. As the saying goes, when the pupil is ready, the teacher appears and that’s how it was. He was then 71 years of age.
What made you decide to train?
I started having private lessons and in those lessons I felt an emanation from him. I needed to stay close to that. So I kept on having private lessons, three a week, and at his invitation began to visit his teacher training classes. The only reason I trained was that I costed it a bit and reasoned if I wanted to be around him, this was probably the best way to do it. But I had no intention of being a teacher.
What were your first impressions of him? Did it take you time to recognise his qualities?
I felt something fairly quickly—almost the first lesson. It wasn’t anything extraordinary that he did. I felt an emanation of quietness and being. There were other factors working that I didn’t realise then. There are things going on that one doesn’t know about for a long time after.
Some people have written about Macdonald’s occasional outbursts of temper during the classes. Some were frightened away by this aspect of his nature and decided that his training course was not for them. How did you respond?
There were not so many outbursts when I was there, and I always thought that the outbursts were not personal, never directed at the person’s inner being. I heard him raise his voice to people to try and, I would say, shock them, and it could be shocking because it exposed you to yourself if you could bear it. In essence he was a quiet man. What he was like before I met him, I don’t know. I never found his shouting bothersome. But he used to use it to shock people, to help wake them up.
Is it an important thing for a real teacher to do?
If it is necessary and you know how to do so properly, yes. He didn’t do it to everyone. He never raised his voice to me. He shocked me in other ways. His eyes could shock you. In fact his eyes could stir you, enable you to see what you were really doing.
When you finished the training course in 1984, did you continue to work with him and in what capacity?
I kept on having private lessons, and working in the training class. Not assisting, just learning how to work. After a short time, some people approached me to teach them, so with certain reservations I began to do so. After a while I would bring them individually with me to share a lesson with him, and I would work with them whilst he was mentoring.
Did he put his hands on you whilst you were working with a pupil?
Yes. I would also ask him to do so.
So in a sense you were like an apprentice?
Yes, very much so. It is the best way to learn and the way Miss Goldie advocated.
…continuing to learn from the master after the basic skills are there?
Of course. I wouldn’t even say that they were there. You do not know what you are doing after three years. Or even after ten years. Maybe after twenty or thirty years, you may come to know something.
Macdonald’s extraordinary level of skill and ease in the work would in the performing arts be called virtuosity and it seemed he could demonstrate this at will. One sees it in the films of him working. Could you speak about this aspect of his ability?
You need to be more specific. What, that he could do it at will?
Yes, it seems that he didn’t need to prepare a pupil in a sense. He could just take whatever was there and immediately …
The key word that you have used is will. You could say that he genuinely had will. Most people assume that they have will and they don’t. He had. He could put his hands on and it would be there instantly. He would take you into that space. Or not take you. You could sense it was something very direct. Somebody who has true power of will and uses it responsibly is rare. When he walked into a room it was there, you felt a presence in the force of his attention.
There is a section in FM’s book Use of the Self about precisely that. He says we think we have the will to do and all this work shows is that this is a delusion.
Yes, exactly. So someone like Mr Macdonald had will in my understanding of the word. He is one of the very few people I have met who I would say had that. It is an assumption we make about ourselves. But the danger is to try and copy that. So you have those who don’t understand and resort to pushing and pulling people. That never happened with him in my experience.
In your own teaching, you demonstrated the pulsing of the spine which you refer to as Macdonald’s original contribution to the work. Would you share your thoughts about this?
I do not remember saying that it was his original contribution. Mr Macdonald is on record stating that Alexander did pulse the spine, but that he didn’t do it that much. Mr Macdonald some times slowed it down to show you that pulse. When his hands were on you, that would just be happening. He could place you in a point and you would feel the spine dancing. You’d feel the forces; you’d feel the spring in the spine moving. He would create that, so there would be pulsing, but in the pulse there would be a lengthening going on as well, so the spine would be naturally stretching.
Would you say he had a spring-like movement?
He was enabling the releasing of a force in the spine which sprung the spine and you could feel it. It was a living motion, it wasn’t sprung and that’s it. It was pulsing so you would feel that throughout the whole body, but strongly and gently in the spine.
Macdonald was a man of few words—a remarkable economy of expression that parallels the simplicity of his work. One of his most potent sayings to which you often refer is ‘let the spine light up the fingertips’. What did he mean by that?
It was an energy—light is the best way to describe it. And even that doesn’t describe it. It comes close to it. So basically it was an energy that emanated. Initially he would ask us to think up from the base of the spine. So directing upwards, sensing up the spine and allowing that to permeate out into the hands and to the whole body, but particularly up the spine. And then gradually as the years went by and your practice deepened, you began to sense this as quicker than light. It is a very fast movement, fortunately so for us, otherwise we would in all probability corrupt it. Through the practice of inhibition, non-doing and directing—as Miss Goldie used to say—at brain-thought level, it gradually comes. When it appears, it is faster than so-called thought, and that’s what he meant in my understanding of it, of this movement that lights up the spine. It lights up the entire body.
How did his hands-on work evolve in his final years? Did the later work differ from the time when you were a member of his training course?
Yes. He was much quieter and towards the end he spoke rarely. After he returned from his last trip to the USA, what passed through his hands was fairly close to what it had been in London, but I would say even stronger. After about two years, there was in my reading of it a subtle yet dramatic shift in his work. There was an extraordinary elevation of the energy and the direction that I felt. I remember first feeling it very distinctly during a visit while he was staying in Lewes. It was a beautiful warm day and he gave me a lesson in the garden. The direction through his hands was different, more vibrant, vertical and direct than previously. It continued growing right to the end of his life. So yes, there was a difference, but not so obvious initially.
Macdonald often spoke about the force of habit—how we underestimate it and how it acts upon us without our knowledge, even when we are otherwise convinced. What did he say to you in this regard?
Nothing direct as such, but he would sometimes show you its action upon you. You would think you’d be doing something very fine, especially working in a class and then you might hear him saying ‘What are you doing?’ The presence behind those words could create a shift in you to throw you or to help you to separate, so you could see that what you were doing was not what you ‘thought you were doing’. It was something entirely different. He would speak about it, but he wouldn’t go on and on about it. He wasn’t that type of a man, but if you were prepared to be shown and to bear that, to really open to what he said and the feeling that accompanied the saying, which was more important, then you experienced it. You couldn’t do anything about it but you experienced it, you saw clearly that what you were doing was not what was required. That’s going on all the time and that’s what a Master can do. A Master can switch the light on in you for you to see. We do not have the level of the force of attention to do so ourselves. This has to be worked for. So the teacher shows you that and it can be a shock. It can be very painful because you are exposed to yourself.
The first time he did it to me, my hands were on a pupil and I thought I was doing some good work. He was standing not too far away working on somebody and he said, ‘Ted, what are you doing?’ It’s very hard to describe, unless one has experienced it, what it opens inside of you. It is a very wonderful place and very precarious. I sometimes describe it like this: you’re on the top of a tree, a very tall tree, sitting on the edge of a branch thinking you’re someplace else and there is the master behind sawing the branch. He doesn’t drop you, he just lets you see where you are. And that’s all he did. His eyes rested on me for a few seconds and then he turned away. There was no commentary from him.
Would you speak about the centrality of the back to Macdonald’s way of working?
Essential. The back was vital. The back and spine. He put great emphasis on the back– coming to the back, you’re not back enough. I never had a lesson of the hundreds I had with him when he wouldn’t say at least once to me ‘come back’ and you would see at that moment, although you might be physically back, you weren’t really back. The back is endless and you begin to re alise that the back is actually a doorway. It is not just the physicality of the back; it is ultimately psychological, but not that of Western psychology. I would just mention in that regard, he used say, ‘Western psychology as it is doesn’t amount to very much. But there is a psychology that is sane.’ And in that sane psychology, the back is very important. But not the back as we know it. It’s a doorway, a stepping stone. The back needs to be working with the rest of the psycho-physi cal organism. There is the back-back and up and then there is the vibration through the spine, the direction through the spine and the opposition between the head against the back, the knees against the hips and the heel and, of course, all of that hinged on the neck.
What did Macdonald have to say about inhibition and how did he teach this core principle, es pecially in his later years?
Through his hands really, and so he would be able to stay you —one way to express it— stay you from going any place and doing anything you were not meant to be doing. The clarity of his words always matched both his hands, so his mouth wouldn’t be saying something and his left hand doing something else and his right hand doing something else again. They were all together. In his last years, unless you had been with him previously, it would be difficult to understand what he was actually doing, but definitely he was living inhibition.
The great masters teach through their being …
Exactly. It was all emanating through the being, through the presence. There was a presence and everything was manifest in that presence. It was a confirmation to me of everything I had ever read about the spiritual search, if you want to call it that. But that’s not to say you could do the inhibition, no. You could see that you couldn’t do what he was doing. It takes a long, long time to learn to inhibit. We have this foolish belief that we are able to allow. Everything comes back, in some ways you could say, to allow. But how many people allow for anything, allow it to be, allow it to happen? We don’t. We just think we do. When he walked into a room, your inner state was magnified so you could see all the rubbish, more clearly. It was like being in front of a martial arts master. They don’t do anything — they use where you are to throw you. But throwing you doesn’t have to be physical. They can throw you just by sitting, standing, walking. He threw me many a time. Sometimes I would stand beside him realising there was nothing to say, and then I’d see this drive in myself to say something to fill in the space. That goes on all the time. People are always trying to fill in the space.
Can you tell us briefly the story behind Macdonald’s book, The Alexander Technique as I see it—how it came into being and came to be published?
Yes, a water pipe burst in his home a few miles outside Lewes. Part of the house got flooded. When they were clearing up after the water damage, they found notes in a drawer. He had been invited to write a book and obviously had started writing it. But it was left unfinished. His wife Alison decided to take these notes and other pieces that he had written and bring them all together in one little book.
Was he still alive at this stage?
Yes, and he was teaching. There was a little school there. Alison broached him about publishing it; he was against it and said no. Over subsequent weeks he kept saying no, so Alison asked me to speak with him about it. I spent some time with him one Saturday morning and sought his permis sion to publish it. He replied ‘Everything that needs to be written has already been written.’
He wasn’t speaking just about the Alexander Technique, he was speaking about the whole —all the great writings that were needed for humanity were already there, so there was no need to add anything else to it. Then he was quiet and I said the book might help at least one person who might be searching. After a long silence he said ‘All right, you may go ahead for at least it will not do any harm.’ As it was being prepared, I read it aloud a few times for him and he made some very minor corrections, requesting it be left the way it was, no introductions and with the same photographs.
I had collected several quotes which he rejected, except the one by John Bunyan from The Pilgrims Progress: ‘Though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am.’ When the book came out, he glanced at it for a few seconds, making no comment about it. If I’d ever met anyone free of the influence of ego ism at that stage of life, it was him.
You were with him on the day that he passed?
No I wasn’t. Around September 1991 he lost the use of his legs. I was holding him by the arm and Alison was on the other side. He said with a smile ‘Once I could run up mountains. Now I cannot even get out of the chair.’Already the last of the pupils was gone and his work was over. Shortly after he was taken to hospital and later he was transferred to a rest home where I used to visit him regularly.
Around 7am on the day of my last scheduled visit, I received a phone call informing me that he had died. But I’ve no doubts as to how he died because of what I witnessed in those last meetings: a man who had become free. To die before you die. You saw the inner weight of the body and it’s a weight that can’t be described. The earthly body was permeated with another seeing presence that was radiant with light.
Looking back, how would you say the two primary guiding influences on your Alexander work —Patrick Macdonald and Margaret Goldie—manifested in their manner of teaching?
I would like to include Walter Carrington because he was important. Although I worked with others such as Bill and Marjory Barlow, and briefly with Marjorie Barstow and Erica Whittaker, the first three mentioned were the most important. Mr Macdonald established in me some sense of the back. I’m not saying I know where my back is, but he gave me some sense of the direc-tion to it. Equally important he gave me a sense of the verticality, although I did not understand the verticality then. It is only now, years later, that I am beginning to understand a little what it might be all about.
Miss Goldie helped me to experience more of the inner quietness. Her teaching wouldn’t have the dynamic that his had. He had a dynamic of direction and movement through his hands. He showed you movement in stillness; stillness in movement. He could create that in your body. In both of them there was a quietness, but his quietness was more like the quietness experienced when I have walked long hours alone in the mountains. You need to work in a certain way to reach the quietness of the inner step. Hers was the quietness of just standing still. When I came out from a lesson with her, I would feel very quiet for a few moments. When I came out from him, something in me was more dynamic, ready to engage with the forces of life. It was also easier to see what she was up to, and more difficult to see what he was actually doing.
I have chosen some words of Mr Macdonald to close this interview: ‘This is closer to you than your next heartbeat and further away than the moon’ .
Yes, or he would say, as close to you as your next breath, or …it can’t be any closer. But he never laboured these things. It always came from a real place in him because he was living it. It takes a long time to realise what teachers of his simplicity and quality are actually teaching.
A Tribute to Patrick Macdonald, a series of events commemorating the centenary of his birth, will take place in London dur ing 2010–2011. For more information, please contactAnne-Marie O’Mahoney, Event Co-ordinator at [email protected] 07939 996504
REFERENCES
1 Macdonald, Patrick ‘On giving directions, doing and non-doing’ The STAT Memorial Lecture given on 12 November 1969. The Alexander Journal 9 (September 1988)
2 Macdonald, Patrick The Alexander Technique as I See It (Brighton: 1989)
3 ‘On Taking Responsibility / notebook Jottings’ Macdonald, Patrick The Alexander Technique as I See It (Brighton: 1989)
(Note: A new more comprehensive edition of this book is to be published by Mouritz.)
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Francesca Greenoak, editor, who grants us permission to post this interview in advance of its publication in The Alexander Journal,
Autumn 2010.
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