From scientist to holistic healer, Penelope Easten shares her remarkable journey of self-discovery through the Alexander Technique.
This fascinating exploration details how her initial experience with AT not only helped her overcome physical challenges but also led her to embrace a more holistic approach to health and well-being.
How did your initial experiences with the Alexander Technique influence your decision to leave a career in science?
I grew up in an academic home – my father was a lecturer in history of art who inspired a love of art in his students. I wasn’t good enough to pursue my other love – dance, and so always assumed my path was to follow him in academia – I knew I wanted to teach and to inspire people on subjects I cared about, and knew I didn’t want to teach children.
Doing my PhD almost brought me to a breakdown, but my back seized first – and that took me to my first AT lesson. During it, I heard a voice: “This is what you want to do with your life!” I inwardly told it “No, I’m going to be a research scientist” and the voice said “No, this is what you want to do”. Hearing voices was not something that happened to me, and wasn’t scientific! So it took a few months to realise the voice was right. By then, I had become very depressed as the deep intelligence in my system asserted its truth – that science research was the wrong place for me. I’d found my real path – intelligent postural and movement work that involved my whole being.
One of the central tenets of Alexander work is that everybody is individual. We seek to see people as they are in that moment, with no assumptions based on information about them, or even how they were last week. The Alexander technique lessons showed me the holistic approach, which seemed a much more intelligent process than the reductionist process of science.
I realised that one of my problems with biology was that it asked researchers to turn information about living creatures into statistics, which strip out the life. I was being asked to make a mechanistic pattern of fly behaviour and it made no sense to me. In 1980s no one was talking about the intelligence and individuality of insects or other small creatures; now, forty years on, decision-making intelligence is slowly being recognised in all life forms. The AT work invites us to let go of our habits of tension and imbalance, so that the intelligence of the body can assert at every level – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual, and we change.
Can you explain how your struggle with ME shaped your holistic approach to health and healing?
It’s often been noted that ME spells ‘me’. It’s not a simple illness, and it’s different for everyone. So to heal, you have to look at yourself from every angle – physical, physiological, emotional, mental, spiritual… I spent the first 7 years getting no help from doctors. Then Alexander technique opened me to holistic exploration – I soon added homeopathy, acupuncture, counselling of various sorts, McTimoney chiropractic and more. But it was another 5 years until a nutritionist diagnosed low blood sugar and taught me a pattern of eating that cleared my afternoon energy lows and dramatic mood swings in two days! So simple. I was furious that no previous health professional – orthodox or holistic – had known about this.
My answer was to run multidisciplinary health centres – first in London then in Sheffield, and get therapists of different disciplines talking together. I also wrote a column on holistic methods for the local newspaper. So many therapists find their own method for helping people and never look any further – but there will always be people you need to refer on and one needs to know how.
You have to have an overview of your own process. Alexander technique has always been at the core of all my self-work. AT is about recognising one’s own limiting beliefs and habits and working consciously with our intelligence systems to bring change. Once a limiting aspect comes to consciousness, it makes sense to find the best person and method to address it.
Core areas I’ve needed to address are nutrition –for anyone with ME it’s non-negotiable that you need to clean up your diet and fit it to your current physiology. For me this meant 18 years on the candida diet – probably a world record – and 35 years later I still strictly avoid all sugar, coffee, chocolate, alcohol and other drugs, along with refined / junk foods. It now feels like a choice to stay healthy rather than an imposition. The AT work at its heart is about clear choices. The ME made me widen the net that this covers. Why eat or drink something that will reduce my capabilities?
Another core area was embodiment work. Like most ME sufferers I was very disassociated and shut down; it’s been a long path to regain conscious presence in every part of my body. It’s now a huge part of my work. Embodiment brings inner stability and as sense of self, from which one can communicate with all the body’s feelings and thoughts. It’s especially important for the Alexander work because when we send directions to bring about a new coordination, the body needs to be ‘switched on’ through being embodied.
Working the breath and with the eyes have also been huge journeys. Seeing is so much more than we know – the eyes lead the whole body into movement, and help the brain organise well. My old disorganised visual habits meant that reading made me ill. Slowly, as the visual system healed at a deep level, this resolved, allowing me to do the extensive research needed for my first book!
Twice there were year-long episodes where the ME took me out of life for a while – each effectively became spiritual retreats. During the first one my legs were painful so that walking was difficult, but I knew intuitively it was not physical. I found I could do emotional clearing methods for myself so I set to work. As the baggage cleared, the pain went and my energy restored. The second episode was more serious. I was housebound and even bed bound for much of it, with intense pain, anxiety, sweats and sleeplessness. It was a deeper process, connected with menopause, of surrendering myself to the cleansing of all that was not useful in my physicality and psyche. My daughter asked at one point – “Why aren’t you depressed mum?” I told her “Because it’s an adventure that will either kill me or cure me.” I slowly recovered – the breakthrough was allowing my heart to open – a painful and frightening process, but life changing.
The final shift out of the ME illness cycle was with Mickel therapy in 2008. I learnt that when symptoms occurred, if I could immediately listen to the intelligence of the body – such as to hear it was bored or frustrated – and change activity to one more enjoyable, then physical symptoms just stopped. I also discovered how to have fun, and the necessity always to follow my real truth. Since then I’ve had amazing vitality, and been able to build fitness and strength as never before, based on AT principles.
What insights did you gain from studying with Miss Margaret Goldie that transformed your understanding of the Alexander Technique?
I went to Miss Goldie after my AT training, as I realised I didn’t know how to work on myself. She was then 86, rather a dragon but immensely kind once you knew her; she’d worked alongside Alexander for 30 years until his death. At that time, AT was mostly done as a rather passive process. Miss Goldie showed me the brain activity that allowed me to work on myself. She taught me to come to a deeper level of quiet in which the whole room came present and still. I’d always assumed that with the AT work you used consciousness to change habits, and then could go back to letting your movements happen by themselves. She showed me the more mindful approach Alexander himself had used, in which one stayed fully present physically and mentally, which then brought in deeper myofascial engagement, more strength, spring, vitality and also gentle touch.
I learnt to do simple tasks from this mindful place, and found myself using different muscle patterns that felt so easy. I call this responsive movement, in which our quiet but fully alive consciousness sidesteps our conscious overinvolvement – trying to control our world – and so allows the body’s intelligence to self-organise different movement patterns. You find yourself moving in unexpected ways, and it can feel weird! Miss Goldie called it going “into the unknown” – it’s the hero’s journey, and it also allows much faster learning. She told me this was how Alexander developed the technique. I love sharing this deep process with teachers and pupils alike.
Miss Goldie also seemed to have a different biomechanical model of the body, which I’ve since discovered went back to Alexander’s earlier work. She linked my legs and arms with my torso with unfamiliar alignments. These brought in more strength and integration, but I didn’t understand it until 2016 when I worked with a French AT teacher, Jeando Masoero, who’d been studying Alexander’s early work. From his work I was able to find the coordination Goldie had brought about in me for myself, and I began to link this with Thomas Myer’s myofascial lines. I realised Miss Goldie engaged my core and all the lines together. Actively engaging with these lines enables us to free up deeply rooted tension patterns for ourselves. I wrote about both these strands in my first book The Alexander technique, twelve fundamentals of integrated movement, published in 2021.
AT work can be highly cognitive, and this has its place. But from Miss Goldie’s work I’ve discovered how to integrate my love of biology and AT: that when we use our embodied awareness and senses, we maintain a poised relaxed frame as an animal does, or as our ancestors would have done. We are using our innate deeper intelligence to guide our processes. It’s beautiful to experience this.
How do you integrate emotional clearing techniques with your practice of the Alexander Technique?
I always start pupils with Alexander work to give them a sense of their bodies – observing their current tension patterns and discovering how they could be using their bodies very differently. They find stability from their feet and legs. They learn to allow their self-organising intelligence to step them out of their usual movement habits: to free their own head/neck joint, to allow their backs to straighten. They discover they can bend easily, and they can move without fear of pain. The process teaches people to be aware of pain, tension, or unfamiliar sensations without reacting to them, an essential aspect to allowing deeper change to occur.
This integrating process will clear a certain amount of emotional blockage without needing to bring it to consciousness – people often notice themselves feeling more confident, or relating better to others, etc.
But if there has been trauma, often the body won’t release the associated tensions. Then I look for the emotional block. I have explored and used various techniques for emotional clearance over the years but they all use the same process – that we need to identify and discuss the issue sufficiently that we reawaken both the mind’s and body’s memory of the event. Once the system is activated and aware, we can use an emotional clearance method to shift it.
I currently use a mix of methods: Havening techniques®, a beautiful and powerful process for clearing trauma in which I trained last year, along with Same Size Technique – a simple method I received myself at the end of the last illness, which is very user friendly. Learning better boundaries also helps, and I also use inner child work to help people with attachment issues and to feel cared for. Once the various blocks are resolved, the AT work often proceeds easily as the body is more available to the intelligence of the system.
The human being is layered like a Russian doll, with physical, emotional, mental and spiritual layers. To find balance, I think it is often easier to begin with the physical, as this gives people a better sense of themselves and their bodies and brings a deeper sense of security to the self. AT work is particularly effective because it works to bring the whole physical system into dynamic balance in one go, through accessing our “primary control” system. With increased sense of the balanced physical self, I notice people can move with more confidence into working with their emotions, or nutrition, or even into deeper soul retrieval / trauma work.
What are some common challenges your clients face, and how do you help them address these issues?
Clients often come to lessons because of physical tension or pain. The Alexander work takes a different approach than most therapies in that we don’t do something to solve the problem, instead we undo the poor habits that create the tension. At root, tension occurs because the mind is tangled with the body, trying to control our world. When we can ‘step out’ and stop trying so hard, often symptoms drop away. I have various ways to help people understand this counter-intuitive approach. Firstly, they need to understand that their system is more intelligent than they know, if only they would allow it space to operate. They are learning how to access the parts of the brain and nervous system that will put things right. I also have a backwards clock in my teaching room, to illustrate that most of the concepts they will learn from me will seem back to front!
Many of my clients have over-busy lives and try to do too much. This means their nervous systems are often operating in flight/flight, stress modes, in which their focus narrows on tasks, and they lose awareness of themselves, their surroundings and other people. I always begin my work with how they see the world – broadening out the vision and then including the sense of the body. As they find a new way of relating to their own bodies they discover they can use less tension in simple tasks, and they begin to calm down. I often hear them comment that they have become more patient with their families or with people generally. They can begin to make clearer choices in their lives.
Another common problem is living in the head. Again, by becoming more aware of their surroundings and their own bodies – what they are doing, how they are breathing etc., they can learn to drop down out of the thoughts and into a more embodied state.
Often clients have confidence issues – these go along with slumping, rounded shoulders or other ‘shy’ postural habits, or else over-straightening to brace against the world. With the Alexander work, people learn to stand tall and broad, fully inhabiting the whole body and being, seeing the world with clear eyes.
Then confidence comes more naturally and they can make clearer choices that serve them better. Where needed I also help them with tips on how to stand firm, speak truth etc. to take this new way of being into their relationships. I’ve watched people learn to stand up to bullying bosses or family members – not in a confrontational way, but instead their different body language calls forth a different response from the other person. Someone who was a bully can become a friend and a support to them. It’s wonderful to watch people find healthier relationships through this, and see their lives blossom and progress.
What can readers expect from your upcoming book about the evolution of the Alexander Technique?
We know that early on, Alexander was very successful in working with breath and voice. He was teaching confidently within a year of his own problems which had prompted his discovery process. His own account, written in 1932, does not mention this early work at all, and is now known not to be a full representation of what really happened. My book will explore the various conundrums and confusions around how the work developed, not only by examining Alexander’s texts, but also by studying authors and other systems it is known that he explored.
The book will take the reader through an experiential journey, in which they can try out explorations and methods that Alexander wrote about or that it is likely he explored. We will walk the path Alexander most likely took and discover it alongside him.
A new story has emerged, the best fit for the available evidence, that not only explains how Alexander probably developed his work, but also gives a clearer sense of his later work. It explains the development of inhibition and direction, mechanical advantage and antagonistic action. A path emerges that leads to the mature Alexander’s understanding of wholeness: that the breath and the body are fully intertwined, and so are the physical body and the nervous system, thinking and sensory processes.
Alexander’s work is also more dynamic than we have thought. I will show that FM really was using a ‘line of unity’ that predated modern biomechanical understanding; he also was way ahead of his time, in attempting to formulate many concepts that now are so useful for describing the work such as tensegrity, the body as a self-organising system, and a concept of mind-body unity which also embraces their separateness.
Alexander was undoubtedly a genius, but like all of us, he was also a flawed human being. I also show his limitations, and the ways in which he inadvertently stopped us fully discovering his technique. We need now to have the full picture of the development of his work so that we can build the modern Alexander technique on secure foundations, and strengthen its place in the current era.
I am launching a new course exploring this at the end of October, for AT teacher and trainees. Go to https://penelope-s-school-4df3.thinkific.com/courses/walk-alongside-Alexander
