An Anthropologist’s View of the Teachings of F.M. Alexander
During F.M. Alexander’s life of teaching there were many examples of learned, worldly-experienced and world-weary people who rediscovered their truer Selves and natural health through working with Alexander.
The following are brief descriptions by the author and anthropologist Michael Jackson in his book Between One and One Another of the experiences of Aldous Huxley and John Dewey from working with F.M. Alexander. I had never read these particular writings until recently.
“In November 1932 Aldous Huxley began writing Eyeless in Gaza, a technically ambitious novel that was also autobiographical. After two years’ work, Huxley was at an impasse. Not only was he unable to resolve the issues that plagued his protagonist and alter ego Anthony Beavis; Huxley was suffering from depression and insomnia. It was as if the general sense of dissociation, intellectual detachment, physical ungainliness, nearsightedness, and world-weariness that had oppressed him from childhood now immobilized him completely. In the fall of 1935, on the advice of a friend, Huxley began daily consultations with the therapist, F.M. Alexander. As a result, his health improved, his morale lifted, and he completed Eyeless in Gaza, writing into the text a doctor and self-styled ‘anthropologist’ called James Miller whose practical philosophy transforms the life of the purblind ‘detached philosopher’ Anthony Beavis, just as Alexander ‘made a new and unrecognizable’ person of Aldous Huxley who, according to his wife, became a better person, more socially adroit and sensually engaged, and in ‘constructive conscious control of the self’. As Anthony Beavis explains this transformation, after rereading D.H. Lawrence’s allegory of rebirth, The Man Who Died: ‘Thinking and the pursuit of knowledge – these were purposes for which he himself had used [his] energy….Thought as an end, knowledge as an end. And now it had become suddenly manifest that they were only means – as definitely raw material as life itself.’
A second and not unrelated example of a thinker redressing the imbalance between his personal and social life is that of John Dewey. Around the period 1914-15 Dewey found that he could not write for more than a few hours without suffering fatigue and deep depression. After consulting with F.M. Alexander, Dewey realized that while philosophy was relatively easy for him, he wrote, as he lived, without much thought. This habitual disconnect of mind from body, or thought from activity, was the probable cause of his enervation and depression. Under Alexander’s guidance, Dewey not only improved his vision, posture, breathing and general well-being; he received immediate sensory confirmation of his relational theories of body-mind, thinking-within-activity, the organism-in-nature, ideas-in-context, and schooling-in-society.” (Michael Jackson, Between One and One Another, University of California Press, 2012, pp.11-12.)
These descriptions of Huxley and Dewey’s experiences from working with F.M. Alexander show the fundamental healing and educational values – physical, psychological and spiritual – of Alexander’s teachings.