Holding the Alexander Technique Still
The Alexander Technique is about movement. It’s about how we hold ourselves still and how we allow ourselves to be free. It’s mindfulness. It’s connection. When our better angels prevail, it’s love.
I can try to hold my shoulders and neck still. I can clench my jaw, furrow my brow, and use lots of physical energy to manufacture a sense of control.
I can also try to hold other people still. In the face of challenge, change, or the overstimulating blur we call daily life, I can attempt to freeze everything: the news, our leaders, the world.
I know that urge well and I see it in many of us right now. Whether we long for a Roe-protected world, fear for the future of Obergefell, or hope to make things “great again,” we are holding. And we are so afraid.
The deeply human instinct to hold things still is the lens I use to understand the world right now. What I didn’t expect was that the Alexander Technique—the practice that taught me to notice this—would itself shift beneath my feet and refuse to be held still.
What does it mean to not hold the Alexander Technique still? How can I honor the tradition, the legacy, and teachers who shaped me while moving the work forward? What does it mean for somatics to be relevant in a post-pandemic, rapidly changing world?
A Living Thread
I had the extraordinary good fortune to arrive at The Ohio State University’s School of Music just as Bill Conable retired, after decades of building Columbus into a hub for the Alexander Technique. His longtime colleague Dale Beaver took over the university classes.
I took one class with Dale and dropped the psychology course I’d scheduled ten minutes later on the other side of campus. I would find another way to fulfill my minor—this was clearly where I needed to be.
From that moment on, I took as many sections as I could—officially or unofficially—until graduation. So did a percussionist named Mike. I would eventually marry him.
Each winter, Bill returned to Columbus to lead a workshop that I attended for 14 consecutive years, through its final iteration in 2025. To give a sense of what the winter workshop meant to us: Mike and I have never exchanged Christmas gifts. Even with work-study scholarships, the workshop was a serious investment for college students, then grad students, then young professionals. Our gift to each other was being there.
In 2019, Mike completed his teacher training at Chesapeake Bay Alexander Studies (CBAS) in Greensboro. I continued studying and attending workshops, adding Carol DeSanto and Jim Kepner’s Nervous System Energy Work to my growing interest in somatic and spiritual integration.
But it wasn’t until 2022 that I finally saw an Alexander Technique teacher training path that fit the demands of my professional life—when Shawn Copeland launched mBODYed.
Learning to Trust Myself
As a classically trained musician, I know what it means to aspire to the work of a master teacher. As a military veteran, I know how to trust another’s authority more than I trust my own. With Shawn, I began unlearning both.
I stopped imitating my teachers and deferring to perceived authority. I began trusting my own guidance to bring this work into the world in a way that felt authentic, powerful, and effective. And when old habits resurface—as they naturally do—I now have the awareness to recognize them and choose a more empowered response.
The quiet paradox is this:
How can I be this free, and still yearn to hold it all still?
How can I expand into a new world, while looking for a box to put it in?
How can I be this excited for what’s coming, and already miss what was?
Letting the Work Move
The Alexander Technique has a creation story and a hero. Those of us who’ve spent our lives in churches know how tempting—and dangerous—it is to say this is the doctrine, these are the rules, and those who do or think differently than my version are wrong.
Key words: my version
I cannot conceptualize early Christianity because I can't know what it was like to live in the ancient Middle East. Similarly, had I been an early student of F.M. Alexander, I wouldn’t have been allowed to vote or had any substantive legal rights. How would I have perceived of freedom and ease of movement as a woman in that context?
The Alexander Technique is accessible to me today because brilliant, thoughtful people were brave enough to let it move.
Marjorie Barstow changed how the work was taught.
Bill Conable reshaped the entire field—more than once.
By the time I walked in, dropped a psych class, and dove headlong into this work, it had already evolved far beyond the original doctrine. Alexander got us started, and look what we’ve done.
How dare we try to hold it still now—and cheat ourselves and our students out of what’s next.
The Leading Edge
I met Bill Conable when he was 67, retired from Ohio State, and already a major figure in the Alexander Technique world. He could have taught the same material on repeat for the rest of his life.
Instead, he kept discovering. For 14 years, I watched the winter workshop’s opening presentation evolve in real time, shaped by his ongoing curiosity.
I was there when he clarified directions through the pelvis and introduced the alligator metaphor that changed how many of us think about the head leading. I was there as energy work, chakra centers, and levels of consciousness moved from hovering beneath the surface to absolutely central to his teaching. The teachers who raised me—Dale and Shawn included—teach from their own leading edge. And they’ve challenged me to find mine.
So, Now What?
Right now, my leading edge centers women. It’s about bodily autonomy through physical awareness and empowerment through choice. It’s a new way of saying: the bodies we live in are ours.
It’s about the world we’re building—where as many female-identifying people as possible know, not just in their minds but in their bodies:
Imagining better isn’t self-indulgent
Knowing what’s right isn’t arrogant
Trusting our intuition isn’t crazy
We deserve to be fully ourselves—and the world is better for it
It’s part Alexander Technique, part energy work, part life coaching—and all authentically my work.
I asked ChatGPT to write my bio the other day, and the poor thing nearly burst into flame. I get it, ChatGPT. I can’t box it up either.
Becoming a Lineage
I’ll risk inaccurately paraphrasing Bill at the final winter workshop when he said something like, “Marj wouldn’t recognize what I’m teaching now, but I think she’d be proud of it.”
I thought to myself: I want that to be me.
That’s how I’m aspiring to be like my master teachers. In 40 years I want to say, "Bill wouldn’t recognize this work, but I hope he’s proud.”
