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EVENTS
To accommodate our flexible training schedule, the curriculum is offered through EVENTS, which are 2 - 10 day immersions offered in multiple locations throughout each year. Events are either WEEKENDS or RETREATS, scheduled in alternating months. You can join them as they fit into your life, allowing for realistic, self-paced study.
Each CAS program has it’s own offerings and requirements for attendance; confirm your personal schedule with the CAS Director.
All EVENTS offer a mixed-level learning environment, which helps foster mentoring and non-hierarchical learning structures. Those in the Enrichment Programs study with those in the Teacher Training Program, and everyone learns from everyone.
EVENTS can be virtual, in-person, or both, to aid in everyone’s participation.
Everyone studies at their own pace, in their own way, as a member of a learning community.
The overall Curricula is organized in organized in basic 3 categories: Ways of Being, Ways of Knowing, Ways of Teaching.
These classes can be offered as part of the training programs as well as being offered as workshops and courses for anyone interested - even if they are not CAS trainees.
Ways of Being
The WAYS OF BEING classes are focused on our Physical/Somatic life, and include core Alexander Technique material:
Ways of Being
Personal Integration
LifeWork
Body, Breath & Sound
Living in a Body™
Personal Integration - Embodying the Principles of Alexander’s Work. It is a core, ongoing study throughout the training.
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This course offers you the tools for noticing how you are interfering with your innate design, and for making new choices in habitual ways of being. Sometimes we call this Personal Use - literally, how you are ‘using’ yourself; it is the core of Alexander Work. It includes how to increase kinesthetic awareness, how to let go of extraneous tension, and how to receive support from the world around us.
LifeWork - Applying the Work in our daily and professional lives.
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This course explores how to use the Work directly in your life. One of the distinguishing aspects of Alexander’s Work is that it is designed to be applied while you are doing something - it fundamentally needs an activity of life. There are no exercises or techniques which belong to Alexander Technique, but rather, it is a study of the quality of you while you do whatever you do.
So, we study how you are being while you do dishes, or climb a mountain, play an instrument, work at your computer, sit in meditation, or whatever else you love to do. Sometimes we call this Activity Work or Situational Work - it is a most essential skill for Alexander Teachers.
Body, Breath & Sound - Freeing your voice and breath.
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This course offers you tools for recognizing and releasing habituals patterns of breathing and sounding. Focus is on identifying your personal interference patterns, especially when you are in the activities of your life.
There is particular attention given to the relationship between your breath/vocal patterns and your ability to use your hands effectively with another person.
Living in a Body™- 20 hour body mapping certification course
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LIAB™ is a 20 hour body mapping certification course which offers a simple, clear, and fun exploration of the basic mechanics of human movement and support. It is the quintessential owner’s guide to using our bodies in accordance with our design, allowing people of all ages to experience ease in their body.
The LIAB™ curriculum uses simple games of sensory awareness, somatic re-education, and metaphor to teach you how your body is designed to move with ease and grace. The course provides the necessary tools for incorporating this knowledge into your daily life and professional endeavors.
Ways of Knowing
The WAYS OF KNOWING classes focus on the beliefs which interfere with our innate design and potential. They address a variety of tools for identifying limiting beliefs, as well as ways to process and re-evaluate whether these beliefs are useful in your present life. They also offer tools for accessing intuitive channels - an important aspect of teaching a ‘whole’ person.
Ways of Knowing
Living in a Body of Choice
Intuitive Arts
Deep Imagery®
Physics of Choice
Sacred Geometry of the Body
Living in a Body™ of Choice - Choosing the Beliefs You Embody.
+ Read Description
In this class we will identify 6 primary psycho-social ‘bodies’ and begin to sense, to feel, how these deeply embodied layers influence our ability to choose our unique life path. What have social, cultural, and familial ideas have you unknowingly embodied? Are they really you? Or do they limit you, perhaps in ways that you haven’t ever noticed directly. If you release them, who will you allow yourself to become?
This process allows you to create your Body of Choice - consciously embodying the beliefs and archetypes of your choosing, rather than what you have been taught or have assumed unconsciously.
Intuitive Arts - Accessing (and trusting) your intuitive channels.
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This class offers you tools for opening alternative ways of knowing and understanding. You learn to use your dominant channels to educate your quieter channels, eventually building trust in all of the information available to you in every moment. It is a powerful way to augment your ability to ‘see’ underlying issues and patterns in your students, allowing you to address the core needs.
Deep Imagery® - Accessing Inner Knowledge
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Deep Imagery® was created by psychologist Steve Gallegos 50 years ago as a unique form of guided imagery/lucid dreaming. A blend of Jungian psychology, the chakras system, and Native American power animal work, Deep Imagery® offers tools for accessing the world of imagery as a profound and reliable way of understanding the larger implications of body and life patterns.
In this class you will learn basic skills for helping a student communicate directly with their own internal world of imagery. It offers practitioners and teachers tools to support a student when emotionally-charged material arises during a hands-on experience, so that the release process can continue in a safe and productive manner.
The Physics of Choice - Changing Your Frequency to Realize Your Choices
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This class uses material from Matrix Energetics® (Richard Bartlett) and Reality Creation® (Frederick Dodson) to help you identify and transform limiting beliefs.
Understanding the crossroads of quantum physics and consciousness, you will learn how to create change at vibrational, as well as behavioral, levels.
Teachers and practitioners will be able to offer their students tools for change at the energetic/vibrational levels of being.
Sacred Geometry of the Body - Understanding Your Innate Design.
+ Read Description
This class offers you an introduction to human design as a part of Nature. It allows you to understand and experience the profound weaving of embodiment, consciousness, and Nature. From this perspective, you begin to deeply understand human support and movement, the inter-relationship of mind and body, and the essential connectedness of all beings - both theoretically and experientially.
Ways of Teaching
The WAYS OF TEACHING classes include philosophical, pedagogical, and practical tools for teaching - especially, but not exclusively, for teaching Alexander’s Work. Educators and practitioners from all fields are welcome to participate.
Particular attention is given to basic through advanced hand skills. Often practitioners, therapists, and educators are taught what to do (the techniques of their profession), but not really how to achieve truly sensitive, non-manipulative, communicative touch. The Hand Skill classes will deepen your ability to both listen and speak, clearly and compassionately, through touch.
Ways of Teaching
AT Principles & Pedagogy
Hand Skills
Contemporary & Classical Procedures
Group Teaching / Crafting Group Games
Teaching Successful Introductory Workshops
Equity & Diversity Studies
Complementary Somatic Studies
Making a Living as an Alexander Teacher
Practicums & Apprenticeships
AT Principles & Pedagogy - What is the Work?
+ Read Description
This class offers a functional, experiential understanding of the core Principles of Alexander’s Work; as well as an experiential study of styles of pedagogy and, importantly, pedagogical forms which bring the Work to Life. Teachers learn how to ‘meet their student where they are’, making the Principles easy to understand and apply in everyday life.
Hand Skills - The High Art of Touch
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This class offers a diverse range of tools for developing the ability to receive and offer information through touch. You will learn how to see, feel, know, and understand who you are touching and how their inner world is functioning. What are their strategies and patterns - at each layer (bones, muscles, organ, thought, energy, etc)? Where do they move easily and where is the internal interference?
Similarly, you will learn how to offer new information through non-manipulative, compassionate, patient contact. You will learn how to modify the volume of your hands - speaking very quietly or with great emphasis - without pushing or pulling.
You will learn how the quality of your whole being - mind, body, emotion, spirit, energy - affects your hands.
Contemporary & Classical Procedures
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This class offers an experiential and pedagogical understanding of Alexander Procedures. Procedures are like etudes - small studies which highlight a particular skill, offering a form for repetition and exploration.
Students will learn the fundamentals of both classical and contemporary procedures, and how to use them in your teaching practice. We will also learn how to create your own procedures, tailored to the population you are teaching.
Group Teaching / Crafting Group Games
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This class offers the basic skills for highly dynamic and experiential group teaching.
Group Teaching is an art form. It is not the same as teaching an individual lesson that is witnessed by a group. Rather, it is multi-dimensional teaching - tracking not only each student, but the group itself, as a dynamic, conscious body.
Teachers will learn the fundamentals of group teaching; specific group activities and games which offer participants a direct experience the Principles of the Work; and tools for designing your own new group teaching material.
Teaching Successful Introductory Workshops
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This class teaches you how to craft simple and effective introductory workshops. Whether you have 2 hours or 2 days, you can offer new students a direct experience of the Work and how it can change their life, without jargon or lengthy and often confusing explanations. You will learn how to use language that speaks to the interests and needs of different communities.
Introductory Workshops are a reliable and effective way to build your practice. If you can offer a taste of what the Work can do, students will come for lessons!
Equity & Diversity Studies - The Future of the Work
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This class offers us tools for radical inclusivity. It is a deep study of belonging - with ourselves, our community, and our world.
We will have the opportunity to compassionately observe how we may, consciously or unconsciously, be excluding others, in our language or assumptions or actions - and how to change those patterns and underlying assumptions.
The more people we reach, the more the Work grows, the richer our lives become.
Complementary Somatic Studies
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This class offers a basic introduction to a range of complimentary somatic and movement studies. You will learn fundamental perspectives and basic techniques which support your hand skills. Material includes cranial sacral, visceral and fascial unwinding, organ mobility and motility, and more.
Making a Living as an Alexander Teacher
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Alexander Teachers can work in a wide variety of ways - a private practice, in a medical or therapeutic clinic, at a spa or retreat center, on the faculty of performing arts departments, free-lancing special interest and introductory workshops, and more.
If you choose to free-lance, rather than affiliate with an organization, you will need to be able continuously feed your practice through dynamic introductory workshops, followed by group classes and private lessons. You will need to know how to create advertising that people can understand, you will need to teach through everyday language and in everyday situations. You will need to go to where people do whatever they do, and teach in many varied conditions.
In this practical, experiential module you will learn how to create and teach workshops that attract people to want further study, which leads to a full practice of group and individual lessons.
Practicums & Apprenticeships
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This practicum is incorporated at the end of the High Touch course and throughout the Teacher Training course, in level-appropriate forms. It is your opportunity to put your study into practice, combining all of the elements of your personal use with your hand skills with your teaching skills.
It is an essential form for actually learning to teach, because ‘real’ students don’t respond the same way that your fellow trainees respond. It’s your ‘reality check’! It’s not enough that you understand what you are saying doing - does your student get it?
Trainees have the opportunity to observe lessons, to apprentice teach lessons and workshops, and to be mentored as they begin to teach lessons and workshops on their own.
It is the “training wheels” of the program - we help you keep your balance and nerve, while you peddle and steer.