Can the Alexander Technique help me become the Crone Swan of my dreams?

A Training for Ageing article where Crone-in-Training Juzza tries summat new & writes about how it's helped her 'Crone Journey'. May you be inspired to try summat new or 'av a laff, at the very least.

Are you sitting comfortably?

No, neither was I.

But I am now.

I’m sitting in a beautifully relaxing room in Sheffield, in a circle with six other crones and crones-in-training at a Crone Club Sheffield meet up. This month, we’re at Crone-in-Training, Hester Singer’s new business, ‘Ease and Poise’, and she’s treating us to a taster session in The Alexander Technique (A.T.).

We start by each explaining why we have an interest in learning more about the technique.

“When I hit menopause, I realised I’d taken my body for granted.”

“Physio has taken me as far it could.”

“I’m frightened of falling.”

“I’ve got long covid.”

“I’m interested in how the body keeps the score and the connection between our minds and our bodies.”

Then it’s my turn.

“I want to trap my head in the car door less. I want to stop standing in dog shit. I want to be less Frank Spencer* and be more… SWAN!”

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a swan.

All my beloved female mentors were so effortlessly elegant, efficient and organised as they glided (glid?), poised and immaculate, across the ‘pond’ of work and life.

In time, of course, I also saw how much secret paddling went on beneath the water, but I am still in awe of how they manage to pull off such an effortless ‘glide’.

If you’ve read any previous Tits To The Wind articles, or indeed know me personally, you’ll be aware that I’m as far from a swan as as a non-swan can be. I am, as I conclude in this recent article about my camper van trip to France, the bastard daughter of Mr Bean and Frank Spencer*. Or was it Bridget Jones? 🤔

Anyway, you get my point.

Me brushing my teeth on holiday. And yes, it was all down my jumper.

But what is the Alexander Technique?

This is the question I asked a friend before my first meeting with Hester. Not only does my friend have ease and poise in abundance, but she also went to public school, so she’s bound to know.

“Isn’t that the thing where it takes them two years to teach you how to sit down?” she laughs.

When I share this anecdote later with Hester, thankfully she laughs too, but doesn’t rise to the bait. Indeed, not ‘rising to the bait’ and being more in control of your emotions is, I later learn, just one of the many things that the A.T. can teach me…

The Alexander Technique is notoriously tricky to explain.

I ask Chat GPT, and it’s actually very helpful:

“The Alexander Technique is a method that teaches us how to move with more awareness and less tension. It’s not about ‘correct posture’ in the stiff, old-school sense - it’s about unlearning the habits that interfere with how our bodies are naturally designed to move."

Not bad for a bot! Here’s my attempt…

My very first session…

The Crone-Swan Transformation Project doesn’t get off to the best of starts.

Being dyslexic with numbers, I’d written down the time of the session wrong so, after a polite phone call from Hester enquiring if I was lost, I arrived late, hot and even sweatier than normal.

And I HATE being late.

Like many autistic folk, my ‘executive functioning’ is pretty low, and much of my work week is lost to counting on my fingers what time to set off in order to get to a meeting on time. I usually turn up at least one hour early. Sometimes a day.

But Hester is kind and seems unruffled as she makes me a coffee, and we head into a beautiful room with sun flooding in through the sash windows. Kamikaze squirrels leap from branch to branch in the trees outside. The sound of the blue tits flutters in on the light breeze through the gap in the window. There’s a smell too. Not a heavy hippy, joss-stick smell, but a more sophisticated, lighter equivalent. Nothing is overpowering - even the light is restful.

In the centre of the room is a therapist’s table with a pile of three books carefully positioned at one end. Next to the table is what looks like an old wooden dining chair.

Hester invites me to sit at the table by the window for a chat before we start. I collapse into the chair, on reflection, with all the ease and poise of Jabba the Hut.

We discuss what I’m hoping to get out of the Technique and Hester listens attentively to my long list of ‘difficulties’ and also my Crone aspirations - what qualities I want to get in training for in my ‘third act’.

When I was 49 and three quarters, I outlined some of the Crone qualities I aspired to achieve in my first stab at a ‘Crone Manifesto’. I wonder if achieving some ‘ease and poise’ could be my passport into acquiring some, if not all, of these qualities and behaviours.

I notice Hester hasn’t written anything down, choosing to actively listen instead. As an obsessive note taker myself, especially since the onset of peri menopausal dementia, this makes me anxious.

I console myself with the thought that I can email her ‘the list’ afterwards.

“And is there anything you don’t like that I should know about?” she asks.

I am overcome with a traumatising flashback of the last time someone in the ‘wellbeing space’ asked me this question. I’d succumbed to trying ‘hot yoga’ in Walkley after much persuasion from friends, and they asked, ‘Is there anything we should know?’ at the end of their pre-assessment form. I’m still haunted by the look on the receptionist’s face when 30 minutes later, I returned to ask for not one, but two additional sheets of paper.

Meanwhile back in the room, I realise Hester is waiting for me to answer, but I also notice how comfortable she seems to be with silence. This pleases me greatly, as it’s another Crone trait I am desperate to acquire.

“Well,” I blurt… “I’m autistic and I don’t really like being touched…I don’t even go to the hairdressers coz I can’t bear them touching me.” I wave my split ends in her direction for illustrative purposes.

“…and I especially can’t bear people touching THESE…” I gesture to the things sticking out awkwardly at the end of my legs. I can’t even bring myself to say the word.

“Your feet?” asks Hester.

“Yeh, those.”

Hester gently asks me whether I’m aware that the technique does actually require her to apply light pressure, with her hands, on different parts of my body.

I try to mask my horror. I’d wanted to go into this ‘experiment’ with an open mind, so I’d resisted my usual autistic inclination to disappear off-grid for several weeks of ‘research’ before coming.

This was probably a mistake, I now realise.

I take a breath and tell Hester not to worry, “I’ve put my Big Crone Pants on today to give me the courage to give this a go, so let’s do it!” (Later, we discuss creating a ‘what to expect sheet’ for new enquiries - you can read this on Hester’s website here.)

With my health history boxed off, we use the final 30 seconds of our session…Ha ha, only kidding. We still have 30 minutes of our session to go! 😅

Hester suggests that we start with some ‘table work’ and invites me to climb onto the table and lay my head on the books. I clamber onto the table and think of that poor beached whale at Flamborough.

As I lay down, Hester places her hands gently on the back of my head and asks me to give her the weight of it.

I realise this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever surrendered the weight of my head to anyone. I wonder how much it weighs. I worry it’s too heavy, packed so densely with all that brain fog and cluttered thinking.

Thankfully Hester is strong and has a safe pair of hands. There’s a practical down-to-earth-ness about her, which surprises me for a practice that feels so ambiguous. I’d wrongly assumed there may be something of the ‘woo’ about this, but Hester is thankfully about as far from ‘woo’ as you can get.

“Relax your eyes,” she tells me gently, “let them just take in whatever is there. There is nothing to do. Nowhere else to be.”

I notice I let out an involuntary breath. I’m starting to like the sound and feel of this.

She asks me to picture all the space behind my head, and all the space to the right of it, and all the space to the left. She gently presses my shoulders down into the table. I breath out again and find my eyes closing.

She now moves over to my right and asks me to give her the weight of my arm, which she then extends and folds back in.

“…And we try to keep our eyes open, because this is a practice to use in real life.”

Oh shit. I might have dropped off.

Hester continues to move around the table, placing her hand under my lower back. The warmth and energy I feel from her hands is remarkable, they literally radiate healing vibes.

When she rolls out my arm which seems to unfold forever, she suggests I picture my arm as a wing from my shoulder blade, with all the space from the end of my fingertips outwards.

Picturing where your individual limbs are in the space around your body, is something I’ve always had difficulty doing, hence the walking into things and my shameful shadow of clumsiness that’s always followed me.

I surrender my right leg, my right hand.

I notice this word keeps floating to the top of my messy brain-mush.

Surrender.

Surrender.

Before I realise it, Hester has briefly rested her warm hands on my socked feet. My eyes prick with tears as I realise it’s the first time anyone’s really ever touched them.

Several years ago I ran an event at the Sheffield Royal Society for the Blind to capture stories on the isolation and loneliness of older people. A blind woman, who was a member at the Society, offered to provide some hand massage sessions at the event.

“A lot of older people, particularly blind people or those in care homes and hospitals only ever experience human touch when they are getting ‘moved around’,” she said.

This has stuck with me - the importance of human touch in later life - and in my sessions with Hester, the phrase ‘healing hands’ came to mind several times.

I discuss this when I meet with another of Hester’s Crone clients, who agrees.

“Yes, Hester has healing hands. She’s a healer whether she likes it or not!”

The main event…sitting down

In the final part of the session, Hester invites me to get off the table in my own time.

I sit on the edge of the table for a few moments, my legs dangling like a child’s. I feel deliriously ‘open’. There’s a ‘cleanliness’ and an even more satisfying achievement of ‘uncluttering’ than when you’ve Marie Kondoed your sock draw.

At the same time, I notice a wave of delicious fatigue sweeping over every part of my body, the kind of full body release that I’ve only ever felt after wild swimming.

When I stand, my hips have a lightness to them that I can’t ever remember having before. Surely she can’t have sorted out my grating menopausal pain already?

Hester then steers me in front of the wooden chair in the middle of the room and suggests we move on to ‘chair work’.

I stand with the chair behind me as Hester gently rearranges my body, making tiny adjustments to my head, arms and shoulders.

She now has hold of my neck and head and I sense we’re building up to the main event. SITTING DOWN.

It might seem strange to have such a seemingly simple and mundane action such as ‘sitting down’ as the focus of a session. And yet, with the chaos of the world being what it is, the idea that I can actually control and master just one thing in my little corner of the world is hugely appealing right now.

“As you’re sitting down, just think ‘forward and up’,” says Hester. “It’s just a thought. Just an INTENTION. You don’t actually have to DO anything with your body.”

This, I realise after several sessions, is a key element of A.T. practice - intention of thought and surrendering your body to just to do what it does. Or rather, do what it DID when we were children, before modern life got in the way and deformed us.

I am reminded of the Mary Oliver poem that Crone Vic opened with at CroneLines:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Contrary to what you would expect for a technique that improves posture, this technique is not about ‘holding it all in’, it’s actually about ‘letting go’.

Does The Alexander Technique help you get in Crone training for ageing?

Just out of curiosity, I put my early draft of the Crone Manifesto into Chat GPT and ask it if any of those ‘crone qualities’ could be helped by the Alexander Technique. Chat GPT proceeds to give at least one example of how the Alexander Technique can directly help me achieve EVERY point on the Crone Manifesto. And I have to say, it’s pretty bang on - here’s just the first three…

💫 Where Alexander Technique DIRECTLY Supports Crone Energy:

#1. CRONES DON’T COMPETE
👉 Learning the Alexander Technique teaches you to move from ease, not tension, meaning you become less reactive, less locked into comparison or rushing. You literally feel more interconnected instead of fighting for space.

#2. CRONES KNOW WHERE THEY ARE GOING
👉 A.T. (Alexander Technique) strengthens body-mind awareness. You get clearer about your internal compass — because you're tuned in, not distracted by habitual tension.

#3. CRONES SAY NO
👉 Practicing A.T. is practicing boundaries with yourself: "No, I don't have to tighten my neck/shoulders when I stand." That physical 'no' ripples out into emotional 'nos' too.

💬 To sum it up:

The Alexander Technique liberates your body, softens your defenses, sharpens your awareness, and anchors you in yourself.

It is crone magic in motion. 🖤✨

Amen to that, Crone AI Sister!!

Back in the real world, I also start to notice that each session awakens different emotions and seem to bring about changes across all of my life, giving me a flicker of hope that my Crone goals may be possible.

After my first session, I see my neighbour ‘out back’ and I notice I hold her eye contact with greater ease than normal. I felt more connected and am in less of a rush to get my words out.

I return from another session with a clarity of thought I haven’t experienced since peri-menopause started.

As the weeks go on, I notice I’ve had more moments of ‘noticing’. I finally physically experience what Tara Brach describes as ‘waking up from our trance-like state’. Could this be mindfulness and Buddhism without the effort?

I feel more like taking up space in a room without apology, fear or shame. Rather than collapsing onto The Hairy Scottish One’s sofa, clutching a knife and fork, waiting to be fed, I am moving around his front room, bending and sweeping like a Tai-Chi master in a sufi-style dance.

A friend told me it’s common for autistic women to be very ‘bangy-into-things’. Whilst I will probably always be clumsy, I realise I’ve probably been physically making myself smaller so my mistakes would be less visible.

Since I’ve been doing the Alexander Technique, I reckon I’ve put on at least 10cm of height. 😳

I am nearing the end of my sessions with Hester, when I am co-hosting a ‘menopause takeover’ event at The Crucible in Sheffield. I’m doing a talk on ‘Overcoming Fear Of Menopause (FOM!) as part of a run-up to Crone Imogen’s wonderful one-woman menopause play, ‘Dry Bits’.

If you’ve seen my TED X talk, you’ll know public speaking, or indeed, speaking at all is a source of great anxiety for me. Like many ADHD folk, my thoughts exit my mouth like a huge tsunami of vomit, and I trip over myself, overwhelmed as to which of those ten million thoughts to pick out first.

To prevent word vomiting, or worse still, corpsing, I do an incredible amount of ‘secret’ work in preparation to get my thoughts in order. My 11 minute TED talk took eight hours a day for a full six months, where I did nothing else but present to the sheep in a nearby field. My 30 minute presentation today at The Crucible takes me two weeks to prepare. And I already knew what I wanted to say.

By this point in my A.T. journey, I was starting to use the Technique as my ‘go to’ self-regulation practice. So, a few minutes before I’m due to start my talk, I dash to the loo to visualise space to the right and to the left and in front of me, and space above my head. I feel the toilet seat behind me and mindfully sit down and stand up a few times. I visualise a lengthening of my arms out to my fingers and my majestic, elegant wings unfolding from my shoulder blades and filling the whole room.

I was ready. Crone Ready.

Not just ready, Crone Ready.

After I’d finished my talk, two lovely Crones invite me to sit with them for a coffee while they fashion crowns for Imogen’s play and, no word of a lie, this is what they say,

“We were just talking about how your movement aligned so well with your message today.”

I’d have fallen off my seat with shock if I didn’t have my feet squarely on the floor, letting the chair take the full weight of my pelvis.

This shit really works.

Is The Alexander Technique worth the money?

At £50 a pop, it’s not cheap but, when you factor in the cost of the room hire, the cost of three years training, and above all, the positive changes it can bring about in your life…if you can find the money, it’s a no-brainer.

And think about what £50 can get you these days…okay, for me, it’s a week’s worth of food, but for others it’s, what… a highly disappointingly average meal out? (Probably without wine.) A counselling session - £70 an hour? A physio session - anything up to £100?

For me, the Alexander Technique is now my ‘go-to’ practice when I need a break, or want to get ready for a meeting or a talk. Even before going out socially. It grounds me, and unlike other practices, it’s not something ‘additional’ to do. On average we stand up and sit down 100 times a day, so if we can save energy by doing that more efficiently, then we’re already quids in IMO.

As for the practical outcomes I’ve noticed, the list grows each day.

I can get in and out of the camper van without crawling in on all fours.

I can walk 11k steps without my hips and knees packing in and with very little stiffness the next day.

My lower back pain has improved as I’m taking notice of how I tense my glutes at my standing desk.

I can drive in contented silence without needing music on. I’m watching less telly.

I’ve been more adventurous in the clothes I wear. I finally feel happy standing out, rather than desperately trying to be invisible.

I can dance like there’s no body watching, and don’t need drugs or drink to do it.

And even if I didn’t get all those benefits, for those precious 45 minutes in that beautiful room with Hester’s healing hands…a room where everything can stop and I can truly surrender… Well, to me, that’s priceless.

But did it turn me into the Crone Swan of my dreams?

I ask Chat GPT’s opinion and it tells me this:

“The Alexander Technique is a Crone Superpower.
It's the art of moving through the world with grace, fierceness, and full unapologetic presence.

When we stop tightening, bracing, apologising we rise taller, breathe deeper, and move with the wild wisdom of women who have nothing to prove and everything to claim.

It's not about sitting up straight. It's about coming home to the body — as she is, where she is — and moving through life with the grounded, joyful freedom that only a true Crone knows.”

Oh yeah, sista!

At a recent Rugby reunion, I was telling a mate about A.T. and the wonders of it. It turned out he was doing weekly physio for similar reasons.

I was chuntering on about how much it was helping me, as I climbed into our mate’s car…and properly smashed my head on the way in.

I fear I may have fractured my skull. Again.

But all is not lost. The Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, in his poem ‘The Swan’, makes an interesting point. If you’ve ever seen a swan walking on land, they are even less graceful than Frank Spencer on roller-skates. Well, okay, Rilke puts it a bit more eloquently:

"This labouring through what is still undone, as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way, is like the awkward walking of the swan.

…And dying — to let go, no longer feel the solid ground we stand on every day — is like anxiously letting herself fall into waters, which receive her gently.”

I just love the idea of how when the awkward swan “lets herself down/ into the water”, she is suddenly transformed into the embodiment of grace.

If this is the case, then maybe I was actually a swan all along, I just needed to find the right pond.

And you, my esteemed Crones and allies, are it. 🙏

Contact Hester

Hester recommends a block of six sessions for optimum benefit, though if you’re like me and very open to suggestion, you might need fewer.

She is kindly doing a deal for Crone Club paid subscribers of half price for your first session, so you can see if you like it.

Men and women welcome.

Get in touch via her website: www.easeandpoise.co.uk

Like her page on Facebook: www.facebook.com/hestersingeralexandertechnique

Huge thanks to Hester for her time and talent so that I could experience the joy of the Alexander Technique and have fun writing about it.

Join the Crone Economy and the Crone movement

One of the aims of Crone Club is to cheer on women in midlife and beyond with their independent businesses and creative projects. I dream of a Crone Economy where we have a network of ‘women of a certain rage’ buying from each other and helping each other out, where we can.

Do you attend an event or project that might help another Crone-in-Training and would make an interesting TTTW article? Are you a paid subscriber yet? If so, drop me a line! 😘

Love and croneage. Juzza. xxx

*Frank Spencer was a character from a beloved TV series in the 1980s that we grew up with called ‘Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em’, where, each episode, he got himself into scrapes, often with much hilarity ensuing. Needless to say, I didn’t find it funny.