My name is Claire Happel, and I am a musician and dancer who just finished my three-year training with the Alex and Joan Murray in Urbana, Illinois. I was first introduced to the Alexander Technique through many of the Murrays’ students – Becky Nettl-Fiol, Luc Vanier, Andrew McCann, Cindy Pipkin-Doyle, Lauren Hill – who taught or helped with classes at the University of Illinois. In the ten years between my undergraduate years and starting the training course, I longed for information about their work because it so fascinatingly applied to what I did in music and dance. As a student on the course and now humble, semi-symbolic assistant, I see the many visitors who come from across the country and world to work with them. It has always seemed to me that documenting the work we do on the course and the topics Joan and Alex are interested in at the moment might be of interest to people not able to come to Urbana. Hope you enjoy it!
Disclaimer: Please don’t judge based on writing style. I want to get the information out but can’t spend hours of my day on it, so posts will be in a raw-ish format.
on the course 
From “An Anatomist’s Tribute to F.M. Alexander” Raymond Dart 1970. “Some clinicians, too, more especially in the neurological field, found evolutionary concepts inescapable. Amongst those in America, Temple Fay, Neurosurgeon at Temple University in Philadelphia, was outstanding. To him, in particular, the involuntary movements during seizures or epileptic fits were simply exhibiting ancestral and beneficial movement patterns reminiscent of piscine, amphibian or reptilian antiquity. He encouraged his physiotherapeutic and psychological conferences to learn form and utilize these and other basic sensory information and reflex symptoms, the procedures by whose employment one might prevent or even bodily eliminate such lacks in bodily control.
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