about elizabeth

Qualified and committed to teaching

Hi! I'm Elizabeth Hurwitt. If you decide to pursue AT lessons with betterATbeing, I'll be your teacher.

Please read on to learn a bit more about me. AT learning requires teacher and student to work in a very close partnership to be successful. So it's important that you choose a teacher who is right for you.

I trained in a rigorous program certified by the American Society for Alexander Technique (AmSAT). My teaching certification is a license and obligation to practice expert care, which begins with taking care of myself.

Living my dream so you can too

When I was little I dreamed of being graceful.

I knew there was something exciting and wonderful about life that always seemed just a little out of reach. But somehow, even then, I knew that this extraordinary thing was really inside me. How to get to it was the problem.

Today I feel that this special thing is the me I become when I practice Alexander Technique. Not because AT makes me a beautiful ballerina! But because it makes every single step, movement, and breath an adventure.

AT opens up the process of becoming, and makes it a place I can enter at will. And a place to be well, whole, and fulfill my potential. Now what I want is to take you to that place with me.

Born to care

My parents were both physicians. From them, I learned that our health, well-being and behavior are intricately connected. And improving other people's lives matters deeply to me, as it did to them.

My parents taught me that listening closely was vitally important in providing care. In my AT work I listen to people with my hands as well as my ears.

My training with Tom Vasiliades

In 2014, I began my teacher training with Tom Vasiliades, some years after my first decade of individual lessons with Pamela Anderson. In 2017, I completed Tom's AmSAT-approved, three-year training course (1600 hours of hands-on work).

Since starting my practice in 2017, I have been pursuing post-graduate studies with Tom, and spent 4 years assisting him in his in-person course at The Juilliard School, Evening Division. My practice of AT is informed by Tom's post-graduate training with John Nicholls and Walter Carrington.

Walter Carrington's way

Walter Carrington is revered for clearly articulating and preserving AT's principles, as formed by its founder F.M. Alexander. Carrington's approach to teaching, documented in his published lectures and practiced by his trainees, encourages the postural muscles' engagement with the whole body's web of elastic, opposing pulls. It promotes a widening as well as a lengthening back, freeing the rib cage for deep and natural breathing. The teacher's inquiring, guiding touch speaks to the entire individual with each placement of the hands.

My work at betterATbeing is dedicated to carrying on this approach, conveyed from teacher to trainee, through John Nicholls' and Tom Vasiliades' work with Walter Carrington, and my years of study with Tom. I want to give students the benefit of this potent approach to AT.

Hands and words work together

My hands are what matter most in teaching Alexander Technique—and Tom has trained me to use my hands with great care. Every lesson is a new conversation between two nervous systems—my own and my pupil's. It has also proved useful that I have had a long professional life working with words. My first paying job was teaching creative writing to high-school students and I have been writing and editing ever since. My knack for coming up with the right words to describe our Alexander work is very helpful to my students. Together, hands and words can say more than either can communicate separately.

OTHER BACKGROUND

Like so many East-Coast dwellers, I'm originally from the West Coast, and grew up the San Francisco Bay Area. Orphaned at 16, I was fostered by kind neighbors, and soon went off to college at the University of California. From there I moved to NYC's Upper West Side, where I joined a church choir of trained singers and actors, who provided a new community and perspective on life. With beginner's enthusiasm and modest talent, I studied voice and Alexander Technique, while working in publishing houses and law firms, and writing for music magazines. I ultimately established a career as a performing arts administrator, helping to shape and sustain a few small but brilliant companies on New York's concert-giving scene. Today, in addition to teaching AT, I serve as Development Director of Copland House, a unique creative center for American music based in Aaron Copland's historic home in Cortlandt Manor, NY. I live in lower Manhattan with my husband Elliott Hurwitt, a music historian.