Forty years ago today, I met my teacher.

Apart from my ongoing astrology studies (I had just completed a practitioner course in horary), my life was going nowhere.

As a Sun, Moon, Ascendant Capricorn, I had begun my spiritual journey up my mountain path about 10 years earlier, but I had only got to base camp and seeing that much of it was strewn with litter left by other travellers and realising that the ascent got much steeper and tougher from there, I had decided to head back downwards.

I played snooker every day and drove taxis at night, but both of these activities had just given me back pain. To try and resolve this I had been looking into the Alexander Technique.

I had been told that I had to see this one man and not to be put off by his appearance.

When I met him, Patrick Macdonald was 75 years old, but looked even older. 

I learnt that not long before, he had a stroke but he was still working full time as the world’s senior teacher of the technique.

Up to that point I had seen 3 teachers all of different levels of experience but it had relatively little impact.

So I arrived at his house as a sceptical Capricorn. 

Despite driving cabs I had no car of my own, so I had to walk the 10 miles to his house over the Sussex Downs. It was a cold clear autumn day so I thought at least the exertion and the fresh air would do me good.

He was a man of few words. He led me over to a chair and asked me to stand in front of it, then touched the middle of my back with two of his fingers.

Immediately a bolt of lightning shot right up my spine to the top of my head and I found myself sitting upright in that chair. 

He did it again and instantly I was standing upright having no idea as to how I got there. 

I had no comprehension of what had happened, but it felt great.

He never said a word to me but carried on doing the same thing for about 20 minutes.

Then politely said we’ve finished and goodbye, shuffling off to his kitchen.

I floated out of his house in a completely different body to the one I had experienced living in for the previous 30 years.

But it was far more than that. I felt as if this little old man had reached down and found my soul that was sleeping, and woken it up.

Instead of heading for a nearby country pub lunch as I had planned, I floated back over the hills barely touching the ground. 

It was the weirdest experience of my life. My brain could not compute it, there was nothing in those old files to compare it with.

All I knew was that I wanted to do it again and spend as much time as possible in the company of this extraordinary little old man.

The only way to do that was to join his practitioner training course in London.

I had no desire to teach his method to others, I just wanted to learn how to do for myself, what he did to me.

I never did find out his birthtime but this is his noon chart.

He was a Piscean with an exact Sun/Neptune trine, but the Capricorn Moon added a touch of steel and a seriousness.

I have spent 50 years in alternative/astrological/spiritual circles, I have met many teachers, some who claimed to be Zen masters, but only one person who truly was one.

Patrick Macdonald did not deal in words, I would spend hours working with him and he hardly ever spoke to me. He didn’t need them, his communication was entirely through the energy which poured through him and and every time he touched you, you felt that dynamic surge go right through you, heading straight for your crown chakra.

This energy he called “direction” because it flows in a specific direction – upwards and outwards.

It is something that is natural in animals and in small children, it informs their every movement, but as we get older we accumulate muscular, mental and emotional tensions that disrupt and interfere with it.

But the time we reach our teenage years most of us have lost this natural direction and it has been replaced by a different quality which has a downward impact in all areas of our life.

Alexander discovered this and realised that given the many unnatural stimuli that humans had to face, this loss of natural direction was inevitable.

But he also found a way to consciously reverse this process and get it back even stronger.

Patrick Macdonald was unique in this respect, he had worked at this method more than anyone alive and had more of this direction in his fingers than most teachers have in their whole bodies.

Despite looking like a frail old man, he was the very essence of this upward direction.

It was my immense good fortune to have such tight synastry with him.

His Sun was within a degree of my Mars.

His Neptune was exactly opposite my Moon and trine my Mars.

His Moon was conjunct mine.

I also met him as I was about to undergo the biggest transit of my life up to that point.

This was the chart of my first meeting with Mr Macdonald.

As you can see, Neptune is rising and the Moon is in the same degree as my own.

Neptune was heading for its conjunction with my Sun (4 Capricorn).

This transit began the following Autumn when I enrolled onto his training course.

There were 20-30 students on the course and each morning everyone would receive about 5 minutes of individual hands on work from Patrick.

The training was 4 hours a day, 4 days a week for 3 years. I was able to do the commute up to London and carry on driving taxis in Brighton at night to fund it. It was an immense commitment, but absolutely worth it for those precious daily 5 minutes.

After the first term, he travelled to New York to run workshops there over the Xmas period. He had another stroke while on the plane over and ended up in hospital with double pneumonia and septicaemia.

He was hospitalised and the doctors over there were convinced he would never make it home.

But this man was made of strong stuff and he had been working intensely on himself since he was brought to Frederick Matthias Alexander (the founder of the technique) as a sickly child with a deformity at the age of 10.

FM’s technique had turned Patrick’s life around and by the age of 19, he was captain of the Cambridge University boxing team.

On leaving University, he joined Alexander’s first teacher training course in 1931, he stayed on after completing it to become his assistant and successor when he died in 1955.

To the amazement of the doctors in New York, Patrick was able to return to the UK, but he did not go back to London, he retired from teaching.

Naturally I was upset, but was so grateful for the experience that I’d received.

Most of the students enrolled on other courses, I returned home to my astrology.

Three months later I received a phone call from Patrick’s wife Alison, (who was 7 years older than him). I was expecting sad news but she actually told me that he had largely recovered and was missing his life’s work and as she knew I lived locally, wondered if I would care to come along and have a session with him.

Half an hour later I was at his house (I had a car by then).

Patrick looked considerably older and was even more stooped over than before. It was clear that his left side was not functioning as it should because of the stroke, but as soon as he touched me with his right hand, that same energy came powering through.

His memory was gone and he didn’t remember me, but I explained that I had been a student on his course.

I asked him if we could continue like before just at his house rather than up in London.

His response was “I don’t see why not”, so from that day on I turned up four mornings a week for four hours a time.

The only difference was I had him all to myself for those four hours.

I had no expectations. If it only lasted a week, that would be fine.

After a few weeks some others heard what was happening and came to down from London to join in. It steadily grew to a class of 6 students.

And it kept going.

I could not believe that the Universe had chosen me for such special treatment, but Neptune in the 9th house is at the apex of a very tight T square for me, and it was now transiting conjunct my Sun.

Towards the end of 1988, Saturn moved into Capricorn too. The following year Uranus joined in.

This extraordinary adventure was still ongoing.

The stimulus to work with us had been good for Patrick, Alison was convinced it was the only thing that kept him alive.

A few months before my 3 year training was due to end, with transit Uranus exactly on my Sun, I turned up at his house one morning to find fire engines, and the house severely damaged.

Patrick and Alison were standing in front of the ruins and about to be taken to hospital for observation and treatment for smoke inhalation.

A few weeks later they were living temporarily in a care home while their house was being rebuilt. I went to visit them and Patrick straight away wanted to work, so we arranged with the home to do some outdoors in the grounds.

With Uranus conjunct my Sun, I completed my training. By now I had realised that I had a responsibility to teach and share what I could of the inner wealth and spiritual energy that Patrick Macdonald had poured into me.

So I started to build a practice, while continuing to visit and work with Patrick. By now I had become one of the family and would often stay back after a session to help with the garden or prepare some lunch for them.

Within 6 months of my completing the training it was clear that his health was deteriorating and he stopped teaching. In November 1990, 5 years after I first met him, Patrick Macdonald passed away.

Alison asked me to write and deliver his eulogy at his funeral.

I was extremely nervous about this, I had never done public speaking before and here I was about to stand in front of hundreds of people many of whom where actors and speech therapists (the Alexander Technique began as a voice method for actors).

But as soon as I began, I felt his presence standing beside me just as he had done for most days of those 5 years. This was the eulogy.

“On behalf of all his pupils throughout the world, I would like to thank Mr Macdonald for his lifetime’s work in the Alexander Technique.

He describes his work in these words – “that FM Alexander’s discovery and the evolution of his technique of teaching ranks higher than almost all other human achievement in any country, at any time“.

Mr Macdonald’s quest for truth required a huge amount of dedication and hard work which led him to a well of knowledge, from which he drank deeply. 

At the beginning of his book, Mr Macdonald quotes Pilgrim’s Progress –

“Though with great difficulty I am got hither, but now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am“

Mr Macdonald was not only a teacher, he was a great master and champion of the Alexander Technique.  He shared Alexander’s view from Man’s Supreme Inheritance that  “Every man, woman and child holds the possibility of physical perfection“

Mr Macdonald’s life was devoted to turning this possibility into a reality.

Countless numbers of people owe their health, well being and even their lives to his skill. 

He enriched his fellow man with love, wisdom and compassion and also entertained us with his humour. 

I once asked him if he thought that he would ever go to heaven. He thought for a moment and replied  “that depends who is on the gate“.

The most profound memory he leaves us with is of his beautiful hands and the magic that flowed from them. It was as if those hands reached into your very soul and pointed it upwards, towards heaven.

In his Notebook Jottings, Mr Macdonald quotes from The Sermon on the Mount to say that –

“The Alexander Technique is ‘like a treasure hidden in a field, the which, when a man has found, he hides and for the joy thereof goes and sells all that he has and buys that field’. Note that he sells all that he has. He does not merely go without a television set or a holiday in France, or perhaps a fur coat for his wife. He sells all that he has. And while a proper use of the self is not the kingdom of heaven, it is practically an indispensable means of approaching it“.

It is seldom that one man has such a profound effect on the world. His death is a great loss to all of us who knew and loved him, but his work lives on in ourselves. 

From all his pupils, throughout the world, I would like to thank Mr Macdonald, for pointing us in the right direction.”

Patrick Macdonald took me to the mountain top every day for 5 years, since he died I have spent the last 35 trying to get back up there on my own, in my own way.

Uranus and Neptune in Capricorn brought an enormous interest in complimentary health. Up until that point very few people had been able to make a career out of teaching the Alexander Technique.

I was very fortunate to catch this wave and within a couple of years was practicing full time.

People assumed my work was about posture when it was nothing of the sort. 

The very word implies something that is fixed. Patrick MacDonald with a Pisces Sun trine Neptune was the exact opposite of that. 

Essentially the Alexander Technique is about subtle energy flow. 

One’s “posture” is one of things that naturally improve through applying the technique, but it is not the most interesting or valuable one.

But just like the world of astrology, there are many different people applying this technique on many different levels. 

Over time I worked more and more like Patrick, with fine, subtle but powerful energy and in silence. 

If someone at a party asked me what I did for a living my answer was “absolutely nothing, people pay me to stay in the moment”. 

Fifteen years after Patrick’s death I opened my own Alexander practitioner training school, which continued until I retired to devote the rest of my days to astrology.

Over the next decade Patrick’s progressed Sun will go through his T square and conjunct his Neptune.

Maybe this means his soul will have found a suitable body and birthchart to emerge once again into our world. Or perhaps he can send his direction to us all without having to make a physical appearance.

My time with him coincided with Neptune, Uranus and Saturn all conjunct my Sun and his Moon.

Over the next few years we will both have Neptune and Saturn square them.

I will happily receive any more blessings that Patrick’s soul has to offer.

Patrick Macdonald was very interested in the teachings and methods of George Gurdjieff .

One of the books Gurdjieff wrote was Meetings With Remarkable Men, talking about a few very special souls that he had met in his life.

On my own Capricorn mountain path, I have also been very fortunate to meet a few remarkable men and women, but none so special as Patrick Macdonald.

Thank you Patrick from the bottom of my heart for reaching deep down into my soul and pointing me in the right direction.

Posted on 16 November 2025