About Us

Karin Brown:

I studied piano with Lauri Väinmaa at the Tallinn Music High School, and also at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (EAMT).

I came to the Alexander Technique due to numerous health problems.

In 2000, as a piano student at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, I was at a crossroads in my life. I hadn’t been able to play piano for a year because of pain in my arms, shoulders and neck. I had visited different doctors and tried various therapies, but nothing had helped me and no one could tell me what was wrong.

Then, someone mentioned trying Alexander Technique lessons with Maret Mursa Tormis at EAMT. I started first with group lessons. In the first lesson I got so much relief from my neck and shoulder pain that I decided to continue with private lessons. I realized that I was creating my problems myself with my habits and learned that it was possible to change my habits of thought and movement. Little by little, my health improved and I started to play piano again.

I finally graduated from EAMT in 2004. The same year I started my training as an Alexander Technique teacher at the Essex Alexander School in the UK. After graduating in summer 2007, I continued my studies with a postgraduate term at the Constructive Teaching Centre in London.

In 2008, I moved back to Estonia and started to work as an Alexander Technique teacher privately and also at the Tallinn Music High School, where I had worked as a piano teacher from 2000 to 2004. In autumn 2009, I also started working at the Geog Ots Tallinn Music School.


Conrad Brown:

I first had a course of thirty lessons in the Alexander Technique as a sixteen-year-old in 1993, due to an interest in playing table tennis: I was an enthusiastic and highly competitive player, but frustrated by my lack of progress.

The lessons were a revelation: the principles immediately made sense to me, and I often left a lesson with a pleasant feeling of lightness and ease in my body. By applying what I learnt my table tennis game improved, too!

A couple of years later, in 1995, by which time my interest in table tennis had faded, I started having lessons again with a different teacher. I had weekly lessons for six and a half years. In that time, the Alexander Technique took on a deeper and deeper significance, and its principles began to inform my whole attitude to life.

In January 2002, I started a three-year Alexander Technique teacher training course at the Constructive Teaching Centre in London with Walter Carrington, who was himself trained by F. M. Alexander. When I started the course, Walter was in his late eighties and had been teaching the Alexander Technique for over sixty years. He was wise, patient and benevolent and embodied the principles of the Alexander Technique. I consider myself very fortunate to have trained under his guidance.

After qualifying as a teacher in December 2004, I taught privately in the UK. I also had the great privilege of teaching the Alexander Technique to the monks at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery for three years.

I moved to Estonia in August 2008 with Karin, where we now live and teach.