The Alexander Technique is an educational process that teaches you how to change the habits you want to change, and how to use your body with more freedom and ease.
Most of us have unconsciously accumulated tension habits that interfere with how we function. The many consequences include poor posture, lack of energy, and neck, back, and shoulder pain.
The Alexander Technique makes you aware of these unconscious patterns so that you can choose to change the dysfunctional movements or postures that have become set in your muscles, thereby reducing and eliminating chronic tension or pain.
By teaching you how to use the appropriate amount of effort for a particular activity, the Alexander Technique improves ease and freedom of movement, balance, support, and coordination. It is not a series of treatments or exercises, but rather a reeducation of your mind and body.
The Technique is taught in private half-hour to hour lessons. The teacher works with you to observe and change mind/body habits that interfere with optimal functioning. The teacher uses both verbal and hands-on guidance to help you experience new ways of moving and embodying yourself.
The basic Alexander instructions are "Let my neck be free, to let my head go forward and up, to let my torso lengthen and widen, to let my legs release away from my torso, and let my shoulders widen."
Training to become an Alexander teacher takes three years (sixteen hundred hours).
Development of the Alexander Technique
Frederick Matthias Alexander was an Australian actor in the 1890s who often lost his voice on stage. When doctors could not solve Alexander’s problem, he began to study how he used his body. Practicing in front of mirrors, he found that he pulled his head back and down, which caused him to breath forcefully through his mouth and compress his larynx.
He experimented and found that moving his head forward and up alleviated this problem. However, on stage he habitually reverted to the old pattern because it felt right. He then realized that he must first inhibit the old pattern by eliminating the decision to "do." He substituted an "allowing" of the activity while thinking "head forward and up."
Alexander believed that poor habits or poor posture always involved rigidity in the head-neck area and unlocking this tension was the key to full freedom and use of the body. To eliminate the problem at its source, you need to prevent the neck from contracting unnecessarily using your conscious mind to change your subconscious muscle patterns.
Seven Basic Ideas That Form the Core of Teaching
Use and functioning. Using the power of choice to determine the quality of actions. Bad body use results in unbalanced coordination; some parts of the body do too much, some too little.
The whole person. The Alexander teacher gets a sense of your potential for coordinating the whole self. The teacher does not attempt to fix something but to teach how to integrate the parts into a functional unity.
Primary control refers to the relationship of the head, neck, and torso. The main concern is to teach better use that results in better positions. Primary control serves as a key to coordinating your body as a whole.
Unreliable sensory feedback. Your kinesthetic sense can be defective ("debauched kinesthesia"). Habitual misuse of your body adversely affects the reliability of your ability to sense what is really happening.
Inhibition is the ability to stop or delay response until you are adequately prepared to make it.
Direction. Trusting reason rather than habit.
Ends and means. Keep your options open through the critical moment, then choose either not to respond to the stimulus, to do something else, or to fulfill the original aim. The emphasis is on the process, not the goal.
