The Alexander Technique is a practical skill you can learn for life
What is the Alexander Technique?
The Alexander Technique is a practical skill. It is not a therapy or an exercise. It is a self help technique for being and moving with more freedom and ease and so avoiding pain and discomfort.
It is learnt and understood through experience with the help of individual sessions. It is a holistic method which improves how you move, look and feel. It involves the whole self – body, mind and emotion.
Conscious thought is harnessed to influence posture and balance. The skills you learn are with you for life.
Issues addressed
Everyone builds up habitual patterns of muscular tension and reaction over the years.
These are unconscious and automatic so we are not usually aware of them. They operate when we move or react.
Sometimes these habits are not appropriate. For example, you may have a habit of bending at the waist and keeping your legs straight when lifting a heavy weight. Out of habit we sometimes stand with bad posture or rush when we don’t need to.
You know these habits are damaging but you find it difficult to change them. The habits can restrict our lives and cause unnecessary pain and fatigue.
What learning involves
Learning the Alexander Technique involves building awareness of unwanted habits of posture and movement and learning how to stop them so that unwanted tension is released.
Through changing old habits of reaction and learning skills of balance and movement, you can restore and enhance your natural coordination.
By learning to stop doing the wrong things and let the right things happen, you can return to the ease of movement you had as a small child.
F. M. Alexander
Frederick Matthias Alexander was born in Australia in 1869.
He developed his technique in response to recurrent hoarseness and loss of his voice. He tells the story in his book “The Use of the Self”.
F.M. Alexander began teaching his technique in 1894 and came to London in 1904. He taught in England and in the United States until his death in London in 1955.
Modern scientific research is confirming his findings.
Professor Niklaas Tinbergen in his Nobel Prize speech (1973) described Alexander’s work as an example of rigorous scientific method, referring to the ‘exceptionally sophisticated observation’ on which the Technique is based.
There are now around 3000 teachers worldwide.
