At face value, Alexander Technique is an immensely practical study of movement efficiency. It will prove to you how certain freeing strategies of thinking-in-order-to-respond are preferable to outdated habits.

But that's not all it can offer. Go a little further into its principles and you'll discover many unexpected benefits; a template for unlimited progress, sharpened perception, how your own psychophysical connection really works, how to be self aware without being self conscious. You'll discover strategies that will make experimentation more fruitful. Curious? Read on...

Simplified Principles of Alexander Technique

Your Kinesthetic Sense

Thinking is the first part of responding to move. In the form of neurons, our brain's intentions fire on electrical paths, making our muscles contract. The selection of which sophisticated array of muscles to contract and which to lengthen is judged by your kinesthetic sense. You use this sense to continuously orient where you are in space, as well as to measure how much effort you need to use to move.

How Perceptual Sensitivity Disappears

Learning to do something entirely new will feel unfamiliar at first. So if we want to learn, we must be ready to feel a little strange. As a new challenge becomes more familiar, humans adapt. To learn, your brain continuously sends out orders to contract your muscles that your teacher and your kinesthetic sense says might be required. If the action needs to be repeated or sustained for a long time, these often complex psycho-physical orders will gradually disappear in the background underneath your conscious attention. Habitual reactions have now learned to automatically engage, often without thinking about it. You have learned to adjust to a constant level of familiar excitement.

Now that we have used a certain amount of effort with an activity, we assume this particular amount of effort is necessary to do the action. In fact, if we repeat any action for a period of time, even a painful, awkward overcompensation, we will adapt to it and sense it as familiar. "A crooked man walks a crooked mile."

Learn to Stop Doing Outdated Habits

Say the need for the activity is over. Can we "turn off" the habit patterns we once intentionally installed? Most people more commonly leave these background habits running indefinitely, forgetting they even exist because they do not know how adaptation works. People think of "doing," but they do not as often think of "undoing." Obviously, problems can come from adding additional effort on top of what people have forgotten that they have been doing.

How to Prevent Insistent Habits from Interfering

Fortunately, you can "undo" overcompensation with Alexander Technique. Rarely do you have to avoid the entire activity. Many Alexander teachers believe this next concept of prevention to be the foundation of their work. This unique concept is a specialized use of the word "inhibition." To Alexander students, inhibition means to recognize and prevent a habitual pattern before it happens, so as to choose differently in the next moment. With practice, any habit can be inhibited. Just how to get past habitual limitation varies with each Alexander teacher's toolbox of experience. Used are: building a new constructive process, sidestepping, stalling, tricking, or boring the old habit - anything to disengage it and leave the freedom to try something new.

Go in a new Direction

What is this something new? The most original principle of Alexander Technique is known as Direction. Its long term importance in physical function is just now being scientifically studied in movement gait research laboratories. This principle teaches that the head and neck relationship leads quality of motion and response. Free the neck and head, and less effort is required to move the rest of you. You can learn to initiate and follow this kind of a start with an easy lengthening of the spine and body. As you do this, your ability to coordinate intention into action will improve. You learn to bring out serendipitous abilities that were tricky to deliberately repeat. Sometimes your other senses improve, even your intuitions and problem solving abilities of thought.

These principles can be recombined and expressed in a number of ways. Basic activities are to first identify and temporarily suspend the goal of an experimental objective. To do this, very simple actions might be chosen by the teacher; such as walking, sitting, making a sound or word or even lying with knees up. Complex activity can also be used.

In keeping with how senses adapt, customary kinesthetic judgment and preparation that "feels right" is examined for unnecessary effort. A hypothesis is formed; for instance, "Is the effort that I think is need actually required?" The next step would be to prevent previously known responses to allow a more instinctive capacity to emerge, to inhibit. A teacher helps with this, using their hands neutrally to detour habit from interfering with freer movement.

The possible improvement is then taken for a spin with all in mind. In a lesson, an Alexander teacher would show what the new improvement of direction means, training you to choose an easier way to move by yourself. Experiencing what is termed "Do-less-ness" or ease might signal success. However, with some students, seeking indicators of success is also suspended, depending on the the degree of disappearing adapted sensory ability on the part of the student. Discoveries and perceptual paradoxes are noted. A similar process is used again for more information.

Any Time You Want to Improve

The immediate effect of a lesson with an Alexander teacher can be quite unusual. Lightness, fluidity, and many metaphors illustrating effortlessness are commonly reported. To retain these advantages takes time and attention, as any skill would, but gradual progress can now be unlimited. Reported is a sense of tapping the unexpected and intuitive, no matter how often the process is used. In time, perceptual ability seems expand to simultaneously encompass many complex factors necessary for sophisticated talents. Imagine consciously staying with your chosen means of carrying out an intention, noticing new information that emerges, and immediately integrating new discoveries while performing. This subtle sophistication is what makes Alexander Technique beyond description for many.

Find a teacher to get a hands-on lesson from near to where you are from our links page here.

If you can't find a teacher, here's a site with more online lessons to experiment with learning Alexander Technique without a teacher - or having a refresher if you've already had some lessons.

If you have familiarity with the Alexander Technique, report your experiences here - anonymously if you like. Web surfers would love to read your story of how and why you learned Alexander, what it has done for you, and why you continue doing it. This site is also collecting additions to the other pages on this site, so please check out the other pages on Alexander Technique from here.

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