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Some of Alexander Technique's Principles

Alexander Technique is an educational attempt to prevent the physical decline caused by habituated mannerisms. The kinesthetic or proprioceptive sense is the medium studied, the sense used to internally calibrate one's own bodily location and to judge the effort necessary for moving. The founder's original intent in designing his work was to apply the scientific method to make experimentation & training deliberately repeatable, and to learn in a way that would allow indefinite improvement, rather than merely adopting a "better" habit, only to have it later be troublesome to eliminate when obsolete.

Two Basic Assumptions You May Never Have Considered Important

First,
learning about kinesthetic proprioception and your own responses is valuable for many reasons. It's a basic operating manual and first-hand discipline for body/mind unity. The study of perception makes a person more aware of all perception. Ignorance of proprioception can cause people to move themselves how they erroneously imagine their bodies are constructed, causing loss of agility. Ignorance of one's own creative constructive learning processes can cause resistance to change.

Second,
Alexander teachers believe that humans have a built-in "proprioceptive blind-spot." The ability to adapt has a serious drawback: repetition disappears sensitivity . People can get used to almost any circumstance by inventing ways to compensate - more often over-compensate. This is beneficial for learning, but the way habits are installed can cause problems. As habit is added onto habit, our human ability to adapt becomes a design flaw. We can get used to and justify gross overcompensation. People tend to forget the habit they designed is running in the background and may not know how to stop doing it, even if they want to. Even if the need for the habit has changed, the old habit will stay in place. Adding habit onto habit allows sensitive perceptual judgment to gradually become dull and untrustworthy as we give ourselves ever more complex orders to perform under imperitively justified necessity.

How Do We Get This Way?

There are many innocent situations when our kinesthetic sense becomes dulled. Because of a talent for adapting, any person can adopt a short-sighted mannerism for a necessary, justified reason. Later, this automatic habit can exaggerate into a mysterious self-imposed limitation, premature aging or eventually, pain. But most situations are insidious. If a person trains themselves to hold a purse on their arm, they will find themselves holding their arm up even though the purse is not on it. If someone is afraid while learning, adapting can mean they will most likely continue the way they learned. If someone is self-taught, they may unknowingly adopt useless and later problematic manner of moving. If someone has healed from a temporary injury, a habit of cringing to avoid pain can be automatically continued indefinitely, usually unnoticed. Sometimes due to rapid growth, teens grow up moving their bodies based on inacurate misconceptions of how their bodies are shaped and structured.

Of the principles discovered by F.M Alexander, the most inclusive is called psycho-physical unity.

He wrote, "...every act is a response to a stimulus received through the sensory mechanisms," and "...that any attempt to make a fundamental change in the working of a part [of the self] is bound to alter the use and adjustment of the whole [self.]"

The second guiding idea is called the universal constant.

Alexander described a fundamental relationship between functional capacity, aging and physical mannerisms during a lifetime of movement. His hypothesis stated that an efficient or inefficient manner of movement influenced all activities for either good or ill general health. This universal constant was more of a factor than how hard or long someone worked. How well a person could coordinate their thinking into using effort in the way Alexander termed "good use" determined their general overall health. "Bad use" started with justifying unnecessary effort and repeating it, which caused the senses to become "debauched." This indiscriminate repetition would eventually add up to a myriad of functional health problems.

With Alexander's Technique, you'll have a first-hand experience of this unity in action during Alexander lessons. Read more of some of these principles in action and about the practical ways they work... here.

Curious what Alexander Technique really is like for yourself? The best way is to find out is to get a lesson from the links page ...unless you live in Marin County of the San Francisco Bay area - in which case, you can get a lesson from Franis by calling or emailing her on this page. In case you're not curious enough, you might want to check out this page where learners describe as they are experiencing.

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

If you are familiar with the Alexander Technique, report your experiences here. - anonymously if you like. Web surfers would be fascinated to read your story of how and why you learned Alexander Technique, what it has done for you, and why you continue doing it.

This site also collects additions and contributions for almost all of its pages, so please check out more of what is on this site from the Alexander portal here,or use the buttons at the top of this page.

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