The Alexander Technique is an educational method used worldwide for well over a hundred years. By teaching how to change faulty postural habits, it enables improved mobility, posture, performance and alertness along with relief of chronic stiffness, tension and stress.
Another reason people take lessons in the Alexander Technique is to enhance performance. Athletes, singers, dancers, and musicians use the Technique to improve breathing, vocal production, and speed and accuracy of movement.
Most of us have many habitual patterns of tension, learned both consciously and unconsciously. These patterns can be unlearned, enabling the possibility of new choices in posture, movement and reaction. During lessons you’ll develop awareness of habits that interfere with your natural coordination. You’ll learn how to undo these patterns and develop the ability to consciously redirect your whole self into an optimal state of being and functioning. Through direct experience you’ll learn how to go about your daily activities with increasingly greater ease and less effort.
The Alexander Technique is typically taught through a series of private lessons. Over a course of lessons, your teacher introduces concepts and practices that expand your awareness of the functioning of your nervous system, muscular system and skeletal system. You’ll learn to restore optimal poise, balance and ease in overall functioning.
As you progress in your study, you’ll find that what you’re learning applies to all areas of your life. Just as study and practice in a new language enables you to understand and speak the language easily without thinking, so does study of the Alexander Technique result in being able to integrate it into the activities of your life on an ongoing basis.
In an Alexander Technique lesson, your teacher instructs you – with verbal and manual guidance – to approach movement differently. Not only will you learn to recognize habit patterns that may be interfering with ease, flexibility, and balance, but you will learn how to change them.