Type of Method
Suitable for
• Groups, teams and organisations
‘What we practice, we become’.
Learning the Alexander Technique is like re-learning your native language, a language you used to know but have forgotten from lack of use. You have the sense of coming home to your self, with ease and comfort in your body and mind.
As a mind-body practice of self-care, the Alexander Technique is more about un-doing what doesn’t work than about adding new rules and exercises. For over 100 years, performing artists have been using the Technique to release habits of tension, develop fuller breath and increase range of movement to boost skill and performance. Once you learn the principles, they stay with you, and you can practice ease and balance in all of your life’s activities.
The Alexander Technique offers a clear, systematic look into the underlying principles that govern human posture, muscle tone, movement and breath. You learn to use your body more effectively. Patterns of tightness or collapse affect your whole balance and well being; just like if a piano is out of tune, all the music played on it will be out of tune. In Alexander lessons, you can re-tune your system to a centered ease and practice this balance of the whole self in everything that you do—from sitting at a computer, to gardening, to debating, to carpentry, to meditating, to dancing. Breath-work calms the nervous system and long-held patterns of movement, posture, breath and voice can be released while new patterns of whole being balance emerge. As capacity for somatic embodiment increases, students learn to respond with choice rather than react from habit.
Our current predicament and coming collapse is stressful and scary. Our human selves will respond with anxiety, grief and fear. Many of us may feel we are coming undone.This un-doing can open us to the possibility of moving into the unknown.
New ways of being can be explored and old ways of being can be let go. Particularly habits of contraction or collapsing internally can be released as we learn how to respond with awareness and choice. Consciously choosing to pause and allow a moment of spaciousness internally (with an easy breath, a softening of a tight jaw or a release of lower back muscles) and externally (a moment in time) gives us the chance to return to center, from where we can choose a clear response. This process of awareness, an un-doing pause and consciously choosing is the heart of the Alexander Technique.
Guides using this Method
Constance Clare-Newman
Guide, Facilitator, Teacher
Somatic and nature practices for resilience, for groups and one-on-one, in person and online. Making …