Although the Alexander Technique is commonly associated with relieving musculoskeletal pain, improving posture, breathing, mental calmness and a plethora of other benefits, these are all effects of the Alexander Technique. Behind all these benefits lies the aim of the Alexander Technique, which is to get you closer to your optimal functioning as a human being.
This is quite a bold claim! However, follow through on this course of six lessons and I think you’ll be convinced it makes sense.
What if there was a way of responding to the demands of life – right here, right now – that took care of your mental and physical health? This unique way is, in essence, the promise of the Alexander Technique. You might therefore think of the Technique as a dynamic framework for acting well in the world, or as a healthy lens through which to see the world. In fact, one of my favourite analogies for the Alexander Technique is that it is a kind of software update which you can install to stop harmful habits from interfering in your life!
How does the Alexander Technique achieve this? Well, perhaps the first principle to get your head around is the idea that Use affects Functioning. In other words, how you ‘use’ yourself in daily life affects how you will function, for good or for ill. This principle is so fundamental to the Technique that F.M. Alexander, the Technique’s originator, named the title of his fourth and final book The Use of the Self. Note how Alexander uses the term the ‘Self’ rather than, say, the ‘Body’. This is because he recognized that the mind and body influence each other intimately and that it doesn’t make sense to talk of one without the other. But more on that later.
A final way for now to describe the Alexander Technique is as a Pre-Technique, one which you can apply when involved in any other endeavour – whether that’s your work life, practising yoga, the piano, football etc. In this regard, John Dewey, the father of American education, put it eloquently when he asserted that the Alexander Technique ‘bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activities’.
Right, enough of the theory. Over the next six weeks we will explore how this all works in practice as we explore six aspects of the Alexander Technique. These aspects are all inter-related and together form that helpful Alexander ‘lens’ through which to see the world.