How does it work?The Alexander Technique helps us to discover our harmful habits in daily life and it helps us to get rid of them. Contrary to many other methods, the Alexander Technique does not teach us what to do, instead it teaches us to be more conscious about what we currently do. It shows us – by means of an enhanced attention and consciousness – how we can discover our schematic and often inadequate automatic response reactions, and how we can eliminate them. Furthermore, it teaches us through the observation of our schematic response reactions (which, as ossified structures of habits, are part of our body use and even of our personality) to step-by-step achieve a freedom of choice in the functioning of our body, as well as in our daily life situations.

 

Learning the Alexander Technique enables us to spot and choose the ways and means that are most adequate for our goals (either talking of a very common movement like sitting on a chair, or an important speech in front of a numerous audience, or a perfectly performed piano play), so that intervene in the natural functioning, coordination and balance of our organism the least possible.

 

Connection to our self and to the world

 

Once we learn not to disturb the innate, natural functioning of our organism, we will liberate not only our body, but also our mind and soul, so that the “world will open up” for us. We will be able to pay more attention not only inward, but also outward, and in result our relationship to our self, to others and to the world will be harmonized. Aldous Huxley, the famous English writer, who himself took lessons from F. M. Alexander, describes this sensation as following:

 

“The body is the instrument used by the mind to establish contact with the outside world. Any modification of this instrument must correspondingly modify the mind’s relations with external reality. Where the body is maladjusted and under strain, the mind’s relations, sensory, emotional, intellectual, cognitive, with external reality are likely to be unsatisfactory.”

 

A psycho-physical method

 

A speciality of the Alexander Technique is that it always works with the whole man.

 

One innovation of F. M. Alexander was, being far beyond of the medical science of his age, that the treated the human body, mind and soul as an inseparable unity. That is why he called the method he invented a psycho-physical method. There is no pure physical or pure mental procedure; it is always the whole person who is involved. Everything we feel or think of, affects our body, and vice versa, body procedures obviously affect our sensations, feelings and thoughts. During our life, a lot of physical and mental stress is stored and cumulates in us gradually and invisibly. “Mental stress” appears on the physical level and in our body as well.

 

Consequently, our body is in fact – along with its muscular tension and awkward muscular postures – an imprint of the events and procedures that caused physical, emotional or mental stress during our lives. The Alexander Technique teaches us to eliminate these superfluous and harmful tensions, and thus it changes our movement patterns as well. We learn to complete our movements with the necessary and least possible muscular tension. On the long term this also means that less tension is stored in us from what occurs in unavoidable daily stress situations, and that even this remaining tension disappears easier.

 

As – with the help of the method – we remove our blocks barring the natural flow of energy in our body, our movement becomes easier and freer, we gain energy and become less tired in our daily activities, because as muscular work and tension decreases our energy consumption too becomes less. Our body will be less exhausted, our respiratory and cardiovascular system, as well as our metabolism becomes more effective, and all these changes can also start the natural self-healing processes in our body.

 

In the light of the above it is clear that, although it is not a method of treatment, by practicing the Alexander Technique, Students regularly experience vital quality changes, improvement in their health, and in many cases diseases that were considered as chronic completely disappear. And what is at least as much important: the disappearing of the physical symptoms and of the awkward muscular patterns liberates our mind and soul as well.