How the Alexander Technique Works
putting the principles into action.

Distinguishing Features

The fundamental difference between the Alexander Technique and other disciplines is that the Alexander Technique starts by recognising the fact of unreliable kinaesthesia — and then goes on to deal with that problem.

Once recognised, nothing worthwhile can be gained by sticking one’s head in the sand and pretending the problem isn’t there.

Implications of Debauched Kinaesthesia

Since your kinaesthetic sense is not trustworthy, your teacher is not going to allow you to use feeling as your guide to correct movement. As a general rule, whatever you feel you need to do in order to make your movement work, if you do that thing, you will remain stuck in your old ways. Your debauched kinaesthesia will bind you like a slave to all that is wrong with your movement.

Example: as you stand up out of a chair you will probably feel the need to push with your legs. As long as you continue to push with your legs every time you stand up, you will never realise the ease and economy of effort that comes from not pushing.

“But I must push or I’ll end up toppling forward onto the floor, won’t I?”
No, really no — but how can I realistically expect you to believe that until you’ve done it yourself?

Necessity for Repetition

Expect to have these basic principles drummed into you again and again during your lessons.

If you begin to feel a bit silly taking so long to grasp a few very simple concepts, remember that you are in good company. Anybody who has a debauched kinaesthetic sense — and that’s most people (if anything the more intelligent and better educated are often the worst) — anybody is going to find it very difficult really to get their head round this work.

Trust Your Teacher

The actual course of an Alexander lesson may be very different with different teachers. The important point is that these methods are devoted to lending you the experience of what happens when you don’t react in your habitual way. Only then do you stand any chance of finding out that that non-reaction does not lead to the disaster you so confidently expected. Rather, it leads to an amazing discovery: all that “essential” doing was actually preventing you from moving in a much easier, lighter and more effective way! If the methodology seems strange, it is because it has to be: reality is not as you imagined it. Trust your teacher.

Guidance …

One vital tool the Alexander teacher uses is a pair of “non-doing” hands. With those hands, the teacher guides you away from your habitual reactions to your situation. You are guided away from your habitual “knee-jerk” responses towards a new way, a new means: a means whereby much that was previously impossible becomes very possible indeed. The teacher can only do this, however, if you are determined not to allow the habitual “right” thing to take over while you are being guided: however wrong a guided movement seems, you must doggedly refuse to correct it. Only so is it possible for you to wean yourself away from habitual reactions long enough to discover that they are not what you thought they were.

and Individual Work

Now you can see the vital importance of individual lessons. Since patient repetition of this type of experience is essential to building the confidence to leave your habits behind, a group class is really only as good as whatever individual hands-on attention you receive during it. No teacher has more than one pair of hands or one pair of eyes!

Exercises? No Exercises!

An exercise, like any other movement, can only be performed using your existing habitual reactions. Since the nature of those reactions is your problem, trying to correct them by means of exercises is a case of the blind leading the blind. In place of exercises and trying to “do it right”, you are taught to inhibit your habitual wrong responses — so allowing the right, reflex ones the chance to work unimpeded.

What You Achieve

A course of Alexander lessons should achieve two things:–

1. It should leave you with a more reliable kinaesthesia so that, without even thinking about it, you begin to move effortlessly and more fluently than you now do. You gradually stop causing yourself all those problems you had and couldn’t sort out in any other way.
2. Even more important than your immediate results, you learn how to exert a more conscious control of your habitual reactions. You become able to continue your own re-education towards an ever more reliable kinaesthesia.

This is in stark contrast to the usual downwards spiral of bad habits and all that means for the quality of life as one grows older. I personally feel that I have been growing younger and younger ever since I first had lessons 33 years ago.