The Man...

 

Frederick Matthias Alexander was a 19th century actor from Australia. Just when he was becoming very successful with his Shakespeare performances, he found he was losing his voice. The doctors of his time prescribed predominantly longer and longer spells of rest between performances. When, after resting for six months, his voice became hoarse again soon after he started performing, he concluded that the hoarseness must have been due to something he was actively doing wrong. Being the man he was, he set out to find his own solution.

 

Finally surrounding himself with mirrors and after a lot of experiments he started to notice that he had added some unnecessary movements to his acting. He lifted his chin, shortened his neck, and collapsed his upper body. In this way he produced tension in the neck area which resulted in a hoarse voice. Proceeding then to eradicate these unnecessary and detrimental movements, he found that he had finally cured himself!

 

Later, when he was enjoying great success helping other people to solve their voice problems with his new method, F.M. Alexander found out that he could in fact use his method to help people gain conscious control of the psychophysical unity and the Alexander Technique or "The Work" was born.

 

 

The Work...

 

The prevailing view of Alexander's time was that the mind and body were different and separate things, but Alexander thought differently and decided that the mind and the body are interconnected; working as one and they form thus what he called the "psychophysical unity".  Alexander Technique teaches people how to use their body and mind closer to its optimum level. Teachers work individually with their students to make them aware of tension and involuntary movements that hinder smooth movement of the body, thereby preventing the body reaching its maximum capacity in an integrated way. It can also result in rigid muscles or, even worse, a severe condition such as back pain or RSI.

 

According to Alexander, movements consist mostly of learned habits so  most of the time we are not conscious of them. We are only confronted with them when they lead to discomfort or an acute condition, or "when the body does not do what it's told". Most of us will have had such an experience one time or another, but to give an example of 'the body not doing what it's told", let's look at a golf player who knows what he has to do to hit the ball straight. After all the player read books about it, moreover his golf teacher explained it to him, and even showed it to him, the golf player understands it all and then when he proceeds to hit the ball, he thinks he is going to do it well… but next thing he knows: the ball will veer off to the left, again, and again, and again. In Alexander-speak we call this "faulty sensory appreciation". 

 

Although we may be aware of the symptoms, we are often ignorant as to the cause.  Working with an Alexander Technique teacher we can become aware of how the movements of our psychophysical unity work and how they connect with other parts. In this way we can then alter them, if we want, to a more efficient and free movement, and are we able to break the habit of a lifetime.

 

 

A very important process is what Alexander called "inhibition". This is not the same as unconsciously bottling up negative emotions, which Dr. Freud rightly condemned as detrimental to the mind, but by which Alexander meant the conscious decision to stop an unwanted habit yourself. Stopping and then proceeding by first thinking of directions, we can give space to our psychophysical unity to allow a more natural movement to happen.  Inhibition is in this way the start of always having a choice! The aim is not to supplant one bad habit by an other but to become aware of the processes in our psychophysical unity so we can truly learn or relearn to use ourselves in another, better balanced way and thus regain the freedom of movement that is our birthright!

 

 

The Student...

 

Almost everyone can benefit from Alexander Technique. If you would like to be able to use your psychophysical unity to its maximum capacity, if you feel that your sporting performance could be improved or even if you just feel you would like to be able to move more freely, why not just book an Alexander Technique lesson and see what you can gain?

 

(copyright Ronald van der Velden and Freya Howard 2006)