Accessing Our Whole Selves

For those who can appreciate the simplicity of profundity, the subtly indirect practice that is the Alexander Technique can be a way in to a practical skill for living fully. Conveyed by kinesthetically-interactive individual lessons, the Technique promotes the release of excessive tensions that block our access to physical and emotional calm and optimal performance. Also useful in managing pain and disability, this eminently teachable skill is a gentle, process-oriented means of undoing the inappropriately elevated muscle tension with which we unconsciously squeeze the life out of ourselves in the name of holding ourselves together. Through Alexander Technique lessons we can learn to re-access our inherent resilience by means of a mental workout, neurologically reprogramming ourselves to regain a sense of fluidity, balance, and buoyancy.

It is now understood that the analytical aspects of the brain can be set aside by using the intentional focus of this Technique to allow non-dominant non-verbal aspects of the brain to come to the fore in order to deal with complex problems that are more appropriately solved through imagistic thinking. This makes it a reversible way into the unconscious and an effective and accessible discipline of mental, emotional, and physical expansiveness.

In an Alexander tutorial session we can become aware of how the impact of our life experiences becomes stored in our muscle memory, affecting our posture and movement. Using the Technique, we can discover how to examine and change our habitual reactions, improving them by exercising directional thinking. To practice the Alexander Technique is to turn down the volume on our psycho-physical experience and to find the stillness at the core, making use of the mind's influence over the body. In a lesson, we first experience how it feels to be without habitual excess tension, normally as unconscious as it is unnecessary. Then we learn how to evoke this state for ourselves in order to attain clarity and ease in our work and in our lives.