Alexander Technique teaches how to recognize and overcome habituated limitations within a person's manner of movement. The Alexander Technique is usually learned from an Alexander teacher in one-to-one sessions by an Alexander student, using specialized hand contact and verbal instructions.

The name denotes both the educational methods taught by Alexander teachers and the individual method practiced by teachers and students of the technique. It takes its name from F. Matthias Alexander ( 1869 – 1955 ), a former Shakespearean recitalist, who first observed and formulated its principles during 1890 – 1900 . Alexander regarded the empirical scientific method to be the foundation of his work. He used self-observation and reasoning to make effortless the physical acts of every-day movement: sitting, standing, breathing, working with the hands and speaking. He designed his methods to make experimentation and training deliberately repeatable, and to learn in a way that would allow continuing improvement from any starting point.

The Alexander Technique

Educates the student's sense of kinesthesia or proprioception . This sense is used to internally calibrate one's own bodily location, weight and to judge the effort necessary for moving.

Alexander Technique teachers believe that humans have a built-in proprioceptive blind spot; people become habituated to whatever they repeat. Repetitious circumstances lead people to create habits as they adapt and learn. These habits are both deliberate and non-deliberate responses that include physical movement patterns, coping and learning strategies. The advantage of adapting is that behavior and learning becomes simplified; it becomes possible to meet a given stimulus or interpretation of circumstances with a ready-made reaction. As a person adds one habit onto another, the disadvantage is they may train themselves to also repeat unintentional side effects - the tension, over-compensation and cumulative stress that the Alexander Technique addresses.

Adapting has a further serious drawback: habits disappear sensation. Using the habit decreases the importance of paying attention to perceptual differences. Also, sensory systems can flood from accommodating too many contradicting habits and intentions. From disuse or flooding, perceptual sensitivity shuts down and eventually become dull and untrustworthy, just as skin becomes numb if the same spot is rubbed for too long. Loss of perceptual awareness encourages mistaken interpretations for the need to choose a particular response. In a panic, all opposing habits can fire off at once, pulling in all directions, sometimes without the person noticing it has happened.

Because habits are designed to become innate, people will commonly experience no sensation of doing a successfully automated habit. Forgetting what they have trained themselves to now do without thinking, this drawback encourages people to feel convinced that whatever effort or ways they now use to move to respond is customary and necessary, even when it is far from normal.

How our kinesthetic sense becomes untrustworthy from adapting to needless overcompensating is built into many innocent situations. For instance, if a person often carries a bag on their forearm, he will later find himself holding up his arm when the bag is not on it. Misunderstanding a teacher's directions, a student may repeat what the teacher knows is unnecessary, but the teacher forgivingly allows the mistake to go by when he should not. A self-taught student may unknowingly adopt useless and later problematic mannerisms. If someone is afraid while learning, adapting can mean he will most likely continue doing the skill fearfully. If someone has healed from a temporary injury, a subtle wincing in anticipation of pain can be automatically continued indefinitely, even though pain has healed. Also due to rapid growth, teenagers often move their own bodies based on inaccurate assumptions of their size and structure.

According to Alexander teachers, few adults in Western culture retain their ability to move freely without needless self-imposed interference. Teachers find that most people assume that they "must" move in the only way they assume is possible. Given an unceasing cumulative demand that unnecessarily stresses the body's structural design, the price as adults grow older can range from feelings of stress and resignation to very real physical problems, due to movement limitations that could be changed. According to those who teach Alexander Technique, most of the time, giving up a certain activity isn't necessary if a learner is ready to free specific habits that work against the body's structural design.

Alexander Technique Learning and Teaching

Teachers train “pupils” in a personalized, living anatomy lesson. Most use a specialized hands-on technique of guided modeling to show what they mean. Even if only briefly for group classes, movement is guided with very light, one-on-one hand contact, usually about the student's head, neck and back. The value of effortlessness is advocated. Coaching the substitution of more appropriate, specific ways to detour limitations are also suggested. As anyone knows who has tried substitution strategies against a habit, there are often more complex paradoxes involved, because habits can be tricky. Alexander Technique addresses these concerns, tailoring how to establish personally constructive experimentation uniquely for each student.

Most commonly at the beginning of lessons, teachers may suggest activities that are routine, such as walking or sitting. For part of the lesson, some teachers have learners lie on a table, so the student can experience the principles in action without having to pay attention to maintaining balance, called table work. Working on oneself while lying semi-supine with knees up is taught to be used while taking a break during the student's workday. Depending on the student's purposes, the teacher might later suggest simulating a particularly stressful situation for using Alexander Technique under pressure, such as acting, public speaking, shouting or other demanding performance.

Training for being a teacher of Alexander Technique involves more than 1600+ hours of classes over at least a three-year period. Teacher trainees must qualify to graduate; attendance is not a guarantee of becoming a teacher. Trainees are evaluated for the presence of a signature of effortlessness and freedom in themselves and the quality of their touch. Alexander Technique's unexpected poise should be an immediate shared fact for both teacher and student in every hands-on Alexander lesson. After qualifying, most professional teaching associations require continuing development courses.

The UK professional Alexander teaching organizations and some trained by them believe the public should beware of inadequately trained impostors, because there are no laws that require legal certification of AT teachers. The necessary skill to teach is impossible to "fake" - a fact obviously witnessed by those with the professional skill to see it in action but not by the general public. Regardless of what other body science or holistic therapy experience someone who claims Alexander Technique knowledge may have, if he has not qualified at a professional teacher-training course in an establishment approved by a recognized professional AT organization, he is not a certified professional Alexander teacher. Professional organizations generally advise checking references of any teacher you might consider studying with.

The Importance Attached To Learning From An Alexander Teacher

F.M. Alexander and his brother A.R. Alexander often stressed that The Technique could not be acquired without the active cognitive participation of a student and the help of a suitably qualified instructor trained in the hands-on technique, deceptive self awareness being the significant effect of sensory adaptation. Most Alexander teachers today agree, but F.M. and A.R. did it first alone. So theoretically it is possible to learn without a teacher, although some properly trained help obviates many common pitfalls.

Alexander Technique is difficult to describe and teach in words because it requires description of subjective kinesthetic sensations and momentary situations, as well as the ability to perceive them. Most people have little conscious awareness of kinesthetic sensation and not much to say if asked to describe what happens as they move. The possibility of moving in an easier way most often emerges as a surprise from underneath a learner's current sensory ability to command it on purpose. It is needlessly difficult to attempt to learn to apply the Alexander Technique for oneself simply by reading about it.

Most Alexander teachers are of the professional opinion that twenty to forty individual lessons are required to learn to use the Technique for yourself. Other teachers believe that group workshops are at least as effective as individual lessons, because camaraderie is supportive, and group teaching usually involves some individual hands-on "turns" directly with the teacher as the class watches. A few teachers believe it is entirely possible to learn and continue to experiment with the basic principles on one's own. Everyone in the field, including other students, agree that having at least a few one-to-one sessions with a trained teacher is useful to appreciate how AT works and to get the benefits it offers.

Availability of Alexander teachers is limited, except in the United Kingdom, where the profession is in the process of being included in the Complementary and alternative medicine of the UK National Health Service . Only a handful of teachers who were personally trained by the founder are still living. Alexander Technique has the lifetime dedication from less than five thousand teachers worldwide, usually grouped in associated professional societies.

Alexander teachers differ in teaching style. Differences in teaching approaches evolved as various teachers originated what they believed constituted more effective teaching. Usually, a style of teaching is not just an imitation of training methods, but integrates many such personal lifetime discoveries. It's rare that a teacher can or will articulate the deliberate reasoning behind their teaching variations. Traditionalists believe that spending time on general intellectual concepts may encourage their student's misuse. These teachers may dodge discussions of principles until the student can have the conversation without their old habits of speaking.

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Information from http://en.wikipedia.org