What is it?
Are you sitting comfortably? No? Then I’ll begin……
At this moment how are you sitting at your computer? Are your feet flat on the floor or tucked under the chair? Are your legs crossed or even wrapped around each other? Are you sitting upright or hunched over your keyboard? Maybe you’re slumped in your chair or propping your chin on your hand as you lean your elbow on the desk. Are you gripping the mouse like you’ll never let go when perhaps you don’t even need it in your hand?
If you were doing any of these, or any other things you noticed, were you aware of doing them until you paid attention?
Right now you are using a computer and possibly a keyboard or mouse. You are also probably using a chair to sit on while you read. Perhaps you are using a pen to make notes or a telephone to make a call. These are all very powerful tools like many others we use every day, but there is another even more powerful tool that you use all the time in every single thing you do that you probably pay very little attention to – yourself
“Our manner of use has a constant influence for good or ill upon our general functioning”
F.M. Alexander
Usually we are only aware of the effects of our use of ourselves – the back, neck or shoulder pain, the RSI, the bad knee, the inappropriate response to stress, the breathing problem, the anxiety or any of the other myriad symptoms of poor use. But what if you could learn to undo the CAUSES of the symptoms and change the way you use yourself so that you could prevent them in the future? Interested? Then you want The Alexander Technique
The Alexander Technique is a set of easily learned yet immensely powerful skills that allow you take control of how you use yourself in all activity. Because these are skills of thinking they are available to you whenever you are awake. What you can do with them is learn how to release unnecessary tension from your muscles which is interfering in your natural freedom of movement, balance, coordination and poise – the sort of use of yourself you had as a small child, but which as an adult you’ve lost touch with. It’s still there, you just have to get out of the way.
So with the Alexander Technique you’re not learning how to DO things – how to sit, stand, walk or talk. You’re learning how NOT TO DO the things that interfere with your natural birthright of free, easy, pain-free movement. The best thing you can do is have a lesson and experience it. Then it begins to make much more sense. Trying to explain the Technique in words is a bit like trying to explain a colour – I could describe the colour blue to you until we were both blue in the face, but as soon as I show you the colour blue you understand it immediately and the understanding never goes away. Gain an understanding of yourself – have an Alexander lesson.