The Art of Change
The Alexander Technique offers a pathway to transform ingrained patterns and habits, allowing us to move through life with greater balance, ease, and self-awareness. Below is an overview of the core principles that shape the work:
Key Concepts of the Technique
Primary Control: The Foundation of Balance
The Alexander Technique centers around The Primary Control—the dynamic relationship between the head, neck, and back. This alignment forms the basis for balance, coordination, and ease in all movement. By restoring harmony in this relationship, we set the foundation for lighter, more expansive movement, allowing us to navigate both stillness and activity with ease.
Harmony in Motion: Integrated Function
The Technique encourages a unified experience of mind and body, harmonizing energies in a way that supports balance rather than conflict. Through this concept of integrated function, we come to understand the body as a coordinated whole, where each part supports the other for graceful and efficient movement.
Awakening to Choice: Constructive Conscious Awareness
One of the most empowering aspects of the Alexander Technique is developing the ability to recognize automatic habits and choose responses that serve us better. Shifting from ingrained reactions to conscious choices, we cultivate a state of freedom and intentionality in our actions. In this way, we come to understand that unlearning, rather than adding, is central to meaningful change.
“You translate everything, whether physical or mental or spiritual, into muscular tension.”
– F.M. Alexander
“As soon as people come with the idea of unlearning instead of learning, you have them in the frame of mind you want.”
– F.M. Alexander
“The Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new to do. It teaches you how to bring more practical intelligence into what you are already doing; how to eliminate stereotyped responses; how to deal with habit and change.”
– Frank Pierce Jones
Transforming Thought and Action
Alexander understood that true change begins with our thinking. Through the Technique, we learn to gently pause and observe our reactions to life’s demands, making space for intentional, beneficial responses. This shift from automatic to conscious choice empowers us to meet each moment with clarity, presence, and ease.
Gravity and Energy: A Path to Sustainable Living
Every living being moves within the influence of gravity and time. To live with balance and vitality, we must learn to use our energy efficiently and sustainably. The Alexander Technique offers a choice: we can either allow gravity to pull us down, creating tension, stiffness, and strain, or we can learn to move in harmony with it, cultivating a sense of buoyancy, lightness, and openness.
The Technique guides us to align with gravity rather than fight against it, supporting us in living with a sense of ease and freedom. In doing so, we develop a foundation of poise and resilience that enriches all aspects of life.
“Freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response.” — Viktor Frankl
How Does It Work?
A typical lesson offers hands-on guidance to help you experience ease and freedom of movement, starting with everyday activities like sitting and standing. The lesson is divided into two main activities:
Chair Work and Table Work.
Chair Work
The Technique uses the simple actions of sitting and standing to help students become aware of, and gradually correct, movement and postural habits. Since sitting and standing are among our most frequent activities, they serve as the foundation of the Technique.
During this part of the lesson, the teacher guides the student in and out of the chair, providing an experience of movement that is effortless and free of tension. Together, they learn to “inhibit” habitual responses to the stimulus of sitting or standing. By stopping for a moment before acting, students have time to use reasoning to assess the most efficient and appropriate way to move.
“Boiled down, it all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus—but no one will see it that way. They will see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that a pupil decides what he will, or will not, consent to.”
– F.M. Alexander
Chair work allows students to become aware of how they move, with special attention to the relationship between the head, neck, and back. This “primary” relationship, identified by Alexander, forms the basis for learning how one moves in any activity. Mastering this awareness in chair work provides a foundation for applying the Technique in daily life, from working and walking to performing on stage or in sports.
Table Work
The other part of the lesson involves “table work.” Here, students lie on their backs with feet flat and knees bent in what is known as the semi-supine position or rest position. The teacher encourages the student to inhibit tension while remaining alert, creating a quiet environment for internal focus.
Table work complements chair work by reducing the influence of gravity on body movement and habits. In this position, students can reflect on their habitual movement patterns without the active demands of movement. This allows for deeper self-exploration, free from external pressures.
“Prevent the things you have been doing and you are halfway home.”
– F.M. Alexander
Why People Learn the Alexander Technique
People come to the Alexander Technique for various reasons:
Pain Relief
Often due to a sore back or injuries unresponsive to other treatments.
Enhanced Performance
Athletes, actors, dancers, musicians, and singers use it to refine their skills. The Technique is part of the curriculum at major performing arts conservatories.
Personal Transformation
Some seek improved awareness of habitual patterns and a more integrated, balanced life.
Each individual’s pattern of physical use is unique, as is their capacity for self-observation and change. Therefore, the Alexander Technique is taught through one-on-one lessons with a qualified teacher.
What Makes the Technique Unique?
The Alexander Technique is an educational process that invites you to actively participate in your own rediscovery, fostering a deeper connection with ease and balance. This is why practitioners are called teachers, and sessions are referred to as lessons. Unlike passive treatments where care is administered to you, the Technique invites you to explore and reshape the habits that influence your movement, posture, and overall well-being.
In contrast to Yoga or Pilates, which focus on specific exercises, stretches, or postures, the Technique cultivates a sense of natural alignment and ease that carries into every aspect of your life. It’s not about performing particular movements but rather about discovering a new quality of ease and balance that informs all your actions.
A variety of physicians, osteopaths, chiropractors, and physiotherapists recommend the Technique. While their treatments may offer temporary relief, symptoms often return if deep-seated patterns of tension remain unaddressed. The Technique helps you identify and dissolve these ingrained habits, leading to lasting improvements.
By equipping you with the skills to sustain your own well-being, a skilled Alexander teacher ultimately aims to make themselves redundant. The goal is to help you reach a point where lessons are no longer needed, as the principles effortlessly become part of your daily life, supporting ease and well-being.
Trying is only emphasizing the thing we know already.
Lessons and Learning
During lessons, teachers use explanations and guiding touch to raise students’ awareness of tension, ease, or effort in simple activities like sitting, standing, and walking. This awareness helps open pathways to better use of the self.
Focus of Early Lessons: Basic movements such as sitting in a chair, standing up, walking, or bending the knees. These simple tasks reveal habitual dysfunctions and guide students toward more integrated ways of moving. The student experiences increased lightness, freedom, and coordination.
Excerpt: A Thought from History
“Basically, Alexander had evolved a method for learning how to consciously change maladaptive habits of coordination. (Coordination includes movement, posture, breathing, and tension patterns.) He had come to the understanding that the mind and body function as an integrated entity, a rather unusual realization for that time. Alexander found that habits, whether ‘physical’ or ‘mental,’ are all psychophysical in nature. He observed that how we think about our activities determines how we coordinate ourselves to do them, and that long-held habits of excessive tension and inefficient coordination affect how we feel and think.”
– Marian Goldberg
By exploring the principles of the Alexander Technique, individuals can enjoy lasting benefits—physical ease, mental clarity, and emotional resilience. This integrated practice fosters grace, self-awareness, and deeper connections, both within and beyond oneself. By cultivating balance and presence, the Technique opens the door to a more enriched, purposeful, and fulfilling way of living.