Body Learning: 40th anniversary edition: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique

The biologist Rudolf Magnus (1873–1927) demonstrated that the head–neck–torso relationship was the Zentralapparat (central mechanism) in orienting an animal in its environment.

Alexander worked out a plan. First, he would inhibit his immediate response to speak the sentence, thereby stopping at its source the habitual uncoordinated direction. Second, he would consciously practise projecting the directions necessary for his improved Use of himself. Specifically, he would think of letting his neck be free and his head go fo

In order to allow his reasoned direction to dominate habit, Alexander concluded that he must give up all thought of the end for which he was working and focus instead on the steps leading to that end (the ‘means-whereby’).

Alexander employed the word Use to describe the process of control over all those actions that he seemed to have the potential to control.

One of the aims of an Alexander lesson is to give the pupil the experience of a balanced working of the Primary Control. This is not an end in itself but rather a preparation for activity. I know from my own experience that when this balanced Use is maintained in movement the quality of action changes. Movement becomes lighter and easier, breathing

he would consciously project a psychophysical pattern that can be described in words as ‘allow the neck to be free to let the head go forward and up so that the back may lengthen and widen’,

It is interesting, however, that the most successful form of treatment, that provided by Alcoholics Anonymous, sets out to put an individual in touch with his own sense of responsibility and integrity and to give him enough support to enable him to face facts and use his power of choice.

So, what is the Alexander Technique? The best formal definition is that offered by Dr Frank Jones, former director of the Tufts University Institute for Psychological Research. He described the Technique as ‘a means for changing stereotyped response patterns by the inhibition of certain postural sets’.1 He also described it as ‘a method for expandi

A pupil might be asked, for example, to visualize his head floating like a helium balloon or to think of his back smiling.