What is the Alexander technique?
A RE-EDUCATION
Gaining Control With The Alexander Technique
STOP HURTING YOURSELF
Do you feel a familiar lower back pain when working on the computer?
Do your feet, knees, or hamstrings give you problems when running longer distances?
Do your hands, arms, neck or back end up hurting when practicing and playing your instrument?
Feeling like a victim in your own body can be very frustrating. But have you ever stopped and wondered why you always experience the same pain when in the same position or activity? Welcome to the first step of awareness.
Physical pain is not an abstract concept that happens to you, but rather something that you have the capability to create and stop through awareness and re-education.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
The Alexander Technique can provide truly therapeutic benefits, but is educational in nature. You learn to recognize and stop unconscious movement patterns, muscular tension and mental tension. It is a very powerful form of Self Care for health. It also provides a unique advantage when applied to special achievement such as performing arts or athletics.
This Technique helps you understand how your body works. Through training with a qualified Alexander Technique teacher, you learn control over your tension and stress responses. In so doing you remove the cause of a lot of suffering and issues.
The Alexander Technique is not so much something you learn as something you unlearn. It is a method of releasing unwanted muscular tension throughout your body which has accumulated over many years of stressful living. This excess tension often starts in childhood and, if left unchecked, can give rise in later life to common ailments such as arthritis, neck and back pain, migraines, hypertension, sciatica, insomnia and even depression.
THE BASIC PRINCIPLES
The basic principles of the Alexander Technique are put together in a method that can be used anywhere and anytime. Your physical freedom and well being while sitting, running, and playing piano is within your own reach.
The trained teacher’s hands-on guidance helps you define and refine the directions and principles. The benefits of regular lessons and your attention to the method and yourself include greater endurance, improved awareness in action, less pain, greater respiratory capacity and control, and refined motor coordination.
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Primary Control The primary coordination of your body associated with the head-neck-back which is united with the mind for better or for worse. Where your response to stimuli is physically expressed first and the rest of the body follows
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Awareness Recognizing the force of habit. To begin learning to recognize the neck pulling the head with tension. Discover when and where the interfering tensions feel instinctively correct. The way it feels vs. what is real. Tension and misbalance feel normal or “right”.
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Inhibition When you start to recognize your own interfering response, what are you going to do? The skill of withholding response.
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Directing Think, picture and release through the primary control leading the rest of the body into action.
THE METHOD
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Pause (withhold consent to proceed - not going to act - do nothing)
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Think and picture
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Let the neck be free from holding the head, so the spine can lengthen and the back can widen
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Move into action with this poise being the priority.
To learn more about the Alexander Technique, or to schedule your introductory lesson, get in touch today. A re-education awaits you.
