The Alexander Technique is an educational method. You will learn a technique that you will be able to apply to all your daily activities. Once learned, you will have the means to take care of your poise, coordination and calm, more than before.
So, taking Alexander Technique lessons is not a passive treatment where you are dependent on the therapist for a cure; instead, you actively learn how to restore balance, release excess tension, free up your breathing, expand your awareness and move more freely on your own. This is why we call it the Alexander Technique rather than Alexander Therapy.
Having said that, there can be therapeutic benefits, and pain, stiffness, anxiety, and other symptoms may diminish or even disappear, because over time your poise, coordination and general well-being will have improved.
A key concept in the Alexander Technique is the ‘head-neck-back’ relationship. It refers to the dynamic unity of your head, neck and back coordinating your posture and movements, while also expressing your thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and emotions.
Think of your head, neck and back as a system/ an entity running all the way from your sitting bones to the top of your head. It contains your head and spine, brain and central nervous system, your organs, ribs and pelvis, as well the muscles of your neck and the entire front and back of your torso.
Let me give you an image to illustrate the importance of the head-neck-back relationship.
Although our bodies are obviously infinitely more complicated than a car, it may help to think of our arms and legs as the wheels of a car, while our head-neck-back is the car itself. If we mainly pay attention to our legs or arms while ignoring our crucial head-neck-back relationship, it’s as if we’re only paying attention to the car’s wheels while ignoring the car itself.
But this is exactly what many people do. When walking or biking, we often mainly think of our legs and feet. When playing a musical instrument, we often zoom into our hands or lips, and when standing, we often focus on our legs, leaving the head-neck-back relationship out of our awareness.
But here’s the thing; if we ignore this relationship, we miss out on valuable information about our primary essential coordination. Thus, we miss out on finding the root causes of problems which often lie in the way we unconsciously tense our necks and shoulders or shorten our spines.
We can vastly improve our coordination if we start to zoom out of our arms and legs and allow our head-neck-back relationship to become part of our awareness too. This will make it the power behind our coordination, which is as it should be.
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