In deze podcast vertel ik over Alexander Techniek, vioolspelen, balans in mijn leven, lichaam én geest.

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.

In our fast-paced, stimulus-overloaded world, it’s easy to get stuck in a near-constant state of stress and tension. From traffic jams to ringing phones, never-ending to-do lists to looming worries – our bodies are constantly firing off low-level “fight or flight” reflexes throughout the day.

You’ve probably experienced this “startle response” many times without realizing it. Your neck stiffens, your eyes widen, your muscles clench, and you hold your breath as your body instinctively braces for potential danger. While adaptive for our ancient ancestors, this chronic tension pattern is incredibly unhealthy for modern humans.

Fortunately, the Alexander Technique provides powerful yet simple tools to defuse this stress cycle and reset your nervous system to its natural, calm state. By bringing conscious awareness to your head-neck-back relationship, you can release layers of accumulated muscle tension – especially around the criticalatlanto-occipital joint at the top of your spine.

Just a few minutes dispersed throughout your day implementing these “decompression” techniques can create multiple micro-moments of renewal. You’ll notice your breathing becomes easier, your mind clears, and a sense of bodily lightness emerges. It’s like hitting the reset button!

An even deeper unwinding happens when you take 15-20 minutes to lie down in the “active rest” or semi-supine position. This restorative practice targets the spine itself. By removing the downward force of gravity, the discs between each vertebra can rehydrate and expand with fluid, almost like re-inflating the cushions of your backbone.

The profound release travels in waves from your neck down through your shoulders, back, ribcage, hips, and legs. You’ll be amazed at how such a simple technique creates a full-body realignment, releasing areas you didn’t even realize were tight. Your mind, too, settles into a state of relaxed focus and clarity.

Lying down in active rest is essentially your daily “system reboot.” You consciously shed layers of physical and mental tension, calming your nervous system and reconnecting to your body’s natural uprightness and poise. It’s no exaggeration to say it can be utterly transformative – both as a preventative practice and for relieving existing conditions like back/neck pain, anxiety, poor posture, and more.

Best of all, it’s completely free, can be done anywhere at any time, and yields immense benefits for just 15 minutes of wise investment per day. Why not experience the power of active rest for yourself and reclaim higher levels of comfort, confidence, and calm in your life?

Seven reasons why Spatial Awareness should be part of any learning process (learning to drive a car, at school, learning a musical instrument, sport, at the computer) and why it is part of Alexander Technique Teaching.

During my Alexander Technique lessons and workshops I put a lot of emphasis on spatial awareness, or, all- inclusive awareness. Why is it so important?

1. Spatial awareness prevents us from shrinking, collapsing and stiffening. If we are concentrating or focussing only on a small part of ourselves (our computer screen, the music notes, a specific place in our body, or our to-do list running through our mind), we narrow not only our awareness, but also our bodies. We literally get a physical effect of shortening and shrinking. When we shrink, we will start to create unnecessary tension and our breathing will become restricted. All this generally happens unconsciously. Spatial awareness gives us inner volume. We become long, wide and deep from within, because the space helps us to release unnecessary tension. The space helps us to connect the awareness of the whole of us ánd the space around ánd a detail or aspect (like the computer screen) all together, simultaneously. This doesn’t require making an effort at all. Instead, allowing yourself the expansion of your awareness, effortlessly. This is a very natural state to be in, for any human being.
   
   
2. Spatial awareness helps us to increase the chances of flow. When we are aware of ourselves, the space and others in an all-inclusive awareness, all these elements will merge together. This is what happens when we are in flow. There is no “hard working you”, focussing on a small thing, separated from the rest. Instead you become one with the music, your heart, others and the space. Spatial awareness helps us to be in the present moment, giving us a feeling of calm, easy movements and connectedness.

Everyone knows the saying: ‘it’s the little things that bring happiness’.

Since becoming an Alexander Technique teacher, I have come to grasp the truth of this better than ever before. I used to think that happiness came from ‘doing as many enjoyable things as possible, working as hard as possible and achieving as much as possible’. Everyday activities (washing-up, doing the shopping) were things that I rushed through as quickly as possible, because they got in the way of all the things that I considered far more important and much preferred doing. Nowadays working hard still makes me happy, but I also experience much happiness when doing everyday activities. Does that sound boring? Well it isn’t at all!

The best weapon against performance anxiety is to totally immerse yourself in the music. Most musicians can remember their most fantastic concert: how effortlessly they played, enjoying every note and feeling the music in every fibre of their being. Psychologists call this flow.

Is it possible to increase the chances of experiencing this flow? Fortunately: YES!

Traditionally, musicians have always concentrated on improving their performance by studying hard. However you can also benefit greatly from focusing on preventing underperformance by releasing unnecessary tension, and improving your coordination and breathing. This involves learning to gradually change thoughts that make you nervous or block your coordination, into more helpful thoughts that make movement easy, make you feel more confident, and more aware of yourself and others in all inclusive awareness.