Academy

Discover our empowering courses at Think Up Academy


At Think Up Academy, we offer transformative courses to help you unlock your full potential and live with greater ease. Explore our empowering programs below.


Catching the Wave –
3 Month Beginner Program

This course is for you if you’ve never had Alexander Technique lessons before. Learn how to:

  • Uncover the root causes of tension, restricted movement, and stress.
  • Change unhelpful mental and physical habits.
  • Learn about the importance of an expanded focus.
  • Reprogram restricted movement patterns of neck, head back and shoulders, arms, legs for lasting freedom and ease.
  • Enhance your performance and create more flow.
  • Respond to challenges in a more helpful way.
  • Enhance your mindset (auditions/concerts/exams)
  • Unify body, mind and emotions.

In 3 months we’ll go deep: you’ll learn the fundamental skills of the Alexander Technique and apply them to your daily life: In this way you’ll bring flow, balance and ease in standing, sitting, sleeping, walking, computer work, music making... you name it!

Mastering the Wave –
5 Month Advanced Program

This course is for you if you’re already familiar with Alexander Technique.
You’ll deepen and refine your skills, uncover increasingly subtle root causes of mental and physical tension, and start to explore the world of your mindset and emotions.

Deepening the Wave –

After the Advanced Program, you can continue on a membership basis.

Refreshing the Wave –

Join for a month to refresh your skills.
Contact me to see if I have availability.

“Alexander Technique lessons with Maaike are being so crucial for me since I was already some years having pain in hands and arms while I play double bass; with the pain the confidence on my playing decreased a lot since I could not trust my body anymore. Neither teachers or physiotherapists could give me the key for the muscle relaxation.
By changing my old habits for new ones, AT lessons are the best way I found till now to solve this issue.

—Lucia Mateo, Double Bass Player, Academy Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Via Alexander Technique Maaike has helped me help myself.  With her guidance I’ve been able to improve my technique and reduce my physical stress level.  Her patience and keen eye helped me identify sources of tension and relax my neck and shoulders to improve my sound in general and specifically help me with a delicate entrance in  Ravel’s “Bolero.”
—Janet Morgan, First Bassoon player, Ballet Orchestra

A few years ago, I was confronted with an unpleasant condition in my left hand. The diagnosis was focal dystonia, a condition that unfortunately offers little prospect of successfully continuing an instrumental career. I had to unfortunately suspend all my work activities and ended up in the medical system. My only hope was, as I understood from literature, that in certain cases improved control had sometimes occurred successfully through “retraining.”

In short, I took on the challenge and chose to achieve this via the principles of the Alexander Technique. Fortunately, I could turn to Maaike Aarts’ practice!
I started from scratch, supported and guided by Maaike with her expertise and unwavering optimism and tried to gradually pick up my clarinet playing again with many “stops”, realizing that a condition in one hand does not only concern the hand but is often the expression of underlying physical problems of the whole body and mind, which have built up over a long period. Through the Alexander Technique you can gain fantastic insight into this.
Fortunately, in this way I was able to continue my career!
—Harmen de Boer, first clarinet player, Radio Philharmonic Orchestra