The Head-Neck-Back

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. 

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The 2nd skill: Directing

With the second Alexander Technique skill of directing, you take advantage of the fact that your brain is able to rewire and change. This is called brain plasticity. 

When you direct, you send constructive conscious messages from your brain to your body to free up movement and breathing, and help yourself to sit and stand soft and tall.

By thinking your directions, as it’s called, you think differently, enabling you to reprogram your brain and create new, healthier habits of coordination.

Let’s come back to the story of the car. Suppose you want to go for a drive. Before driving away, you practice the skill of stopping. You pause for a moment so that you can prevent driving with unwanted habits. 

Then you tune into all-inclusive awareness so that you become aware of your whole body, the space around you and the car.

But of course you don’t want to stand still and do nothing! After you’ve said ‘no’ to what you don’t want, there needs to come a ‘yes’ to what you do want. You need something that energizes you, shows you the way; a plan, a wish to go somewhere. This is exactly what the skill of directing will give you; it will help you fill up your tank with gas, drive away in any direction, turn the steering wheel with ease, and go faster or slower as you please.

Let me give you another metaphor. Imagine you want to start growing vegetables in your garden, but it has grown full of weeds, and there is nowhere left to plant your veggies. The skill of stopping will help you release your garden of unwanted weeds so that the ground is clear. After that, the skill of directing will help you plant the seeds and water them so that the seeds can grow into beautiful, tasty veggies.

This is why the skill of stopping needs to come before directing; you cannot plant your veggies in a garden full of weeds, and you cannot drive away while the handbrake is still on.

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All-Inclusive Awareness: The Golden Mean

All-inclusive awareness is a focus that is relaxed yet alert, open, curious, and calm.
It is inclusive, meaning that you are simultaneously aware of your whole body, your activity, and the world around you.

All-inclusive awareness offers us the golden mean between two polarities:
it brings us focus level 5, right in the middle between sleeping, which has focus level 0, and overfocusing, which has focus level 10.

Let’s first discuss the two opposite sides of the spectrum and let’s start with low focus levels.

When you’re sleeping, you’re obviously not focused at all.
You’re dreaming, recovering, and processing; your muscles become heavily relaxed, your muscle tone is lower, and your heart rate, breathing, and digestive systems slow down.
Let’s say that the more your focus moves towards levels 1 or 2, the dreamier, sleepier, and more deeply relaxed you become.
Obviously focus levels 0, 1, and 2 are very important. Many people sleep too little or have trouble falling asleep.
Also, many people take too little time daydreaming and hardly ever sit around doing nothing. 

People can help themselves tune into focus levels 1,2, 3 or 4 during the day by practising various kinds of meditation, yoga, Tai Chi, mindfulness or by lying down in active rest.
These activities can be very valuable in our lives, bringing various levels of relaxation and reduced stress. 

However, there can be a downside if you spend too much time in low focus levels during the day, as your body can become heavily relaxed, which puts pressure on your spine, organs, and joints.
Additionally, you might accomplish less than you would like because you’re daydreaming, dozing, and lounging more than you would like.

The Alexander Technique can help you rediscover all-inclusive awareness, but can also help you tune into low focus levels without becoming heavy and sinking downwards in your body so that you’ll be able to daydream without collapsing, but instead in effortless expansion. 


Next, let’s talk about the opposite side of the spectrum, which is hyperfocusing, zooming in or concentrating hard. 

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All-Inclusive Awareness; the focus of And-And-And!

Before I trained as an Alexander Technique teacher, I thought there were only two options:
I was either concentrating well or I was unconcentrated (which meant that I was distracted by something).

Now I know that in both cases, I was actually concentrating hard or hyper focussing:
I was either zooming in on my activity, or I was over-focussing on my busy mind.

In both cases my focus would be exclusive, narrow, and limited to only a detail or part of myself.
And in both cases, I was excluding the awareness of the space around me. 

Once I started training as an Alexander Technique teacher, I began to see that there is another way of giving attention to something.
I learned that there is a much more useful focus, which I later started calling ‘all-inclusive awareness’.

All-inclusive awareness is a focus that is relaxed yet alert, open, curious, and calm.
It is inclusive, meaning that you are simultaneously aware of your whole body and self, your activity, ánd the world around you.

If this sounds like it’s hard work, I can assure you it’s the opposite; it’s completely effortless.
It feels easy, as if you’re in a state of flow, as if things are happening without you trying hard.
Your senses are receiving information without you needing to make them receive.
All there is to hear, see, or feel is simply and gently coming to you. You feel connected, calm and easy.

I believe that all-inclusive awareness is a natural form of focus for all human beings, but it has been lost in our present-day society. And I think that we naturally used this kind of focus much more when we were living as hunters and gatherers for thousands of years.

For a very long time in our evolution, we needed to scan the horizon and look into the distance. We were much less focused on things close to us.
Even when we were looking closely, for instance while carving wood or picking berries, we had to maintain a relaxed-alert open focus, so that we could be simultaneously aware of our activity, our surroundings and our loved ones close to us.

Also, when hunting, in order to work together and successfully catch an animal, we needed to be aware of the animal, each other, and the space around us at the same time; otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to successfully catch it.

So this all-inclusive, open focus was very natural to us back then and crucial for our survival. 

But what a contrast to our present civilized society! Now we can walk down the street with our earphones in, looking at the ground, disconnected from our bodies and the world.
Now we can be zoomed into our computer screens or phones without any immediate consequence.

Somehow we’ve come to believe that concentrating hard means we need to hyperfocus on a detail at the expense of everything else.
We started to believe that good concentration requires us to zoom in on our activity, and that as a consequence, we can’t be aware of ourselves and our surroundings too.

Read more > “All-Inclusive Awareness; the focus of And-And-And!”

The first Alexander Technique skill: ‘stopping’, or ‘pausing’

This audio guide is about ‘stopping’, also called ‘pausing’, ‘inhibition’, or ‘the positive no’.
Stopping is the first basic principle of AT. It is a practical skill you will learn from any AT teacher during your AT lessons.

In short, stopping helps you create a pause between a stimulus and your response to that stimulus, so that you can choose your reaction more consciously. You stop to give yourself time and space to prevent engaging in an unwanted habit, such as tensing your neck and shoulders.

At first, ‘stopping’ can be strange: Here you are in your Alexander Technique (AT) lesson expecting your teacher to tell you what you need to do differently to fix your problem, but then you hear that you don’t need to do anything at all! Instead, you’re asked to stop, which means to think differently, in order to prevent interference and let go of unwanted habits.

Unconsciously holding excess tension in your body interferes with your body’s coordination. You can compare it to trying to drive your car with the handbrake still on. The skill of stopping will help you release the handbrake from your body, so that you can move and breathe with ease and flow.

So, instead of asking yourself “What should I do about this?”, you start to ask yourself, “What can I stop doing that I don’t need to do?”, “What can I release?”, and “Where can I do less?”

Over the years, I have come to see that there are three slightly different aspects to the skill of stopping.To clarify them, let’s discuss all three, and let’s call the first one Stopping 1.

Stopping 1 is the definition I just gave you at the beginning. It means that you briefly stop before starting your next activity or in the middle of your activity. You temporarily give up your goal, decide to do nothing, release stress, become calm, and tune into a feeling of inner peace before going into action. In this way, you create a moment of space so that you can give yourself the freedom to choose how you want to perform the activity you’re about to do or how you want to continue the activity you’re already engaging in.

Imagine you’re standing at a crossroads in your brain. If you turn right, you turn into the street of your unhelpful habit. For instance, suppose you habitually crane your neck forward when working at your computer. If you start to work immediately like you always do, you will automatically enter the highway of this unhelpful habit. But by stopping a moment before starting, you can decide to rewire your brain and turn left, into the street of your new, more conscious healthier habit.  

You have a chance to let go of excess tension in your neck, and prevent working with your neck jutted forward. Obviously you can also decide to briefly stop working in the middle of your computer work, reset yourself, start over and continue with a clean slate.

Basically, briefly pausing before you do something gives you freedom of choice, because when you pause, you allow yourself time to become more aware of yourself. This way, you will not only have an opportunity to choose how you want do something but you also give yourself a chance to think about how to respond to your own thoughts and emotions or tune in to your needs before responding to a request from someone. In this way, stopping can help you prevent doing something you actually don’t want to do and can help you avoid responding too quickly and habitually. 

Read more > “The first Alexander Technique skill: ‘stopping’, or ‘pausing’”

The Benefits of Lying down in Active-Rest

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 critical atlanto-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 small 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 managing 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 15-20 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? 

Here’s my video about Lying down in active-rest:

Spatial Awareness

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.
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Happiness

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!

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Flow and Freedom for musicians 1

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.

Read more > “Flow and Freedom for musicians 1”