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.
When you take Alexander Technique lessons, you’re aiming for a unified, expanded, strong yet flexible head-neck-back relationship while maintaining full, free, natural breathing.
But how does that work?
Let’s picture a runner who is practising the Alexander Technique. We’ll call him John. John started his AT lessons because he wanted to learn how to run without excess tension in his neck, shoulders, and lower back.
In his lessons, John learns the two AT skills called stopping and directing and how to apply them to simple activities like standing, sitting, and walking. First, he learns to pause, in order to prevent unwanted habits like overly tensing his neck muscles. Next, he learns how to lengthen his neck, balance his head, widen his shoulders, lengthen and widen his back and free up his arms and legs. After a few lessons, John starts getting the hang of it and feels he is ready to apply the AT to his running.
Now, imagine John standing at the start of his running track in the park. First, he stops for a moment to make sure he doesn’t contract his neck and tense his shoulders before starting to run.
Next, instead of looking only at the ground and focusing only on his legs, John becomes aware of his whole body and starts to use panoramic vision to look into the distance beyond the horizon. In this way, he not only sees the road ahead but also the surrounding space. This improves the functioning of his vestibular organ and helps him to get better data, which in turn improves his overall balance and coordination.
Next, John starts to lengthen and soften his neck muscles. This stops him contracting his head downwards into his spine but, instead, he balances his head freely in an upward direction. As a result, his back muscles lengthen too, giving his spine and intervertebral discs more space. In turn, his shoulders start to release sideways.
Because John’s head-neck-back is now expanding upwards, there’s no unnecessary downward pressure in his spine, ribcage, and organs. This enhances his breathing as there’s more space in his torso, allowing his ribs and diaphragm to move more easily. This increases oxygen levels to the brain and muscles, which in turn will enhance performance.
As you can imagine, a downwardly contracted, collapsed head-neck-back would lead to a lot of unnecessary pressure on John’s hips, knees, and ankle joints. Conversely, John’s expanded head-neck-back will reduce unnecessary downward pressure in his leg joints, thus creating more space and increasing the ease and freedom of their movement.
As we have already seen, the length of John’s neck and the free balancing of his head widens and expands his shoulders, easing up his shoulder joints and freeing up movement in his upper torso and arms. This will greatly help him to run more freely because his arms need to counterbalance his legs while he’s running/doing so.
Finally, as you can imagine, being mindful of his coordination helps John avoid thinking about his to-do list, and instead allows him to tune into the present moment, enjoy the park around him and give him a clearer, calmer, process-oriented mindset.
Let’s summarize; John’s primary organizer is his head-neck-back relationship. An expanded and well-coordinated head-neck-back creates a chain reaction of benefits such as improved coordination, muscle tone, balance, breathing, and freer movement, which will help him feel better and enhance his enjoyment of running.
Obviously, John’s running is just one activity. You can apply the Alexander Technique to everything you do and improve the use of your head-neck-back while working in the garden, sitting at the computer, carrying boxes, standing, playing sport, making music...whatever you can think of.
Even when you’re sleeping, it’s possible to lie in a comfortable position with the expansion of your head-neck-back, allowing you to truly recover, prevent tensing up at night, and avoid waking up with pain.
All scientific research on the Alexander Technique is listed on the website www.alexandertechniquescience.com. Have a look at it if you would like to know more. However, I would briefly like to mention one significant study on the effects of the Alexander Technique on low back pain, published in the renowned British Medical Journal. Conducted on 579 patients, it showed that 24 Alexander Technique lessons led to a significant reduction in pain from 21 days to 3 days per month, and an improvement in functioning and quality of life by “limiting muscle spasm, strengthening postural muscles, improving co-ordination and flexibility and decompressing the spine”. Importantly, this benefit was maintained one year after the AT lessons had ended.
Until now we have looked mainly at the physical effects. But since we cannot separate our body from our mind and emotions, the Alexander Technique can have mental and emotional benefits too.
Increasing the awareness of your back, strengthening your back’s postural muscles, and sitting and standing soft and tall can help with mental strength and confidence.
Think about the expressions ‘He’s spineless’ or ‘I’ve got your back.’ They’ve been around for a long time and for good reason; our backs are very important to our coordination, physical and mental strength and emotional balance, and people have known this for centuries!
A well-balanced head-neck-back can also help you cope with chronic stress and anxiety. When it is free from excess tension, it releases a chain reaction: it will feel more connected, stronger, longer, wider and easier. This will enhance your breathing, will help you quieten down your mind and nervous system and help you lower your stress levels. You may start to feel a bit more hopeful, calm, confident, and strong... this canin turn boost your general sense of well-being and help you balance your emotional responses.
Scientific research on patients with Parkinson’s disease has shown the effect of the Alexander Technique on emotional well-being. Patients felt significantly less stressed and less depressed, a benefit that was maintained 6 months after they had stopped taking lessons.
The Alexander Technique is a highly practical method; once you’ve learned the skills of stopping and directing, you can apply them to your daily activities for the rest of your life. You don’t even need to stop what you’re doing because you can practise Alexander Technique while sitting, standing travelling or even waiting somewhere, basically whenever you like. Because you start to take charge of your own health and well-being and thus find poise, balance, and ease, the benefits can continue even after you’ve stopped taking lessons.