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The Alexander Technique was developed in the late 1800s by a gentlemen who was trying to perform a job and found that he was exerting himself to the point where his voice gave out and he couldn’t even effectively communicate without exhausting himself. Trying to find the root cause of this, Frederick Mathias Alexander discovered that in the act of trying and doing, these intentional efforts were causing the body to tense up and hold a great amount of stress and were creating blockages and a lack of alignment.
If you ever look at a baby or small child (or if you look at a wild animal in nature), you can see that they have a lightness and a freeing ease of motion and they seem to just elevate as if floating on a cloud effortlessly. It appears as though there is a string pulling them up by the top of their head and pure, natural alignment and ease just comes naturally. By the time most individuals have finished going through formal schooling, whereby for decades they sat uncomfortably for long stretches of time over and over again, their natural ease seems to have become shot and they no longer resemble this freeing, upward mobility in their posture and overall existence.
The Alexander Technique doesn’t really focus on trying or doing to correct this issue — rather, it focuses on an overall being-ness of the complete individual. The goal of the technique is not to focus on having a straight back or good alignment. Rather, the technique shows you how to increase your awareness of your own body and your own inclinations to hold tension or blockages in certain areas of the body.
Once you grow your awareness, more and more, which is a nuanced skill that can take several months to mature, then you can start to focus on letting go of this tension and ignore the urge to contrive a certain type of posture or movement. This is an act of great discipline, as we are naturally conditioned to hold our bodies in a certain way, whether standing, sitting, walking or something else. And so, somebody employing the technique will grow an awareness of the tension in their bodies, and then once that awareness is rich and mature, that person can practice the act of letting go of this tension, simply allowing the body to relax in a way, and not trying to contrive it into any manner of posture or movement.
Once you let go of these tensions and allow the body to reset, the posture and alignment of the body will naturally balance out and stretch upward and outward in a freeing and elevating manner. Just like how an animal in the wild moves and exists with great poise and elegance, so too can your body begin to take on this beautiful constant interaction with its environment, once you learn to get out of its way. Once this becomes second nature, then the simple existence of you within your body becomes a sort of an art form, with your surrounding environment as the canvas and your body as the paintbrush.
Once people begin to apply a higher level of energy, focus, and importance to the art of simply being, then the quality of life improves and the incidents of health issues or pains can decrease, as the body gets the level of awareness and relaxation needed in order to do what it is divinely designed to do — which is to be free and exist and move freely and easily.
I will recommend further reading in this subject for self-education, as well as other resources in terms of finding an instructor, if you do wish to receive personalized teaching here:
RapidRegeneration.com/AlexanderTechnique
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