An ever-increasing number of peopl e have heard of the Alexander Technique and have even had some practical experi- ence of it, and thus there is a growing demand for more infor- mation. Michael Gelb supplies this very well. He does not claim to have written a definitive work, but he offers a clear, contem- porary introduction, based on his own experience of applying the Technique in everyday life. To write about practical procedures is always unsatisfactory and can even be misleading, in as much as the written word cannot convey the relevant experiences: that is why practical skills cannot be properly learned from books alone.
Bonks can inform, stimulate and entertain, but they cannot instruct unless the writer and the reader share at least some amount of experience in common. For the proper underst andi ng and evaluation Oi practical experience, however, supplementary information Ll usually necessary. We need to know ' why?
When ynn are confronted by the problem ol llON Ul dl anything, how to uggle for instance, yon soon real! The mind obviously affects the body, but the body equally affects the mind. You soon begin to understand that what you think is as important as what you do, You have to control thinking as well as doing. But since the mind and body together make up the self, the problem can literally be described as a problem of self-control. How is this achieved? The daily process of living goes on for each of us, and, so far as we are aware of what is happening, we say ' yes' to it, or ' no' , giving or wi t hhol di ng consent.
Yet when we come to the problem of doing somet hi ng, as we under st and ' doi ng' , how do we make our choice? How do we use ourselves to do it? This was the crucial problem that Alexander posed when he made his classic self- observations: and his answer was that we do not know, any more than the dog or the cat knows. But we need to know; because the way we use ourselves deter- mines the way in which the whole of our mi nd-body functions.
Mostly we use ourselves in accordance with our habits; we do what has become habitual, and we do and think in the habitual way. As life flows on we react to situations and demands entirely predictably. We give consent to what is going on without any conscious realization of what we are doing.
However, our habits often produce all sorts of harmful consequences: stress, strain, nervous tension and ill health. Above all they frequently result in poor posture and movement, poor breathing and digestion. We lose poise, and this tends to handi cap us mentally as well as physically.
When we encounter the unfamiliar and unknown, we are thrown out of our way, we are at a loss, and we do not know how to react. We strive to make efforts, but mostly they are misdirected and therefore quite counterproductive. This was Alexander's own experience: this was the problem that he recog- nized. Poise is a f undament al human need. We must have control, conscious, reasoned control of our reactions, but primar- ily we must learn to control the mechanism of poise; and this necessitates both practical experience and knowledge.
It also requires a technique, and this was what Alexander evolved from his self-experiments. Michael lelb illuminates the problem from his own experi- eneennd observation and makes the implications easier to grasp. TM PDF Editor Foreword to the First Edition We are all too familiar with the stiffness, tension and futile effort that so often go first into the attempted mastery of a new skill.
Let anyone remind themselves by trying to juggle three balls into the air. To find a better way must be welcome, and yet surely the most serious concern for human beings today is not so much our limited practical skill or frequent failure to achieve our desired aims as our general state of poor health and the harm and damage that we manifestly suffer in ourselves as we go through life.
Our bad habits of mind and body become more entrenched and we feel incapable of doing anything about them. We come to accept this state of affairs as inevitable with a mixture of self-pity and fatalism. Alexander used to say that self-pity needs to give way to self-accusation. We have the power to choose what we do: at least, we have the power to choose what we will not do.
If this is so, and we are able to choose how to use ourselves, we cannot afford to let this choice go by default.
We must find out how to make change; we must become aware of how we use ourselves and furt hermore discover how we ought to use ourselves.
Otherwise we shall live out our lives as mere slaves of habit and pawns of chance. The Alexander Technique, which this book is about, offers a different prospect: it proposes a means whereby the necessary changes can be made. According to friends who had studied Alexan- der' s work, it was not like yoga, massage or Eastern psychophi- losophy; it did not involve doing exercises, and it was much more sophisticated than posture or relaxation training. My friends suggested that I would never really understand what the Tech- nique was about until I took some lessons.
I did, and then I began to appreciate their difficulty in defining and describing it. The Alexander Technique eludes precise definition because it involves a new experience - the experience of gradually freeing oneself from the domination of fixed habits.
Any attempt to put that experience into words is necessarily limited, rather like trying to explain music to someone who has never heard a note. Nevertheless I thought the attempt worth making, if only because previous descriptions of the Technique seemed more restricted than necessary and I sensed that it might be possible to stretch the limits of the printed word.
The book I have written is the book I wanted when I started to study the Technique. This book st art ed life as a thesis present ed as part of my Master' s degree, when I was also in the middle of training as an Alexander teacher.
Since presenting my thesis, I have qualified as an Alexan- der teacher and have gained a great deal of experience in the Technique. My understanding of it has deepened and ils prac- tice has become an integral part of my daily life. In rewriting the manuscript for publication, I have added some descriptions of my experiences as a teacher and have taken great pleasure in remov- ing those tentative phrases, for where once I wrote '1 think' , I now find I know.
So, what is the Alexander Technique? The best formal definition is that offered by Dr Frank ones, former director of the Tufts University Institute for Psychological Research. He described the Technique as 'a means for changing stereotyped response patterns by the inhibition of certain postural sets'. Much depends on what they needand what they hope to achieve.
In general, people seem to take Alexander lessons for three main reasons. First, pai n: peopl e wi t h bad backs, stiff necks, ast hma, headaches, depression and many other ailments often find their way to an Alexander t eacher' s door havi ng exhausted more conventional methods of treatment.
These ailments are frequently the result of bad habits of movement and can be relieved through re-education. Second, performance arts and skill development: bad habits, oil en the result of general patterns of misuse in daily life, can become exaggerated when one regularly practises a difficult or delicate activity. Those Heeking to master such pursuits can fearn by observing the truly j-. When Artur Rubin- stein plays the piano, when Fred Astaire dances, or when Michael Jordan plays basketball, they all have one thing in common: they make it look easy.
Alexander discovered that this quality of relaxation in action is not only the result of natural talent but can also be learned. Third, personal transformation: the development in recent years of humantistic psychology and the increasing popularity of Eastern phi l osophi es have brought about a growi ng under - standing of the importance of the individual' s responsibility for the development of his own awareness.
In this connection, John Dewey, the American educational philosopher and one of Alexan- der' s most influential supporters, has written: The hardest thing to attend to is t hat whi ch is closest to ourselves, that which is most constant and familiar. And this closest something is, precisely, ourselves, our own habits and ways of doing things Never before, I think, has there been such an acute'consciousness of the failure of all remedies and forces external to the individual man.
Tt is, however, one thing to teach the need of a return to the individual man as the ulti- mate agency in whatever mankind and society can collectively accomplish. It is another thing to discover the concrete procedure by which this greatest of all tasks can be executed. And this indispensable thing is exactly what Mr Alexander has accomplished. In addition, they are also discovering that it is an invaluable tool in the pursuit of such disciplines as yoga, meditation and the martial arts.
Of course, in reality, the distinction between the categories tends to blur. Some people come for all three reasons at once and some seem to come for no reason at all. In the following pages I hope to shed some light on the devel- opment, nature and application of Alexander' s principles. The book begins with a brief account of Alexander' s life as it relates to his discoveries. I then go on to describe these discoveries in detail.
My aim in this is threefold. First, I want to let the reader see for himself the scientific nature of Alexander's explorations. In his introduction to Alexander's book The Use of the Self, Dewey wrote: Those who do not identify science with a parade of technical vocabulary will find in this account the essentials of scientific method in any field of inquiry. They will find a record of long, continued, patient, unwearied experimentation and observa- tion in which every inference is extended, tested, corrected by further more searching experiments.
Personally, I cannot speak with too much admiration - in the original sense of wonder as well as the sense of respect - of the persistence and thoroughness with which these extremely difficult observa- tions and experiments were carried out.
Alexander' s method in actual operation, I would stake myself upon the fact that he has applied to our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and about our acts exactly the same method of experimentation and of production of new sensory observat i ons, as tests and means of devel opi ng thought, that have been the source of all progress in the "phys- ical sciences.
Alexander liked to say, 'You can do as I do if you do what I did. We can, however, learn from his example, so long as we keep in mind Aldous Huxley's statement that, even with the help of an Alexan- der teacher, 'one has to make the discovery oneself, starting from scratch. In Part 2,1 discuss each of these ideas in some detail, relating them to my own experience and showing how they arose from Alexander' s practical work and were not merely the product of theory.
Although the Alexander lesson of today differs from Alexander' s original experiments, the essence remains the same. In Part 3,1 discuss the importance of the Technique in learning how to learn and show its relevance to the education of-children. This is not intended to be the ultimate work on the Alexander Technique but rather a simple introduction to the subject based on my own experience of applying the Technique in everyday life.
Indeed it would be unwise to attempt much more, for what we are considering is not a final, perfected theory. In Alexander' s own words: 'We are only at the beginning of understanding. He was brought up on a large, isolated farm where self- sufficiency was not an abstract concept: when the roof leaked, one fixed it or got wet. Alexander was a precocious child and, suffering from recurring respiratory difficulties, was taken out of school to be educated privately.
As his health began to improve from about the age of nine, he developed a passion for horses and gradually became expert at training and managing them. His other great love was the theatre, particularly Shakespeare, and throughout his life he kept up an active enthusiasm for these two very different interests.
At the age of sixteen financial pressures forced him to leave the country life he loved for the mi ni ng t own of Mount Bischoff. During the day he worked at a variety of jobs and in the evenings he studied music and drama and taught himself the violin. After three years he moved to Mel bourne, where he continued his dramatic and musical training under the best teachers, visiting t heat res, concerts and art galleries and organi zi ng his own amateur dramatic company in his spare time.
When his money ran out, he took odd jobs as a clerk or an accountant, even worl ing as a tea-taster on one occasion. Alexander as a young man: a portrait taken for his theatrical portfolio.
In his early twenties, he decided to devole himself to a career as an actor and reciter, and he soon established an excellent repu- tation, giving recitals, concerts and private engagements and producing plays. His speciality was a one man show of dramatic and humorous pieces heavily laced with Shakespeare. There was only one cloud on the horizon:. Voice teachers and medical men advised rest, and Alexander found that the symptoms disap- peared so long as he did not attempt to recite.
On one occasion he rested his voice for two weeks before a particularly important performance. Half-way through the show, il failed. Confronting his doctor, Alexander was told only that he should continue to rest his voice. Not being one to stand under a leaky roof, he decided to take matters into his own hands and to seek his own cure. Clearly, something he was doing while using his voice was the source of the problem. As he had no apparent difficulties in ordinary speech, Alexander deduced that it must be something he was doing while reciting that was the cause of the problem.
Stand- ing in front of a mirror, he started to observe exactly what he called his 'manner of doing' - first while speaking and then, since he found nothing unusual, while reciting. As he started to recite he noticed three things: he stiffened his neck, so causing his head to retract he later called this ' pul l i ng the head back' ; he depressed his larynx undul y; and he sucked in breath with a gasp. In more difficult passages the pattern became exaggerated.
He soon realized that this pattern was also present in his ordinary speech, although it was so slight as to be barely noticeable, and that this meant that the difference between speaking and reciting was one of degree only. Reasoning that the pattern must constitute a misuse since it seemed to be responsible for his problem, Alexander set ou t to try to prevent it. Although he could not stop himself depressing his Larynx or gasping for breath by direct, conscious effort, he did.
What is more, this led to the disappearance of the other t wo harmful tendencies. As he got better at prevent i ng this pattern of misuse, Alexander discovered that the quality of his voice improved, and his medical advisers also confirmed that his larynx was in a better condition. From all this Alexander concluded that his ' manner of doing' did indeed affect his functioning.
This was the beginning of his realization that the choices we make about what we do with ourselves to a large extent determine the quality of our lives. He called this power of choice ' Use'. In an attempt to improve his functioning further, Alexander now started experi ment i ng by put t i ng his head forward. He observed, however, t hat when it passed a certain poi nt he depressed his larynx, with the same effect as before. Seeking next a way of using his head and neck that did not involve depressing his larynx, he discovered that when he depressed his larynx he also t ended to lift his chest, narrow his back and shorten his stature.
This observation was a turning-point. Alexander now under- stood that the functioning of his vocal mechanism was influ- enced not only by his head and neck but by the pattern of tension throughout his body. His next step was to prevent himself short- ening his stature while maintaining the improved Use of his head and neck. His experiments showed that his voice functioned best when his stature lengthened and that this could only be achieved when he used his head in a way that he described as ' forward and up' in relation to his neck and torso.
From this came his later discovery that the dynamic relationship of the head, neck and torso is the primary factor in organizing human movement, a special relationship that he termed the Primary Control. Having reasoned out the steps to his goal, Alexander was now confident that he could combine the necessary el ement s of 'prevention and doing' while he was reciting. Bringing two more mirrors into service, he was surprised to discover that Here then was startling proof that I was doing the opposite of what I believed I was doing and of what I had decided I ought to do.
I le already knew that the patterns of tension and malcoordination throughout his body all appeared to be ' synchronized' with the imbalance of his head on his neck. Going on to examine their relationship with his mental concep- tions of his actions, he began to understand that the patterns of misuse were not simply physical.
They involved the whole of his body and mind. From this realization he came to formulate the idea of psychophysical unity, a truly revolutionary idea that became the cornerstone of his work. Opposed to Alexander' s desire to use his mind and body in this new way was an overwhelming habitual pattern.
This pattern was particularly powerful in Alexander' s case because it had been specifically cultivated during his theatrical training, when he had learnt how to stand and walk on the stage.
The stimulus to misuse himself, he realized, was much stronger than his abil- ity to change, and he was forced to conclude that his approach to the problem of improving his Use had been misdirected and thai he had never consciously thought through the way in which lie directed his Use of himself. Like everyone else, he did whai 'fell right' in accordance with habit.
Now that he had observed I ha I '" pulled his head back and down when he felt he was putting H forward and up, he had to admit that his sense of whal lell i luhl was unreliable. This was a disturbing discovery. As he knew his voice func- tioned best when his stature lengthened and also that any attempt to bring about such lengthening would be based on his untrust- wort hy sense of what felt right, he decided that the habitual pattern had to be stopped at its source.
He therefore practised receiving a stimulus and refusing to do anything immediately in response. He called this process 'inhibition'. He then exper- imented by consciously willing the lengthening rather than by attempting to ' do' it directly. This he called 'direction'. Once again, however, at the 'critical moment' when he began to speak, he observed that his habitual direction dominated his reasoned intention. T could see it actually happening in the mirror,' he wrote. Now he realized t hat he must spend time pract i si ng this conscious mode of direction and that any new Use of himself based on this practice woul d feel wrong according to his old sensory standard.
As he practised, he came to understand that I here was no clear dividing line between habit and reasoned direction and that he could not prevent the two overlapping. Taking now the problem of speaking a sentence, Alexander worked out a plan. First, he would inhibit his immediate response lo speak the sentence, thereby stopping at its source the habitual uncoordinated direction. Second, he would consciously practise projecting the directions necessary for his i mproved Use of himself.
Fourth, at the moment when he decided to speak the sentence he would stop again and consciously recon- sider his decision. In other words he would leave himself free to perform another action, such as lifting an arm, walking or simply remaining still, but whatever he chose to do he woul d continue to project the directions for the new pattern of Use.
It worked! By payi ng attention to the quality of his action rather than to his specific goal, Alexander began to free himself from his unreasoned control of his organism.
He out wi t t ed his instinctive habi t ual direction and in the process devel oped a new met hod of l earni ng based on psychophysical integrity. Continued practice of the new technique had an exhilarating effect on Al exander' s entire being.
His breathing difficulties disappeared, and he moved with a new air of lightness and grace. His fame as an actor grew, and he became especially celebrated for his striking voice. Other actors and members of his audience flocked to him for lessons in voice production. Finding that words were insufficient to convey his experiences, he now began to devise a subtle process of manual guidance that would directly communicate the experience of improved psychophysical coor- dination, a process that he spent the rest of his life developing and refining.
Alexander' s initial discoveries were made gradually over a period of years, during which he continued his stage career. His fame both as an actor and as a teacher grew, and by the mid- he had a flourishing practice in Melbourne. At first his pupils came chiefly from the performing arts. As local doctors came to hear of his work, however, a few sent their patients to him, and before long these pupils outnumbered the ones with a theatrical background.
In Alexander moved to Sydney. His reputation preceded him, and he was soon inundated with work, although the medical establishment on the whole remained suspicious. One famoui surgeon whom Alexander did win over was J. In this photograph he is extremely alert, and yet his hands are relaxed and easy by his side.
His movement is finely balanced and light. I [e shook McKay's hand warmly, saying, 'You are the man I have been looking for. In London, Alexander' s practice developed rapidly, and he soon became known as ' the protector ol I he I ondon theatre'.
As his work became more widely known he had to deal with those who tried to copy and cheapen it. To forestall would-be plagiarists he published in his first book, Man's Supreme Inheritance, the theme of which he described as ' the great phase in Man' s development when he passes from subconscious to conscious control of his mind and body'.
The book was very well received and remained in print throughout Alexander' s life. The outbreak of war in broughI an immediate decline in the number of pupi l s. Alexander knew that unless he could continue to teach he would lose the skills and understanding he had laboriously developed, and so he decided to move to the United States. In New York he knew jusl I wo people, but within a few weeks personal recommendations had brought him a teem- ing practice.
For the next ten years he spent half the year in the United States and half in Britain, taking on an assistant in each country to cope with the demand for lessons.
Between the two world wars Alexander' s work continued to expand and flourish. In Alexander' s second book, Constructive 'oiir. Dewey wrot e that Al exander' s work contained 'the promise and potentiality of the new direction that is needed in all education'. Like Dewey, Alexander believed that education was the key to social evolution and in he estab- lished at his studio in London the first school to be based on his principles. Run by Irene Tasker, a fully qualified teacher who had trained with Montessori, it took children aged between three and eight; although a conventional infants' school curriculum was followed, the main emphasis was on teaching the children a proper Use of themselves.
After ten years, Tasker emigrated to South Africa, where she became the first Alexander teacher to set up an i ndependent practice, and the school moved from I ,ondon to the country under the direction of Margaret Goldie.
In it was evacuated to the United States, but attempts to re- establish it in England after the war failed. For many years Alexander had been urged to set up a formal training course for potential teachers of the Technique.
He held back, wanting to be sure there was sufficient demand for his work and, most important, to be certain that he could train his pupils to the highest standard. Would-be teachers of his work, he believed, had to be trained to put its principles and procedures into practice in their Use of themselves in daily activities before they could attempt to teach others to do likewise. Alexander' s brother, Albert Redden A. After crushing his spine in a riding accident, A.
He spent his convalescence on his back, practising the processes of inhibition and conscious direction. Within eighteen months he had recovered, and he continued to teach the Tech- nique until his death in With his brother's example in mind, Alexander eventually inaugurated the three-year Training Course lor Teachers in Alexander's third book, The Use of the Self, in which he set out to describe the process by which he worked out the Technique, was first published in Nine years later came his final book, The Universal Constant in Living.
This consisted of a collection of al icles on the concept of Use in which Alexander laid particular Stress on the harmful effects of 'physical culture' and exercise TM PDF Editor Alexander: The Man and His Discovery systems that ignored the unity of mind and body. Shortly after the end of the war, Alexander's supporters in South Africa attempted to replace the methods of physical education practised there with a system based on Alexander' s ideas.
Having exhausted diplomatic channels in an attempt to clear his name, Alexander sued for libel. In a bitterly contested case that lasted four years, Alexander found many medical men ranged against him. Two extremely influential men did declare for Alexander, however, testifying to the scientific validity of his work.
Alexander eventually won the case in , although a severe stroke which paralysed the left side of his body meant that he was unable to attend the trial.
Applying the principles he had developed, Alexander fought his way to recovery. Now an old man, deprived of most of his strength, he had to rely more than ever upon the power of pure direction, and pupils say that he did his best teaching during the five years before his death. In these years he continued to refine his method, at the same time maintaining his private practice and supervising the work of his assistant teachers. He died after a short illness on 10 October As this brief biographical sketch has shown, Alexander's achieve- ment was immense.
He developed, on his own, an entirely new scientific method of examining and solving a particular problem and in so doing established a revolutionary way of looking at human functioning.
Yet it must be recognized that, despite all this, and despite the work of his followers in the forty years since his death, his name is not as celebrated as his work undoubtedly merits. He must surely be counted as one of the most underrated men of the twentieth century.
There are two main reasons why this should be so. The first lies within Alexander' s own character, the second within the nature of the established institutions of society. Alexander was certainly larger than life, a man whose faults were as exaggerated as his TM PDF Editor When working with a pupil Alexander was concerned with the total distribution of energy in the body throughout the lesson.
In this picture, with acute awareness of the information his hands and his eyes are giving him, he focuses on putting the pupil's body together so that she may experience a new dynamic relationship between all her body parts, especially her head, neck mill upper buck.
Those who knew him say that he was not the easiest of people to work with. He was not a sociable man and he was, above all, an individualist never content to fall in with the crowd.
It may therefore be that his insistence on the highest standards, along with his understandable reluctance to entrust others with teaching the ideas he had so laboriously and painfully devel- oped, led him, perhaps unconsciously, to avoid possibilities of publicizing the Technique. Certainly the number of teachers he trained was minute, too small to make a significant impression at any one time.
It has only been during the last thirty years that a substantial number of teachers have completed their training and set up in practice and that the general public has in conse- quence begun to become familiar with the Technique.
It may be too that Alexander' s very certainty about the Tech- nique, the fact that he knew and was unwilling to waste time explaining and provi ng what he knew, served to discourage potential advocates.
As George Bernard Shaw once remarked, ' Alexander calls upon the world to witness a change so small and subtle that only he can see it.
Much the most important explanation of why Al exander' s work lacked general acceptance lies in the fact that it was - and to a great extent still is - decades ahead of its time. It is not specifi- cally medical, nor is it educational in the usual sense of that word; practitioners of these disciplines cannot readily and easily assim- ilate it and adapt it to their methods.
The Technique demands a fundamental revision in the way an i ndi vi dual thinks about himself, and if it is to be accepted within society an even more fundamental collective revision of attitudes, by doctors, psychol- ogists and teachers among many others, will be necessary. As his teaching experience grew he expanded and refined the theoretical framework for his Technique.
His theories on the corrupting factors in civilization and the evolution of conscious- ness are instructive, but the main thrust of his work was always practical and down-to-earth. In effect there are seven basic ideas which form the core of his teaching.
I have called these ' opera- tional ideas' because they serve as a useful guide to anyone who wishes to apply the Technique in daily life. The operational ideas are: Use and functioning The whole person Primary Control Unreliable sensory appreciation Inhibition Direction Ends and means Let's consider them 'all together, one after the other In The Universal Constant in Living, Alexander begins: 'Few of us, hitherto, have given consideration to the question of the extent to which we are individually responsible for the ills our flesh is heir to.
He realized that he had never taken respon- sibility for the direction of his Use of himself. Instead of employ- ing his power of choice fully, he had always done what felt right. He had never questioned his unreasoned Use until he discov- ered that certain habits were interfering with his functioning.
Then, when he did decide to exercise his power of choice, he came up against the almost overwhelming force of habit. Commenting on this discovery, Walter Carrington wrote: Alexander' s experiments led him to study processes, of the nature of which he knew very little and, indeed, of which very little is still known by anybody.
Even today, the human organ- ism as a whole is largely unknown territory so far as experi- mental observation is concerned. The nature of the relationship between mind and body is still undetermined. The precise relationship between what we call the voluntary and the invol- unt ary aspects of human behaviour is still unknown; and al t hough we know a great deal more than was known in Alexander' s early days about the structure and functioning of the nervous system, the exact nature of the processes of 25 TM PDF Editor Body Learning willing and wishing, of choice and selection of response, of t hi nki ng and feeling, and all t he ot her so-called ment al processes of which we are subjectively aware, is still largely a mystery.
It was this realization that led Alexander to choose terms for his descriptive needs that were at once as simple and as non- committal as possible. He saw that the borderline between the voluntary and the involuntary was too blurred to be capa- ble of sharp distinction. This power of choice allowed him to deter- mine, to a degree, the quality of the actions he chose.
He came to understand that his power had much more potential than he was using at that time. His chapter on 'The Evolution of a Technique' in The Use of the Self recounts his attempts to take full command of his power to choose. He realized that the choices he made about t he Use of his organi sm were fundament al , since t hey directly affected his functioning and therefore influenced all his other choices.
Alexander employed the word Use to describe the process of control over all those actions that he seemed to have the potential to control. The concept of Use has the same fundamental importance as 'heredity' and 'environment'. Heredity is usually considered to be the factor that sets our pot ent i al , envi ronment the factor that determines the extent to which we actualize it.
Use is necessary to complete the picture. Take the case of a man who drinks too much. His problem may result from a variety of hereditary and environmental influences.
Eventually he perceives that his drink- ing is havi ng a harmful effect, and he may therefore decide to stop. Although it may seem impossible for him simply to choose not to drink, the potential for that choice is there. Hel p may be sought t hr ough hypnosi s, chemot herapy, psychoanal ysi s or voluntary incarceration. It is interesting, however, that the most successful form of treatment, that provided by Alcoholics Anony- mous, sets out to put an individual in touch with his own sense of responsibility and integrity and to give him enough support to enable him to face facts and use his power of choice.
He discovered that he could use himself in different ways and that some ways were better than others in terms of functioning. We all know that the way we use a tool determines its effectiveness. A chisel used as a screwdriver will not only be inefficient, it will also become damaged. The analogy with the way we use ourselves is limited because the self is such a complex tool. User Settings. Skip carousel. Carousel Previous. Carousel Next.
What is Scribd? Explore Ebooks. Bestsellers Editors' Picks All Ebooks. Explore Audiobooks. Bestsellers Editors' Picks All audiobooks. Explore Magazines. Editors' Picks All magazines. Explore Podcasts All podcasts. Difficulty Beginner Intermediate Advanced. Explore Documents. Uploaded by NeoFu Did you find this document useful? Michael J. The Alexander Technique is now recognized the world over as the most revolutionary and far-reaching method developed for maintaining the health and efficiency of the body.
Essentially a type of therapy Michael J. Essentially a type of therapy that aims to treat and prevent a range of disorders through a system of postural changes, the Technique stresses the importance of reeducating the muscular system as a means to achieve physical and mental well-being.
By unlearning common bad postural habits and ways of using the body, people can alleviate tension, fatigue, back pain, neck stiffness, asthma, headaches, depression, and many other ailments. Body Learning also shows how the Technique can be applied to every kind of learning experience, from children's education and the acquiring of basic skills to the most advanced needs of musicians, entertainers, professionals, and athletes.
Get A Copy. Paperback , Second Edition , pages. More Details Original Title. Other Editions 9. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Body Learning , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Nov 15, culley rated it it was amazing Shelves: somatic , psychology.
I think of the Alexander Technique as a holistic, Western method for opening yourself up to the Taoist notion of Wu Wei, or the psychological notion of Flow. It can aid and compliment other systems and beliefs, and it is a concrete tool to help us live up to our full potential, physically and mentally. I have just barely dipped my toes into this practice and already I have begun to break from my habitual postures of mind and body I find myself more susceptible to grace and even compassion.
The e I think of the Alexander Technique as a holistic, Western method for opening yourself up to the Taoist notion of Wu Wei, or the psychological notion of Flow. The experience has been profound and uncanny. Obviously not everyone is going to be inclined to get into this stuff Want to learn to sing? Roller skate backwards? Quit smoking? Speed read? Speak a new language? It helps you do or learn whatever it is that you want to do or learn. This book isn't going to be very meaningful without private lessons.
Feb 07, Janie rated it it was amazing Shelves: body-works. We hold our life's history in our bodies. Physical trauma, stress, bad habits all contribute to our posture, breathing, and ultimately our well-being. This book is a fine introduction to the Alexander Technique, a process of understanding the impact of that history and how to bring balance and alignment back into the body. Not a book just for dancers, but for anyone who wants to better inhabit their body.
Feb 27, Kaila Tacazon rated it really liked it. Helpful and Easy to read. Of course the actual class in Alexander Technique is better, but the book cements concepts we learn. Jul 25, Meg rated it liked it. A former student who went on to study acting in college recommended the Alexander Technique to me, so I bought this book.
Sep 28, Hunter rated it liked it. Just starting my first class in Alexander Technique, so can't profess to know how thorough or insightful Gelb's book is, but it's answered a lot of questions about where the Technique came from, what it is, and perhaps most importantly what it is not. Intriguing anecdotes and some inspiring possibilities arise throughout. Excited to see what I might discover of myself through class this fall.
Oct 04, Caroline Rosenblum rated it really liked it. Insightful, but a tad too repetitive at times. Mar 28, Woody Hayday rated it really liked it Shelves: body , alexander-technique. Along the path I started to separate body and mind, and basically operate entirely from mind. This lead to Burnout, back pain, neck ache and many other symptoms. Much of this ultimately developed due to my incorrect perception of mind and body distinct from one another.
In seeking to recover I have explored this dislocation, and can thoroughly recommend this book, read alongside Alexander Technique lessons, as part of a solution.
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