Yesterday a student told me that he thought it 'took energy' to sit or stand using the principles of the Alexander Technique. If he just sat the way he always sat, he said, it took very little effort and felt comfortable. I can't disagree that it is comfortable to sit, stand, move and walk in our habitual way. A lot of our habits, though comfortable, aren't beneficial for us. Slumping is one of those habits, and slumping also takes energy because...
In 1973, Nicholas Tinbergen and two others won the Nobel prize for Physiology-Medicine. He dedicated a good portion of his acceptance speech to F.M. Alexander, the Alexander Technique and it's benefits. He was an Alexander Technique student, as was his wife and daughter. They all took Alexander Technique lessons with different Alexander Technique teachers. What follows is the beginning of the portion of the speech relating to the Alexander Technique: …My second example of the usefulness of an ethological approach to Medicine has quite a different history. It concerns the work of a very remarkable man, the late F. M. Alexander. His research started some fifty years before the revival of Ethology for which we are now being honoured, yet his procedure was very similar to modern observational methods, and we believe that his achievements and those of his pupils deserve close attention...
It's hard to know how fast and crazy everything around a large city can be, until you leave it. I think it's comparable to people at the beginning of Alexander Technique lessons not realizing how much they're tensing themselves, until they release that tension... It also made me realize that I want to take some of that calm energy back with me as I teach my Alexander Technique lessons in NYC.
A useful component in learning the Alexander Technique is the idea of oppositions. A few Alexander Technique oppositions include: head and torso opposing each other, arms and torso, legs and torso, sit bones down; torso and head up, shoulders opposing each other and more... We probably aren't going to learn the Alexander Technique purely through observation but being aware combined with lessons...
