For Dangerous Wisdom podcast episodes that explain principles of the Alexander Technique, click HERE.

The Alexander Technique (AT) is an educational approach to the synchronization of heart, mind, body, and world that allows us to unleash our fuller potentials, directly impacting performance in any domain. The technique works on our total being, including our habits of attention, perception, movement, speech, and thinking in general. AT can help us transform stubborn patterns of living and being that give rise to physical and mental suffering.

In terms of everyday life, the educational practice of AT shifts patterns of overall coordination of our mind, heart, body and world in ways that affect posture, muscle tension, reactivity, and general movement and performance across all realms of activity. A singer applies it to singing better, a dancer applies it to dancing better, a teacher applies it to teaching better, a coder applies it to coding better, and so on. 

Since the Alexander Technique bears the same relationship to learning that learning itself bears to all other activities, it can enhance all learning and action. It is an educational rather than a medical or therapeutic approach, involving one-on-one learning with a skilled teacher, focusing on simple movements, such as sitting, standing, and walking. Clients can begin transferring the insights to all aspects of their life, or they may ask for focused support from a qualified teacher. 

Beyond enhancing and integrating philosophical training, common reasons people explore Alexander Technique training include: 

Posture

Back pain, including chronic back pain

Other forms of chronic pain

TMJ, jaw tension, neck tension

Injury recovery and prevention, including chronic issues such as carpal tunnel syndrome

Psychological transformation

General flourishing and personal development

Performance enhancement (including artistic and athletic performance, such as dance, vocal performance, musical performance, acting, running, surfing, and more)

Stress and burnout

Confidence and presence

Public speaking

Curiosity

You can find more detailed philosophical reflections on the Alexander Technique below.

As part of his training as a philosopher, Nikos also went through a rigorous three-year, full-time training program to become certified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique—akin to getting a master’s degree in mind-body synchronization. While Nikos has fully integrated the Alexander Technique into the wisdom traditions—thus expanding its potential—and it has a clear presence in his work.

“. . . the claims made, first by Alexander, and reiterated and extended by Barlow, sounded so extraordinary that I felt I ought to give the method at least the benefit of the doubt. And so, arguing that medical practice often goes by the sound empirical principle of ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’, my wife, one of our daughters and I decided to undergo treatment ourselves, and also to use the opportunity for observing its effects as critically as we could. For obvious reasons, each of us went to a different Alexander teacher.

“ . . . . from personal experience we can already confirm some of the seemingly fantastic claims made by Alexander and his followers, namely that many types of underperformance and even ailments, both mental and physical, can be alleviated, sometimes to a surprising extent, by teaching the body musculature to function differently.”

Nikolaas Tinbergen, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Medicine

“The Alexander Technique is a way to transform stress to joy.”

Juliette Binoche, actress

“I was born with no natural aptitude. I wasn’t pretty. I moved with no grace at all. I auditioned for the London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Arts but was not accepted. When I was finally admitted to Central School of Speech and Drama and showed up at my first movement class with my hump back and wearing a leotard, the movement teacher said, ‘Oh God.’ He sent me to the head of the school who then sent me to study the Alexander Technique with Dr. Wilfred Barlow. That whole semester I took Alexander lessons instead of attending movement classes which helped me enormously in my training and in subsequent years in my acting work. Now I can play people who are graceful and beautiful.”

Lynn Redgrave, actress

“With the best intentions, the job of acting can become a display of accumulated bad habits, trapped instincts and blocked energies. Working with the Alexander Technique has given me sightings of another way . . . Mind and body, work and life together. Real imaginative freedom . . .”

Alan Rickman, actor

“The Alexander Technique helped a long-standing back problem and to get a good night’s sleep after many years of tossing and turning.”

Paul Newman, actor

“I was dubious about the effects of the Alexander Technique when I first went in to experience it, but I found out almost immediately that the benefits were total—both physically and mentally—and, happily, have also been long-lasting.”

Joanne Woodward, actress

“The Alexander Technique has helped me to undo knots, unblock energy and deal with almost paralyzing stage fright.”

William Hurt, actor.

“I find The Alexander Technique very helpful in my work. Things happen without you trying. They get to be light and relaxed. You must get an Alexander teacher to show it to you.”
John Cleese, actor

“If your body is free, your mind is free. [The Alexander Technique allows] you to feel what it’s like to stay open physically, and also stay fully involved in whatever you’re supposed to be doing.”
Annette Bening, actress

“97% of people with back pain could benefit by learning the Alexander Technique - it is only a very small minority of back pain sufferers that require medical intervention such as surgery.”

Jack Stern, Renowned Spinal Neurosurgeon (interviewed about the AT here)

“The Alexander Technique gave me a glimpse of the possibility of freedom.”

Edna O’Brien, Irish writer

“Of all the disciplines that form the actor training program, none is more vital, enriching and transformative than the Alexander Technique.”

Harold Stone, Associate Director, Theater Department, The Juilliard School, New York USA

“The Alexander Technique can be sustaining; it is something that if learned well, can be carried along with you for the rest of your life. It gives you confidence to be who you are when you are up in front of an audience.”

Patrick Maddams, Managing Director, Royal Academy of Music 

“I can definitely say without hesitation that I wouldn’t have had the rowing success that I have had the luxury of experiencing in my short time on the water, without finding the Alexander Technique and the great teachers that I have had the privilege to work with.”

Valerie Thompson-Williams, rowing masters gold medalist

“The Alexander Technique changed my life. It enabled me to devote more time to creating beauty. This inner strength is essential for all.”

Andrew Logan, Sculptor

“Alexander’s method lays hold of the individual as a whole, as a self-vitalising agent. He reconditions and re-educates the reflex mechanisms and brings their habits into normal relation with the functioning of the organism as a whole. I regard this method as thoroughly scientific and educationally sound.”

Professor George E. Coghill, prize-winning anatomist and physiologist

“Alexander has done a service to the subject by insistently treating each act as involving the whole integrated individual, the whole psycho-physical man. To take a step is an affair not of this or that limb solely, but of the total neuromuscular activity of the moment—not the least of the head and neck.”

Sir Charles Sherrington, Nobel Prize winner in medicine

Howard Payne improved his throw by 5.64 meters at the age of 37. Commenting on this, which he believed to be due primarily to taking Alexander lessons, he said, “Balance is a vital aspect of good hammer throwing and getting the head, neck, spine and pelvis in the correct relationship enables the balance of the throw to come so much more easily. Once the balance is settled there is an enormous improvement in turning speed.”

Howard Payne, Commonwealth record hammer thrower

“It is my opinion that every singer and performer should enroll in a course of Alexander lessons.”

Barbara Bonney, International classical singer and teacher

“Alexander is a teacher pure and simple. He does not profess to treat disease at all. If the manifestations of disease disappear in the process of education, well and good; if not the education of itself will have been worthwhile. Manifestations of disease, however, do disappear. Including myself, I know many of his pupils, some of them, like myself, medical men. I have investigated some of these cases, and I am talking about what I know.”

Peter Macdonald, in his inaugural address as Chairman of the British Medical Association, 1943

“I have been a pupil of the Alexander Technique now for over forty years—the benefits to me have been immeasurable.”

Sir Colin Davies, Conductor

“The Alexander Technique removed a long standing back problem and improved my riding ability. Riders who take up the technique always make a very significant improvement in their riding.”

Daniel Pevsner, Fellow of the British Horse Society

“I regard it as one of the fortunate experiences of my life that I should have met F. Matthias Alexander at a time when I had been suffering physically for many years. There can be no doubt as to the value of his technique judged by the practical results which I myself have experienced. Instead of feeling one’s body an aggregation of ill-fitting parts, full of frictions and deadweights pulling this way and that so as to render mere existence in itself exhausting, the body becomes a coordinated and living whole, composed of well-fitting and truly articulated parts. It is the difference between chaos and order and so between illness and good health.”

Sir Stafford Cripps, British Chancellor of the Exchequer 1947-50

Question: Which book changed your life?

Answer: The one the teacher put under my head during the Alexander Technique sessions . . . I grew an inch and a half.

Q&A: Jonathan Pryce, Actor, The Guardian, May 7, 2015

“Through the Alexander Technique I was able to rehabilitate my running after 25 years of being unable to run through injuries, to the extent that I was able to set ten world records for veterans in 1982.”

Paul Collins, Canadian National Marathon Champion 1949-52 and veterans world record holder

“After studying over a period of years Mr. 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 observations, as tests and means of developing thought, that have been the source of all progress in the physical sciences. It is a discovery which makes whole all scientific discoveries, and renders them available, not for our undoing, but for human use in promoting our constructive growth and happiness.”

John Dewey, philosopher

In a 1941 article in the Saturday Review of Literature, Aldous Huxley argued that, in the entire history of humanity, we have developed only two reliable solutions for the problem of bridging the practical and the ideal: mysticism and the Alexander Technique. If you have ideals that you don’t know how to make a reality in your life—if you feel a tension between your most sacred ideals and your lived experience—or if you just want maximal success and efficacy in order to reach the ideals of your own potential, these two solutions can radically transform your world.

Huxley’s claim may seem both strange and obscure if we have limited understanding of “mysticism”. For now, let us rest assured we do not mean anything woo-woo, though it may mean something that pushes the edge of scientific paradigms that now stand long overdue for a shift. 

Of Alexander’s principles, Huxley wrote that they made it, 

possible to conceive of a totally new type of education affecting the entire range of human activity, from the physiological, through the intellectual, moral and practical, to the spiritual—an education which, by teaching them the proper use of the self, would preserve children and adults from most of the diseases and evil habits that now afflict them; an education whose training . . . would provide men and women with the psycho-physical means for behaving rationally and morally; an education which, in its upper reaches, would make possible the experience of ultimate reality . . . 

The Alexander Technique makes all of this possible, says Huxley, because “it can be combined in the most fruitful way with the technique of the mystics for transcending personality through increasing awareness of ultimate reality.”  

What does Huxley’s assertion mean?  

To understand it, we could look in particular at those philosophers and sages most interested in a practice of education that results in what we might characterize as profound shifts in consciousness and identity, amounting to an experience of intimacy and attunement with a reality completely unimagined prior to the educational experience.

Such an experience leaves the learner—as experienced by others in the community of life—as wiser, more loving, more beautiful, more graceful, more trustworthy, more insightful, more creative, more just, and so on.

We could refer to this as making learners (and teachers) into full participants in reality, in accord with the meaning of “mystical participation”. Any education calling itself “transformative,” but lacking these sorts of shifts, should rethink its name.

No one has yet provided a detailed account of the relationship between the Alexander Technique and mysticism, and how the Alexander Technique not only makes possible more ethical behavior, but, “in its upper reaches, would make possible the experience of ultimate reality . . .”

The mention of “mysticism” may put some readers off. We should focus on Huxley’s mention of “the technique of the mystics for transcending personality through increasing awareness of ultimate reality.” Transcending the deeply ingrained limiting beliefs we have about ourselves appears as part of any holistic spiritual orientation to life. We leave so much of our potential trapped in stubborn beliefs.

And yet, all of the values most people hold most dear demand transcendence of the ego and its limiting notions: Love, compassion, kindness, benevolence, wisdom, creativity, justice, critical thinking. We find ourselves needing to serve or participate in something greater than ourselves—and indeed this seems to come with the nature of reality itself, for in participating in the nature of reality—the nature of mind, life, and Cosmos—we participate in something that transcends the ego.

We can only do this when we find out for ourselves how much potential in us remains untapped. We have to face the “I can’t,” and both the wisdom traditions and the Alexander Technique offer us a way into the shocking, wondrous magic waiting for us beyond that “I can’t,” beyond our suffering and our confusion.

Such a “mystical” orientation thus emerges as another name for a holistic spiritual orientation, one that emphasizes the transformation that takes place when we become more intimate with our own highest values and potentials—and with reality itself (which of course means intimacy with what we truly are).

Without an essential place for the transcendence of self-centeredness, we leave ourselves with the virtual impossibility of becoming homo sapiens (the being of wisdom), and the high likelihood of becoming homo economicus (the being of economics)—whether we like it or not, and whether it accords with reality and even our own values or not.

Indeed, we see here one of the great dangers of wisdom-based learning: It threatens to dispel the delusory images of human beings and reality that currently organize the dominant culture and all its activities (including its ways of speaking, and all the activities of teaching and learning that more or less align—intentionally or not—with the dominant culture’s conquest consciousness). 

Reading these lines from Huxley reaffirmed my growing admiration for, and understanding of, philosophers properly characterized as mystics, including Dōgen and Plato, and even including aspiring mystics like Nietzsche and (in his own way) Dewey. It seems to me that Huxley needed to emphasize that we must fully integrate Alexander’s discoveries with those of the mystics. Wisdom-based learning arises from this integration. 

To the extent that Dewey was right that something in the Alexander Technique bears the same relationship to learning that learning bears to all other activities, he was wrong in leaving that with any implied completeness. Alexander simply made clear in, a certain important way, some of the principles the mystics already outlined. By studying those traditions and integrating them with Alexander’s discoveries, I could eventually make the unique contributions that constitute wisdom-based learning. 

While Alexander’s work supported me in developing the notion of the core human skills underlying everything we do—skills that we are as opposed to skills that we have . . . a crucial distinction—we could not possibly ground education in a holistic and comprehensive way without the insights into the nature of mind that only mystical geniuses of the wisdom traditions outlined for us. Wisdom-based learning draws from many traditions, and indeed its principles have cross-cultural validation.

Dangerous Wisdom Episodes

That Help Explain

the Principles of

the Alexander Technique

The Only Way I Know to Live a Human Life: Healing, Wholeness, the Challenges of Suffering, and the Paradoxes of Success

The Artefact: Holographic Habits and Healing, Part 1

The Backward Step - Getting Unstuck by Moving Forward and Backward at the Same Time

The above episodes offer reflections on basic principles shared by the Alexander Technique and the wisdom traditions of the world. In one way or another, most episodes of the podcast illuminate these basic principles. But, for those seeking further insight beyond the three episodes above, consider trying one or more of these:

The Mind of Nature and the Nature of Mind

The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Mountain Thinking

Dangerous Magic 2: Principles of Magic—Yeats and the Extended Mind

Transcending Trauma with the LoveWisdom of Spacious Mind - with Sara E. Lewis, PhD, LCSW

You Are Super Natural - We Were Super Before We Were Human - Jeff Kripal, PhD

The Way of the Wolf, Part 3—The Secret to Entering Wolf Wisdom and Wolf Magic

The whole of the wolf series is worth contemplating, but if you have time for only one of those, start with part 3.