Alexander lessons are hands-on, giving you detailed feedback on what you’re doing while you’re doing it.

In a lesson, movement is guided. You learn how your movement habits are triggered, and learn to react instead with ease and confidence.

Lessons begin with sitting and standing, but the insights and skills gained can be applied to any habit.

An Alexander Lesson

If movement habits are at the root of our pain or performance problems, how do we change them? And how does an Alexander Technique lesson help?

Alexander lessons begin with sitting and standing. This is not because Alexander teachers are obsessed with perfect chair comportment, but because sitting and standing are habitual. By addressing our habits in sitting and standing, we develop the skills needed to address any movement habit.

Lessons are also hands-on and movement is guided, meaning that the teacher literally moves you, as from sitting to standing. This means that you don’t have to translate verbal instructions into action. Lessons show, not tell.

Building awareness

Habits are largely unconscious. For this reason Alexander lessons begin with building awareness. Unlike massage, touch in an Alexander lesson is not primarily manipulative, but educational. The teacher’s hands give you detailed feedback on what you’re doing while you’re doing it. The emphasis is on self-observation: not how you’re feeling, but what you’re doing.

In building awareness, the teacher’s role is not to tell you what you’re bad habits are, but to help you perceive them directly. Through Alexander lessons you develop much more accurate and constructive self-awareness: an awareness of how you move, not because you’ve been told, but because you know.

Learning to change

Habits are also automatic—they are triggered by our movement goals. In my example of holding the violin, I had only to think of raising the violin to my shoulder, and my chin would jut forward, shoulders round, and hips push forward.

Once a habit is triggered, it is too late to change it. In an Alexander lesson, therefore, the emphasis is on preventing your habits, disconnecting your habits from their trigger.

Here, the guided nature of the lesson is crucial. The teacher initiates the movement, acting, in effect, as a trigger. This gives you repeated practice controlling how you react. In the beginning you may find that you have little choice—that you always react habitually. But over time you develop greater presence of mind. You learn to prevent your habits. And it is this skill that opens up new possibilities in movement: greater ease, confidence and purpose.

Applying the Technique

Alexander lessons begin with sitting and standing, but the insights you gain in lessons apply not only to these everyday movements. Everyone has unique challenges, whether it is playing the piano, working at the computer, speaking in public, or working on the fundamentals of Aikido. There is time in a series of Alexander lessons to address such specific challenges, as learning expands outward into the realities of your life and profession.

Next: Frequently Asked Questions