So I take an Alexander lesson nearly every week and have for something like 4 years now. I can say that the linked tweet about AT is basically right, although I think it overplays the level of conscious access you can get to what’s going on. I generally describe it to people as behaviorist retraining of posture and movement: the methods of AT are nothing more than just getting you to develop new habits via dressed up clicker training, and they work really well because clicker training works really well. Your teacher stands and moves naturally, uses their hands to inform your body about what their body is doing, and your body slowly learns to copy what they’re doing, all while your teacher says phrases that you come to associate with what’s happening so you can just say something to yourself like “forward and up” and then your body does it.
The Alexander Technique is old. One of the implications of that is that over time different teachers evolved different ideas and there are significant differences between teachers. The one teacher with whom I had a 5-day course said that in her teacher training they practice sitting up and sitting down for hundreds of hours. I was talking with another Alexander technique teacher and they said that didn’t do the “sitting up and down”-thing that intensely.
The level of conscious access you can get with one lesson per week and the level that you can get with very intensive training are different.
If you approach it as a behaviorist exercise as you describe that’s not a practice of increasing conscious access. If you want to train conscious access then it would make sense to add more of a Feldenkrais-like approach of playful discovery. In that, the teacher’s job is to point your attention to what’s outside of your attention.
So I take an Alexander lesson nearly every week and have for something like 4 years now. I can say that the linked tweet about AT is basically right, although I think it overplays the level of conscious access you can get to what’s going on. I generally describe it to people as behaviorist retraining of posture and movement: the methods of AT are nothing more than just getting you to develop new habits via dressed up clicker training, and they work really well because clicker training works really well. Your teacher stands and moves naturally, uses their hands to inform your body about what their body is doing, and your body slowly learns to copy what they’re doing, all while your teacher says phrases that you come to associate with what’s happening so you can just say something to yourself like “forward and up” and then your body does it.
The Alexander Technique is old. One of the implications of that is that over time different teachers evolved different ideas and there are significant differences between teachers. The one teacher with whom I had a 5-day course said that in her teacher training they practice sitting up and sitting down for hundreds of hours. I was talking with another Alexander technique teacher and they said that didn’t do the “sitting up and down”-thing that intensely.
The level of conscious access you can get with one lesson per week and the level that you can get with very intensive training are different.
If you approach it as a behaviorist exercise as you describe that’s not a practice of increasing conscious access. If you want to train conscious access then it would make sense to add more of a Feldenkrais-like approach of playful discovery. In that, the teacher’s job is to point your attention to what’s outside of your attention.