The Alexander Technique

Food without salt is tasteless; without vitamins, it fails to nourish. Just so, movement not informed by the Alexander Technique becomes weak, effortful, inefficient, damaging and graceless.

AT provides an essential ingredient: the unique solution to the problem of faulty sensory appreciation, or debauched kinaesthesia.

• No essential ingredient is enough by itself. Yet, without it, all attempts to improve your life are, at best, limited.
• This makes the Alexander Technique a “pre-technique”: a technique that needs to be applied to all other techniques before they can become fully effective. It is not a replacement for, and does not try to usurp, those other techniques.

This is why an Alexander Technique teacher can team up with a top instructor in anything — to the enormous benefit of both, and without either treading on the other's toes. Examples include: piano teachers, football, tennis or golf coaches, fitness trainers, NLP practitioners, tai-chi or yoga teachers.

For instance, a golf coach may instruct a golfer to swing in a particular way. The golfer attempts to follow instructions but the result is not at all what the coach intended. The golfer thinks he has followed instructions even though any observant outsider can see that he hasn't — the movement was different. This kind of thing happens all the time.

What can the coach do? Many strategies have been tried. None of them really deals with the core problem: the golfer thinks and feels he is doing what he was asked when, in reality, he isn't. The golfer may begin correctly, yet, in mid-swing, feeling that it needs adjusting, he adjusts it. Doing so, he loses the swing the coach intended him to make. Most often, this sense of needing adjustment and the consequent correction are completely automatic and not even noticed.

The solution? Tackle the problem itself: the faulty sensory appreciation that makes the golfer apply his misconceived correction. This is what the AT (and only AT) does.

Learning the Alexander Technique, anyone can learn to perform all movements better: from breathing to swinging a golf club, from threading a needle to playing the violin, from working at a computer to dancing in the Bolshoi.

In 1980, Philip Pawley completed, in London, the 3-year, full-time training to teach the Alexander Technique. Now in his twenty-fifth year of teaching in Liverpool, he has taught people of all ages from 7 to (literally) 100 and in many walks of life: house-wives and mothers, medical doctors, clergy, yoga teachers, osteopaths and chiropractors, runners, professional musicians, dancers and actors.

His own teacher, Paul Collins, was also a concert violinist and a runner. He ran the Marathon for Canada in the 1952 Melbourne Olympics.

Philip Pawley
37 Hope Street, Liverpool L1 9EA
Tel. 0151 708 6172
Mobile: 07872 905 154