What went wrong:

How and why you get in your own way

1. You use feeling (kinaesthesia): both to tell you how to move and to report back on how you are moving.
2. That feeling is seriously untrustworthy. (See examples).
3. That means you are moving, neither as you intended to do nor as you thought you were doing. It follows that your resulting position isn't what you think it is either — as the trained eye of an Alexander Technique teacher can quickly confirm.
4. Even though it lets you down so badly, you still rely on your feeling — absolutely and implicitly.

So why do people ignore the problem?

Does it seem strange and hard to believe that you could be so out of touch? I agree, it is. Yet, trusting your faulty understanding only makes it easier to continue messing yourself up. This faulty understanding is debauched kinaesthesia.

Easy to ignore, it plays havoc with your life.

If a problem is too big to cope with, ignoring it may be the obvious solution — but what does that solve?

For a real solution, you must first recognise what is happening. Then you can search for the tools to put things right.

That's what the Alexander Technique is about. It helps you recognise the problem and it allows you to re-educate your kinaesthesia. The reward is a return to reliable functioning — and the ease, confidence and health that goes with it.

People often complain that the Alexander Technique is slow. It has to be. It's a big problem. You can solve it slowly, but surely, or you can give up and deny it exists.

Which will you choose?

Some typical examples of debauched kinaesthesia

For most people:–

• You may think you stand upright. In fact, you lean backwards from the hips to compensate for a forward stoop. When you make a special effort to stand up straight, you end up leaning backwards even more than usual.
• When you think you are bending your legs, you are really bending your back first. If you are prevented from bending your back, you stiffen your legs and lock your knees for fear of falling over!
• When you think you are relaxing, you are just stiffening in a different way: a so-called “slump” is actually a tight, pulled-down state. Your own muscles are physically pulling you down.
• Very likely, you turn your head slightly to one side to look straight ahead. But you feel you are looking straight as you do this. As a result, if your head is adjusted to face in the same direction as your body, you feel you are favouring the eye that was turned away.
• Although you think you are standing equally on both feet, you are usually putting most of your weight on one. If this is corrected for you, it will seem to you that you have been pushed over onto the lazy one.
• In the course of your everyday activities, you routinely squash and contort your neck and back. If you become aware of this and make an effort to stand or sit taller, you only end up contorting yourself more!

The catalogue goes on....

“But, surely all this can't be true, not for normal people?”

Unless you are a VERY exceptional person, it is true for you. What's more, any Alexander teacher could prove it to you in your very first lesson.

“Give me some exercises to do.”

Many people miss the point in this way.

Whenever you try to improve your posture, the greater your effort the worse it gets. Exercises have their uses, but when it comes to correcting your posture they are worse than useless.

Instead of trying harder, a subtler approach is needed, one that takes full account of the facts. Only the Alexander Technique does this consistently; this is what makes it uniquely powerful. No exercise programme ever invented could do it for you.

Remember the reason why you can't move well: as soon as you begin to, your unreliable kinaesthesia can be relied on to tell you that you are doing it wrong. Inevitably you react by correcting yourself and going back to those old ways that your kinaesthesia approves, the very ways that created your problem in the first place.

So whenever you practise an exercise, unless you can resist the tendency to correct yourself (even though your next movement feels utterly impossible without the correction), you will always end up doing what your debauched kinaesthesia dictates.

So far from improving your posture, you will be practising your faulty co-ordination. If your movement never does feel utterly impossible that's simply because you never left the primrose path laid down by your debauched kinaesthesia.

If something is reliable, rely on it. If it isn't, to rely on it anyway is sheer folly!

Practice makes perfect: exercising to correct a problem arising from a debauched kinaesthesia is the best way to turn an occasional acute pain into a chronic problem.

Does all this sound preposterously far-fetched?

Is it too much to expect you to believe that so many people could be so wrong so much of the time?

Then, you won't be interested in the Alexander Technique. Why not click the “Back” button and try something else. Sorry I couldn't help.   

You still here?

Then you've got some serious work to do ...   

 Oh Noooo!

Do you want to recapture the poise you had as a young child?

Then click here: How can I get out of my own way?