WHO COMES FOR LESSONS?Who Was Alexander? Who Comes For Lessons? Alexander & Riding There are three broad groups of people who come for lessons. Personal transformation – Developing awareness Accelerated rehabilitation – Surgery and injury Improved performance – Athletic and sports related It is taught all over the world in major universities and conservatories including Julliard, Yale, Bard, Royal Academy of Music, and RADA to name but a few. Many well known people have derived benefits from studying the Alexander Technique, including George Bernard Shaw, John Dewey, Aldous Huxley, Raymond Dart, Sir Colin Davies, Kevin Klein, John Cleese, Sting, William Hurt. RECOMMENDATIONS The Alexander Technique remains the best of the self-care strategies to prevent the sequel of poor posture and poor breathing. The technique is not a treatment; it is a discipline that, to be effective, has to be applied to the activities of daily life. The reward is an increase in competence and self esteem and in the sensory satisfaction that accompanies self-knowledge and self-control. The Alexander Technique stresses unification in an era of greater and greater medical specialization. Its educational system teaches people how best to use their bodies in ordinary action to avoid or reduce unnecessary stress and pain. It enables clients to get better faster and stay better longer. This is undoubtedly the best way to take care of the back and alleviate back pain. I think I have given my patients something almost as good as magic. I have taught them what to do and not to do when their backs give them trouble, and how to reduce unnecessary stress and pain. As a result, they no longer have to feel afraid and helpless when back pain occurs. Many consider themselves cured because they have been able to return to an active, normal lifestyle. This story of perceptiveness, of intelligence and of persistence shown by a man without medical training, is one of the true epics of medical research and practice. Instead of feeling one’s body to be an aggregation of ill fitting parts, full of friction and dead weights 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. We cannot ask for more from any system of physical education, nor, if we seriously desire to change human beings in a desirable direction, can we ask any less. Mr. Alexander has done a service to the subject by persistently treating each act as involving the whole integrated individual, the whole psychophysical man. To take a step is an affair not of this or that limb solely but the total neuromuscular activity of the moment. |