The Alexander Technique.
Alexander Technique teachers help you improve your posture, but not your military posture. After a bit Alexander Technique posture feels comfortable, while military posture requires a lot of work. You have to throw your shoulders back, suck your stomach in, stick your chin back, thrust your chest out. This amounts to little more than unsustainable posing, posturing, and stiffening up.
The type of good posture the Alexander Technique provides isn’t stiff, stilted, fixed, tensed, posed, held, or strained. At the same time, good posture isn’t slumping, compressing, or shrinking. Alexander Technique good posture doesn’t puff you up, nor does it make you smaller. Good posture is natural, and feels good. You had good posture when you were a little kid. Alexander Technique posture reduces tension, stress, and spinal compression, helping those with back pain, neck pain, and shoulder pain.
The Alexander Technique posture, breathing, mood, look.
Good posture is also helpful for all aspects of breathing. Fuller, slower breathing results in increased physical/mental calmness and clarity, and a decrease in strain, worry, and anxiety.
As you change the physical manifestations of nervousness, anxiety, stress, depression, and shyness, your thinking changes too because the mind/body neural connection is bi-directional.
Improving your posture gives you a new look, and a new view. People notice, even if they can’t quite identify the difference. You change from the outside in and the inside out. You are building positive loops, virtuous cycles, and developing new postural habits. We improve at whatever we practice, and Alexander Technique posture is easy to maintain, and is done with a minimum amount of effort, inviting you to practice hours every day.
Mark Josefsberg-Alexander Technique NYC
This is why I love the Alexander Technique so much! I’m reminded of what actor Hugh Jackman said an interview where he talks about how the Alexander Technique helped him to achieve “incredibly good posture with incredible relaxation!”
Great blog!
Thanks so much Imogen!
It’s so interesting to me that the six-word quote by Hugh Jackman contains two words some of us Alexander Technique teachers are weary of, or afraid to use: posture and relaxation. Yet those are two of the few main reasons people seek out Alexander Technique lessons, in addition to pain relief. What do you think?
It’s true, people notice you are changing.Reading my past texts or remembering something I did, I can’t recognise what I was just few months before now. I feel myself 2.0 updated.
Hi Matteo,
I love that you’re 2.0 updated! The Alexander Technique is so cool that way. And, the Alexander Technique is yours, to use whenever you want.