Testimonials and Quotes
Students of the Technique • Teachers of the Technique • FM Alexander
The Alexander Technique has taught me how to live pain free and has gently created greater balance and flexibility in my thinking and moving. Pam Darby-Mann
I have a serious back problem, which even with surgery and regular massage I still suffered pain. After attending Alexander sessions over an 18 month period my posture was better resulting in less pain and discomfort. I now think about the way I sit , stand and walk I just wish I was able to access it more regularly. Carol Gartrell.
As a veteran of occupational injuries, sporting injuries, and surgical damage, my day to day functioning is directly threatened in my work as a music teacher and an active musician. In my life outside work and music, I work with a sense of constant limits. ÊCoping with body pains and strains has become routine. Greg's therapy through Alexander Technique offers a most profound insight - how to spend every minute of every day not hurting myself. Through careful, detailed observation, Greg can and does help people move better and know the true physical nature of relaxation. Most profoundly, the tools for self-improvement lie within one's own understanding. Greg works carefully and respectfully with me, Êalways eloquent, always encouraging, Êbut persistently breaking down my sense of personal limits. With every physical breakthrough, one's spirit lifts. I believe Alexander Technique is unique in what it can offer, and ÊGreg is a most valuable practitioner. Given the chance, he could work with anyone. Those of us in the Orange area are very lucky that he is prepared to come here regularly. Lyndall Scott
I regard it as one of the fortunate experiences of my life that I should have met F. Mattias Alexander at a time when I had been suffering physically for many years. There can be no doubt as to the value of his technique judged by the practical results which I myself have experienced. Instead of feeling one's body an aggregation of ill-fitting parts, full of frictions and deadweights 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. It is the difference between chaos and order and so between illness and good health.
A.
Rugg-Gunn, M.C., F.R.C.S.
(Senior Surgeon, Western Opthalmic Hospital, England)
Mr Alexander is an educationist, and not a "healer" or physical culturist. His teaching embodies with complete precision those principles of psycho-biological behaviour, which are among the most recent deductions of experimental physiology, and applies them in man to a constructive art of living.
Mr Alexander's method lays hold of the individual as a whole, as a self-vitalizing agent. He reconditions and reeducates the reflex mechanisms and brings their habits into normal relation with the functions of organisms as a whole. I regard his methods as thoroughly scientific and educationally sound.
Students of the Technique • Teachers of the Technique • FM Alexander
Quotes from Teachers of the Alexander Technique
The Alexander Technique is the conservation of energy for human beings. Back to ATA homepage
After nine years of experimentation upon himself and others, he found that a certain dynamic relationship of the head, neck and back can be brought into operation; and that this relationship or pattern, integrates all bodily movements bringing about the best use of the whole organism as well as of each specific partÉ.
The relationship exists potentially in every human body except in cases of extreme pathology or where certain forms of drastic surgery have been used. Even in individuals where it has been damaged by disease, surgery or malformation, it can be reawakened and put to work when it has fallen into disuse. Because of the intimate association between use and functioning, such restoration is followed by improvement both physical and mental, sometimes to an amazing degree and in realms where it might not be expected to penetrate.
Alexander called the pattern he discovered the Primary Control.
(Lulie Westfielt in "F. Mathias Alexander, The Man and His Work" pg 16.Centreline Press, 1964).back to ATA homepage
Students of the Technique • Teachers of the Technique • FM Alexander
F.M. Alexander
Épupils free from any [serious] difficulties have frequently come to me because they believed - and results justified this belief - that however well endowed they might be with health or other gifts, they would derive benefit from learning how to direct and control the use of themselves consciously in their daily activities (Preface, Use of the Self 24th July 1931)
My Technique is based on inhibition, the inhibition of undesirable, unwanted responses to stimuli, and hence it is primarily a technique for the development of the control of human reaction. (The Universal Constant in Living, 1941)
It seems strange to me that although man has thought it necessary in the course of his development in civilization to cultivate the potentialities of what he calls 'mind', 'soul' and 'body', he has not so far seen the need for maintaining in satisfactory condition the functioning of the sensory processes through which these potentialities manifest themselves. As a result, the functioning of his sensory processes has bcome so unsatisfactory that the use of his mechanisms is constantly misdirected in his efforts to 'do', and when he tries to put right the results of this misdirection, he has no other criterion for self-critism to guide him in these attempts but that of the untrustworthy sensory processes which originally led him into error. (The Use of the Self, 1932. Gollancz 1985 edition pp 107-108). back to ATA homepage