What is the Alexander Technique?
Many people think the Alexander Technique is about posture. For me, it’s about the relationship between attention and action, between intention and habit, between what you want to do and how you go about doing it.
Lessons are practical, hands-on (my hands, in this case), and deeply experiential. Rather than giving you a set of exercises to practice, they help you develop a different way of noticing your experience.
That’s why this work can support not only physical comfort, but also public speaking, sports, making or playing music, cooking, learning, working at a computer, photography, or simply moving through everyday life.
This is me teaching a class.
You almost never notice how you do what you do.
You stop when something hurts, when an ordinary day leaves you unexpectedly exhausted, when your breathing goes short. The habits that brought you there went unnoticed.
This is the field the Alexander Technique works in, and it does its work through attention.
It doesn’t ask you to stretch more, strengthen more, or try harder. Instead, it helps you become aware of subtle patterns of tension and effort that have become so familiar you no longer notice they’re there.
As those patterns become visible, you discover that many of them aren’t necessary. And as unnecessary effort begins to release, movement often becomes easier, breathing freer, balance steadier, and you may find yourself responding to life with a little more space and a little less urgency.
We tend to treat the body like a machine: something to fix, strengthen, or control.
I’d rather think of it as a camera’s aperture: the opening that light passes through. In us, it’s also where the world touches us: beauty, pain, other people.
You bring yourself into everything you do.
When we stop making the extra effort, we don’t only move differently.
The amount of the world we let in changes too.
I’ve done my best to describe it here, but honestly, you’ve probably never experienced anything quite like it. It’s remarkably difficult to put into words.
The best way to understand the Alexander Technique is to experience it.
In one-to-one lessons, the first lesson is simple: you arrive, we do everyday things (sitting, walking, speaking) and you start noticing what shows up. You don’t need to know anything beforehand.
If you’d like to know more…
I first came across the Technique in 2016 and trained as a teacher at the Escuela de Técnica Alexander de Montevideo. I keep studying with teachers I admire, and sometimes I interview them: some of those conversations are below.