This ebook, Yoga and the Alexander Technique Principles of Good Body Use, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical, and it will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to do the asanas with great poise, posture, ease, and release.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
What is the purpose of hatha yoga? Historically it has been a spiritual practice where you release the effects of fear on your body in conjunction with meditation or other spiritual practices, so that your body doesn’t reinforce fear with tension and poor posture and block enlightenment.
If your posture and use (way you do things habitually) demonstrate to the world that you are afraid, then through yoga, meditation, psychotherapy, and the Alexander Technique, you get to change this and can more easily attain enlightenment.
When you take your whole body’s musculature through a much greater than normal range of motion with the asanas, then this will release the accumulated physicalizing of fear out of your body, so your body doesn’t back up your fearful thoughts and make it harder to release them in meditation. (It’s hard to feel expansive and divine when your neck is hurting, and you’re thoughts are negative.)
As an Alexander Technique teacher, if I show you how to do the asanas with the least amount of work, to be in the asanas with the least amount of immobility, and take the benefits of the asanas into all everyday activity, then yoga can have an effect on how you brush your teeth, run five miles, or sit at a desk eight hours a day. It is a wonderful thing not to leave the transformative effects of yoga at the studio door.
The Alexander Technique makes it possible for yoga students to do the asanas without pain and wear and tear to their bodies. An Alexander Technique teacher shows the yoga student how to do the asanas with power, poise, and ease. We teach you to talk to your body and invite the musculature to release and not think of a greater range of motion as over-stretching muscles.
What is it exactly that an Alexander Technique teacher does for the yoga student that makes Alexander Technique postural work unique? We teach the student to find the most effortless way to do the asanas. We teach the yoga student that the whole body does the posture. If the whole body is balanced, and the yoga student’s technique makes personal sense, then he or she will create the asana without sacrificing his or her body.
In the Alexander Technique the yoga student’s well-being is paramount, and if he or she takes care of him or herself using Alexandrian principles of good body use, the yoga student will do the asanas at an extraordinary level of good postural use and not pay a price for expansive asanas.
I write from a background as a concert guitarist and as an Alexander Technique teacher of 20 years. When I went to an Alexander Technique teacher with carpal tunnel syndrome on the guitar, I wanted to get out of physical trouble as soon as I could. And I did! It is this experience as a hurting guitarist that I never forgot. After I finished my Alexander Technique training, it is this remembered pain and fear of having to stop playing and performing that I bring to my writing and teaching.
It makes it possible for me to write clearly about the main physical problems that the yoga practitioner creates in his or her body.
