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)
The goal of the Alexander Technique is to help the yoga practitioner create the most effortless and balanced yoga technique and posture possible, so that the yoga practitioner doesn’t have to struggle to do yoga. This isn’t always easy, because many yoga practitioners bring misconceptions of what they are doing physically when they do yoga. In other words, the yoga practitioner thinks they are doing one thing, when they are doing another thing.
What does this mean? Doing yoga, as with many specialized activities, has a history of the rules of doing yoga that has gotten passed from teacher to student etc., over generations of teachers and students. What is taught isn’t always an accurate representation of what is physically happening in many of the yoga asanas.
Here are a few of my corrected misconceptions of movement in the body. You can’t lock the knees, you lock the thigh muscles to lock the knees. When you rotate the forearm, turning the hands over up and down, it is the biceps that rotate the forearms. When you move your hand side to side in relationship to the forearm, it is from long muscles tied to the elbows. When you move your fingers, it is from the forearms – the flexors and the extensors. When you support bent forearms, it is the brachialis, not the biceps for the most part.
Here are two of the major misconceptions in doing yoga. I see these misconceptions with 100% of the people who come to me, who want to apply the principles of the Alexander Technique to yoga. Most yoga practitioners experience yoga as stretching muscles. You cannot stretch muscles, but if you believe you do, then you set up a battle in your body, as you attempt to increase the range of motion in an asana.
If you ask/order your muscles to release and lengthen, instead of stretch, you will gain control over your musculature and regain the range of motion you had as a child, without harming your body.
The second misconception is that tendons lengthen as you do yoga, and this is how you get a greater than normal range of motion. Tendons do not lengthen, only muscles release.
Returning back to the first paragraph of this article, if you believe the body does one thing, and it actually does another, then the conflict between your misconceptions and what really happens will contribute to pain, strain, and injury. So, when a yoga instructor tells a student something that is not true about how the body works, then it seems to really cause physical problems.
Because the student is stacking statements from authority to back up misconceptions of what he or she is doing as he or she does yoga. This can really lead to strain and injury. It may take years, but many yoga practitioners get in trouble eventually over the years of doing yoga.
It is an extraordinary feeling when you are made aware of what you are really doing in an activity. Every time I was given accurate information from an Alexander Technique teacher on what balanced posture and accurate movement in my guitar technique were, my classical guitar playing always improved dramatically.
It was truly as if I took off blinders, and could clearly see and experience how easy and free playing the guitar could be.
