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WEEKLY STUDY TEXTS   Weeks 1 - 10 

 

 

Week 10

 

MIND BODY UNITY 

What is the Alexander Technique ?

“For me, the Alexander Technique is a paradigm or set of life values. It’s most important principe is of non-duality, the fundamental unity of our being and also the fundamental unity of all things, interconnected in a complex web of relationships which we can’t really understand intellectually.

It’s second most important principle is the inevitable influence that our thoughts and feelings have on our reality, on our perception of ourselves and of the world. Call it the subjective dimension. My body is what I think and feel about my body; my cello is what I think and feel about the cello: my wife is what I think and feel about my wife, which is very, very different from what my wife thinks and feels about herself. My difficulties are what I think and feel, and my solutions too are what I think and feel. It means that the difficulty starts inside me …, and the solutions, too, will start inside me. If I think and feel differently about a difficulty, it might transform itself and loose it’s quality of difficulties. I can think and feel myself into creating a problem; Alexander called it end-gaining. And I can think and feel myself out of a problem; Alexander called it non-doing.

The fundamental unity of all things, and the primacy of the subjective dimension, together create a wonderful life full of possibilities, where each individual can manifest universal principles in a completely individual manner called the use of the self. This, for me, has been the Alexander Technique for the past 40 years.

And now for my second description, similar to this one but different from it. I’ll boil it down to a single word: connection.

(This extract is taken from the book ‘The Alexander Technique - A Skill for Life’  by Pedro De Alcantara)

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