I’m reading a terrific book addressing this question — Freedom to Change by Frank Pierce Jones, a professor of Classics at Brown University and a teacher of Alexander Technique.
From page two: “For the Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new to do. It teaches you how to bring more practical intelligence into what you are already doing: how to eliminate stereotyped responses; how to deal with habit and change. It leaves you free to choose your own goal but gives you a better use of yourself while you work towards it.”
“Alexander and his brother, A.R. Alexander (1874-1947), developed a way of using their hands to convey information directly through the kinaesthetic sense. They gave their pupils an immediate “aha” experience of performing a habitual act — walking, talking, breathing, handling objects, and the like — in a non-habitual way. The technique changed the underlying feeling tone of a movement, producing a kinaesthetic effect of lightness that was pleasurable and rewarding and served as the distinguishing hallmark of non-habitual responses.”
From Appendix A: “John Dewey once said that the reason F.M. Alexander’s teaching had appealed to him in the first place was not that it made him feel better (though the improvement in his health had been marked), but that it made him conscious of his total ignorance of a whole field of knowledge. The field he referred to was the knowledge of how he used himself in the ordinary activities of life. Like many intellectuals, Dewey was aware of a certain ineptness in the performance of physical tasks. If he was going to get up from a chair, or sit down, or pick up something he had dropped, he would do it awkwardly, and his aim was to get it over with as quickly as possible so as to get on to something more suited to his abilities, like “thinking.” Alexander made him realize that his impressions and beliefs about his own physical activities were as appropriate a field as any for the exercise of constructive thought.”
Dr. Jones writes about John Dewey: I asked Dewey about his early experiences with the Alexander Technique. He said he had been taken by it first because it provided a demonstration of the unity of mind and body. He thought that the demonstration had struck him more forcibly than it might have struck someone who got the sensory experience easily and quickly, because he was such a slow learner. He had always been physically awkward, he said, and performed all actions too quickly and impulsively and without thought. “Thought” in his case was saved for “mental” activity, which had always been easy for him. (Alexander told me that when Dewey first came to him he was “drugged with thinking” and used to fall asleep during lessons.) It was a revelation to discover that thought could be applied with equal advantage to everyday movements.
