Luke Ford

Dana Ben-Yehuda, an Alexander Technique teacher in Mt. View/Palo Alto California, describes the Technique to Bonnie Coleen of Seeing Beyond on KEST Radio.

From Dana’s website:

Dana Ben-Yehuda is a Certified Alexander Teacher, M.AmSAT (American Society for the Alexander Technique). She trained with Giora Pinkas and John Baron at The Alexander Educational Center (TAEC) in Berkeley, California, and with Shaike Hermelin in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

Dana was the Media Spokesperson for the American Society for the Alexander Technique, 2002 – 2009. She also served as Media Relations Chair, 2002 – 2006. She has been interviewed for publications including O (The Oprah Magazine), Prevention, Arthritis Today, MS Focus, Elle, Glamour, Catholic Digest, and more.

Dana has been in private practice in Mountain View for eight years. She has also assisted as a teacher-trainer at TAEC. She has given over 50 workshops, classes and talks at schools and businesses including San Jose State University Department of Music, the Mt. View Community School for Music and Arts, and Camino Medical Group. She is in the referral system for the Stanford University Pain Management Center.

Professor Nicolas Tinbergen, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, chose to speak about the Alexander Technique:

“I recommend the Alexander Technique as an extremely sophisticated form of rehabilitation… From personal experience we can already confirm some of the seemingly fantastic claims made by Alexander and his followers – namely, that many types of underperformance and even ailments, both mental and physical, can be alleviated, sometimes to a surprising degree, by teaching the body musculature to function differently. We already notice, with growing amazement, very striking improvements in such diverse things as high blood pressure, breathing, depth of sleep, overall cheerfulness and mental alertness, resilience against outside pressures, and in such a refined skill as playing a musical instrument.” 

Professor N. Tinbergen,1907-1988, Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1973

Read an Article Written for PMPR Cosmetic Forecast, 2003
Read an article describing what it is like to take a lesson.
Read an article to learn more about the Alexander Technique

Dana: “People often think Alexander Technique is posture. People often think it is a form of exercise or body work. It’s not. Good posture happens and people come to it often times because they want posture but it is about awareness in the body. This helps undo postural habits at the root of many aches and pains.”

“Alexander Technique is about conscious control of human reaction, of learning to think in your body and learning the connection between thought and muscular activity.”

“This method has been in constant use for over 110 years.”

Dana took her first Alexander lesson in Tel Aviv in 1983. “I felt like I was floating as I walked in the room. It was a very zen experience. Very peaceful. I liked it, so I just started taking lessons.”

“When people come to me with pain, which is one of the biggest reasons that people come to me, sometimes people have chronic pain that won’t go away, but we can deal with our reactions to pain. Normally we tighten up. We don’t think. We hold our breath. That makes things ten times worse. If we can learn to stop, let go and release, we can observe our pain. We don’t have to be our pain.”

“People don’t come forever. They come. They learn a skill. After a certain point, it begins to stick. We’re undoing habits of posture that put pressure into your body.”

“Learning to leave your neck unlocked doesn’t make me look any different from the outside but it has a completely different feeling from the inside. You can look at your front door and if it is locked or unlocked, it doesn’t look any different.

“When we’re locked in our joints and are compressing from within, and then if you stop and think of not tightening, you’ll notice a change.”