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Whatever brings a student to the Alexander Technique, what is taught in
every lesson is a new, quieter way of using the whole psycho-physical
self. It's this explicitly preventive approach that has
distinguished the Technique from the very beginning. Just over 100 years ago, the promising career of a young actor named F.M. Alexander was threatened by a serious problem: he began to lose his voice. Because his physician could find no evidence of infection, and because he lost his voice only while performing, Alexander assumed he must be doing some extra thing on stage, something that interfered with his normal functioning. Sure enough, rehearsing in front of an array of mirrors, he saw that every time he began to recite, his chin jerked up as his head was yanked back and down on an over-stiffening neck. Continuing his careful observation, he came to realize that interfering with the head's balance on the spine radically upset his whole balance. Alexander was to later call this critical head-to-neck relationship "the primary control." 
This inherent primary control can be seen working for the three-year-old
in the picture. Because his neck
muscles aren't (yet) over-busy, his head's own weight (thanks to his
skeleton's superbly adapted shape) is acting as a counter-weight, rocking
forward and up on his lengthening spine. This leverage action, in turn, is reflexively recruiting just enough supple muscle tone to secure all the space necessary, for everything inside to work in harmony. Conversely, stiffening the neck - pulling the head back and down - pulls the whole self "out of tune." And all too often a child's neck begins to stiffen shortly after starting school. Frequent episodes of boredom, with its neck-scrunching slump, conspire with the ill-fitting furniture in most classrooms to degrade the self-balancing, reflex signaling from the primary control. Computers have greatly increased this unconscious noise with even more scrunching. To all this interference add the instinctive, everything-stiffening stress reactions, and it's no wonder that the child's balance gets disrupted. |
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