_WHO WAS F.M. ALEXANDER? 

Frederick Matthias Alexander was born in Tasmania in 1869. His career as an actor was off to a promising start when he began to struggle with hoarseness and gasping for breath.  To his dismay, the best help available at the time was unable to make sense of the problem.  Unwilling to give up on his theatrical ambitions, Alexander set out to see if he could figure out what was getting in the way of his voice. 

​Many years of patient observation and exploration led him to a number of important discoveries.  Among them was the realization that our sense of where our body is in space (sometimes called proprioception) becomes unreliable over time.  Along with the tremendous force of our habits, this inaccurate sense of what we’re doing can interfere with our most well-intentioned attempts at improving our posture or changing the way we do things.  Alexander also came to see that working directly to try and solve what he understood to be the problem tended to fall far short of the mark – in fact, when he narrowed his attention in on the perceived problem, he often added more tension and overdoing! Bit by bit, he started to see progress when he began working to improve his overall balance and coordination.  Along the way, he regained full and flexible use of his voice. 
In solving his own problem,  Alexander developed a way of increasing peoples’ awareness of unhelpful tension, and of helping them redirect it along more productive lines.  His focus shifted to using what he had learned to help others with a wide range of challenges, with the help of what is now known as the Alexander Technique.
“The Alexander Technique gives us all things we have been looking for in a system of physical education: relief from strain due to maladjustment, and constant improvement in physical and mental health. We cannot ask for more from any system; nor, if we seriously desire to alter human beings in a desirable direction, can we ask any less.”

- Aldous Huxley, author