My local college is offering an Alexander Technique class this spring

[Don Higdon]

Originally Posted by Dharmabum

I have yet to find any empirical evidence in support of Alexander Technique. Have there been any large studies?

This is a bit like saying "I have yet to find any empirical evidence in support of Richmond, VA. Have there been any large studies?"
Google.

[Dharmabum]

No, it's not. If Alexander Technique gives positive results, at least some of these positive results should be measurable. For example, physical thearapy has measurable results.

[Alex Scott]

Give Don a break guys, he has spent way more time than most of us with this stuff. I can share my personal experience that reading about the technique and taking a few lessons has helped me enormously.

Measurable evidence has probably been found in a scientific study, but then again scientific studies are usually paid for by special interest groups and have agendas.

My experience is that had I measured the muscle tension in my body with electrodes before and after the lessons their would be a pretty measurable result.

You could also measure my inch+ worth of height from better posture and my wife's comments that my shoulders look the same height all the sudden.

That would be scientific.

No need to bash this stuff. Their are a lot of people that speak in a little mystical way about some of it, but that shouldn't discount it. My teacher was very down to earth, and gave us lots of little exercises in sensory awareness to try.

If you don't want to pay a teacher read a book and talk to some other people about their experiences.

Do a study.

[Dharmabum]

I think my brain just clicked into understanding the idea of Alexander Technique when I thought of it compared to yoga or pilates.

In this way, it makes sense to me, and a lack of studies would be understandable, as I'm sure there are few studies on yoga or pilates, specifically.

Is this a useless comparison?

[Alex Scott]

I'd say you are on the right track. There isn't really anything too strenuos about what I've done but I'd say AT would fit into a larger body work-type pigeon hole if everything fit nicely into pigeon holes.

[Andy Allen]

No-one has posted this link yet (I've been Googling ):

http://www.alexandertechnique.com/musicians.htm

The page contains lots of links for further info.

There's more general info. on the home page: http://www.alexandertechnique.com/

As someone who plans to live to a ripe and grumpy old age, and to continue playing well into it, this is likely worth my investigation.

[Don Higdon]

Originally Posted by Alex Scott

I'd say AT would fit into a larger body work-type pigeon hole if everything fit nicely into pigeon holes.

Your favor towards AT is appreciated, but AT is not body work. The student's kinesthesia is used for access to the brain at the experiential (right-brain) level in order to alter the pattern of response to all stimuli. In no way am I doing body work in the sense of a physical therapist, yoga teacher, etc.

Originally Posted by Dharmabum

I think my brain just clicked into understanding the idea of Alexander Technique when I thought of it compared to yoga or pilates.
In this way, it makes sense to me, and a lack of studies would be understandable, as I'm sure there are few studies on yoga or pilates, specifically.
Is this a useless comparison?

"Useless" is more in-your-face than I mean to be. "Of very limited applicability" is kinder.
There's a problem in that our culture carries a consuming bias in favor of left hemispheric thought. This bias becomes self-reinforcing when I try to explain that AT is understood through the right hemisphere. People take it personally, as if I were rendering some judgement of character, when I say that AT cannot be understood via left brain, objective, rational thought alone.
I'll try to expand on this later.
Meanwhile,

Originally Posted by airbass

No-one has posted this link yet (I've been Googling ):

http://www.alexandertechnique.com/musicians.htm

The page contains lots of links for further info.

There's more general info. on the home page: http://www.alexandertechnique.com/

Thank you, air, for doing a little research on your own. There is a ton of information available to anyone who will make the effort. It will not substitute for experience, but will help to the degree that constructs can.

[Alex Scott]

Yes, AT is more body work than say, playing chess. Of course I haven't spent years to get a certification, but the benefits I have received have helped my body as well as my mind.

Maybe the words body work have been stolen by the masseuse guild.

I would add to try to get a teacher of whatever method you want who is open minded and not too clingy to traditional methods. I find that when I am talking with new practitioners of whatever method they are very adept at reciting their teachers words but not neccesarily imparting their wisdom. I have had better experiences with teachers who having been doing whatever for 20-30 plus years. It is usually worth whatever "extra" money they charge.

Returning to the original thread topic, if you have the opportunity to take a class through a community college, I might be inclined to tell you thatyou should seek out a master teacher instead of wasting half the money that might cost at your community college.

[Don Higdon]

Originally Posted by Alex Scott

the benefits I have received have helped my body as well as my mind.

Of course. Two essential points:
1) Alexander said that the body and the mind are not distinct components but are the same thing. Every doctor I say this to agrees.
2) AT is not therapy, physical or mental. The benefits you received were indirect consequences of changed reaction processes. Alexander said the work is to get you to stop doing the wrong thing. "The right thing does itself," i.e., when not interfered with, the body's self-righting mechanism restores the self to its natural design. The teacher doesn't do it.

Maybe the words body work have been stolen by the masseuse guild.

I think the words are appropriate for what massage therapists do, which is to directly alter the physical conditions of the body.

[myrick]

[sorry about this - I've edited three times. the forum software insists on dropping all my paragraph breaks, making this hard to read, for anybody who cares to ] let me add another voice to this discussion. I've been doing AT pretty much one session a week for nearly four years. I started originally because of bowing-related right shoulder pain from starting up bass playing after a 25-year hiatus. It was partly Don Higdon's urging, as well as other regulars here, who all recommended that I give it a shot. At that time Don had just recently started on the long teacher training path (3 years minimum, I believe). After four solid years, I guess I qualify as a serious AT devotee. So I'll attempt to add a useful comment or two, from first hand experience. Is AT phoney-baloney, hocus-pocus, airy-fairy, crunchy granola, hippy-dippy BS, as questioned by one or two posters here? Decidedly not. This is real stuff, sensible, down-to-earth, utterly without any metaphysical clap-trap. It offers a real potential to bring concrete benefits to anyone who puts in the time and (sometimes huge) effort to learn it. Of course this is just me saying so, and you don't know me, so you'll just have to see for yourself, won't you. Having made that statement, I will admit that AT does, sometimes, sound just a little bit flakey, especially when explained to a newbie. But, well, sorry, that can't be helped. It is deep, and in its own way mysterious, in that it's unlike most other stuff in our lives. To say its like yoga or Pilates is only very, very roughly correct; its just as much like Zen Buddhism or Neuro-linguistic programming or who knows what else. What it's really just like is Alexander Technique nothing more, nothing less - and I'm not trying to be cute, that's just it. One of the remarkable things about Alexander work is just how difficult it is to put into words exactly what it IS. This fact makes discussions like this thread, joining some people who know something about Alexander and some people with no first hand experience, difficult, to say the least. There are countless AT websites and quite a few books. Some are better than others but frankly, ALL of the written (and spoken) explanations can't really get the real essence of it across, sadly. That's just the way it is, I have concluded. As a clumsy, over-simple analogy, imagine explaining RED to a blind person. If you are curious, or attracted to the potential benefits as explained by practitioners, I recommend you suspend judgment, forgot about trying to understand much before you start, and simply give it a try. A meaningful starter course, which would enable most people to begin to see some of the benefits and attractions of AT, would almost certainly be for more than two or three sessions, probably more like ten or so. Then gradually (or possibly suddenly - people can respond differently) it becomes more clear what its all about. For me, after four years, I still look forward every week to each session because I learn something new every time. It just keeps unfolding. Incredibly subtle, in a way, but at the same time incredibly simple and fundamental and powerful. It’s all about how we work, how we function, how we think, act, move, and pretty much everything else. As Alexander puts it, its about how we use ourselves. It's about insight into self. AT work often starts with an apparently more physical focus - things like learning to become more aware of tensions in your body and habitually physical reactions and responses to various stimuli. As discussed above, some AT teachers will work with specific activities in your day to day life, like bass playing, while others prefer to stick to basic actions such as standing or sitting, using these as proxies for anything else we do with ourselves. Regardless, let me give a specific example for readers of this forum. Let's say you have a certain way of holding your shoulders when you play the bass, which is leading to cramps or pain or other complaints, or maybe to bad tone or bad intonation. Fact is, you probably adopt this shoulder tension pattern unknowingly just by looking at the bass, or thinking about picking it up. So the simple thought “I'm gonna play my bass now” is probably enough stimulus to trigger your habitual shoulder thing (or neck thing, or whatever - its all connected). By the time you actuall start playing, your'e completely locked into the pattern - forget about trying to "stop" or change at this point. And chances are, you can't really see accurately what it is you're doing right or wrong in yourself. On one level, AT is about helping you perceive these ingrained stimulus-response habits, and learn how to derail or defuse them (Alexander uses the term “inhibit”) before they happen. Only by learning to stop doing a wrong or undesirable thing can we have the freedom to then do something different. But as mentioned, our ingrained stimulus-response habits are really hard to even observe accurately in ourselves, let alone “inhibit”. So, AT training at one level works on this stuff. But wait a minute, this is already sounding more mental than physical. And indeed in a way it is. In fact, as Don stressed in a post above, one of the most basic tenets of Alexander thought and practice is that mind and body are, at the real functioning level, nothing more than two aspects of a single thing. So its both mental AND physical. Or better still, forget the dichotomy - it’s just “you”; and how you use yourself. Finally, some here have wondered why there is so little hard, academic research involving AT. On one level, I think it would be hard to do. Virtually all AT teachers I have met or read take pains to downplay any specific direct physical or medical benefits to Alexander work. But I daresay the majority of people who study AT for any length of time will tell of specific benefits or problems solved or reduced, and will firmly and confidently believe that their AT study led to hard benefits. I am certainly among these. But it takes time, and gains usually come slowly. Probably the real reason for this is that these original complaints are problems that people were causing for themselves, by “bad use” of themselves. Alexander study merely helped these people learn how to help themselves, by correcting bad use. Powerful, beneficial stuff, but very indirect and thus probably pretty hard to study scientifically. Also, the whole approach of AT goes against the grain of the reductionist trend in science of the past 50-75 years. I suspect there will be more research over the coming years. In my view, Alexander's insights address certain basic principles of human functioning, even though he did hiss main work around a hundred years ago. Modern neurology, cognitive psychology and consciousness theory, fields which have undergone huge change and advancement in the past two decades, have recently come around to views that are very much in synch with the principles Alexander formed many decades ago. I suspect that more and more people will notice this and dream up some useful relevant researches to delve more deeply into this. anyway, that's my $0.2.