Fredrick Matthias Alexander was a genius of the world that developed a technique that revolutionized the way we see the human body and how we use it to interact in our daily lives. He was a simple man that was born and raised on an isolated farm in Wynyard near the coast of Tasmania, Australia in 1869. Alexander, at birth, was afflicted with recurring respiratory ailments. He was a hard workingman burdened by financial pressures, but managed to still learn arts such as drama and music. Eventually, he turned to the profession of acting due his dissatisfaction for commercial life. However, after continually practicing and performing is work on stage he began to notice that he developed a hoarseness and lack of quality in his voice. After seeing several physicians and doctors about his problem, they could not see anything physically wrong with is body or at least they couldn't find a visible cause for his bodily behavior. He would go home and rest his voice and body and everything would eventually go back to normal. Alexander, continued to practice his usual method of reciting, but this ultimately failed during one of his performances. After going home for the second time, Alexander decided that the cause of his problem might be what he's doing to provoke it. He slowly, yet surely discovered that the cause of the problem was, in fact, the posture and alignment of the body. He concluded that he the result of the body reacting this way was because of the misuse that he lead the body to practice. Soon after he developed techniques and structuring to help him correct problem and prevent any more damage to occur, it reflected in his work reciting as an actor and he quickly developed a reputation and received a mass of compliments on the quality of his voice. Later on in his life as he practiced performance he went on to share his technique with the public and the medical community. With a little time he was able to develop a genre of technique that helped shape the body to it's proper use and have the average person find the harmony with the function of the body and mind. He has written books and taught various pupils all over the world who have praised and supported the technique throughout the development.
Use and Functioning
In essence, what Michael Gelb described about Alexander's views and the purpose of the technique was to inform us of the way that we condition our bodies and how to correct the situation to ensure full functioning capacity of your instrument. It really enlightens us about being aware of the body and making sure that there is a level of understanding the body and having it work in your favor and not against it. We need to make deliberate choices that's going to be beneficial to the body in the long run. Alexander decided that the "Use of his organism were fundamental, since they directly affected his functioning and therefore influenced all his other choices."
"We must have creative and adaptable habits in oder to cope with our complex world."
The Whole Person
This is just as it suggests. This aspect of the book describes how we are able to look at singular part of the body, yet they don't mean as much when they don't harmonize together in the body. You can have an optometrist, a pediatrist or a chiropractor look at you individually for different parts of the body, but it may not cover an underlying cause for something. Same thing happening with the Alexander technique there are many things going on in the boy that you don't realize are happening. Correcting one thing does not account for the whole problem. Everything has to harmonize with each other to do a single task, if not something goes wrong.
"All training, of whatever kind, must be based on understanding that the human organism always functions as a whole and can be only change fundamentally as a whole."
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