About Conditioning

Conditioning solves a need with the ability to adapt. Conditioning is establishing a program or routine to solve an anticipated routine situation. The situation is that a question or problem is repeating that supposedly requires a solution. In conditioning, automating a series of physical actions is the solution. As the situation itself is recognized, the [...]

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Giving Up

It’s tricky to perceive what’s going on with thought and actions, because everything happens at once – and fast.
You have done it a million times. The most familiar way to suspend what you do not want is to do something else. Fire off another cue and change the channel. Time to go on to the [...]

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Your Ideas: Illustrations for Captions

I’m illustrating ideas of thinking strategy & perception in some educational writing about Alexander Technique in the form of an e-book.  Useful would be a bunch of ideas how to illustrate abstract concepts in pictures.
As thinking skills are, this subject is a challenge because it is a process. It is similar to how people get [...]

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Understanding Unfamiliarity By Filling In the Blanks

On the Alexander Google list server group, it turns out that I’ve gotten a reputation for being able to explain things that others find difficult. So I thought that I would explain how I can read something that has lots of confusing or unfamiliar words in it and still get something out of what is [...]

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Recognizing Meaning

How would a person recognize for their own benefit a larger important change or fulfilment that may be taking place moment-by-moment? This skill seems to be related to the ability to select important points that is most commonly used in today’s culture as the ability to tell an interesting story. For instance, a movie will [...]

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Approaching Pervasive Habits

This article was written in response to a question posed on the Alexander Technique Email Discussion Group. Although the question is about piano playing, the issue it raises applies to just about any activity. In this answer, there are some useful suggestions for any student of the Alexander Technique who is working on their own.
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Why Are Habits Hard to Change?

It should be possible to recognize a habit – specifically enough to be able to undo it, stop it or substitute a better response. Why is this so challenging?
Within the intention of making a habit useful is the design for habits to become innate by disappearing. Then the next habit can be chained on, to [...]

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Need Some Sources for Quoting – Have ‘em?

For an article I would like to write on Alexander Technique, I need some footnotes and quotes from reputable scientific or book sources, as well as quotes from books that have been written on Alexander Technique.
My library has been packed away in storage in Calif. since I assummed my books would only be ruined if [...]

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Notes on Teaching Kids

If I were presenting the principles of Alexander Technique to kids, I would start with basic thinking skills of revealing assumptions. I would teach what is an assumption as being a habit of a ground rule in games. I’d outline some basic thinking strategies as strategy in game play. I’d go through some common decision-making [...]

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How is Primary Control Taught?

How does a person who is trained to teach Alexander Technique actually show people how to learn Alexander’s principle of “forward and up”? This may only make sense to you if you do already have some experiences with Alexander’s work, but you can also see what happens as you read and try this out [...]

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Asking Really Great Questions

As a topic in general, good questioning has many examples in every field. It pays to study the process of questioning as a separate subject, as if you were going to design an FAQ for your skill. Not only can it make you a better learner, but a better teacher.
If you are a teacher, you [...]

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