by Loretta James

Most things you can teach by describing an end state — “keep your back straight,” “relax your shoulders” — and the student can check whether they’ve done it. The Alexander Technique breaks that model. It’s not a fixed posture or a set of exercises; it’s a change in how you decide to move. You’re asked to notice a habit before you act on it and choose not to repeat it, which means the “content” of the lesson is something happening, for example, in the split-second before you sit down, not the sitting itself. Worse, the very sense you’d use to check your progress — your feel for what your body is doing — is usually the thing that’s unreliable, since the habit feels normal and the change feels wrong at first.

Three ways to explain it:

One Sentence

The Alexander Technique teaches you to notice the habitual tension you bring to everything you do, and to consciously stop adding it, so the coordination you are capable with can take over instead.

One Paragraph

The Alexander Technique is a way of paying attention to yourself while you move, sit, stand, or speak, so you can catch the small habitual tightening — in the neck, the shoulders, the back — that most people do automatically without noticing. Instead of adding a new posture or exercise, you learn to stop interfering with the coordination you already have. Teachers guide students toward this in two ways: some work mainly hands-on, using gentle touch to let you feel the difference between effort and ease directly; others teach just as effectively online, using precise language and close attention to small movements to guide you toward that same recognition without touch. Either way, the goal is the same — learning to recognize and release unnecessary tension yourself, in ordinary moments like reaching for a cup or sitting at a desk.

Fuller Explanation

F.M. Alexander was an actor in the 1890s who kept losing his voice on stage. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, so he started watching himself in mirrors to figure out what he was doing differently when he recited compared to when he spoke normally. What he found was that just before he began to speak, he pulled his head back and down into his spine, in a way that squeezed his throat and threw off his balance. The habit was so ingrained he couldn’t notice it until he’d spent months training his eye using his mirrors.

That’s really the whole discovery, scaled up: we all have unconscious patterns of tension that we bring into almost everything we do, and most of us can’t feel them because they’ve become “normal.” Sit at a laptop for years and you might jut your chin forward and hunch your shoulders every single time you type, without ever registering it as effort. The tension doesn’t feel like tension — it feels like how sitting is.

Alexander’s method for interrupting this has a few pieces that don’t map cleanly onto everyday language, which is part of why it resists easy explanation.

The first is what he called inhibition — not suppressing an emotion, but pausing before a habitual action long enough not to trigger the automatic response. If you always tense your neck the instant before standing up from a chair, inhibition means catching that instant and simply not doing the usual thing.

The second is direction — a kind of quiet, ongoing intention (not a physical push) toward letting your self be free. It’s often described as “thinking” the direction rather than “doing” it, which sounds mystical until you realize it’s meant literally: any deliberate muscular effort to achieve it tends to recreate the very tension you’re trying to release.

The third is the idea of means-whereby versus end-gaining — the difference between fixating on a goal (touch your toes, hit the high note, climb a mountain) and paying attention to the process that gets you there. End-gaining is what causes most of the unconscious strain in the first place: we want the result badly enough that we grip and shove our way toward it, bypassing any awareness of how we’re doing it.

None of these ideas is complicated on its own, but together they describe a shift in attention rather than a physical technique, which is why lessons rely so heavily on the teacher’s guidance — whether hands-on or verbal. A teacher’s hands can guide your head and spine into a freer relationship in a way that gives you a direct experience of “release” before you have any concept to hang it on; a skilled online teacher does something parallel, using close observation and carefully chosen words to help you notice the same thing from the inside. Only after you’ve noticed it — by either route — does the vocabulary of inhibition, direction, and non-doing start to mean anything concrete.

That’s also why people who’ve had lessons often describe results (less back pain, easier breathing, a lighter way of moving) far more easily than they describe the method itself. The results are visible and felt; the process is a private, moment-to-moment act of noticing and choosing, which is inherently difficult to hand to someone else in words. You could say the Technique teaches a skill that has no object — you’re not learning to do a thing, you’re learning to stop doing something you didn’t know you were doing.

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Loretta James works for the United Nations and has been taking Alexander Technique lessons online with Robert Rickover. She now plans to become a teacher herself. She created this page because, as she said:

Soon after I started, I wanted to explain the Technique to people I know and was frustrated that I didn’t have a good way to do that. I shared my frustration with Robert and later he suggested I create a page for his site that could be useful for people who had no experience with the process, but were curious to find out more.

I hope I was successful!