I’m an AmSAT certified teacher of the Alexander Technique based in Bayside, WI. For the past 10 years I maintained a private teaching practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. My wife and I recently re-located back to the midwest to raise a family.
My Story with the Alexander Technique:
I was in my first year of undergraduate studies when a professor suggested I take his Alexander Technique class. I thought it’d make me a better dancer so I signed up. But there was no dancing. Just sitting up and down in a chair. Moving slowly. Paying attention on purpose. A little boring for my 19 year old self. Still, there was something there. It felt good to do a lesson. I felt safe and supported. I was exploring the building blocks of movement. After awhile I began to experience a sense of expansion in my life. Not only in my body releasing it’s grip, but of having a deeper, emerging sense of myself.
The Technique felt like a coming home because I was so fragmented and desensitized in my body. The hardness of a dysfunctional childhood gripped itself around everything I did. I coped by becoming disembodied. I hid behind a facade of being good and smart and resilient. What I didn’t yet understand was that those things were somewhat of an illusion. I had in a practical manner severed the relationship between mind and body so I could survive. As a result, I wasn’t able to feel much, and I certainly wan’t aware of the numbness. My "progress" with AT came in bursts of intellectualization with the embodied part a few steps behind.
Eventually, I learned that nothing fragmented can be free. The Alexander Technique pointed me through my body in the direction of wholeness.