What some well-known people have said about the Alexander Technique...

I find The Alexander Technique very helpful in my work. Things happen without you trying. They get to be light and relaxed. You must get an Alexander teacher to show it to you.

John Cleese, Actor

 

The Alexander Technique helped a long standing back problem, and to get a good night's sleep after many years of tossing and turning.

Paul Newman, Actor

 

The Alexander Technique makes a real difference to my often tense and busy life. Its thoughtful approach has made me calmer, improved my concentration and given me a clearer sense of my own well being. I am grateful for it.

Joan Bakewell, TV Presenter and Journalist 

  

The Alexander Technique will benefit anyone whether they are an elite athlete or whether they just wish to live life without the aches and pains that many people suffer and accept as part of life. It is a pity that these techniques are not shown to us all at an early age for I have no doubt that this would alleviate many of the causes of ill health in our communities.

Greg Chappell, Australian test cricketer (1970 - 1984)

 

The Alexander Technique works... I recommend it enthusiastically to anyone who has neck pains or back pain.

Roald Dahl, Writer

 

Alexander established not only the beginnings of a far reaching science of the apparently involuntary movements that we call reflexes, but a technique of correction and self control which forms a substantial addition to our very slender resources in personal education.

George Bernard Shaw, Writer, Nobel Prize winner for literature

 

It gives us all the things we have been looking for in a system of physical education: relief from strain due to maladjustment, and consequent improvement in physical and mental health, increased consciousness of the physical means employed to gain the ends proposed by the will and, along with this, a general heightening of consciousness on all levels... We cannot ask more from any system of physical education; nor, if we seriously desire to alter human beings in a desirable direction, can we ask any less.

Aldous Huxley, Writer

 

97% of people with back pain could benefit by learning the Alexander Technique - it is only a very small minority of back pain sufferers that require medical intervention such as surgery.

Jack Stern, Renowned Spinal Neurosurgeon (interviewed about the AT here)

 

I love the Alexander Technique. It has corrected my posture, improved my health and changed my life.

Alec McCowen CBE, Actor

 

The Alexander Technique has played an important and beneficial part in my life.

John Houseman, Actor, Producer and Director

 

Alexander students rid themselves of bad postural habits and are helped to reach with their bodies and minds, an enviable degree of freedom of expression.

Michael Langham, Director, the Juilliard School, New York USA

 

The Alexander Technique has helped me to undo knots, unblock energy and deal with almost paralysing stage fright.

William Hurt, Actor 

 

The Alexander Technique gave me a glimpse of the possibility of freedom.

Edna O'Brien, Celebrated Irish writer

 

The Technique's many benefits for actors include minimized tension, centeredness, vocal relaxation, and responsiveness, mind/body connection and about an inch and a half of additional height.

Kevin Kline, Actor

 

Of all the disciplines that form the actor training program, none is more vital, enriching and transformative than the Alexander Technique.

Harold Stone, Associate Director, Theatre Department, The Juilliard School, New York USA

 

The Alexander Technique can be sustaining; it is something that if learned well, can be carried along with you for the rest of your life. It gives you confidence to be who you are when you are up in front of an audience.

Patrick Maddams, Managing Director, Royal Academy of Music 

 

I can definitely say without hesitation that I wouldn't have had the rowing success that I have had the luxury of experiencing in my short time on the water, without finding the AT and the great teachers that I have had the privilege to work with.

Valerie Thompson-Williams, rowing masters gold medallist

 

The Alexander Technique changed my life. It enabled me to devote more time to creating beauty. This inner strength is essential for all.

Andrew Logan, Sculptor

 

Alexander's method lays hold of the individual as a whole, as a self-vitalising agent. He reconditions and re-educates the reflex mechanisms and brings their habits into normal relation with the functioning of the organism as a whole. I regard this method as thoroughly scientific and educationally sound.”

Professor George E Coghill, prize-winning anatomist and physiologist

 

Alexander has done a service to the subject by insistently treating each act as involving the whole integrated individual, the whole psycho-physical man. To take a step is an affair not of this or that limb solely, but of the total neuromuscular activity of the moment - not the least of the head and neck.

Sir Charles Sherrington, Nobel Prize winner in medicine

 

We already notice, with growing amazement, very striking improvements in such diverse things as high blood pressure, breathing, depth of sleep, overall cheerfulness and mental alertness, resilience against outside pressures, and in such a refined skill as playing a musical instrument.

Professor Nicholaas Tinbergen, Nobel Prize winner for medicine and physiology 

Video of his Nobel Prize Address, in which he describes the A.T.

 

Howard Payne improved his throw by 5.64 metres at the age of 37. Commenting on this, which he believed to be due primarily to taking Alexander lessons, he said; "Balance is a vital aspect of good hammer throwing and getting the head, neck, spine and pelvis in the correct relationship enables the balance of the throw to come so much more easily. Once the balance is settled there is an enormous improvement in turning speed."

Howard Payne, Commonwealth record hammer thrower

 

It is my opinion that every singer and performer should enrol in a course of Alexander lessons. I have personally profited by doing so.

Barbara Bonney, International classical singer and teacher

 

The Alexander Technique transformed my life. It is the result of an acknowledged genius. I would recommend it to anyone.

Tony Buzan, Author of Use Your Head and inventor of 'Mind Mapping'

 

In the hands of a good teacher the Technique is invaluable to anyone who seeks to maintain health physical posture and alignment.

Ralph Fiennes, Actor

 

With the best intentions, the job of acting can become a display of accumulated bad habits, trapped instincts and blocked energies. Working with the Alexander Technique has given me sightings of another way... Mind and body, work and life together. Real imaginative freedom...

Alan Rickman, Actor

 

Alexander is a teacher pure and simple. He does not profess to treat disease at all. If the manifestations of disease disappear in the process of education, well and good; if not the education of itself will have been worthwhile. Manifestations of disease, however, do disappear. Including myself, I know many of his pupils, some of them, like myself, medical men. I have investigated some of these cases, and I am talking about what I know.

Peter Macdonald, In his inaugural address as Chairman of the British Medical Association, 1943

 

Alexander Technique really helped my posture and focus during my stint as Othello... Imagine how excited I was when arrived at the National Theatre for Comedy of Errors and found I could have Alexander taught to me once a week, I was chuffed to little meatballs.

Lenny Henry, Comedian and Actor

 

I have been a pupil of the Alexander Technique now for over forty years - the benefits to me have been immeasurable.

Sir Colin Davies, Conductor (as a young conductor, he was sent for A.T. lessons by Sir Adrian Boult)

 

“The Alexander Technique removed a long standing back problem and improved my riding ability. Riders who take up the technique always make a very significant improvement in their riding.”

Daniel Pevsner, Fellow of the British Horse Society

 

I regard it as one of the fortunate experiences of my life that I should have met F. Matthias Alexander at a time when I had been suffering physically for many years. There can be no doubt as to the value of his technique judged by the practical results which I myself have experienced. Instead of feeling one's body an aggregation of ill-fitting parts, full of frictions and deadweights pulling this way and that so as to render mere existence in itself exhausting, the body becomes a coordinated and living whole, composed of well-fitting and truly articulated parts. It is the difference between chaos and order and so between illness and good health.

Sir Stafford Cripps, British Chancellor of the Exchequer 1947-50

 

The electronic facilities (of electromyography and electroencephalography) have confirmed Alexander's insights and authenticated the technique he discovered in the 1890s of teaching both average and skilled adult individuals to become aware of their wrong body use, how to eliminate handicaps and thus achieve better (i.e. increasingly skilled) use of themselves, both physically and mentally.

Professor Raymond Dart, anatomist and anthropologist who discovered the so-called 'missing link' between modern humans and our ape-like ancestors

 

Question: Which book changed your life?

Answer: The one the teacher put under my head during the Alexander Technique sessions at RADA. I grew an inch and a half.

Q&A: Jonathan Pryce, Actor, The Guardian, May 7, 2015

 

The Alexander Technique has given me a greater awareness of the way my body moves and the way tensions move through my body. I have learned to release these tensions and to move more efficiently. It has helped me to play football with more confidence and has improved my coordination and balance.

Andy Hunt, Striker for Charlton Athletic Football Club, London

 

Describing the Alexander Technique in an interview: "Incredibly good posture, with incredible relaxation."

Hugh Jackman, Actor

 

In an interview in The Mail on Sunday: “The fastest way to lose 5lb and take off five years is to stand up straight...I’ve studied the Alexander Technique in the past, which really helps with posture...It not only looks better, it opens the throat and makes it easier to breathe properly. I took up the Alexander Technique because I’d noticed on TV that my posture wasn’t great. But, importantly, it also helps you to feel more at ease in your body — and clothes sit better on a woman who’s comfortable with herself."

Lulu, Popular Singer

 

Good acting is revealing yourself, not covering yourself up. If your body is free, your mind is free. (The Alexander Technique allows) you to feel what it's like to stay open physically, and also stay fully involved in whatever you're supposed to be doing.

Annette Bening, Actress

 

Through the Alexander Technique I was able to rehabilitate my running after 25 years of being unable to run through injuries, to the extent that I was able to set ten world records for veterans in 1982.

Paul Collins, Canadian National Marathon Champion 1949-52 and veterans world record holder

 

The Alexander Technique keeps the body alive, at ages when many people have resigned themselves to irreversible decline.

Robertson Davies, Illustrious Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor

 

After studying over a period of years Mr. Alexander's method in actual operation, I would stake myself upon the fact that he has applied to our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and about our acts exactly the same method of experimentation and of production of new sensory observations, as tests and means of developing thought, that have been the source of all progress in the physical sciences. It is a discovery which makes whole all scientific discoveries, and renders them available, not for our undoing, but for human use in promoting our constructive growth and happiness.

John Dewey, educationalist and philosopher. (Dewey is widely regarded as one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century, and wrote the introduction to three of Alexander's books).

 

It is a particular pleasure to bring to the attention of the public an approach to the general problems of motion and technique...which rests on a broader basis, one of balanced effort, than is usually the case. So often the apparently specific defeats itself as any problem can only be successfully conquered by an understanding of its whole rather than of only a limited section of its circumference. I can only suggest from my sympathetic interest in my colleagues, of all ages and all levels, that it is a useful one and especially welcome in such cases where continued and renewed efforts seem only to dig more deeply into a rut.

Yehudi Menuhin, violinist and conductor. From his foreword to an introduction to the Alexander Technique for musicians 'Posture, Tension and Technique' by Niso Ticciati, 1953

 

There are an overall flexibility and tonic ease of movement, greater freedom in the action of the eyes, less tension in the jaws, more relaxation in the tongue and throat, and deeper breathing because of the effect of the new alignment on the diaphragm. There are also a sense of weightlessness and a diminution of the effort previously thought necessary to move one's limbs. Activity is now more free and flowing - no longer jerky and heavy with strain.

Edward Maisel, Director of the American Fitness Research and consultant to the President's Council on Physical Fitness

 

Neck problems are virtually an occupational hazard for Ear, Nose and Throat surgeons. I had serious problems during my working years, but hoped for relief on early retirement. This was not the case and limitation of cervical (and thoracic) movement became quite an intrusion on my life. Physiotherapy and medication gave only short-term improvement. On being introduced to the Alexander Technique I was somewhat sceptical that anything was going to work, but can only describe the relief gained, and maintained, as quite incredible. General posture has improved and neck mobility has returned to that last experienced more than twenty years ago. What more could one ask for?

Kieran Tobin, M.B, B. Ch, BAO, FRCS(Eng), FRCS(Irl), D.L.O., Senior Surgeon, University College Hospital Galway Ireland. Past President of the Irish Otolaryngological, Head and Neck Society and Past-President of the E.N.T. Section of the Royal Society of Medicine of Ireland.