Art of Breathing: Workshop for Alexander Teachers
“An easy and effortless exhalation prompts an easy and effortless inhalation.” – Jessica Wolf. Jessica Wolf’s Art of Breathing investigates the awakening of our attention by way of the breath. Breathing is movement and the respiratory system is the balance wheel of the body. We can restore mobility to overworked muscles, replace habits of holding […]
The stomatognathic system
We all breathe, speak, eat, drink, chew, swallow and have facial expressions. These are basic human functions performed by the stomatognathic system. Stomatognathic originates from the Greek language where ‘stoma’ refers to the mouth and ‘gnathos’ refers to the jaw. In this workshop I will take you through the anatomy of this system in which […]
Abodominals and Directions
AbdominalsThe abdominal muscles are located between the ribs and the pelvis on the front of the body. The abdominal muscles support the trunk, allow movement and hold organs in place by regulating internal abdominal pressure. What happens to our abdominal muscles when working with the Alexander method? The abdomen is the front part of the […]
Body Tuning
It is common for Alexander Technique teachers to work with musicians, yet often Alexander teachers feel like they need more specific information about how to work with musicians. Since musicians tune their instruments before they play, this workshop will address how musicians can ‘tune’ their bodies before practice and performance. Using material from Robyn Avalon’s […]
Horses and Humans: An Animal Model for Understanding Stability and Resilience
We will look at the work and research of Postural Rehabilitation, an intervention for treating horses by influencing how the animal is organized in stance. The discomfort, or physical cost of staying upright on a compromised system influences all aspects of the four legged athlete including their performance, their susceptibility to injury, their breathing and […]
Our Evolving BodyStory: an experiential collaboration with Meg Jolley and Frances Marsden
Explanation:We explore how early reflexes feed into full-body coordination, through the lenses of Developmental Movement Patterning and the DART Procedures. Meg will lead us into a ‘sensory tune-up’ to clarify pathways of awareness, highlighting how these early movement reflexes trigger sensori-motor responses. From conception to crawling, our bodies develop the sensori-motor coordination to survive, and […]
The Marvellous Mandible: A Jaw-Dropping Study for Acoustics, Diction, Embouchure, Chin, Dental & TMJ Issues
Alexander was born prematurely and had issues in what is known today as the suck-swallow-breathe synchrony. Carrington records that FM was very concerned about his jaw, since he had an extreme overbite. This faulty coordination is at the opposite end of the habits that appear in the general population. So of course, the jaw never […]
‘We are just upright worms’ revisited
The idea made me smile. Worms have segmented body parts that help it to move. ‘These segments either contract or relax independently to cause the body to lengthen in one area or contract in other areas. Segmentation helps the worm to be flexible and strong in its movement. If each segment moved together without being […]
Standing Upright in an Alexander Context – Developmental Erasure and Reconnection
Alexander Technique’s postural signifiers have become so culturally ubiquitous that standing postures (or standing correctly) are often regarded as exemplary or neutral/normal. Musculoskeletal and biomechanical postural perspectives frequently omit the evolutionary process that brought humans to standing. In medical models, body positions are depicted mechanically, as if bodies were neutral entities not subject to habit. […]
Engaging and Resetting Spirals with Hands-on Work
Raymond Dart (1893-1988), a palaeoanthropologist and prominent player in the development of modern anthropology articulated what he called the human Double Spiral musculature. In Alexander Technique hands-on teaching, there is an opportunity to tune into and follow various spiralling pathways. With a collaboratively created developmental movement pattern recognition system, the Framework for Integration (FFI), AT […]