How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique to Explore Your Mind-Body Connection and Achieve Self-Mastery

by Missy Vineyard

The Alexander Technique (AT) is a remarkably simple but powerful method for learning to skillfully control how your brain and body interact, allowing you to better coordinate your movements while increasing the accuracy of your mind's thoughts and perceptions. Now, in How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live , leading Alexander Technique master teacher Missy Vineyard sheds a completely fresh light on this revolutionary method and, in the process, offers path-breaking insight into the mind-body connection. Vineyard thoroughly explains and teaches the central skills of the AT through simple self-experiments, and she offers engaging stories of students in their lessons to show its effective application across a range of disciplines, including the performing arts, athletics, health, psychology, and education. How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live introduces us to a world within ourselves that we know surprisingly little about--and thereby helps us to understand why we often cannot do what we should be able to do, why we harm ourselves with chronic tension and anxiety, and why our thoughts often seem beyond our control. Vineyard is also the first AT teacher to draw on cutting-edge research in neuroscience and to synthesize those findings with AT theories and techniques. She fully illuminates the benefits to be reaped by mastery of the Alexander Technique, which Release from acute or chronic physical pain Enhanced mental attention and focus Reduced anxiety Improved balance and coordination Relief from tension and stress Increased ease and efficiency performing precise movement skills

Genres: Health, Self Help, Fitness, Nonfiction, Psychology, Bodies, Unfinished

336 pages, ebook

First published May 23, 2007

Reviews

[rixx · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything I knew about the Alexander Technique came from cultural osmosis and [Michael Ashcroft's](https://twitter.com/m_ashcroft) tweets. Now I know more: It's about taking care of your body (posture, harmful patterns, pain and age) by taking care of your thoughts. *Mens sana in corpore sano* only the other way round. Missy Vineyard has a lot of experience helping people fix their bodies, but also with their mental hangups and how these two influence each other. My biggest takeaway, apart from some *very* useful mental exercises, was an increased skepticism against what I feel I know about my body.

Part of it has detailed instructions and explanations for exercises: Where is your center of gravity, how does your head misalign when you're looking at a screen, which muscles and joints move in which directions, and so on. The other part is about what you think and *how* you think it. I appreciated this attention to detail a lot. There are a lot of anecdotes, too, but they are not any more or less obnoxious than usual in this genre.

Much of the book provides reasons to actually try the exercises listed. Much is just paying very careful attention to your movements: Standing up, sitting down, but placing your hands on different muscles to observe what you actually do. Watching yourself in a mirror, figuring out weird patterns of movement and unnecessary muscle tension. Observe how deciding to do something already contracts muscles, and so on.

A big part of the book deals with the concept of **inhibition**. It's unintuitive, but I've found it very powerful: While you're doing something, think verbally and consciously that you are **not** doing that thing. "I am not standing", "I am not walking", "I am not playing the piano". Trust your mind/body/subconscious/whatever to take care of it, and keep your brain/conscious/whatever from interfering by keeping it distracted.

Inhibition is also useful as a way of dealing with pain or discomfort: "I am not reacting to this itch", "I am not reacting to my anger". Your goal is never to get rid of an input (e.g. your anger, your itch), just of your response to it. It's also useful for any performances (think music, speeches, theatre) or any exercises and sports. Particularly reactive sports (all ball sports) work much better when you trust your body to do the right thing and inhibit. Same for driving a car, riding a bike, and so on.

Feelings are inputs, thoughts are commands/outputs in this model. Putting your attention on your tightening muscles is not the same as *thinking* that you want to stop tensing your muscles. Feeling will shift your attention downwards and inwards, while conscious thinking allows you to detach and expand your awareness. It's not intuitive, but powerful. Anything you try to do with this conscious verbal thinking has to be intense (aka carry meaning). You can't just say "I'm not moving my leg", you have to focus on imbuing every word in the sentence with meaning (play around to find the best words for *you*).

The negative phrasing in this model may be unintuitive – much self-help focuses on positive frames, positive statements, finding a yes for every no, etc. Vineyard makes the point that focusing on a negative statement is liberating because all that is required is to stop doing something. There's nothing that you *should* do, no effort looming on the horizon. You just have to stop.

The second big part of the book is about **spatial awareness**. Vineyard encourages you to perform a mental motion that keeps you aware of your surroundings. The shortened formula is "up, forward, wide" (see details in the exercise below), or imagining a sheet of paper morphing into a cube. Expanding your active awareness in these directions, and then beyond yourself and into your surroundings, feels extremely powerful and good, though I could not say for what.

One last thought that I picked up from this book, and that has kept me busy for a while: You have and maintain a model of your body, and you build this model by way of your bodily sensations. The sensations are true, but your interpretation of them is often flawed. This will often lead to vicious circle, because your efforts to correct a problem will not touch the actual problem, and you have no way to see this. As Vineyard puts it: "Both the machine and the hologram needed repair simultaneously." That's where mirrors (and teachers) come in and let you correct your assumptions. Now we just need a brain mirror to be able to fix our emotions …

## Exercises

This is the selection of exercises that were useful to me. There were others: Many more movement and inhibition exercises, and some strengthening exercises for neck and back muscles.

### Lying down (semisupine)

Lie on your back, on a firm surface. Elbows bent, hands on ribs. Knees bent, feet on the floor. Place some books under your head (do **not** use a neck pillow – you want to support your head and allow your neck to lengthen naturally). No pressing your lower back down, no holding in your stomach.

### Lying down (prone)

Lie facedown on a firm surface, arms placed along the sides of your body, palms up, elbows bent. Shoulders fall forward toward the floor. Head rotates forward, forehead on the ground. Put about three inches of books under the sternum. Do not roll your legs in or out. Relax and open your jaw.

### Inhibition

A good practice for inhibition is starting small: First, tell yourself you're not lifting your arm and *don't lift your arm*. Repeat for a while, no matter how silly. Then, tell yourself you're not lifting your arm and start lifting it. The second your attention moves to your arm (probably after a few cm of movement): stop, focus on your thoughts for a bit, then start again.

Your end goal is to reach a point where you can consciously form an *intention* to move, but never *decide* to move. Form the intention, then remove your mind/brain/thoughts from the equation. Make sure that you're always in the mode of conscious verbal thought, up and forward, instead of collapsing your awareness.

### Spatial awareness: 3D

Picture a sheet of paper. Now picture it transforming into a cube.

(Yes, that's it. It can have a huge impact, particularly if you can do it while reading or while engaging in anything else that causes your awareness to collapse).

### Spatial awareness: Up, wide, forward

Focus on the directions "up" (direction of your head), "forward" (direction of your face), "wide" (direction of your ears). Try to sustain this focus during everyday activities – if you lose it, ideally stop, focus, start again. Later add inhibition exercises. If you do it long enough, you won't need the words anymore.

The counter-movement is implied (you want a sense of stability and tension), but focusing on up/forward/wide is usually sufficient for that. If you have trouble with all of this or feel interested, play with these directions, though. Think "up" for a while, then think "down" and compare what is happening.

### Spatial awareness: Body release

Do the previous exercise: Focus on verbal thinking, think up/forward/wide. Then think of your head releasing forward and up from your neck. Think of your back lengthening and widening. Think of your legs releasing forward and away from your torso.

## Other useful stuff

- Your head is balanced on your spine, but its center of gravity is slightly in front of the spine (and also in front of the center of gravity of the torso). - Standing and moving requires dynamic counterbalance, not static balance – only most sitting and lying down is static. - Muscles fatigue. Take short breaks from sitting/standing. Lie down, prone or semisupine. Six times a day for ten minutes is better than an hour at once. - "Uncomfortable = bad" is simplistic and long-term harmful. Learn that you can tolerate reasonable levels of discomfort without reacting. - The words we find for our feelings are often inconsistent. What you call "worried" today may be "tired" tomorrow. It's easy to mislead yourself. - Sensations come to our awareness only after an action has happened. So they are never quite up-to-date, and when you react to sensations by way of thought, you are slow. Instead, direct your body with thoughts and words, and let it take care of the rest. Yeah, this requires a ton of trust. - Touch is powerful and underappreciated. You can communicate (both unintentionally and intentionally) moods and more via touch. - When doing something, you're always better at it when you don't hide yourself. Like, when you read a text out loud, you're an important part of the reading, and you'll be more interesting and engaging when you put yourself (and your sense-making, your self) in there. This is vastly better than trying to control what happens, or hiding your part in it.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an introduction to the Alexander Technique (A.T.). This technique was conceived of by Frederick Matthias Alexander, a 19th century stage actor who discovered a connection between our way of thinking and the effect it has on how we move. In his case, he developed a chronic problem with his throat that made it difficult to speak comfortably when performing. Over time his voice would become raspy and his throat would feel raw. So he visited a doctor who told him to stop performing for a while and drink lots of tea with honey. He did this and was able to return to the stage. Shortly after returning, his voice became a problem again. He went back to the doctor who advised that he stop performing again and drink more tea with honey. He then asked the doctor if there might be something that he was doing that was wrong and therefore hurting his throat. The doctor said it's possible, but had no suggestions. Since Alexander didn't want to stop acting, he decided to try some experiments, one of which was to watch himself in a mirror from various angles as he performed. He was shocked to discover that he had some unusual physical mannerisms that he was completely unaware of.

That introductory story is followed by other stories about the author's (Missy Vineyard) students (she is one of the leading A.T. instructors in the U.S.). However, I won't go into that in the review. Instead I'll say that the book really does make some rather obvious but normally ignored points about how we move. Most of the time we're too busy to pay attention to every detail of how we move our bodies. As a result we take many shortcuts which become habits that we are unaware of. Just like my habit of sometimes saying "Umm..." as I formulate the next sentence while speaking, we all have habits in our movement that we have no conscious knowledge of. Some examples are; slouching, tensing muscles that aren't needed for a particular activity (think of how some people grit their teeth as they try to solve a difficult problem) or even trying to compensate for something like slouching by overextending our muscles incorrectly. Many of these habits can lead to very debilitating physical conditions as we age. This book teaches you how to become aware of how you move (she calls it a sixth sense, the sense of bodily movement) so that you can correct habits that might negatively impact you later.

As she progresses in the book she proceeds from how to become conscious of our movement to the connection between our thoughts and our movement. One notion that she expands beyond what Alexander proposed originally, is that our thoughts control of movement, but not with just a single mind. Vineyard has the advantage of nearly 100 years of neurological scientific developments to help her with explaining why she believes that rather than conscious control of our movement, we're better off letting our more primitive portion of the brain (the amygdala) coordinate a lot and letting our prefrontal cortex (the conscious "thinking" part of the brain) simply direct. By direct, she means that our conscious contribution to movement should amount to nothing more than "go forward" instead of "put one foot in front of the other and watch where you're going". This may seem extremely obvious and farcical, but the full impact of changing your way of thinking regarding movement becomes a lot clearer as you read the book.

Sadly, all is not well with the book. While she makes a lot of very interesting observations and I have found them to be of great benefit in changing both my ways of moving and my ways of thinking, she does delve into areas that many will regard as pseudoscience or even mysticism. She tries her best to avoid anything that sounds supernatural, but skeptical readers will likely paint her with that brush since they will likely not be able to relate to what she has to say about touch being a form of communication. (To the point that she could feel a student's depression every time she touched him and that it caused her to feel a strong pressure in her chest) This portion of the book comes in the last chapters, so it's well concealed based on earlier parts of the book that have some rational science (even if applied in sketchy ways) behind them. Thankfully, it is not essential to believe everything in the book and you can pick and choose what applies to your situation. I think it's best to approach the book as a series of mind experiments combined with a physical aspect and as I mentioned earlier I have benefited from that approach. So if you're inclined to altering your way of interacting with reality, this might be the book for you.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly descriptive, with a handful of exercises

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first few chapters were very helpful but as the author drifted into the mind-body control I started to lose interest. With all the imagining machines available to monitor brain activity I found this behind the times (written 10 yrs ag0). I started diving into google scholar to see if AT is real and many of the medical establishments endorse it. I also started watching videos which were very helpful. I am already much more conscious of my posture and keeping my head up and back straight. With sitting and working one video showed how it is not necessary to scrunch up and get close. Get comfortable further away. I also notice the contortions I make with my neck when going up the stairs. I try to keep it relaxed and use my legs, not my posture to get up the stairs.

Bottom line, it was helpful but the materials on-line are also necessary.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was kind of a weird book. If you’re looking for a hands-on book with lots of exercises, this is not it even though it does have exercises in it. The exercises are like “lay on the ground and try to move your leg into a bent position without using any muscles and telling yourself your not bending your leg.” Like I said, weird. However, this book in its weird glory helped me to start developing a new bodily sense. A sense of spaciousness. A sense of minimal effort. It has stuck with me and I find myself using the techniques in this book regularly.
I’m not sure how much the authors ideas are in the Alexander Technique mainstream, but I found them interesting and compelling. I still haven’t been able to move my leg without moving it though.

[Berni Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was useful although I didn't do the exercises and am not ready to jump on the bandwagon. My voice teacher recommended I look into Alexander technique. I hold too much tension in my body and that causes pain after a while. Thinking consciously about releasing tension in various body parts has made me more comfortable.

This is the sort of thing where you are supposed to find a teacher who can be hands-on with you, as she describes in the book. That's kind of hard to do in a pandemic, and I don't think I could afford it anyway.

[Helene Poppleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This feels like it'll be a game-changer for me, the way the Bradley Method was when I was having babies. Not for everyone perhaps, and a fair amount of work, but so many elements resonated with me and felt like reasonable antidotes to lifelong habits that are catching up with me in middle age. I look forward to continuing to practice this and seeing what happens!

[Brandi D'Angelo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This started out promising with advice on how to overcome movement problems. However, the chapters became too tedious and detailed for me. I felt like I was reading a college research report. I didn't finish this.

[William R. Gauger · Rating 2 out of 5]

Junk

[Althea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introductory book on the Alexander Technique, I read it several times and will read it again, I always get more out of it.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solid 10/10 introduction to the Alexander Technique. The book contains a great number of specific examples on how posture and mind are deeply connected - I see this book especially useful for athletes, musicians, and people with any form of repetitive strain injury. Highly recommend.

[Jules · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had the effect of making me LESS interested in the Alexander technique! I am guessing that the Alexander technique is better learned through practice than theory.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I became interested in Alexander Technique through my musical study. David Monette promotes the concepts and through my research I learned that Adolph "Bud" Herseth was a proponent as well. It's hard for a trumpet player to ignore the advice of a couple guys like that!

The first part of the book lays down the basics of the technique. Much is made of the changing orientation of the head and spine through (human) evolutionary history. I took away an idea that human capacity for language has perhaps diminished our ability to move naturally, i.e. efficiently, in accordance with our physical structure. If you want to make sense of that you'll just have to read the book.

Also useful was the information presented about the amygdala and its role as our mental burglar alarm. Vineyard connected these ideas with others findings in neuroscience regarding the stress reaction. This stuff is just good to understand if you are a performer. Heck it's good for every single person to understand because we all deal with stress, and I'd say most of us deal poorly with it.

Where the book lost me though, was in the second part, where it descends into woo. There is a whole chapter on touch that reads to me just like a disposition on therapeutic touch. Therapeutic touch has been thoroughly debunked.

Further, while there are lots of good theories presented in the book, very little is actually backed up by evidence. Based on my research into Zen mindfulness meditation I can definitely buy into some of the basics of Alexander Technique: lying supine, semi-supine, observing your thoughts, doing without doing (to some extent), massage/touch/manipulation. I've personally experienced the positive effects of all those things outside the context of Alexander Technique. But when Vineyard ascribes magical powers to the idea of thinking "up", "forward" and "wide" and claims that we can change the nature of our being by thinking in "three dimensions", I just don't see the evidence. Vineyard provides anecdotal evidence from her practice, but that's not really sufficient: remarkable claims require remarkable proof.

Alexander Technique looks like an early 1900's neurological theory based on a combination of science and belief. Vineyards practice, as described in the book, has updated the theory by attempting to fit it to the past 100 years of additional neuroscience. Vineyard has found many things that seem to fit, but ventures way too far on way too little hard evidence. There are a few core concepts that to me, are viable, but as a whole I think Vineyards Alexander Technique, while perhaps a good source for neuroscience PhD thesis topics, belongs in the new age section of the library.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Alexander technique is yet another way to become more aware of your body in space and to control it for better health, presence, and even charisma. It was started by an Australian actor whose posture, he noted, was damaging his voice. That began a long process of self-discovery, and finally teaching, in proper posture and movement. And yes, his voice improved. The book by Missy Vineyard, the head of the New England Alexander Technique school, is full of stories of people who hold themselves wrong and re-learn how to do it right. The stories themselves are often moving and are usually illustrative, but I could have wished for more technique and fewer stories. When I lay down on the floor to do the first technique, I promptly fell asleep. I don't think that's supposed to be part of the plan. I needed more guidance from Vineyard about what I was supposed to be doing.

[Nicolás Díaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book while browsing randomly at Amazon, looking for some base to improve my overall posture. This book seemed like a good starting point to something called "The Alexander Technique", which as I found out from my internet research, was a good way to solve body problems.

Wow, was I shocked as I began reading this book! Yes, this is a book about improving your posture, but it also delves into more profound topics. How your mind-body connection is formed and can be retrained, how we often confuse bodily inputs (feelings and emotions) with our outputs, the direction that our developed pre-frontal cortex offers.

Its main tenents are that of inhbiting and directing, and their mission is to be able to move your body in a way that produces no tension. I do not believe that it is equally useful for sports, music and walking, but it presented interesting ideas.

[Steven Yi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on the Alexander Technique. The case study stories helped to explain different applications of the technique. I was really amazed by many of the connections between the technique and the practice of Tai Chi. The descriptions of the use of the mind to control the body and the ideas of effortless and free motion that result were enlightening. I am sure I will be rereading this again in the future.

[Kathryn Hermes · Rating 5 out of 5]

The other reviews and the write-up are clear indications about the contents of the book. I would like to add that I was able to do the Alexander Technique for about a year. I purchased this book because I wanted to be able to continue it on my own. That was precisely the audience of the book. Clear instructions and a lot of the "behind the scenes" information that allows you to live a more integrated life...and of course improve your posture!

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the anecdotes of how Alexander Technique helped others, I liked some of the exercises, but for some reason I found it a little hard to follow in a linear way. I'll hang on to it as a reference for a while.

[Michael Hetherington · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a bit long winded for my liking but does contain many gems and does explain the Alexander Technique well, eventually.

These teachings really add a new understanding to the dimension of the body mind connection and for that I am grateful.

[Sharon K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

trouted from Bookery 2. I'm not sure this book offers anything new but it looks case-oriented and readable.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is quite a marvelous technique, very simple but effective.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book for understanding the Alexander Technique. Good flow and easy to understand, though I may have a biased AT teacher perspective.

[Giedrius · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overcomplicated and mystified. Too much words. I will rather read "Body Learning" by Michael Gelb which is much more clearly written.

[Raquel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books on Alexander Technique. Well written, easy to read, good illustrations.