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Frederick Matthias Alexander was an actor who often lost his voice, a condition the medical profession was unable to cure. Moshe Feldenkrais was a physicist with an old knee injury he wanted to resolve. What caused these two men to seek solutions to body alignment problems in such similar and dissimilar ways? Which method is best, or do they both work well in different ways? The author is familiar with both methods through practical experience. This column will explore the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method, compare and contrast them, and then give personal experiences in both, in order to encourage the reader to seek more information about them.
The Alexander Technique
F. M. Alexander was born in Australia in 1896. Working various day jobs as a teenager he studied music and drama in the evenings, teaching himself to play the violin. In his early twenties, he became an actor in a one-man show, but he had a tendency toward hoarseness and respiratory illnesses. The doctor's advice to rest his voice did not work, so Alexander decided to cure himself. By looking at himself in a mirror while speaking, he began to notice patterns of forced breathing, pulling the head back, and depressing the larynx. His voice improved when he worked to prevent himself from pulling his head back. Alexander began to discover through the use of two mirrors, that many habits of movement involved the whole body and mind. Habitual patterns were preventing him from making changes because the stimulus to misuse his body was stronger than the stimulus to change the habits. In other words, what felt right was not!
He wrote in The Use of the Self, "Surely if it is possible for feeling to become untrustworthy as a means of direction, it should also be possible to make it trustworthy again."1 He began to work on refusing to do anything in response to the old stimulus, calling this "inhibition." Alexander then realized that he could not change his body usage by willing an end result. Rather, he understood that he needed to direct his body to first inhibit the old habit by consciously directing his neck to be free and his head to go forward and up, thus allowing his torso...