F. M. Alexander spent his early years on a large, isolated farm. He had a respiratory difficulty throughout his childhood until about the age of nine. He developed a love for horses and theater. At sixteen he was forced to move to a mining town where he worked odd jobs by day and taught himself to act and play violin in his free time. After three years, he moved to Melbourne where he began to study under the best teachers of acting. He never had any job for long while he was studying because he was sickly with a violent temper.
He started to lose his voice and when he looked at himself in the mirror to try to understand what could be happening in his body, he discovered that his body was doing strange things whenever he spoke. He developed a few concepts with which he decided to help him retain his voice and speak correctly.
The first of these is Use and Functioning. The core concept of it is that there is always the potential to choose how we wish to use our bodies, and we can always choose at any given moment to change the bad habits we have in order to function better within our own bodies.
"Alexander called this power of choice 'Man's Supreme Inheritance' perceiving that the way in which we use it affects our functioning at all levels'.
When we decide on bad Use, the body easily shows signs of it by gaining weight, becoming sickly, and generally not functioning to its full potential in a way that only good Use will allow.
The second of these is the concept of the Whole Person. Too often in Western society, we view what is going askew in our bodies as something that is happening simply with the part that is showing the symptoms. With the Alexander Technique, we bring focus to the body as a whole, mind included, so that we can integrate all parts of the self to begin healing and becoming our true selves.
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