A guest post from guyhutch who inspired me to start studying AT.

I used to spend a lot of time working with people of varying backgrounds, sometimes in partnership and sometimes in quick challenging situations. I realised whenever I worked with someone new I was picking up on some traits that they had in the first few meetings – and then interpreted these to decide how best to work with them.  I realised the one thing that told me a huge amount about where somebody was as was their posture.

We all pick up the obvious postural signs, tiredness, stress, lack of interest and so on. But then pretty soon I realised that on the whole I never saw good posture – just  a series of bad postures. The one most common to come across was a hunched, angry and tense posture – the person fighting a daily battle with their PC or the slumped collapsed body reflecting the unwanted emailed request that they would find themselves reading.

So why was there so little positive body language going around, why didn’t I find myself observing poised well balance  alert and positive human beings.  Well it’s not because there aren’t any – it’s because there are few. We all unlearn our natural poise and directions in the process of reaching adult hood. But our natural use of ourselves remains with us, it’s just you wouldn’t learn to tap into in if subsequently you have developed the ‘normal’ bad habits. Well unless you had a reason to.

Well I had a reason to – and one day I found myself watching an interview with the legendary John Cleese and he’s waxing lyrical about the power of the Alexander Technique. What he says is this ‘“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.”

Well I liked the idea of light and relaxed – they were two adjectives I would rarely if ever apply to myself. As for things happening without you trying, well no one is going to knock that.

And the rest, for me, is history. A couple of years of Alexander Technique lessons and the world looks a lot different. I still observe poor posture in many of those around me, but my ability to apply the principle directions and find a natural lighter use of self has been life changing. In a world where we spend so much time contorting out postures at the wheel of a car, slumped on a sofa or hunched over a PC it is surely just a matter of time till Alexander Technique as a life skill emerges into the mainstream.