"The objective of our work is neither health nor posture,
but rather lightness and freedom of movement"
Frank Pierce Jones
What it is
General
First of all, the Alexander Technique is an essentially mindful approach to understanding ourselves. An understanding that is practical and based on experience. An understanding that enables us to get conscious and constructive control over our habitual daily patterns, our way of responding. So you can say that it is about change, changing for better.
Use & Functioning
F.M. Alexander discovered that the way we use ourselves is affecting our functioning (see short history) and that this effect is present all the time. So you can say that there is a 'universal constant in living', either working for better or for worse. More seriously he noticed that our use tends to deteriorate on a large scale with growing age. Of course we all know that health complaints come with growing age and even today we tend to believe that this is inevitable, but FM demonstrated that this is is far from being true. He demonstrated the disappearance of a wide variety of complaints and diseases as a result of changing these 'bad habits'. As our society has become and is still becoming more and more complex and demanding, this wrong way of using ourselves has become more and more serious.
How does it work
Basically what we do in a lesson is, we help you to prevent your habitual pattern from taking over. What happens next is that you get a quite nice experience of how it is to move free again. To realize this experience, we normally make use of two simple activities: 'sitting and standing up from a chair' and lying down on a ('massage') table. In the chair activity we basically guide the movement and on the table we first of all make you feel comfortable, enabling us to further ease the process of letting go of all unnecessary tensions.
When you decide to continue
In the lessons that come, we learn you to realize the 'moving free again' experiences by yourself. In other words, gradually you develop a 'constructive conscious control' over your self (your reaction patterns), enabling you to effect a conscious choice. A choice for better.