The Alexander Technique

Twelve Fundamentals of Integrated Movement

Penelope Easten
Handspring Publishing
304 pages
ISBN: 978-1912085859
March 2021

This book gets back to the core of the Alexander Technique (AT), much of which is not known even to most teachers. This is because Alexander (1869-1955) changed what he was doing at least three times, around 1912, 1923, and 1930, each time leaving key elements behind, unexplained. These lost elements include natural breathing, his biomechanics to alter the body for ourselves, the real thought processes of his directions, how he used inhibition and quiet attentiveness to discover intrinsic movement patterns, and how he used vision as part of his process. There are snippets of AT history throughout, and a potted history of what really happened in the AT, as it has not been told before, but the emphasis is on AT in the context of integrated movement.