Three blind men once met an elephant. The one touching its trunk perceived a snake, the one touching its tusk a spear, the one touching its leg a tree…
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
The Alexander Technique takes books to describe and years to study and embody. I think each perspective can be fully right on its own and want to hold space for all explanations simultaneously (even those I disagree with).
Within this website, I hope everyone can find words that at least bear some proximity to how they see and describe the Alexander Technique. I also hope you will enjoy reading a description near to your heart, written in my voice.
Hi, I'm Greg and I'm training to become an Alexander Technique teacher. I'm happy to receive feedback on how this website can be improved (gregdyke@gmail.com or find me as @gregdyke on most social networks). Do bear in mind as you read through that there are certain trade offs inherent to the shape of the website: no single 15-paragraph description of the Alexander Technique will ever fully do it justice.
I wanted the website to be able to construct short, readable and shareable explanations. As each portion of explanation is made to stand alone, combining several of them together carries the risk of making it repetitive and disproportionately unreadable. But multiple selections *is* something I would like to add at a later date.
That's quite possible. Or the explanation I would write for that perspective is already written but under a different title. It might also be a subset of a more generic concept or a combination of multiple concepts together into a complex perspective. Please let me know what you think I should add (and ideally find the closest existing description and tell me how the new one is similar but different).
The beauty of writing small freestanding pieces of explanation is that they don't have to be a perfect disjointed set. The only constraint is that at some point two different descriptions should have some difference. And writing takes time.
I considered getting rid of the jargon. But then I realised that embracing overlap means that I can have my jargon and eat it. I can account for stimulus and response, the predictive nature of the brain and a dialogic perspective of humans sharing a world with other humans without having to get into the weeds of how they are different or similar or complementary.
