Product Description

The Alexander Technique (AT) is a remarkably simple but powerful method for learning to skillfully control how your brain and body interact, allowing you to better coordinate your movements while increasing the accuracy of your minds thoughts and perceptions. Now, in How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live, leading Alexander Technique master teacher Missy Vineyard sheds a completely fresh light on this revolutionary method and, in the process, offers path-breaking insight into the mind-body connection. Vineyard thoroughly explains and teaches the central skills of the AT through simple self-experiments, and she offers engaging stories of students in their lessons to show its effective application across a range of disciplines, including the performing arts, athletics, health, psychology, and education. How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live introduces us to a world within ourselves that we know surprisingly little about--and thereby helps us to understand why we often cannot do what we should be able to do, why we harm ourselves with chronic tension and anxiety, and why our thoughts often seem beyond our control. Vineyard is also the first AT teacher to draw on cutting-edge research in neuroscience and to synthesize those findings with AT theories and techniques. She fully illuminates the benefits to be reaped by mastery of the Alexander Technique, which include: * Release from acute or chronic physical pain * Enhanced mental attention and focus * Reduced anxiety * Improved balance and coordination * Relief from tension and stress * Increased ease and efficiency performing precise movement skills

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21585 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Customer Reviews

If you read one book on the Alexander Technique, read this one
I am training to be a teacher of the Alexander Technique and have a stack of books from introductory guides to the difficult works of Alexander himself.

Everyone would agree that no book should replace having lessons from a teacher - that would be impossible - but if you read one book on the Alexander Technique, make it this one!

Missy Vineyard writes so well, has come up with new insights, it's fresh and inspiring and reaches newcomers and experienced teachers alike. She makes new links, gets the fundamentals right and is a new star in this field.

Answered problem I had with the Alexander Technique
I have had some Alexander Technique lessons in the past and at that time I experienced more neck pain than I started with. After reading this book there appears to be a way forward for me to offset my tendency to create tension in my neck when I carried out the Alexander directions "Let the neck be free, so that the head can go forwards and up etc" . Missy Vineyard suggests the introduction of the thought "I want to not tighten my neck" to inhibit that tendency, before going on to give directions "I want to let my head be forward and up". For this reason alone I would have bought the book, as I have experienced less tension in my neck since applying the suggestion.

There are numerous exercises in the book which allow experimentation with all the concepts of the AT along with new ones introduced by Missy, in particular "turning on the Prefrontal Cortex" which activates the part of the brain that does the inhibiting to prevent habitual patterns of tension.

An excellent book and one I will be picking up to read and apply on a regular basis.

A Shiatsu teacher's enthusiatic view
A number of books attempt to describe what the Alexander Technique (AT) is and why and how it works. Because the method is so subtle (and also because our system gives us sensory spacial feedback that we can't always rely upon) authors on the subject invariably stop short of giving any more than the most basic self-help exercises, or techniques, and advise finding an Alexander Teacher. This Author takes a different approach. By using a number of cleverly interwoven cases, explanations of the way the brain and nervous system operates in terms both of human development, and our day-to-day 'use' of our body-mind, Missy Vinyard manages to explain and give deep insights into the reasons we can't readily correct our own misalignments and body 'mis-use'. She also gives a clear and thorough explanation of how the AT works in both theory and practice, with a lot of material for self-exploration. It's evident that the Author has a deep knowledge and understanding of the way we humans develop, learn and 'operate'. As a teacher of Shiatsu and Qigong I found this book exciting and informative and I'd recommend it to anyone considering embarking on, or engaged in, AT lessons. Also to those in other branches of Complementary Medicine interested in some different perspectives & insights into the way human function and mis-function.