When I bought a new car... I had driven my old one for about 12 years. Children, cats, dogs and guinea pigs had been sick in it, gone to the toilet, dropped mud, hay, food and drink everywhere. My son had climbed on it, damaging the sunroof which therefore leaked. It was held together with bits of tape and it was also, at the end, very, very unwell. Smelly, damp, bashed and scuffed, it had something very wrong with it's engine, which meant I risked conking out in the middle

Recently I have had the opportunity to work extensively with a couple of men who are a challenge because they 'feel nothing'. Although they are able to release tension and reorganise the use of their muscles, they are unable to feel that happening in themselves. They can feel pain, discomfort, heat etc but not the more subtle stuff. In mainstream Alexander circles we definitely aim to 'feel'. Teachers have a highly developed, elastic way of using their hands to detect patter

I recall a pupil I worked with at Sherborne School for Girls who first came to me aged about twelve. She had recently moved back to the country from the Far East and had been signed up for Alexander Technique classes because of chronic back pain. She had a mysterious and highly troublesome problem in her lower back which so far nobody had managed to alleviate, or even identify. This girl stood out because of her size - tall, sturdy and fully grown, whereas her peers were al

People often have tension in the lumbar area of their backs which has the effect of pulling the back forward, sometimes accentuating the natural curve there. When I work with this sort of back it feels as though the person is dividing themselves in two - top half and bottom half. The same problem often occurs with horses, where the dip in their backs will be dropping, thus cutting off good coordination between the two ends of the animal. Trying to function with this distorti