Alexander Technique Articles:

'The Personal Account':

A personal account of a three year Alexander Technique teacher training course.

Part 7 - Stop Reinforcing the Wrong:

By now I was ready to work on another aspect of the Technique - Prevention of blindly repeating the habits. It suddenly dawned on me that you couldn’t prevent something you don’t recognize.
Once you recognize and are aware of a habit, you can work at preventing it. Instead of trying to do 101 things at once, there was only one thing to do - to prevent the repetition of the harmful habit. When I stop end gaining everything functions in a free, well co-ordinated, accurate, focused way. I had experienced this on many occasions in the hands of a teacher, but had been a million miles from bringing this about for myself or anybody else. In my end gaining way, I had been trying to go directly for ‘being free’, trying to ‘be co-ordinated’. Of course that’s never going to result in the desired result, because the prime habit that is preventing one from being free and co-ordinated is still lurking.

Suddenly Alexander Technique stopped being dependent on ‘pot luck’. I could recognise many of my own habits, and knew that if left unchallenged they were going to accompany everything I was doing, including teaching others.