How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique to Explore Your Mind-Body Connection and Achieve Self-Mastery

by Missy Vineyard

Overview

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 mind's 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

ISBN-13:	9780738213057
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	03/24/2008
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	28 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Missy Vineyard is one of the foremost master teachers of the Alexander Technique in the United States today. Vineyard is the director of the Alexander Technique School of New England (ATSNE), which she founded in 1987, and the author of numerous articles on the technique. For the last nineteen years she has devoted the majority of her schedule to teacher training and to developing a unique, systematic curriculum designed to ensure the highest level of hands-on skill among the graduates of ATSNE. In addition to her work at ATSNE, she maintains a busy private teaching practice and conducts workshops on the Technique to a wide variety of groups, large and small, young and old. She lives in Amherst, Mass.

Editorial Reviews

Vineyard (founder & director, Alexander Technique Sch. of New England) provides a clear introduction to the Alexander Technique, guiding readers through a series of self-experiments centered on compelling case studies from her practice. In an especially powerful lesson on conscious inhibition (a core Alexander Technique skill), Vineyard teaches readers to activate the prefrontal cortex in order to learn the difference between feeling and thinking. Because she effectively builds the reader's skills during the course of the book, rather abstract ideas about space and direction seem natural and accessible when they are introduced. Although this comprehensive guide could replicate the experience of sessions with a certified instructor, some readers may be overwhelmed by its text-heavy format and focus on neuroscience. Those who wish to dispense with the philosophy (at least initially) and just hit the mat might be better served by Richard Craze's Teach Yourself Alexander Techniqueor Robert M. Rickover's Fitness Without Stress. Recommended for large alternative-health collections.
—Blanche Angelo

Library Journal