For readers who want more
Going deeper
The deeper ideas behind each doorway, gathered in one place: where the work came from, how it works, and why it matters.
You want something to change
Modern pain science sees pain as the nervous system’s way of protecting you, not a simple measure of damage. Lessons may help by changing the low-level muscle tone that holds you up, reducing fear and reactivity, and rebuilding confidence in movement.
You don’t need to know what your habits are to change them. Working with a few simple principles, such as letting everything move that needs to move and letting support go up through you, brings change. Insight into the old habit often arrives afterwards.
Research: ATEAM trial, BMJ 2008 (back pain); ATLAS trial, Annals of Internal Medicine 2015 (neck pain); Kinsey et al. 2021 (calm, confidence and agency).
Getting better at anything you love doing
BodyMinded teaches in the tradition of Marjorie Barstow and Cathy Madden, applying the work to the activities people care about, often in groups where you learn as much from watching others change as from your own turn.
At its heart is the Yes Plan: a clear plan for what you do want to happen. Your coordination responds to whatever is in your mind, so “don’t tense” tends to bring tension. Plan for what you want, and let the right thing do itself.
Exploring awareness, meditation and freedom from habit
Alexander called his method indirect. Instead of forcing a change, you create the conditions in which the right action can organise itself.
Awareness here is wide and inclusive: the self and the situation together, the small detail and the whole field at once. Habits feel natural and right, so feeling alone can mislead. The work relies on knowing where you are rather than on how things feel.
Cathy Madden often asks students, “Is it kind?” People change most easily when they are not fighting themselves.
Teaching, coaching or caring for others
BodyMinded teaching is organised around the BodyMinded Triangle: whole-person coordination; conscious cooperation with how our design and the world work; and the Yes Plan, a constructive plan for action.
Six principles guide whole-self coordination:
- Head and whole body
- Moveability
- Support goes up
- Forward organisation
- Self-organising
- In the world
Together they are a practical, teachable form of what Alexander called the primary control.
Simply curious, just here to read
At the heart of F. M. Alexander’s work is what he called inhibition: interrupting your habitual reactions by reorganising your whole-self in the moment. Over the years this has come to be called “the inhibition of unnecessary and unwanted responses to stimuli.”1 That places it in the territory of behaviour and choice, not only movement. Guidance in lessons focuses on noticing, locating, thinking, allowing, choosing, moving and cooperating in place of just doing or reacting. When your coordination begins to work well, then the right thing will become easy, as Alexander often said, “the right thing does itself.”2
Curious about where the work came from? Frederick Matthias Alexander was a Tasmanian-born actor whose voice kept failing him on stage. With mirrors and great patience he observed that how he used his whole-self shaped how his voice worked. He discovered that he could change only by pausing his habitual reaction and coordinating with his whole-self, so that his mind and body could present a new, less stressful and more optimal way. He tells the story himself in the first chapter of his book The Use of the Self (1932).
1 What he actually said was: “(1) the inhibition of the instinctive direction of energy associated with familiar sensory experiences of wrong habitual use, and (2) the building up in its place of a conscious direction of energy through the repetition of unfamiliar sensory experiences associated with new and satisfactory use.” F. M. Alexander, The Use of the Self (1932), chapter 4, “The Stutterer”, p. 85 (Gollancz 1985 edition).
2 A saying from Alexander’s teaching, recorded by his pupils rather than written in his books. Walter Carrington recalls him repeating it: “The right thing does itself, the right thing does itself, the right thing does itself.” Walter Carrington, Thinking Aloud (1994), “Teaching Directions to Beginners”, p. 75.
