Welcome to this introductory course on the Alexander Technique. My name is Paul. To help me explain what this course is about. I'm going to use some questions that you may have. So the first question is, who is this course for? This course is for anyone new to the Alexander Technique, or anyone who would like to know more about the Alexander Technique.

The technique has been around for 100 years, and still not many people know about the Alexander Technique. So that's the main purpose of me making this course. What is the format of the course, the format of the course is I'm going to in the next lecture, I'm going to explain Alexander's story and how he discovered the technique and also how he developed it and the principles he coined and established that have been used from then still today. So the first principle that I'm going to talk about is what Alexander called use effects functioning. So we could call this Alexander's law, because this is what he discovered. And this show you, all right, use effects functioning.

So what does that mean? Well, to help, I'll show you a picture. Okay? So how you use yourself in an activity affects your functioning. So, if you if you use yourself badly or inefficiently, you will, there will be consequences over time. Okay, so that's one example.

Here might be another example. If you're at work, how you how you are using yourself in an activity is, is affecting functioning. And when I say functioning, I mean, breathing, circulation, digestion etc. I have one more picture. As another example, example when you're driving, how you use yourself while you're driving is affecting your functioning. So what Alexander discovered was that people weren't aware or they weren't conscious of what they were actually doing when they were doing things.

So this is what the technique is based on. It's based on prevention. So, that's my introductory overview, and I'll see you in the next lecture.