Expanding Awareness

Let's get you out of your own way.

Otome Pass, Hakone — by Hiroaki Takahashi

Hello!

You've stumbled upon Expanding Awareness, a website run by me, Michael Ashcroft, that explores Alexander Technique and all the things it intersects with.

Alexander Technique is an awareness-based skill that helps people live with greater ease and freedom, a method to notice, expand and ultimately play within the space between stimulus and response.

This has an enormous range of applications.

While Alexander Technique is most commonly associated with physical performance — and it’s often used by actors, musicians and athletes for that reason — in reality the entire scope of human experience can be enhanced by being able to make new conscious choices in response to things that happen in our internal and external worlds.

Ultimately, Alexander Technique gives you conscious control over your awareness, and from there more agency in any aspect of your life, whether it’s how you move, how you think, how you perform, how you speak, how you relate to others or how you relate to yourself.

If you want to dive right in then I have an affordable, fully self-paced course, which I think might be the only one of its kind covering my awareness-first flavour of Alexander Technique anywhere on the Internet — about 900 people have joined already.

Courses
Fundamentals of Alexander Technique The course is available to buy here, There are more details on what’s inside the course below. It’s entirely self-paced, so you can fit your learning around your schedule. The standard price is $250, with a reduced $150 option for those with lower incomes and a

I also have a bunch of posts here on Expanding Awareness, so if you want to explore those then these are a good place to start.

What is the Alexander Technique?
You’re probably familiar with this well-known, yet misattributed, quote from Viktor Frankl: Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Not Viktor Frankl But… how? At its heart, Alexander T…
How to dance without trying to dance
There’s a particular way of being we inhabit when dancing. Dancing is a kind of availability, a capacity to respond to the invitations of each moment in a receptive, fluid and open way. When dancing without a partner, say in a club or at a concert, the music is
Getting unstuck - physically and philosophically - with Alexander Technique
I want to open with a quote from Frank Pierce Jones regarding John Dewey, who was an early proponent of Alexander Technique: (John) Dewey considered that the Alexander Technique provided a demonstration of the unity of body and mind. With progress as a pupil, he reported an improvement in his

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