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.

Join the mailing list to get my latest writing:

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…

Expanding AwarenessMichael Ashcroft

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

Expanding AwarenessMichael Ashcroft

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

Expanding AwarenessMichael Ashcroft