Selling the Invisible: Why We Talk About Posture

There's greater depth to the Alexander Technique than the way it's often marketed. I'm equally guilty of this for practical reasons, you have to meet people where they are. We live in a culture of images. Scrolling through social media, we’re met with curated visions of health, wellness, and the perfectly aligned body. In this visual marketplace, the Alexander Technique often gets squeezed into a box labelled “posture correction.” You’ll see “before and after” photos suggesting a transformation from slump to upright soldier, marketed as a fix for back pain or a ticket to “better posture.”

But this is a profound misunderstanding. To reduce the Alexander Technique to a visual endpoint is to miss its entire, revolutionary point. As its founder, F.M. Alexander, framed it, his work was about helping with the "reaction to the stimulus of living." And you can’t photograph that.

Let’s take a classic example. We see someone sitting or standing with a straight back, shoulders retracted, chin up. Culturally, we code this as “good.” We might think, “They have great posture. They must be comfortable, confident, and pain-free.”

The Alexander teacher looks at the same image and sees a series of questions: 

• Is that rigidity born of forceful holding?
• Is the breath free, or is it locked in a chest gripped by effort?
• What is the quality of their attention? Are they present, or are they fixated on maintaining a “position”?
• If you asked them to move, would that “good posture” dissolve into strain or coordination?

The static image tells us nothing about the person’s inner experience. They could be in a state of immense, exhausting effort, masking discomfort with a learned shape. That shape is often just another pattern of tension, aesthetically approved but functionally no better than a slump. Both are habitual, unconscious reactions to the stimuli of sitting, standing, performing or simply being, a deep seated emotional state.

Your posture is the outer manifestation of your inner experience and engagement with your environment, but it's easy for the untrained eye to miss the more subtle clues as to the nature of that experience. Your posture is completely unique to you and not something to be copied from somebody else, or from preconceived ideas of "good" posture. It's something you uncover and reveal if habitual interference is reduced.

Alexander Technique is not about acquiring a new, improved pose. It’s about how you respond, inwardly and outwardly, to the moment-by-moment stimuli of life: the decision to reach for a cup, to answer an email, to walk to the door, to speak in a meeting.

The quality that matters is internal: 

• The quality of your attention: Are you aware of your tendency to tighten your neck before you even move?
• The quality of your direction/intention: Can you mentally invite length and expansion in activity instead of forcibly pulling yourself up, or habitually collapsing and contracting?
• The quality of your inhibition: Can you pause and not react habitually to the urge to slouch or stiffen?
• The quality of your kinaesthetic sense: Is your felt sense of yourself accurate, or is your “normal” feel actually a pattern of compression?

This work happens in the private theatre of your own consciousness. It’s about upgrading the process, not polishing the product. When the process improves, when you learn to respond with less habitual interference, the outcome (how you stand, move, speak, or perform) naturally reorganizes. It might look “upright” to an observer, but it will feel entirely different to you: easier, lighter, more dynamically supported and mobile.

This is why marketing the Alexander Technique is so challenging. We are drawn to tangible promises: “Fix your back in 5 sessions!” “Stand taller in 10 minutes!” And it's totally fine to want to fix specific problems such as back and neck pain, or poor balance. After all, Alexander didn't discover his method out of esoteric curiosity, but to solve the problem of repeatedly losing his voice, so why not appeal to the issues people are experiencing. That's what marketing is about, and Alexander certainly wasn't shy about promoting the benefits of his work. NHS funded clinical trials have shown that the technique is effective for chronic back pain (published in the British Medical Journal), so why not mention it? But the Technique offers something far more valuable but less instantly gratifying: a fundamental change in your use of Self.

It offers not a quick fix, but a re-education. It doesn’t give you a posture; it gives you the tools to stop getting in your own way, in any activity. The benefits, reduced pain, easier movement, calmer reactivity, vocal freedom, and yes, improved posture, are the side-effects of this improved use.

The problem may be compounded by the simple activity we tend to use in teaching the Alexander Technique, sitting and standing. From an observer perspective that no doubt looks postural, and may even be initially interpreted as such by the Alexander student. But the only reason sitting and standing is used is to make it easier for the teacher. It's a simple familiar everyday functional movement that requires no specialist equipment. It's a metaphor for all movement.

Running and swimming, for example, would be completely impractical for hands-on guidance by the teacher, yet the Alexander Technique can absolutely be applied to those activities. And where practical, a teacher may market niche to many other activities, such as playing a musical instrument, singing and public speaking, yoga or horse riding (with use of a saddle in the studio before adventuring out to the horse.)

In F.M. Alexander's own words: 

“Boiled down, it all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus. But no one will see it that way. they will all see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that a pupil decides what he will or will not consent to do.” 

and 

"You are not here to do exercises, or to learn to do something right, but to get able to meet a stimulus that always puts you wrong and to learn to deal with it." 

The next time you see the Alexander Technique presented as a posture clinic, look deeper. Remember F.M. Alexander’s own words. The real work isn’t about achieving a snapshot of perfection. It’s about improving a conscious, gracious, and efficient way of meeting life itself. The results are felt far more than they are seen, and they belong entirely to the person experiencing them. That is something no before-and-after photo could ever capture.