For Alexander Technique teachers, developmental movement offers both a challenge and an invitation. To think developmentally is to accept that the future is uncertain and that our aliveness depends on engaging with the unfolding process of living.
I once believed ballet was separate from the movements of babies, but I’ve come to see they are one and the same. Yet too often, the Alexander Technique is taught as if divorced from these inherited patterns of swing, rhythm, bounciness, spirals, extensions, and flexions. To deny this while acknowledging the body’s bones, muscles, and tendons is contradictory—our anatomy itself is inherited, and what Alexander called “use” arises from this foundation.
Yes, AT practitioners often embody an upright stance, quiet symmetry, and non-reaction. But this can quickly slide into erasure: stripping away the asymmetry that makes locomotion efficient, the very asymmetry that evolution has passed down to us.
The truth is simple: we are not “better” than those who came before. Our bodies carry their wisdom. That wisdom happens through the double spiral musculature. Our work is not to erase, but to honor it.
Integral Movement Research Center 