Born in Tasmania, F. M. Alexander was a successful actor and reciter whose career was cut short by loss of voice during performances. With no help forthcoming from the medical profession, Alexander undertook an intensive examination of himself in action, convinced that the source of his voice problem lay in the way he used his body. A long period of research led him to discover certain principles affecting mind/body co-ordination applicable to every kind of physical activity.
With this knowledge he went on to cure his own voice problem and found hat he could also help others.

It was at this point that teaching his method became the main focus of his life.

Alexander arrived in England in 1904 and during the next 25 years built up a practice in London and the USA. He had many influential supporters among whom were Sir Henry lrving, John Dewey, Aldous Huxley and Sir Stafford Cripps.
In 1931 he began training others to teach the Technique and continued to do so until his death at the age of 86.
Today the importance of Alexander's discoveries is confirmed by the existence of a rapidly growing body of teachers of his method.
There are nearly 1,000 Alexander teachers practising in the U.K., most of them members of the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (STAT) founded in 1958 to maintain professional standards. There are societies affiliated to STAT in seven countries outside the U.K.

Quotations:

You come to learn to inhibit and to direct your activity.
You learn, first, to inhibit the habitual reaction to certain classes of stimuli, and second, to direct yourself consciously in such a way as to affect certain muscular pulls, which processes bring about a new reaction to these stimuli.'

Boiled down, it all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus.
But no one will see it that way. They will 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. They may teach you anatomy and physiology till they are black in the face - you will still have this to face, sticking to a decision against the habit of life.

There is no such thing as a right position,
but there is such a thing as a right direction.

You can't do something you don't know,
if you keep on doing what you do know.

Trying is only emphasizing the thing we know already

Sensory appreciation conditions conception
- you can't know a thing by an instrument that's wrong.

To know when we are wrong, is all that we shall ever know in this world.

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