Awareness is what you’re aware of, what your attention is available for, what you’re keeping track of or tabs on. An object outside your awareness can’t be responded to — at least not directly — because when you’re unaware of something, you don’t know it exists or is there right now. The same goes for mental objects. You can have thoughts or processes in your mind that other parts of your mind are not aware of. When you are aware of objects, you can account for them. You can avoid banging your head on an open cupboard, or avoid banging your mind on an uncomfortable thought. Awareness has a size: it can be expanded to include the whole room, or contracted to just these words you’re reading.

Awareness helps give you space between a stimulus and your reaction to it.

if a problem or emotion feels overwhelming, it can feel as though we’ve become the problem or emotion; we’re inside it; it almost feels like there is nothing else; it dominates our mental attention. Eugene Gendlin in his book Focusing describes how you can distance yourself from your problems just enough that you can think about them clearly, while still giving them your attention. Expanded awareness is how you do this. It allows you to have a more ‘objective’ or ‘outside’ view of yourself, your problems, and your environment. It feels as though things are close enough to see in vivid detail, but not so close they obscure your vision. But unlike certain(!) meditative practices, there’s no dissociation. Alexander Technique is inherently anti-dissociative. A mental object becomes just one of many objects, both mental and physical, included in your awareness.

In meditation, you’re expanding awareness of your inner thoughts/mind; in Alexander Technique, you’re expanding awareness of the physical space around you.

Awareness of your body helps with movement, muscle tension, performances like public speaking or music, and can even help with knowing how you’re feeling and what you want. Practising this kind of physical awareness helps with things like muscle tension and posture as a byproduct. Alexander Technique is not about posture — posture ‘just happens’ when you have expanded awareness.

If your normal reaction is stimulus→response, you can expand your awareness to notice the stimulus and then you have space to either react or decline that reaction. The pause is where you can give consent to a reaction, or not. We spend a lot of time just going with our first reactions, which may contain inner conflicts or tension. Acting while you have a conflict is uncomfortable, yet happens all the time. Our first reaction may not represent all of our opinions and desires.

This is much like how ‘true/authentic self-expression’ is not just saying the first thing that comes to your head — because that may or may not be what is most true to you. We can feel loss of self-expression both in situations where we just go with the first thing that pops into our head (feels out of control, inaccurate to deeper thoughts/feelings), or where we only say what we think is ‘proper’ to say (feels like it denies part of ourselves). True self-expression is about having free choice in what you express, instead of railroaded into a narrow band of expression.

consider when you’ve picked up something to fiddle with without realising. You didn’t consciously intend for it to end up in your hand, but there it is. There was an effortlessness to it. Now, that’s a case where you’re unconscious of it and just reacting. Maybe you picked it up because you’re nervous. In this case, perhaps the reason you picked it up without noticing is that it was outside your zone of awareness. You may have been paying attention to a conversation, and not your hands. But this kind of non-‘deliberate’ effortless action needn’t be automatic and unchosen, like a nervous fiddling habit; nor need it require redirected attention / collapsed awareness, like not noticing you picked up the object. You can be fully aware of what you’re doing, and ‘watch’ yourself doing it, while choosing to do it, and yet still have there be this effortless “it just happened” quality. For most people, the moment conscious choice is involved, the ‘trying’ or ‘doing’ process takes over: you are now deliberately performing the action, in order to get the result that you decided on. In Alexander Technique, you learn how to have choice without the accompanying deliberate/conscious performance aspect. You make choices, but after the choice is made, the effortless process takes over.

If you juggle, you may have had this experience: you don’t try to catch each throw, your hand just moves to where it needs to go. (This is especially obvious if someone throws a ball at you without warning. Your unconscious mind does a split-second calculation and moves your hand where it needs to go.) Likewise if you play tennis. Fiction writing can also have something of this experience. You can find yourself surprised by what comes out of your own characters’ mouths. You’re ‘watching’ them; they ‘have a life of their own’. When editing, many writers switch modes where they ‘make’ their character say something (it feels like you created the dialogue, rather than the dialogue coming from outside you). But with non-doing, you can edit in a different way: instead of putting words in your characters mouthes, you can decline their first response, pause, and then see what else they might say.

Suppose you do actually want to pick up that ball over there. But you don’t want to ‘do’ picking-up-the-ball. The solution is to set an intention. [1] Have the intention to pick up the ball. [2] Expand your awareness to include what’s all around you, the room, the route to the ball, and your body inside the room. [3] Notice any reactions of trying to do picking-up-the-ball (like “I am going to march over there and pick up that ball”, or “I am going to get ready to stand up so I can go pick up that ball”, or “I am going to approach the ball to pick it up”) — and decline those reactions. [4] Wait. Patiently hold the intention to pick up the ball. Don’t stop yourself from moving — stopping yourself is another kind of ‘doing’ — yet don’t try to deliberately/consciously move. [5] Let movement happen. After you’ve declined all the ‘doing’-type actions, if you still have the intention to pick up the ball, you can find yourself naturally moving to bring about the state of the ball being in your hand.

with some practise, you can find yourself having plenty of space to think about other things, or feel the space of the room, or attend to sensations in your body, while performing the effortless motor action of picking up the ball.

You can think of Alexander Technique as coming in 5 steps, or 5 key ideas: 1. Intention 2. Awareness 3. Pause (take a moment instead of react) 4. Non-doing (actively don’t ‘do’; decline ‘doing’) 5. Spontaneous, effortless action