by Robert Rickover

The Use of the Self is F. M. Alexander’s third, and shortest, book. It is generally seen as his most readable.

With the help of AI I’ve put together key passages, and provided a little context for each one below.

The Man Who Watched Himself in Mirrors: F. M. Alexander’s Four Books provides short summaries of all four of Alexander’s books.

(Those 2 have a somewhat different approach than the one taken by Ron Brown in his Authorised Summaries of F. M. Alexander’s Four Books, which I highly recommend. It can be purchased from the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique and from Mouritz

If you are intrigued by these passages and want to learn more,  Use of the Self is available from Amazon.

This is an experiment and I’d love to hear if it’s been helpful for you.

1. On discovering the problem hiding in plain sight
The quote:
“I saw that as soon as I started to recite, I tended to pull back the head, depress the larynx, and suck in breath… When I succeeded in preventing the pulling back of the head, this tended indirectly to check the sucking in of breath and the depressing of the larynx.

The context:
Alexander discovered something remarkable by watching himself in a mirror: that a subtle, unconscious habit in how he held his head was triggering a cascade of tension throughout his whole body. This is the heart of the Alexander Technique — the relationship between the head, neck and back (what he called the “primary control”) quietly governs the quality of everything we do. Most of us never notice it, because it feels completely normal. A teacher helps you see what you can’t see yourself.

2. On why willpower alone doesn’t work
The quote:
“The lure of the familiar proves too strong and keeps him tied down to the habitual use of himself which feels right.”

The context:
Ever decided to sit up straighter, stop tensing your shoulders, or breathe more calmly — and found yourself back to square one five minutes later? Alexander identified exactly why this happens: our habits don’t just live in our muscles, they live in our sense of what feels normal. The Alexander Technique doesn’t ask you to try harder. It works by changing what feels right in the first place.

3. On the shock of discovering we don’t do what we think we do

The quote:
“Here, then, was startling proof that I was doing the opposite of what I believed I was doing and of what I had decided I ought to do.”

The context:
This was Alexander’s most unsettling discovery — and one that almost every student of the Technique recognizes in their first lessons. We trust our sense of what we’re doing with our bodies, but that sense can be surprisingly unreliable. When a teacher gently adjusts your posture, the new position often feels strange or even wrong — even when it’s measurably better. Learning to trust that unfamiliar feeling is one of the great shifts the Alexander Technique brings about. Whether you work with a teacher in person or via Zoom, both have proven to be effective ways of developing this new awareness — making the Technique more accessible than ever before.

4. On why being told what to do isn’t enough

The quote:
“The belief is very generally held that if only we are told what to do in order to correct a wrong way of doing something, we can do it, and that if we feel we are doing it, all is well. All my experience, however, goes to show that this belief is a delusion.”

The context:
“Relax your shoulders.” “Don’t slouch.” “Breathe from your diaphragm.” Good advice — but why doesn’t it stick? Alexander found that instructions alone can’t override deeply ingrained habits of movement and tension. The Technique works differently: through a process of conscious attention and self-direction, guided by a skilled teacher either in person or via Zoom, students learn to experience a better way of moving directly — bypassing the habits that make good advice so hard to act on.

5. On the hidden life of habit

The quote:
“My desire to recite, like any other stimulus to activity, would inevitably cause this habitual wrong use to come into play.”

The context:
Alexander noticed that the moment he prepared to do something — speak, perform, even just stand up — his habitual tensions would automatically switch on, before he’d done anything at all. The same is true for all of us. The Alexander Technique works at this precise moment: the gap between intention and action. By learning to pause before responding to a stimulus, students gradually gain the freedom to choose how they move, rather than simply repeating what they’ve always done.

6. On how trying harder makes things worse

The quote:
“The more he tries by any special effort of ‘will’ to speak without stuttering, the more certain he was to increase the already undue muscle tension, and so to defeat his own end.”

The context:
Whether it’s a stutter, back pain, performance anxiety or a tennis elbow, the instinct is always to try harder. Alexander saw that this instinct almost always backfires — effort piled on top of tension just creates more tension. The Technique introduces a different approach: instead of doing more, you learn to do less. To inhibit the unhelpful response before it takes hold. Students are often surprised to find that less effort produces better results.

7. On what genuine change actually requires

The quote:
“I must be prepared to carry on with any procedure I had reasoned out as best for my purpose, even though that procedure might feel wrong.”

The context:
This is one of Alexander’s most important and counterintuitive insights. Real change — in posture, in movement, in how we respond to stress — feels unfamiliar at first. Not wrong in any absolute sense, but simply not like us. The Technique teaches you to stay with that unfamiliarity rather than retreating to what feels comfortable. Over time, the new way of being becomes the familiar one, and students often describe it as feeling more like themselves than they ever have.

8. On the scope of what becomes possible

The quote:
“In the process of acquiring a conscious direction of the use of the human organism, a hitherto ‘undiscovered country’ is opened up, where the scope for the development of human potentialities is practically unlimited.”

The context:
Alexander began his investigation trying to solve a voice problem. What he uncovered turned out to be something much larger: a method for developing a more conscious relationship with yourself in everything you do. Students come to the Technique for specific problems — pain, anxiety, performance, recovery from injury — and often find that the benefits spread into areas of their life they hadn’t expected. That sense of an opening-out is something teachers and students speak of again and again.

9. On what the Technique ultimately offers

The quote:
“If he inhibited his immediate instinctive reaction to any stimulus to ‘do,’ he could prevent the misdirection of his use… he would have at his command a means of controlling the nature of his reaction to stimuli.”

The context:
At its deepest level, the Alexander Technique is about freedom — freedom from automatic, unconscious reactions that we didn’t choose and can’t easily change. Whether you’re reacting to pain, to pressure at work, to a difficult conversation, or simply to the effort of getting out of a chair, the Technique gives you a moment of choice where before there was none. That moment, cultivated over time, changes everything.

10. Professor John Dewey’s summary

The quote:
“One finds himself continually growing, and realizes that there is an endless process of growth initiated.”

The context:
John Dewey — one of the most influential philosophers and educational thinkers of the 20th century — studied the Alexander Technique himself and wrote about it with striking enthusiasm. His observation here captures something students often feel: that unlike a course of treatment with a fixed end point, learning the Alexander Technique opens something that keeps developing. It’s less a remedy and more a lifelong skill — one that quietly improves the quality of almost everything else you do.

For more information about the Alexander Technique: The Complete Guide to the Alexander Technique