AT Blog of the week

Selecting the 'best of' anything is a popular human pastime. The Alexander Technique lacks the glamour of Oscar nominations, world champion titles and the like. Competetiveness can lead easily to end-gaining, but a friendly competetion can as well be playful and enjoyable. I can only choose from the blogs I know of, which means those who appear in my Google alert and those mentioned on Robert Rickover's Alexander Technique Blogs site. Please use the talk section of this article to contest my decisions or suggest entries that slipped under my radar.

April
Mark Shaw published an eBook about Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and shares in this blog his ideas about how to apply AT to alleviate the symptoms of these diseases. Padmini shares her observation about the usefulness of note taking for learning the Alexander Technique. A blog provides an easy platform for taking notes of one's own process of change, yet a good old diary will do the same.
 * Week 14: Fibromyalgia, CFS and the Alexander Technique: Part 4 – Inhibition and the Four Concepts
 * Week 13: Making a note of it

March
Patrick Smith managed to get his second nomination for the Blog of the Week. He's currently the most prolific blogger writing about AT, and has a great way of descibing his experiences. Bill Plake's blog scored the second year already this year. The bulk of this article contains answers to some questions about AT by Elisabeth Gray, one of Bill's students, who has an amazing sense of humour. Enjoy. This weeks winner looks a bit different than usual, it's just a short poem about stillness in movement. Sometimes images drawn with few words can have an amazing depth in meaning. Denise Helm describes her experiences of applying Alexander Technique to running.
 * Week 12: Laying down the end
 * Week 11: A writer/performing artist talks about the Alexander Technique
 * Week 10: Real Stillness
 * Week 9: Run faster with fewer injuries

February
Paige McKinney shares her thought about the 'universal applicability' of Alexander Technique in this week's AT Blog of the week. Bill Plake offers an answer to this tricky question, which interests many people considering studying AT. Sandra Bain Cushman describes some of the obstacles one might encounter on the quest to know oneself better. I'm always happy to find some 'new' blogs about Alexander Technique, although this week's winner started out already more than half a year ago. Maria Bucht, a swedish, writes about fear and flow, and how AT might transform one into the other.
 * Week 8: The Alexander Technique and the Art of Whatever
 * Week 7: How many lessons will I need?
 * Week 6: Day 30 - The refining fire
 * Week 5: Flow - Absence of fear?

January
Tanya Shoop reflects on the change of technology around us, and how the Alexander Technique might offer the tools needed to adapt in healthy ways to the modern ways of living. Fear is an emotion that affects our movement immediately. Amira Alvarez describes in her blog how to deal with those fears we produce ourselves needlessly. AT seems often hard to explain, all the while giving some lasting impressions. Elvind describes the experiences around the first lesson he ever had. The first nomination of the virtual competition for the AT Blog of the Week goes to Patrick Smith, a guitarist and student of the Alexander Technique. He simply describes how he applies AT to deal with his daily affairs and life as a musician.
 * Week 4: From typewriter to computer - and how the body suffers
 * Week 3: There is no tiger
 * Week 2: My first encounter with the Alexander Technique
 * Week 1: Tuning

September
Just before I can get tempted to renominate some of the excellent bloggers honoured before with the AT Blog Of the Week, new writers appear in cyberspace. Turtle Eyeland is a fresh student who shares his online diary about the technique with the world.
 * Week 35: Unraveling Habitual Patterns

August
This weeks winner offers an entire outsider perspective to Alexander Technique. Good luck in finding a teacher :) You may wonder about an AT article about breath control - FM made his objection towards breathing techniques quite obvious. However, we have fallen already from grace, and for many activities we have been told to breath in specific ways. Liz Brody gives some helpful hints how to bring a bit more awareness into your life, and yet another take on explaining AT. Jeff Hall shares his personal experiences about how AT brought some chance into these aspects of his life. I read plenty of interesting articles this week, and luckily stumbled upon another AT teacher's blog I hadn't noticed before. Bill Plake writes from a theater perspective about 'directions', and shares some insights found together with his students.
 * Week 34: The Alexander Technique
 * Week 33: Flow Breathing - Breath Control Technique has been officially released
 * Week 32: Five ways to wake up your body (so easy)
 * Week 31: Love, Relationship and The Alexander Technique
 * Week 30: What Is "Good Direction"?

July
This article provides a short overview how to 'do' Alexander Technique, from the perspective of posture improvement. This weeks AT BOW originates in a Self Help Blog. It is written by Sandra Jumpingdeer and addresses mainly sufferers from sciatica, nevertheless gives a quite concise overview of AT principles. Holidays in the summer make my weekly selection a bit more difficult than usual. A heat wave grips Germany, and potentially a lot of areas where people rather go to the beach than write blogs. So this week I chose Kitti Carriker's blog which features a poem about courage. Feel free to look for the association to Alexander Technique. A busy and exciting week for me has gone, and I hardly found time to go online. When I finally entered the virtual world of the internet again, I was quite overwhelmed by the abundance of articles I had to choose from for the blog of the week. Keeping up with my intention to delay the nomination of a site for this exclusive title twice, I found yet another great piece by a student of the technique, Karl Boyken, that deserves the title Blog Of the Week. Enjoy.
 * Week 29: Improve Posture
 * Week 28: Sciatica Treatment: How The Alexander Technique Can Help
 * Week 27: Courage
 * Week 26: What is the Alexander Technique

June
Being on the road at the moment makes it more difficult to select an entry for this non-competetion. This week's winner is again technically not really a blog entry, however, Carol Radford offters yet another poignant introductory article about the technique which was published in various places on the web. Luckily I was well connected to the web this week, just to find this article discussing the posture of characters from comics. The link between pose, posture and being in life becomes a bit clearer, thanks to Sonia Harris thoughtful words. So far I found each week a new, interesting bleep from the Alexander Technique blogosphere, which means I found this year already 18 different sites providing some insights about AT from a variety of perspectives. This week, Franis Engel shares her ideas about some typical pattern in thinking that contribute to shaping our habits. I suspect Robert Rickover wrote this entry for Camilla Vannote's teenground blog, but maybe he just inspired this article. Garnished with some remarkable quotes, the article provides an elegant and sophisticated overview of the Alexander Technique.
 * Week 25: Understanding the principles of the Alexander Technique
 * Week 24: Committed: Super Heroic Posture
 * Week 23: Predicting
 * Week 22: Mind-Body Unity - A practical approach

May
Another winner coming from the student side of Alexander Technique. Elise LaBarge takes a suggestion of her AT teacher into her life and shares her observations. I came across two more blogs this week, as well as very interesting posts on familiar ones. The winning post discusses the difference between being a patient and being a pupil, and how the ideas of therapy, healing and remedy relate to learning (and teaching) AT. Another blog of a student received this week's honorary mentioning. A musicians describes his application of AT to his music, a reminder that we cannot 'learn the technique by itself', but learn AT by applying it in our daily lifes. posturecorrectionblog does not really qualify as AT blog, but I like the snippet of the DVD with William Hurt and Jane Kosminsky. I chose it mainly for the comments section, providing some interesting insights in the perception of the technique outside the AT world. This week's selection is again an easy introduction to Alexander Technique, this time bringing food, music and AT together. Bon appetite!
 * Week 21: Focus on the up
 * Week 20: In a funk? Move from patient to pupil
 * Week 19: Learning as I go along
 * Week 18: Alexander Technique: A first lesson
 * Week 17: A recipe for pain-free practice

April
A new blog arrived lately, with some interesting articles. As a fairly unknown skill, short introductions what AT is about help deciding whether it's worth visiting a teacher or not. This week's win belongs to Penny O'Connor. Although AT teachers probably apply the technique to more aspects of their lives than other students, the world around us still offers enough surprises to stay aware of the wonderful flow of life. Jeremy Chance's article is a response to a discussion in a mailing list, yet illustrates some ideas about AT nicely. Somehow this entry vanished from the BOW list temporarily, or I forgot to save last week. I had a bit of support this week for the selection: Franis nominated the blog. That made it easier for me to pick between three remarkable blogs this week. Joav Taler's article about the web-age reflects on our use while using modern technology in a modern way.
 * Week 16: Alexander Technique - A technique for what?
 * Week 15: Another busy day in Alonnisos
 * Week 14: Everything is about movement
 * Week 13: Web-Age, Part 4: Time & Ability

March
It becomes more and more enjoyable to browse through the diversity of AT Blogs and look for another gem. Pedro de Alcantara shares his observations about musicians, and uses jazz legends Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker to illustrate his ideas. This weeks blog of the week entry was already featured on twitter, but certainly deserves some more mentioning. Unless the blogging activity increases, there's a good chance that next week's BOW comes from an already nominated site. I chose a fairly short article this week, connecting the idea of inhibition to Gurdijeff's 'stop'. The article is part of detailed book review, so you might want or not read as well the preceding nine parts. I went with the ebb and flow in numbers of blog posts, and this week I had an easier choice. Unless there's no other good entry, I try to prevent nominating the same blog post twice. I know I will have to break this rule at some point, but I found so much quality material in most AT blogs that each active blog deserves some publicity. This weeks winner is written in a quite academic style, an enlightening essay about human word processing.
 * Week 12: The Oppositional Principle In Music, Part III: Dizzie And The Bird
 * Week 11: The Alexander Technique for pregnancy and parents
 * Week 10: Surface
 * Week 9: Some views on reading

February
I caught up with weeks articles just in time after 4 days electronic silence, and was blown away by many good pieces. The winning piece deserves as well the title blog of the months. My chosen title would be 'Seamless flow, poetry in motion', Enjoy a visual example for freedom in movement and some enlightening thoughts from the Riding between Heaven and Earth blog. This week the decision was difficult because there weren't many new posts. I chose an entry from a blog that links Buddhists teachings and Alexander Technique, inspired by online discussions about the 'uniqueness' (or not) of AT. I read many good blog posts this week. I chose this one because it deals with voice work, an essential part of AT.
 * Week 8: Sharing a center
 * Week 7: SAUNDARANANDA 17.36: Impurity & Emptiness Revisited
 * Week 6: Things you'll never hear me say in a voice lesson: RAISE YOUR SOFT PALATE

I haven't researched all the blogs for that week, yet this one stood out for me immediatly.
 * Week 5: An Alexander Student's Story - Part III