“You can’t do something you don’t know, if you keep on doing what you do know.” FM Alexander
When I think about the future of Alexander’s work, the biggest question for me is how we meet the nervous system of the world we live in now. Not FM’s world of London in the early 1900s. The world of today, where people are moving faster than their biology can tolerate.
The nervous system has a speed limit. Healing has a speed limit. Integration has a speed limit.
And most people are living far beyond them all.
Slow Unlearning: The Future of Alexander’s Work in a Nervous‑System Age
This is why I like the idea of a Slow Unlearning movement. We have Slow Food and Slow Travel. What we need now is a way for people to slow down enough for their nervous systems to register safety, to feel accompanied, to integrate past experiences in the safety of the present moment. Without that, nothing changes. Neuroception – our threat detection system – rules the show.
This is where Alexander’s work has a huge, often unspoken relevance. Being touched in a non‑demanding way is not a luxury. It is a biological requirement. Humans regulate through contact, through presence, through co‑regulation and relationship. Polyvagal theory has given us some language for this, but Alexander teachers have been practicing it for decades without naming it.
We have always worked with the implicit. We have always helped people move from unconscious habit to conscious choice. We have always offered a route out of the known pattern.
This is the heart of the work. Showing people the door of possibility.
My passion is in bridging the somatic with the emotional and relational. I want to help people know their thoughts, history, their emotional brain and body sensations. I want to support the nervous system to update itself, to release old fear, to integrate what was too much at the time. Emotional integration is a big part of my toolkit now. I love helping people cry when their tears have been blocked. I love helping people feel more themselves. I love supporting someone to get more up to date with who they are now, rather than who they had to be then.
Not everyone wants to talk about their feelings. Of course not, that is fine. Alexander’s work offers another route. Through the body, with the mind, and the emotions, all together.
This week I’ve been offering 20 minute sessions to people, some know the work intimately, others are brand new to it. I’m reminded how essential this integration is. In twenty minute sessions I worked with someone who injured their arm, a strained shoulder girdle, someone hoping to garden without pain, and someone carrying old fear that was ready to move again. Each person needed something slightly different and all from the Alexander toolkit. A bit of movement. A bit of touch. A bit of emotional resonance. A bit of clear living-anatomy. A bit of nervous system safety.
It seems like plumbing, like I was unblocking some drains. Some old gunk was cleared, some was lumpy and awkward, even temporarily a bit painful, but then the flow returns. Ease follows. People felt lighter, taller, tired, energised – more truly themselves.
So the question I hold for the future of Alexander’s work is this: How do we bring the emotional work into the room without becoming counsellors or coaches? For me Nonviolent Communication and its extension Sarah Peyton’s Resonant Healing Language offer great possibilities.
For me, the answer lies in integration. In nervous system literacy. In emotional safety. In the kind of touch that asks nothing and allows everything. In helping people slow down enough to feel the truth of their own experience. In taking the implicit and making it explicit. In offering a way out of the habitual and into more possibility.
And this is emotional healing is possible only so far as the practitioner has done their own emotional work. We cannot safely hold space for work that is bigger than our own capacity. So for me to be safe-enough, I keep on doing my own personal emotional work. I have regular sessions with Sarah Peyton and ongoing supervision and peer group work too.
If these decades of working with FM’s discoveries have shown me anything, it is that Alexander’s work is not a fixed method. It is a living conversation between attention, touch, thought and possibility – truth and wisdom – within me, between me and the client – and within themselves.
It grows as we grow. It changes as we change. My path has taken me into neuroscience, resonance, systemic understanding and emotional integration, yet the essence remains the same: helping people find more ease, more choice, more presence.
I am not here to preserve Alexander’s work as a museum piece. I am here to keep the work alive in my hands, my words and my way of meeting people. And I am excited to discover what will emerge next.