SMART YOGA:
Apply the Alexander Technique to Enhance Your Practice, Prevent Injury, and Increase Body Awareness
Yoga instructors, Alexander Technique teachers, and those who are serious, curious and open-minded about their yoga practice will find much in this book of interest to them. With thirty years of teaching experience in the Alexander Technique and yoga, David Moore brings fresh and practical insights into how the Alexander Technique can contribute to yoga practice. More than an instruction manual, this book, complete with visual examples, offers readers a critical approach to yoga practice. Furthermore, this guide accommodates the needs of people with a diverse range of movement, in terms of injuries, structure, strength and flexibility. Offering comprehensive advice in modifying yoga practice, David takes account of the huge variability in people doing yoga practice, and examines how to deal intelligently with this variability. The topics covered in this book include:
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Applying the Alexander Technique for safe and effective yoga practice
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Altering poses to suit a wide range of structural issues, body-types, and flexibility
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Dealing with pain and injury
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How Hatha Yoga, Patanjali, and Buddhist insight practices relate to the Alexander Technique
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Bringing the practice into daily life
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Balancing the autonomic nervous system
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Mindfulness and meditation
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Changing habits
David Moore, director at the School for F.M. Alexander Studies graduated from Australia's first Alexander technique training course in Sydney in 1985. Prior to studying the Alexander technique, David did many years of yoga practice. He spent over seven years in India and Thailand, including over two years in Thai meditation monasteries, and two years in Madras studying at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandaram. He now teaches classes applying the Alexander technique to yoga.
REVIEW BY WENDY LIM FROM YOGA TODAY
Full disclosure, I had never heard of the Alexander Technique before reading this book. Smart Yoga is a useful guidebook on navigating the Alexander Technique with yoga practices. The book is filled with diagrams and photos throughout to complement the text.
The book explores tadasana, floor stretches, squatting poses, standing poses, twists, forward bends, backbends, hip openers, inverted poses and plank variations in great depth. I would recommend the book to anyone curious about the Alexander Technique and wanting to go into more details on the principles underpinning the methods as it relates to various yoga poses.
It’s great to get another layer of perspective applied to poses, especially in preventing injury and building greater body awareness. I found the background and development of the Alexander Technique fascinating and can see how it would complement yoga practice.
Yoga Today, 5th July 2018