Welcome to the Dimon Institute Sensorimotor Awareness program! We are happy you are here and appreciate your interest in the Dimon Institute. As a way of introducing you to our program, I wanted to say a few words about our course of study, how it has evolved over the years, and how we structure it to maximize the student’s learning process.

    As a moving machine, the human body is one of nature’s most incredible marvels. Our capacity for skilled movement, our upright posture, our hands, vision and the other senses—all are marvels of engineering and design. For most of us—particularly when we are young—the body works remarkably efficiently, doing whatever is demanded of it and requiring virtually no upkeep. When something goes wrong, as it so often does as we age, we take up exercise and stretching or go to a specialist who can help us strengthen parts of the body or relieve pain. But there is little in all these methods to help us understand how the body actually works in activity, and what we can do to become more fully aware of what we are doing to interfere with its natural design. 

    Enter the work of F. Matthias Alexander. In identifying what he was doing to interfere with his voice, Alexander made a series of remarkable discoveries. He saw how the body was designed to work, how he interfered with it and how, through a process of “directing,” to restore natural balance. In the process, he was able to reinstate the normal working of this mechanism so that his voice and general functioning improved. To communicate what he had discovered, he also devised a way of using his hands to communicate sensory or kinesthetic experiences, making it possible to help others and creating the method we know today as the Alexander Technique. 

    But the Alexander Technique is not primarily a method for teaching or receiving knowledge from others. It is a new form of learning based on knowledge of the self in action. To master this subject, a number of competencies must be acquired, both as a subject and in oneself. Understanding these elements represents a new and revolutionary discipline in the study of the human body in action and how to become more conscious and mindful in activity. Identifying these skills, and approaching them in clearly-defined stages, requires a fully-developed curriculum, or course of study, that includes specific procedures, knowledge, and clarity of goals. Identifying this new discipline of the self in action, and teaching it in definable stages, is at the heart of the Dimon Institute program.

 

All the best,

Ted Dimon

Director