Alexander Technique

What Alexander actually discovered

Alexander's original observation was more subtle than it appears. He noticed that when he prepared to recite, he tightened the muscles at the back of his neck in a way that pulled his head slightly back and down and, as a consequence, shortened and compressed his spine. This shortening altered the mechanics of his whole torso, restricted his breathing, and constricted the vocal mechanism - which was why his voice failed during performance and recovered between performances.

This in itself is an interesting but limited finding. What turned it into something larger was his second observation. When he tried simply to stop tightening his neck, he could not. More than that: when he believed he had stopped, the mirrors showed him that he was still doing it. His sense of what he was doing with his own body was unreliable. The pattern had been in place for so long that it felt, to him, like the absence of pattern. It was only through the impartial feedback of the mirror that he could see what his own proprioception was missing.

And this is the deeper discovery, the one that makes the technique what it is. Most of what we do with our bodies we do unconsciously, on the basis of internal feelings that we trust implicitly. Those feelings are, for most adults, systematically miscalibrated - we have been repeating patterns for so many years that our sense of what is neutral, what is upright, what is effortless, has drifted from what those things actually are. We feel straight when we are tilted. We feel relaxed when we are gripping. We feel that we are standing still when our whole spine is being subtly pulled downward by muscles we do not know we are using. Alexander called this faulty sensory appreciation, and it is the reason the technique cannot be learned purely from within. You need something outside yourself - a mirror, a teacher's hands - to show you what you cannot feel.

The five principles

Alexander's later students codified the practice into five interlocking principles. They are easier to understand as a sequence of realisations than as abstract concepts.

Recognition of habit. The first insight is that much of what we experience as our natural way of being is, in fact, a pattern of muscular and postural habit laid down over years. The slumped working posture is a habit. The held breath in difficult conversations is a habit. The locking of the jaw when concentrating is a habit. The tightening of the neck before speech is a habit. These patterns feel like us, but they are not us. They are things we do, repeatedly, without knowing we are doing them.

Faulty sensory appreciation. The second insight is that our internal sense of what we are doing cannot be trusted. The habits feel like nothing; the absence of them, when we first encounter it, feels wrong. A person who has been standing with their head pulled forward for twenty years will, when a teacher gently guides them into a more balanced head position, often report that they feel they are tilting backwards. They are not. What they are experiencing is the unfamiliarity of an arrangement they lost long ago.

Inhibition. This is the word that has caused the most confusion - it has nothing to do with Freudian repression or social shyness. Alexander's inhibition is simply the deliberate pause before an action in which you decline to respond to the impulse in your usual way. Someone is about to stand up from a chair. Normally, in the micro-second before rising, a whole orchestra of preparatory tensions fires - head back and down, shoulders up, breath held. Inhibition is the act of noticing this impulse arriving and, just for a moment, not going along with it. The body is not yet doing anything new. It is simply not doing the old thing. In that gap, something else becomes possible.

There is a resonance here worth noting in passing. The idea that a deliberate pause - a refusal to act reflexively - is the precondition for skilful action appears in many contemplative traditions. The Taoist concept of wu wei, often translated as non-action or effortless action, describes something closely related: the insight that trying to force a result tends to produce the opposite, and that the right thing often happens of itself when the wrong thing stops being done. Alexander arrived at this through empirical observation of his own body in a mirror, not from any contemplative tradition. But it is striking that two very different investigative routes - one Eastern and philosophical, the other Western and practical - converged on the same recognition. There is something real about the pause.

Direction. After the pause comes what Alexander called direction - not a physical act but a kind of quiet mental orienting. A person might silently think: let the neck be free, let the head go forward and up, let the back lengthen and widen. These are not commands to muscles. If you actively do them, you will introduce new tensions and spoil the result. They are closer to permissions - quiet mental indicators of what you want the body to allow to happen once the habitual interference has paused. The directions are given without muscular effort. The teacher's job, in the early lessons, is partly to help you notice when you have shifted from allowing to doing, and to bring you back to the lighter state.

Primary control. The fifth principle is Alexander's name for the relationship between head, neck, and spine that organises the functioning of the whole body when it is not being interfered with. When the neck muscles are not gripping, the head balances freely and delicately at the top of the spine - like a weight suspended rather than a weight held up. When this balance is free, the spine lengthens, the back widens, the breathing deepens, the limbs move more easily. When the neck muscles grip, all of this is compromised in a cascade. The head pulls back and down, the spine shortens, the breathing narrows, the limbs become effortful. Alexander's claim, supported by the research on chronic back and neck pain, is that this primary head-neck-spine relationship is the master organiser of everything else in postural life. Get this relationship free, and much else rights itself. Keep interfering with it, and no amount of corrective exercise elsewhere will fully fix the problem.

Why the teacher matters

This is the point where the practice diverges from most others in this library. Mindfulness can be learned from a good book. Breathing techniques can be learned from a recording. Gratitude practice can be done with nothing more than a notebook. Alexander Technique, in its functional form, genuinely requires a trained teacher for reasons that are worth understanding rather than dismissing as guild-protection.

The first reason is the one already named: faulty sensory appreciation. You cannot feel your own habits. You can read about them, think about them, resolve to change them, and none of that reaches the layer where the patterns actually live. A trained teacher has spent three years learning to see the patterns in other people's bodies and to influence them through a specific kind of touch. When their hands are on your neck, they are detecting micro-contractions you are not aware of and gently asking those contractions to release. You feel the difference as it happens. Without this external input, you are working with the miscalibrated instrument you came in with.

The second reason is related. Trying harder does not work in Alexander's paradigm and often makes things worse. The practice is counterintuitive in a specific way: the harder you try to do it correctly, the more you interfere with the very release you are looking for. This is almost impossible to understand on your own, because every other skill you have ever learned rewards effort. The teacher's role is partly to hold open a different possibility - one in which the right thing happens by itself when you stop doing the wrong thing. This is not something you can instruct yourself into.

The third reason is that habits of the kind Alexander worked with are deeply motor-patterned and respond poorly to purely verbal instruction. You can read a description of what your neck should be doing and still not be able to locate, in your own body, what that would feel like. The teacher's hands are, in effect, a bridge - they give your nervous system a direct experience of what the words are pointing at. Once the experience has been had, the words become useful; before that, they mostly are not.

None of this means that the technique is mystical or that only initiates can understand it. It means that Alexander Technique is in the same general category as learning to swim, to play an instrument, or to ride a bicycle. You can read about all of these and you will not be able to do them. At some point you need someone to show you, and in the case of Alexander work, showing happens through gentle, skilled touch rather than through words alone.

What gradually changes

People who continue with Alexander work over months rather than weeks often describe a slow shift that is hard to name precisely. Specific pains tend to reduce or resolve. Movement becomes lighter. Breathing deepens without being worked at. There is often a sense of more space - internally, as though the body had been compressed and is now uncompressed; and externally, as though one were taking up one's actual size rather than a slightly hunched version of it. Stress no longer lands so automatically in the neck and shoulders; when it does, it is noticed and can sometimes be prevented from taking root.

These effects are real but they are also slow. The technique does not produce the sudden clean shifts that some other practices in this library produce. What it produces, over time, is a gradual un-learning of years of accumulated habit, and an equally gradual emergence of a way of being in the body that feels, when you finally settle into it, oddly familiar - because it is approximately how you moved when you were five, before the accumulated layer of holding and effort began to accrete.

The honest starting point

Unlike most practices in this library, Alexander Technique cannot usefully be tried this evening. The practice requires a teacher, and the teacher requires finding. This section walks through what to actually do, in the order you would do it, if you decide this is worth pursuing.

Finding a teacher

A qualified Alexander teacher has completed a three-year, 1,600-hour training course at an institution approved by a recognised professional body. The two pieces of information most worth checking are whether they are listed on their national society's register and what sort of students they commonly work with.

In the UK, the authoritative body is the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (STAT), based in London and founded in 1958 by teachers who had trained directly with F. M. Alexander. Members who have completed STAT-approved training use the post-nominal MSTAT. The STAT website has a Find a Teacher tool that allows you to search by geography. Outside the UK, equivalent societies exist in most countries where the technique is practised - AmSAT in the United States, CanSTAT in Canada, AUSTAT in Australia, and similar bodies across continental Europe.

Beyond qualification, the other factor that matters is fit. Different teachers have different backgrounds and different clienteles. Some came to the technique through the performing arts and work largely with musicians, singers, and actors. Some came through chronic pain and specialise in that. Some work extensively with office workers and repetitive strain. A teacher whose primary clientele matches your reason for coming is likely to have encountered your specific patterns many times before and will often be more immediately useful than one who is technically excellent but rarely sees cases like yours.

Practical considerations. Most teachers offer a shorter first introductory session, usually 30 minutes, at a reduced rate, specifically for people deciding whether to commit to a course of lessons. This is worth using. The chemistry between student and teacher is not incidental to the work - much of what happens in a lesson involves allowing a near-stranger to place their hands on your neck and back and guide your movement, which requires real trust. If you do not feel comfortable with the teacher within the first one or two sessions, find a different teacher. The technique itself is consistent; individual teachers vary considerably in temperament, style, and focus.

The first lesson

A typical first lesson lasts 30 to 45 minutes. You remain fully clothed throughout - wear something comfortable and reasonably fitted so the teacher can see how you move. Most lessons involve a combination of four elements, though the proportions vary by teacher and by what you bring.

Talking. The teacher will usually begin by asking what brought you, what you hope to get from the work, any specific pains or difficulties you are experiencing, and a little about your daily activities. This is practical information-gathering rather than therapy, and usually takes ten minutes or so.

Watching you move. The teacher will ask you to do some very ordinary things - stand up from a chair and sit back down, walk a few steps, perhaps lean forward to pick up an object - while they observe. They are not evaluating your posture in a conventional sense. They are looking for the specific patterns of unnecessary tension that you bring to these actions without knowing it.

Hands-on work. This is the core of the lesson. You will usually spend some time seated or standing while the teacher places their hands lightly on your neck, head, or back, and asks you to think particular thoughts - let the neck be free, let the head go forward and up. Their hands provide feedback that the words alone cannot. You may feel small releases happen under their touch. You may feel that nothing is happening. Both are normal. You will also do some movement - standing up from a chair, for instance - with the teacher's guidance, to begin the process of noticing what you do automatically when you initiate action.

Table work. Many lessons include some time on a padded table, lying on your back in what Alexander teachers call the semi-supine position - knees bent, feet flat on the table, head supported on a small stack of paperback books. The teacher will work with your neck, shoulders, arms, legs, using gentle contact to invite release. This part of the lesson is often the most immediately pleasant and restful. It is also where, for many people, the first real experience of the technique lands.

You will very likely feel subtly different after your first lesson - often taller, sometimes a little disoriented, sometimes pleasantly calm, sometimes with a sense of strangeness because familiar patterns have briefly loosened. This sensation tends to fade within a day. That is normal and does not mean the lesson failed. What the first lesson has done is introduce your nervous system to a possibility. It will take many repetitions before that possibility becomes stable.

What a course of lessons looks like

The traditional recommendation from STAT is a course of at least twenty lessons to establish the technique as a genuine skill. The ATEAM research tested 24 lessons and six-lesson courses; both produced benefit, with 24 producing larger and more durable effects and six producing about 70% of the benefit when followed by an exercise programme.

Practically, most people find it useful to take lessons weekly at first, sometimes twice a week in the early stages, then spacing them out as the work settles. A realistic timeline is roughly:

• First 2 to 3 lessons: orientation; you are getting used to what a lesson is and what the teacher is pointing at.
• Lessons 4 to 10: the work starts to make sense from the inside. You begin to notice, between lessons, the habits the teacher has been indicating. You may also notice specific pains reducing.
• Lessons 10 to 20: the technique starts to transfer into ordinary life. You catch yourself mid-pattern during a meeting, a walk, a tense moment, and notice you can do something about it. Lessons become less about learning new things and more about refining what you have already encountered.
• Beyond 20: the technique, for those who continue, becomes part of how they live rather than a thing they do. Many long-term students attend an occasional tune-up lesson once a month or so to keep the work fresh.

If you cannot afford or commit to this arc, a useful minimum is six lessons - enough to tell whether the technique speaks to you, and enough to give you some tools to take away. What six lessons will not do is install the technique as a durable skill. That generally takes the longer commitment.

Constructive rest - the one self-practice that works

There is one Alexander-based practice that genuinely can be done at home, on your own, and is worth doing regardless of whether you are currently taking lessons. Alexander teachers call it semi-supine or constructive rest. It is the single most valuable thing to bring home from lessons and continue between them.

Lie on your back on the floor - carpeted floor is ideal, a yoga mat works. Place a small stack of paperback books under your head, adjusted so that your head is supported in a neutral position without tipping back or being pushed forward. Roughly two to three inches is typical for most adults, though this varies; a teacher can show you the right height for your body. Bend your knees so the feet are flat on the floor, hip-width apart, and let your hands rest on your belly or by your sides. Close your eyes if you wish.

Now simply lie there for fifteen to twenty minutes. Do not try to relax. Do not try to fix anything. Do not try to feel a particular way. The only active component is a quiet mental direction - something like: let my neck be free, let my back lengthen and widen, let my shoulders spread. These are permissions, not commands.

What happens during constructive rest, for most people, is that the weight of the body very gradually transfers into the floor. The lumbar spine, which is usually held in a constant low-grade contraction to maintain upright posture, has nothing to do for twenty minutes. Over many repetitions across days and weeks, the body learns what it feels like to not be doing its habitual work. Small releases happen. Breathing deepens without being worked on. The mind, if you can leave it alone, tends to quieten.

A daily fifteen to twenty minutes of constructive rest, paired with regular lessons, noticeably accelerates progress. Without lessons, it is still worth doing - it will not teach you the technique, but it will give you direct contact with a restful baseline state that most adults rarely experience, and this alone is useful.

Applying the principles between lessons

Beyond constructive rest, what you can usefully do between lessons is notice. The work of Alexander Technique happens largely in ordinary moments - standing up from a chair, walking to the kettle, sitting at a computer, reaching for something on a shelf. After a few lessons, you will begin to catch yourself in the micro-moments before these actions, noticing the preparatory tension pattern that your teacher has been pointing at. When you catch one, you do not need to do anything elaborate. You simply pause for a fraction of a second - this is inhibition - and let the action happen with slightly less of the habitual gripping than it would otherwise have had.

You will forget to do this most of the time. Everyone does. What matters is the occasional moment of remembering, accumulated over weeks and months. Each remembering reinforces the pathway. Gradually, the noticing becomes more frequent and the habit becomes more visible. This is how the technique slowly moves from something the teacher does to you into something you do with yourself throughout the day.

A note on self-taught Alexander Technique

It needs to be said, because plenty of books and videos claim otherwise: you cannot really learn Alexander Technique from a book. You can learn the concepts, the history, the principles, even quite subtle intellectual nuances of the work. What you cannot get is the felt experience of what those concepts point at in your own body - and the felt experience is where the practice actually lives.

This is not a marketing position taken by teachers. It is a structural feature of the practice. The core problem the technique addresses is faulty sensory appreciation - the fact that your internal sense of what you are doing with your body is miscalibrated. No book can fix this. Only external input - specifically, a trained teacher's hands - can give you access to the layer you cannot feel.

Books about Alexander Technique are still useful, and the Resources section of this entry includes several. What they do well is help you understand what the work is about, what to expect from lessons, how to find a good teacher, and how to think about your own progress. What they cannot do is substitute for the lessons themselves. If you read a book and think that sounds interesting, the honest next step is a lesson, not another book.

What the research actually supports

The research evidence for Alexander Technique is best described as narrow but solid. The landmark study is the ATEAM trial, published in the BMJ in 2008 by Paul Little and colleagues at the Universities of Southampton and Bristol. This was a properly conducted randomised controlled trial with 579 patients, comparing 24 Alexander lessons, 6 Alexander lessons, 6 massage sessions, and normal GP care, with half of each group also receiving an exercise prescription. The trial was funded by the UK Medical Research Council and the NHS.

The results were unusually strong for a chronic back pain intervention. At one year, patients who had taken 24 Alexander lessons were experiencing pain on an average of 3 days per month, compared with 21 days per month in the normal care group. Functional limitation had reduced by 42%. The effect was maintained at long-term follow-up. Six Alexander lessons combined with GP-prescribed exercise produced about 70% of the benefit of 24 lessons - a genuinely useful finding for cost-constrained applications. The conclusion most commonly drawn, by both researchers and NHS guidance bodies, is that Alexander Technique is an effective, durable, and cost-effective option for managing chronic lower back pain.

Beyond back pain, the evidence picture narrows. A 2015 trial in the Annals of Internal Medicine (MacPherson and colleagues) found that Alexander Technique lessons, along with acupuncture sessions, produced significant and lasting benefit for chronic neck pain compared with usual care. A 2002 trial of Alexander Technique in people with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (Stallibrass and colleagues) found meaningful improvements in self-assessed disability and depression. Smaller studies have looked at applications in stuttering and in musicians' performance anxiety with modestly positive but limited findings.

What the research does not clearly establish - and this should be said plainly - are the broader claims sometimes made for the technique. Alexander teachers and enthusiastic students often describe profound shifts in creativity, presence, emotional regulation, voice, and general wellbeing. These reports are sincere and, for the individuals concerned, presumably accurate. But they have not been reliably demonstrated in controlled research. Someone coming to Alexander Technique for chronic back pain can reasonably rely on the evidence base; someone coming to it primarily to enhance creative performance or personal development is operating in less well-mapped territory.

On the touch question

One honest question that comes up in the research is how much of the effect depends on the specific Alexander method and how much depends on general features of one-to-one attentive touch-based practice. The ATEAM trial addressed this partially by including a massage comparison group, which found that massage provided short-term but not long-term benefit, while Alexander lessons provided sustained benefit. This suggests that what Alexander teachers do is specifically different from what massage therapists do - though the precise nature of the difference is not fully understood at the level of research.

The technique's own explanation - that it works by teaching the student a skill of self-management that continues to operate between lessons, whereas passive therapies require repeated application - is plausible and consistent with the long-term follow-up data. The ATEAM authors note that the Alexander effect persisted long after the lessons ended, which is what one would expect if students had genuinely learned something, and not what one would expect from passive treatment effects alone.

Why the technique remains relatively obscure

Alexander Technique has better evidence than many more popular wellness practices, and yet remains little-known outside the performing arts and certain specialist circles. Several factors contribute to this.

First, the practice is expensive and inaccessible compared with group classes, apps, or self-guided practices. A meaningful course of lessons costs what most wellness interventions do not.

Second, the practice is genuinely difficult to describe. Its effects are real but subtle; its mechanisms require explanation; its outcomes unfold over months rather than weeks. This does not translate well into the vocabulary of mass wellness media.

Third, the practice is old. It was developed in the 1890s, formalised in the early 20th century, and carries a somewhat vintage vocabulary - inhibition, direction, primary control, use of the self. These are not the words in which modern wellness tends to speak.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, it is one-to-one and hands-on. This is core to how it works and is also exactly what makes it resist mass scaling. You cannot turn Alexander Technique into an app or a ten-minute morning routine. The teacher is not a peripheral feature of the practice; the teacher is the practice.

None of these factors detracts from the technique's value. They do, however, explain why it is likely to remain a specialist practice rather than a widely-known one, and why it sits a little awkwardly in a library otherwise made up of practices most people can begin today.

On Alexander's legacy and honest acknowledgement

A word on F. M. Alexander the person, which belongs honestly in this section. Alexander was a gifted observer and a genuine empirical discoverer. He was also, by the standards of his time and certainly of ours, a man whose writings contain passages of uncomfortable racial and social theorising. The Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique explicitly notes this in its public materials and states that its members stand apart from any such passages in Alexander's writings.

The technique that bears his name has been developed, refined, and expanded by three generations of teachers since his death in 1955, and is not bound to every opinion he held. The practical work - the careful observation of habit, the skilled hands, the patient re-education of movement - stands on its own merits. This entry describes that work, which is what students encounter in modern lessons. Alexander's personal views form no part of what any competent contemporary teacher will transmit.

Essential guidance

Alexander Technique is one of the physically safest practices in this library. The teacher's touch is notably light - much lighter than massage, physiotherapy, or chiropractic. There is no manipulation, no thrust, no forceful stretching. The risk of injury from a competent teacher is extremely low. A few considerations are nevertheless worth holding in mind.

Find a properly qualified teacher. The title Alexander Technique teacher is not legally protected in most countries. Anyone can claim it. The professional societies - STAT in the UK, AmSAT in the US, and equivalents elsewhere - maintain registers of teachers who have completed approved three-year training programmes and adhere to codes of professional conduct. For your first teacher, stay within this system. Someone who has done a short course and calls themselves an Alexander teacher is not what the ATEAM trial tested and is not what this entry is describing. Once you have spent time with a fully qualified teacher and know what the work is meant to feel like, you can make more informed judgements about less credentialed practitioners.

On touch and consent. The technique involves a teacher placing their hands on your neck, head, back, shoulders, and sometimes your arms and legs. The touch is professional, skilled, and not intimate, but it is still touch, and you are entitled to set limits on it. A good teacher will explain before touching any new area, will check in about pressure and comfort, and will respect any boundary you set without question. If this does not describe your experience with a particular teacher, find another. This is not a reflection on the technique; it is a reflection on that teacher.

If you have a specific medical condition. Alexander Technique is generally compatible with most medical conditions, but a few situations warrant discussion with your doctor before beginning, or with the teacher before your first lesson. Recent surgery, acute injuries, severe osteoporosis, pregnancy, conditions involving spinal instability, and significant neurological conditions are the main cases. In most of these, Alexander work can still be very helpful - the technique has been specifically studied in Parkinson's disease, for example, with good results - but the teacher needs to know, and may modify how they work with you. Be explicit with them about any condition they should know about.

Expect a period of feeling slightly strange. For the first several lessons, many people experience brief sensations of disorientation, unfamiliarity, or mild achiness as habitual patterns begin to loosen. Muscles that have been gripping for years may take a day or two to adjust to working differently. None of this is harm; it is the body adjusting. If a sensation persists for more than a few days or is genuinely painful, tell your teacher - they will usually be able to identify what is happening and adjust how they work with you.

On emotional release. Because the patterns of muscular holding that Alexander work addresses are often connected, in ways not fully understood, to longstanding patterns of psychological holding, lessons occasionally produce unexpected emotional responses - a quiet sense of sadness or tenderness, sometimes tears, occasionally laughter. This is not a frequent feature of the work, but it happens, and a good teacher will hold the moment with practical, unintrusive care. If you are in a period of significant emotional fragility, it is worth mentioning to the teacher beforehand so they can approach the work appropriately.

Cost and time commitment are real. A single Alexander lesson in the UK typically costs between £40 and £80, depending on location and teacher experience. Courses of 24 lessons therefore represent a significant financial commitment - in the range of £1,000 to £2,000 - and a comparable time commitment. This is worth stating honestly. Some teachers offer sliding-scale fees or reduced rates for students and those on lower incomes; it is worth asking. Some training schools offer supervised lessons from trainee teachers at lower cost; these are often excellent value, though the trainees are less experienced.

Do not use it as the sole treatment for serious conditions. If you have significant back pain, Alexander Technique can be a very useful part of your response, and the ATEAM evidence supports this. It should not, however, replace appropriate medical investigation. Some back pain has specific causes that need specific treatment - disc problems that require physiotherapy or surgical assessment, inflammatory conditions requiring rheumatological input, referred pain from abdominal causes, and so on. Get a medical assessment first, then use Alexander Technique alongside whatever else is indicated.

Where it fits with other practices

Alexander Technique pairs well with a number of other practices in this library, though the pairings are specific.

It is a natural complement to Body Scan and Mindfulness - both practices cultivate the kind of present-moment attention to bodily experience that Alexander work requires, and the two reinforce each other. Students who have a meditation practice often find they pick up Alexander work more quickly than those who do not; students who come to Alexander first often find that meditation becomes easier once they have begun to notice their habitual patterns of holding.

It is generally an excellent counterweight to vigorous or force-based exercise traditions - weight training, running, high-intensity interval work - where habitual patterns of tension tend to be reinforced rather than released. Many athletes and performers take up Alexander work specifically to improve their efficiency and reduce strain in their primary activity.

The relationship with yoga is more complicated. Alexander and certain kinds of yoga can be genuinely complementary, and some yoga teachers integrate Alexander principles explicitly. But yoga that emphasises achieving correct postures through effort often works against what Alexander is trying to teach, by encouraging students to force their bodies into shapes they think they should be in. A good Alexander teacher can help you practise yoga in a way that serves rather than undermines your Alexander work; without this guidance, the two practices can be somewhat at odds.

It pairs usefully with Progressive Muscle Relaxation for people who need to learn what muscular release feels like before they can recognise what release looks like in Alexander work. PMR gives you a crude but very useful sense of tense versus released; Alexander refines this into something much more subtle.