Welcome to lecture five. In this lecture, we will talk about directions, Alexander Technique directions. So what are directions? Well, if we go back to Alexandra story, when he was looking in the mirror to see why he was losing his voice, he saw that he was throwing his head back. And so he gave himself directions or orders to prevent the head going back. And when he did this, he tended not to lose his voice.

So these are directions, they're conscious orders that I give myself to prevent doing something that's unnecessary. more examples are that my shoulders drop, let my neck be free. Let my chest release upwards, that my knees go forward in a way. These are Alexander Technique directions. There are other ways to think of them. You can think of them in the negative form where I might say, you might think to yourself, I'm not tensing my show.

I'm not tensing my neck. This is just another way to think of them, they can be effective, more effective that way, or the other way, depending on the individual learning the technique. So that's my description of directions, Alexander directions. They're very simple. They're just conscious orders that you give yourself to stop doing something unnecessary. Also, when you're lying down in the semi supine position, which I'll show you later, you can give yourself directions like, let this let the back, lengthen and widen, let the support come in.

These are more directions but I'll talk about these further on. But they're still the same. They're conscious orders that I give myself to release muscle tension and to stop doing something that's unnecessary.