Most people who end up in my studio didn’t come looking for the Alexander Technique. They came because their back hurt. Or their neck. Or they’d been to physiotherapy, tried massage, done yoga, and something still wasn’t right. They arrived a little skeptical and a little desperate — and that’s completely fine. I was too, the first time I encountered this work.
Many of my students first came to me for yoga or meditation — and discovered the Alexander Technique along the way.
So what is the Alexander Technique?
The Alexander Technique is a method of re-education — not exercise, not therapy, not massage — that helps you notice and change the habitual ways you use your body. The ways you sit, stand, walk, reach, type, breathe. Most of us have accumulated years of patterns that quietly create tension and pain without us ever realising it. The Alexander Technique makes those patterns visible, and then gives you the tools to change them — not by forcing your body into a different shape, but by learning to get out of your own way.
What actually happens in a session?
The first session often surprises people. There are no exercises to follow, no poses to hold. We talk, we move through ordinary everyday movements — sitting down, standing up, walking across the room — and I use gentle hands-on guidance to help you feel the difference between your habitual way of doing something and a freer, easier way.We also spend time on the table — lying down fully clothed, in what might look like rest but is anything but. It’s often in this stillness that the body reveals its most persistent habits, and where the deepest releasing happens. It’s subtle. And then it isn’t.
What my students say
One of my students, Avital, described it like this after her ten sessions: “It sounds like magic, I know. It is not. It is a lot of mindfulness in moments when we are usually on autopilot.” That’s probably the most accurate description I’ve ever heard.
Then there’s Gareth, who came because of chronic tension in his shoulder and neck from working at a computer. After a few months, the pain in his shoulder was gone. So was the pain that had been running from his hip to his ankle for years. “My overall body awareness is much better,” he told me, “and I am hardly stressed anymore.”
Katherine came to me with lower back pain from her work in preschools — spending her days sitting in tiny children’s chairs, constantly up and down. What she found through Alexander Technique surprised her: “When I sit at the rowdy lunch table with a bunch of kids, I can think ‘back is back’ and release my lower back.” Simple cues, available to her in the middle of a chaotic working day. That’s the whole point.
And most recently, Tom came to me with his cello. He had developed some bad habits that were creating shoulder tension — something many musicians know well. He found it helpful, he told me, “to find a teacher in Berlin who was willing to help instrumentalists.” Within the first session we had identified the pattern and found new ways of practising that allowed easier, more natural movement to emerge. The technique doesn’t care whether you’re sitting at a desk or playing Bach — it goes wherever your body goes.
Why Alexander Technique is different
These are not unusual stories. They are, in my experience, quite typical.
What makes the Alexander Technique different from other approaches is that it doesn’t treat symptoms in isolation. It looks at the whole person — how you organise yourself, how you respond to stress, how your habits of movement ripple through everything you do. A session with me in Berlin will always begin with curiosity rather than correction. I am not here to fix you. I am here to help you notice what you are already doing, and to offer you a choice you didn’t know you had.
Alexander Technique lessons in Berlin — in English
I teach Alexander Technique in English in Kreuzberg, Berlin — though German works too if that feels more comfortable. Sessions are one to one, 50 minutes, and most people find that a course of sessions works better than a single visit, since the real learning happens in the space between lessons, in your daily life, as the technique quietly becomes part of how you move through the world. 🧅
If any of this sounds like something your body has been waiting for, you’re welcome to get in touch.
About the teacher:
Pinelopi began her yoga journey in 1999 and founded English Yoga Berlin in 2010. She holds a 600-hour Hatha Yoga Teacher Training and completed a 1,600-hour Alexander Technique Teacher Training in 2023 under Jörg Aßhoff — one of the most intensive trainings of its kind.
She has studied Yoga Anatomy with Leslie Kaminoff, trauma-informed practice with Legacy Motion and Linda Thai, and ways of applying Internal Family Systems for Social Transformation with Steffi Bednarek. Her meditation work is deeply inspired by Tara Brach and the RAIN technique, which she brought to life in Magic of Rain — the first children’s book on RAIN meditation, with a foreword by Tara Brach herself.
She teaches because she believes it is not what you do in life, but how you do it that matters.
