I offer lessons in the Delsarte System which are designed to help you teach yourself how to eliminate your bad habits in how you use your body. Lessons are conducted online over Zoom (a free video communication service), so a webcam and internet connection are necessary. In these lessons you will learn through experimentation how to apply a system of thought to control how you use your body. By taking conscious command over how you gesture, you will be able to overcome your harmful habits and gain balance, poise, and symmetry.

Lessons are done in the style of Jeando Masoero’s famous Initial Alexander Technique.

Nearly everyone in the modern world is discombobulated. This is why actions that should be simple, like sitting in a chair or bending down to pick something up, are done in a way that is tiring or uncomfortable. The result of this discombobulated state can be seen in the fact that nearly everyone has what’s called “bad posture.”

What “bad posture” really is, in simple terms, is a habitual crumpling, shortening, and narrowing of the torso. This repeated compromising of one’s full stature is done subconsciously. By learning to consciously use your self in a different way than you are used to, you can cease to shorten, narrow and twist your body. You don’t need to shorten yourself. You don’t need to diminish yourself. You can let your body take up all of the space that it’s supposed to. The lessons I provide are aimed at bringing your conscious mind into action, and allowing you to free your body from the harmful restrictions that you have absent-mindedly placed on yourself.

I think most people would like to improve their posture, but it often seems to be an unapproachable problem. If there is not a good chance of succeeding, why would we even try? There are many services out there that claim to address the discomfort caused by this discombobulated state, but very few have any long term effectiveness. Based on my years of studying the issue, I can say it seems quite clear to me that many methods used to fix one’s posture can actually cause further damage alongside any benefit they may provide. This is largely because most interventions are purely physical; they seek only to massage away tension, stretch and strengthen certain muscles, or manually change the relationships of certain bony structures by the manipulations of an outside actor.

The real trouble is that, in a discombobulated state, we rely on habits and our feeling sense to guide our actions. Though we have powerful minds capable of reasoning, we do not apply that reasoning to how we use our bodies. We assume that our body knows what it’s doing. But then we experience pain and discomfort. We find our movements to be awkward and out of our control. When under the spotlight of a tense moment, whether it’s playing an instrument, swinging a club on the golf course, speaking in public, or simply being in a stressful interaction, we find that we cannot command ourselves to do what we want to. We fall into habits, our “nerves” show up, we lose the ability to focus, and we get along as best we can.

Of course, even despite this limitation, we are capable of doing many great things. But without this limitation, you will find we are capable of reliably accomplishing things which before we had only a prayer’s chance of succeeding in.

In these lessons, you will learn to stop doing your unreasoned habits, and you will learn to use your reasoning capabilities to gain the ability to act with poise in response to any situation no matter how stressful. You will gain long term results because your thinking will change, and you will no longer absent-mindedly cause yourself discomfort and pain while using your body.

There are health consequences that result from being in a discombobulated state because, as a consequence of being in such a state, the body is put into a contorted, crumpled, shortened, and narrowed shape. This has negative effects on your circulation, breathing, and digestion. In circulation, the constraining effect of misplaced bodily structures can affect blood pressure and cause stagnation in certain areas. In breathing, the diaphragm can become misused and negative habits around “sucking in” air are extremely common. In digestion, harmful pressures and lax areas can interfere with the regular course of digestion. On top of this, there is the damage to joints, pain from certain movements, severe flaccidity of certain muscles along with tension in other muscles, and a general fatigue related to the inefficiency with which actions are undertaken.

The lessons I provide will not attempt to directly alleviate these symptoms of the problem, they will be aimed at the cause of the problems - which is in your thinking, and how that thinking plays out in how you use your body. I offer a practical and actionable system of thought that will bring about observable changes in how you use your body.

Francois Delsarte (whom these lessons are named after) found that often teachers merely asked you to imitate them; that they had no real intelligible system. They could tell you what to do, but they could not provide the means whereby you could understand how to do what you’re asked to do. As he said: “I had learned how vain is advice dictated by the caprice of a master without a system!”

We see many systems advise certain exercises in pursuit of changing how you use your body, but then people just do those exercises using the same mindset and habits that caused them trouble in the past. Far from developing a new way of using one’s body, this just makes one’s habits more deeply ingrained. The system I teach works because it will explain to you the means by which you can use your body differently. Rather than having individual exercises that you hope will one day alter how you use your body in your day-to-day life, you will have the means by which to consciously change how you use yourself any time you like; not just within prescribed exercises, but in response to any stimulus you come across in your life. You will learn the practical movements you can use to achieve the changes that will free you from painful and harmful habits.

Once you have learned to take conscious control over how you use your body, you will not need more lessons from me. I do not wish to make you dependent on me to alleviate your discomfort or pain, I wish to make you capable of solving the issues for yourself. Once I have shown you a practical and effective system of thought and helped you gain skill in putting it into practice, you will be able to help yourself.

If you have any questions, please visit the FAQ or email me at Delsartelessons@protonmail.com

If you would like to schedule a lesson, email me at Delsartelessons@protonmail.com