Usually, you will feel great after an Alexander lesson. You’ll feel more at ease in your body, more balanced, and more tranquil. But there’s also a good chance that once you let go of your body armoring (unnecessary tension), you’ll be overwhelmed with fatigue, emotion and frustration.
Once you notice how much you interfere with yourself through needless compression, you might be frustrated at how much work you have to do. A few Alexander lessons might just open a window onto a bigger problem than you want. You might get angry at the expense and aggravation ahead if you want to rid yourself of needless tension.
Also, when you let go of some tension, you might get flooded with emotions you’ve been repressing.
I can well imagine that, if our hypothetical student has had a particularly tiring or stressful time, they may well make the decision that, for whatever reason, they are not able to allow themselves to rest. They decide to keep going. And in order to keep going and keep concentrating on their work, they turn on muscles (FM writes about this in Man’s Supreme Inheritance too).
And then they keep them turned on. And on. And on.
They forget, in fact, to turn them off.
So now, in addition to the original fatigue, our hypothetical student is expending energy on the needless use of muscles.
When, therefore, they come for their Alexander Technique lesson, and the teacher convinces them to give up the excess muscular energy that they were using to counteract the fatigue, our student is going to feel the full force of the tiredness that they were originally fighting. In the short term, they will probably feel terrible. But if they allow themselves to rest, in the long term they will feel better because they will have stopped the unnecessary muscular activity that was not just masking but adding to the fatigue.