“… I think we do better to study fairy tales than to study anatomy and physiology. Fairy tales really do get to the serious business much more cogently altogether because in fairy tales we are considering wishing and willing and the consequences thereof. When you look at fairy tales, it must strike you that one thing that nobody ever worries about at all is how the wish is going to be carried out. You never get the good fairy or even the witch saying ” I´ll grant you three wishes, but do make them reasonably easy because I´m not terribly good at this sort of thing.”
People imagine their bodies are disobedient and unreliable in carrying out their wishes, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Our bodies get terribly confused because of the conflicting demands that we make of them all the time in our muddled, confused, contradictory wishes. And that is certainly what this technique is really about: if you are going to wish, you´ve got to have pause for thought, because if you just rush in to wishing without thought, without inhibition, you´ll get into all the trouble – dragons, moats, and the lot – that the characters in the fairy stories always get into. “
From Thinking Aloud by Walter Carrington (1st generation Alexander Technique teacher)