About Stan
"This is too serious to be serious about."
"If we're not having fun, we're doing something wrong."
Stan brings both of those into every lesson.
Stan Hobbs is the creator of SkinGuidance — a practical evolution of the F.M. Alexander Technique that places the skin and its embedded senses at the center of movement, posture, and presence.
He has been teaching for more than 45 years. He is not selling a fitness program. He is not promising a six-week transformation. He is offering something rarer and more lasting: a way of thinking that changes how you move — for the rest of your life.
The Background
Trained in 1979 in the Patrick J. Macdonald lineage of the F.M. Alexander Technique. Stan began teaching in Oberlin, Ohio — with a private studio less than half a block from the College and Conservatory — working with musicians, singers, and performers at every level.
By keeping his fees deliberately low he taught an unusually high volume of lessons in a short time — sometimes as many lessons in a single day as colleagues gave in a week. Combined with hundreds of hours observing rehearsals and performances, this convinced him early that posture cannot be fixed in isolation. The real work is integrating better use directly into whatever you actually do.
In 1988 he moved to Germany, where he was hired at a Musikschule in Duisburg and later led workshops at Musikhochschulen in Köln, Dortmund, and Wuppertal. Working with musicians, ballet dancers, modern dancers, and ballroom dancers, he made a discovery that would change everything:
When people directed their attention over the skin — rather than focusing inward on muscles and joints — they could stretch further, move more freely, and perform with less strain.
In 1989 he opened an Alexander Technique teacher training course that ran until 2007. It was there that SkinGuidance took its fullest shape — working directly with student teachers revealed what the standard approach was missing.
One development from that period was the organized hand. Where student teachers are traditionally taught to place their hands on a client in a particular pattern — gentle, but often transferring little more than the teacher's own tension or collapse — the organized hand works differently. When the hand is genuinely organized, the entire upper shoulder girdle and neck organize with it. The contact then carries something real: a message of expansion rather than weight. For musicians this prevents the tendency to clutch. For singers it opens the shoulder girdle and with it the voice.
From that discovery grew SkinGuidance.
The Discovery
For almost fifty years Stan had observed something the fitness industry, the yoga world, and even many Alexander Technique teachers consistently overlooked:
The skin is not just a covering. It is a guidance and control system.
With millions of nerve endings constantly organizing the body's entire infrastructure in response to contact, pressure, and movement — the skin with the five senses embedded within is already doing the work. The question is whether you are conscious of it or not.
SkinGuidance makes that process conscious. The result is natural, sustainable presence — not a position held by effort, but a living alignment that grows with you instead of collapsing with age.
The Person
Stan is 80+ years old. He has worked more than 70 years across more than 40 jobs — Marine Corps, aerospace engineering, systems development, international work, restaurant ownership, and a lifetime of teaching. He lived and worked in Vietnam and England — where he completed his Alexander Technique teacher training — before moving to Germany where the teacher training course and SkinGuidance itself took shape.
He is still building, still learning, and still showing up every day.
He will tell you directly whether this work is right for you. If it isn't, he will say so.
He teaches under the name Stan the SkinGuide.
"I have been observing how human beings move and organize themselves since I was eighteen years old. I have something worth sharing."
He teaches under the persona Stan the SkinGuide.