My Journey with the Alexander Technique
My Journey
When I was 23, I woke up one morning and could barely turn my head.
Me, age ~16
Without excruciating neck, shoulder, and upper back pain, I couldn’t lift a pot of coffee or brush my hair. I’d been a professional ballet dancer, so I took pride in my strength and flexibility; this shouldn’t be happening to someone of my age and fitness, I thought. Doctors told me the extreme pain was due to stress, told me to relax (eye-roll), and recommended prescription-strength Ibuprofen. Within two weeks, the pain had faded to gone. Great! Four months later, it was back. For the next five years, a pattern emerged and continued: debilitating neck pain or back pain for one to three weeks, gone for months, only to return like a comic-book super-villain, laying me out flat.
I got massaged. I meditated. I stretched in yoga class, strengthened in Pilates, saw a chiropractor, got Rolfed.
I saw an acupuncturist, saw a therapist, saw a Reiki practitioner. I tried homeopathy and Bach flower remedies.
Some of those modalities helped in the short term. In the long-term none of them did. Looking back, I can see that most of them were addressing only my pain symptoms. They were not looking at me as a psychophysical whole. They were not looking at the root cause of a chronic issue or examining how I moved in everyday activities. They were not considering what I might be doing to cause my problem or what changes I could make to help myself.
Alexander Technique Solved my Back Pain
Finally, as part of my graduate-school training in Theatre, I found the Alexander Technique. Even though it was then 100 years old, had been included in top acting and music conservatory curricula since the 1950's, featured in The New York Times, used at institutions like the Mayo Clinic, and cited in respected medical journals for decades, I'd never heard of it. Yet, as I acquired experience in and applied the Technique within my daily life, I noticed that my pain incidences gradually became less intense and were of shorter duration over time. Eventually, they stopped altogether.
This was no miracle. I simply was learning and putting into practice the common-sense principles of the Alexander Technique, an educational modality that had been around since the late 1800’s, used by smarty-pants like George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, John Dewey, Sir Charles Sherrington, other Nobel-Prize winners, scientists, actors, musicians, members of Parliament… and most notably spotlighted in the last 12 years by The British Medical Journal’s 2008 long-term clinical trial.
I knew how to use a can-opener, a key, a toothbrush, a vacuum cleaner; but how did I use me?
How did I walk? Or sit or stand or sign my name or perform any other “automatic,” every day activity? And if I didn’t know how I did those, if I had no conscious control of such simple things, how could I truly know what I was doing during something more challenging like exercise? Or acting? How much effort did I really need to use in any daily activity? Was I aware of when I was using unnecessary tension and how that might lead to me compressing myself, which might create pain? And was my awareness, my “feeling” of what was “right,” in fact, right? Healthy?
To answer these questions and feel better, I dove into learning the Alexander Technique.