Pain Relief With The Alexander Technique
Are you sick of dealing with back pain, neck pain or shoulder pain? Your pain may stem from poor postural habits causing pointless strain, tension and effort. The Alexander Technique can help you to shed these habits, replacing them with fresh postural choices that offer pain relief. At the same time, you can learn how to move more efficiently while exploring better balance and easier breathing.
When we have back pain, neck pain or shoulder pain, all we want to do is find relief. We may reach for Advil, or for something stronger, again and again. But to find lasting pain relief, we have to figure out the cause. One cause that’s often overlooked is the way we perform our daily activities. How do we sit, and how much of the day do we spend sitting? When we walk, are we easily upright, or are we off balance and hunched over? When we send text messages, do we raise the phone to eye level, or do we lower our heads and shoulders to the phone? The way we perform these basic tasks can have a profound effect on our well being.
Uncovering and observing harmful habits
Each day offers us countless opportunities to notice how we’re doing what we need to do. When we pay attention to our ourselves in this simple way, we can begin to recognize the key role our basic activities play in triggering our pain. We can see the needless slumping, contraction, rigidity and compression that complicate and distort our movements. We can see that our own unconscious habits often play a key role in triggering and perpetuating our pain.
Lose the habits…and you just might lose the pain
Alexander Technique lessons can reveal our own patterns of misalignment, strain and overtension. Working with an Alexander teacher, we become familiar with our harmful habits and gradually learn to inhibit them while consciously directing ourselves in new, beneficial ways. As we adopt a new approach to daily activities, we have a real opportunity to reduce or eliminate our pain and to avoid problems such as herniated discs. Not only that, we can start to take real pleasure in performing basic activities, and they can become much more interesting to us.
Scoliosis, sciatica and sacroiliac pain
While many people suffer from pain induced by their habits, some people have specific conditions with deeper causes. Alexander Technique, while not a treatment or a therapy, can help people to manage painful conditions such as scoliosis, sciatica and sacroiliac pain. By exploring alternative ways of moving and performing daily activities, and through heightened self awareness, people with these conditions can find relief and greater comfort in their basic activities. For example, Alexander students with scoliosis can learn to not lean into (or favor) their curves, choosing instead to be more upright while moving, with better alignment and balance. This can reduce the back pain caused by scoliosis even as the underlying condition remains unchanged.