Pain Relief With The Alexander Technique
Back, neck and shoulder pain can be very debilitating. The pain restricts our activities, impairs mobility, interferes with breathing and depresses our mood. We can also experience a lot of confusion about how to get out of pain. This confusion, and the pain itself, can be relieved by the Alexander Technique.
When we’re in 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 relief from pain, we have to figure out the cause. One cause that is 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 pulling down, 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. Not only that, we can start to take real pleasure in performing basic activities, and they can become much more interesting to us.