My Experience With The Alexander Technique

Why I Tried The Alexander Technique

Back pain can be with you all your life. Whilst there can be no cure it is always worth listening to how other people have dealt with it. This is my personal story about back pain. Sure this was never the continual debilitating pain which many people have to put up with, but it has been a problem for these past 30 years and the lessons are worth sharing.

The problems first appeared during my early 20′s. The location was often around the back of my neck but lower back problems were also there. For the first couple of years I had tried to ignore it. Sure there was the occasional unexpected attack which would leave me lying flat on the floor and sometimes I couldn’t recall how I got there but it was, I thought, containable. With hindsight these early signs were probably the precursor of worse things to come.

However I was lucky. The boss at the company where I worked had worse problems than I did. You only needed to see the way he sometimes walked and the curve in his back to know that he was in bad pain. Then one day he decided to try the Alexander technique. This practice dates back to the late 1890′s and was devised by an actor looking for a way to improve his voice when delivering his lines.

Not A Typical Office Visit

Let’s call my teacher John. Well John turned up in loose clothes and left his shoes at the door. I had to remove my tie, loosen my collar and lie down on my back with my head on a pile of books. And so my education began. No, let me repeat that, what John did was to uneducate me. Through careful placement of his hands he helped me to become aware of how I was holding myself. I started to recognise which muscles were tense and where I was out of balance.

But John also made me laugh by making caricatures of how people look and move. He would show me simple things like the movements you make when sitting at a desk and answering the phone. Typically you “crunch” your stomach, bend your neck and heck, the way he mimed it just made you laugh. After his lessons I would find myself watching the posture of other people fascinated about the tensions which they carried around with them. I guess this is how cartoonists must look at the world.

Since then many people have asked about these lessons and even now I can’t really explain what and how John taught. There are no prescribed exercises; all that is left is a kind of deep muscle memory instilled by his guidance over what must have been thirty or forty lessons. And here we have the real challenge for anyone contemplating starting this treatment. I was lucky, the treatment was paid for and it took place during work hours. For most people they face probably six months of lessons, usually on a one to one basis, and it won’t be cheap. The more cynical students might say it is just lying on your back but don’t believe them. This does work.

How Have I Done Since?

So how have I managed over the years since then? Well I guess that the best I can say is that I have awareness and a care for my back which wasn’t there before. I have, largely, avoided times when I could have hurt it. And of course the real invisible benefit is that I honestly believe that without this training I would have suffered from some of the more extreme postural problems which tall people can develop.

The downside? Yes, as always there is one. The lessons I learnt have helped me to manage my back and posture. Ideally I would have worked harder to strengthen and improve the muscle tone instead of keeping a status quo.

Would I recommend it? Definitely. Like most things in life it doesn’t come quick and easy but there is beauty to something which seems to bypass your mind and teaches your body directly.

This article was written by Mike Holly. Mike lives in the North of England and has been looking at luxury cottages along Hadrian’s Wall