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Note: This is a post on my learning process during the Alexander Technique teacher training course, and it might not reflect my current understanding of the technique.

So I feel like last semester and this semester in the teacher training course has a pattern – I start out feeling really pumped and like I’m learning fast, then a few weeks in, I start to encounter left shoulder/neck pain and get upset about the pain, since it has a long history (basically from when I first injured my right hip almost a decade ago).

Last Thursday I brought it up in the training course and we ended up talking about emotional/physical pain for quite a while. I went through two phases during these conversations. First, I had the following questions confusedly swirling in my head:

  • If I want to work on a procedure, be it taking the back of the chair, or someone’s arm or head, but I experience pain, how do I react? Can I still learn something useful, inhibit, and direct, while experiencing the pain? It seems like sometimes yes, and sometimes no. What makes the difference?

  • Is it a ‘correct’ goal to want to do an AT procedure without pain? It doesn’t seem like it in this particular circumstance, because I’m getting caught in a rollercoaster of emotions based on whether, in this particular moment, I’m doing a procedure with or without pain, and it’s exhausting.

  • can I reframe the muscle pain as an opportunity to be grateful for increased awareness? I’ve come to believe that I feel increase pain, because I am MORE aware, so in that sense, I don’t get afraid anymore that the pain is a sign of wrong-doing. But, there’s a lot of emotion tied up with this particular pain pattern related to flute-playing and traumatic performance anxiety in grad-level classical conservatory. Can I sever the connection between that pain pattern and those traumatic emotions, and just experience the pain calmly?

After these reflections, I got stuck. I felt as if I were in a catch-22:

If I let go of the desire to practice AT procedures without pain, then where was my motivation to perform them at all? After all, I got into AT to resolve chronic pain!

THEN I had a couple big ‘ah-ha’ moments:

  • This shoulder/neck pain pattern is associated with a compulsive desire to try, try, and try again. In conservatory, I was trying and trying and trying again to resolidfy what felt like a crumbling breath technique – I was a moth to the flame, returning again and again to the practice room and only upsetting myself more and more. This is a similar situation! If the “taking a head” procedure causes me pain, then I keep returning to it compulsively trying to do the procedure without pain, and getting more and more agitated. THIS is what I need to inhibit – the desire to ‘retry’ procedures that cause me pain. I ACTUALLY NEED TO INHIBIT MY DESIRE TO TRAIN. Seems very meta!

My teacher showed me an alternate path out of my paralysis:

  1. work on scaffolding procedures that eventually lead to the procedures that cause me pain

  2. start from a place that is as pain free as possible.

  3. Communicate my pain level on scale 0-5 in real time, and my teacher can put hands on to back me out of the pain during the procedure

So now, I conclude that I don’t necessarily have to ‘let go of the desire to do things in a pain free manner’ – instead, I have to let go of the desire to do the complete procedure in spite of the pain, because that particular pain (even if not severe physically) is associated with some pretty severe emotional end-gaining. Which is to say – sometimes I think it’s OK to experience pain and do a ‘complete’ procedure – for example, if you can do it in a spirit of curiosity (how is this pain connecting to my habits/directions and what am I learning from it?). But it’s not OK for me right now with this particular pattern.

And the AMAZING thing is that I actually now have some tools to reduce left shoulder pain pain – for example bending in primary in the chair and looking to the right. I didn’t have that even last semester! (And I don’t quite know what I would do if I didn’t have these tools at my disposal).

What that means in practice:

  • maybe everyone else in class does a procedure, but all I do is go into primary and look to my right. Great! That’s enough.
  • maybe I’m supposed to be observing another student’s procedure, but my shoulder pain is distracting me. I give myself permission to stop paying attention to that other student, and do some self-care by going to primary, etc.
  • maybe my teacher asks me to do something, and I explicitly ask for her support to inhibit my desire to do all of what she’s asking me, and only do part of it.

I feel like I can make the choice to refuse to do something if it causes me left-shoulder pain, because I see pathways towards eventually doing that procedure pain-free, and can practice them in the meantime. And that gives me a preview of what it might be like in future to find more pain-free paths. For example: my hips hurt today after working on the floor on a quilting project, but I don’t really have the skill to avoid that hip pain for the most part. But I recognize that down the road, I perhaps will make different choices when I have more tools for hip-pain avoidance.

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