(Personal post) Wearing a backpack no longer hurts?

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’ve been making a lot of progress in the last semester on directing my limbs in the service of coming up through the torso and no longer hunching my shoulders. It feels immensely freeing both emotionally and physically, and it’s a skill I’ve been impatient to learn for a long time.

I had a nice proof of these new skills recently: I carried a somewhat heavy backpack around while my family and I went to a Christmas lights festival outdoors. Normally, backpacks always hurt my shoulders. When the backpack started to hurt this time, I thought, “wait a minute! I have some skills around this now!” I directed and inhibited till I felt I had a really strong “up” from my heels to my shoulders. And guess what? the backpack didn’t hurt me for the remaining 40 minutes that I carried it that night.

In other good news, I had an attack of my old hip pain (mostly piriformis pain) a couple weeks ago, so bad that I was on crutches for a day. Why is that good news? Because I didn’t freak out! I had confidence my A.T. skills would allow me to recover, so I didn’t go to the emotionally painful places I remember from my hip surgery days, even though the discomfort was pretty bad. This approach worked. I had a lesson with my teacher that relieved the pain in the moment despite some twinges, and that gave me confidence that I was headed in the right direction. After a couple more days of pain … it just dissipated! (well. first it migrated from my right hip to my left hip, which I found amusing. then it dissipated). A.T. isn’t just about preventing pain; it’s about resilience in the face of pain, and I felt like in this case, it served me very well.