You Can Change the Pain in Your Lifeby Shirley Hanson(Reprinted from the Chestnut Hill Local, Thursday, July 13, 1989, p. 17+.) As a writer, Aldous Huxley is noted for his arduous intellectual quests. As a man, he was viewed for many years as awkward, vulnerable, tired, and depressed. While working on the emotionally and intellectually demanding Eyeless in Gaza, he so exhausted himself that he could write only while lying on his back with a typewriter on his chest. At that time he began taking lessons with F.M. Alexander, who, wrote Huxley's wife, "made a new and unrecognizable person of Aldous, not only physically but mentally...." If a young Tasmanian actor with a love for Shakespeare, FM Alexander, hadn't lost his voice while performing and hadn't experimented on himself with the greatest scientific rigor until he developed a path to recovery, Huxley would never have learned how to take responsibility for his own well-being. And Doris Ferleger's existence might remain one of increasing pain. Ferleger, an individual and family therapist, came to Alexander lessons for a back problem so severe she was able to see patients only while lying on her office floor. Always physically active, she had danced three hours the night before cleaning out the attic. It was then that her back gave out. She tried many routes, each one unsuccessful. "Nobody seemed to know what to do with me." Once she began Alexander lessons, she found her teacher, Jeff Tessler, "Knew about the kind of pain I was experiencing, understood its cause, and believed that I would get better." "It is clear to me that I can prevent my pain from recurring through continued awareness of the most efficient way to wash the kitchen floor or to bend down to reach for something. One of the things I am most excited about is that I thought I would never be able to lift my son again. I can do it with optimal body usage." What is the technique Alexander discovered? Aldous Huxley called it a "total training of the use of the self." It is "training people in the art of getting out of their own light." It is a way of "freeing ourselves from our eclipsing bad habits." Then, the "indwelling intelligence of the body," he said, "can be relied upon to perform miracles." From Alexander's experimentation came several overriding principles. One is the concept of primary control: the relationship of the head to the neck and back and, also, to the activity of the moment. He wrote of the "indivisible unity of the human organism." He concluded, "It was impossible to separate mental and physical processes in any form of activity." Alexander grasped the "close connection that exists between use and functioning." A better use of the self leads to improved functioning at all levels of being. Jeff Tessler, for eight years a teacher of the Alexander Technique and for the past year a Chestnut Hill resident, came to Alexander lessons because "I wanted to stop hurting. I was experiencing almost a total body breakdown." His problems began with athletic injuries in high school and grew more intense through misusing himself. While in college he started Alexander lessons. The philosophy and methodology to which he was introduced, he said, "applied common sense to my problems." The lessons were not about "someone else fixing my problems," but about "teaching me to stop doing things that stood in my way." Through lessons from a trained Alexander teacher, Tessler achieved gradual relief from his knee, back, and neck problems. The most important change was "my loss of the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, which were replaced by a sense that I was the one who was going to change my harmful patterns. The idea of the use of the self is very much overlooked. People do not think about how they are creating their own problems." At the heart of the technique is inhibition: that is, "pausing to give yourself a gap in which expanding awareness is possible--time to realize what you are doing and what you are choosing to do." Once awareness and acceptance of responsibility are brought into the process, change is possible. Not accepting responsibility for yourself, good or bad, is often identical with feeling a loss of control over your life and problems. Applying Alexander's technique of conscious control provides an edge of pleasurable dispassion and helps to bring you out of the situation. "The technique is not about getting it right but about seeing where you are going wrong and beginning to deal with it. It's about upgrading your standards of functioning. A more skillful use of yourself as you grow older can prevent many of the degenerative problems associated with aging." The Alexander Technique is not a panacea. Lessons, usually on a one-to-one basis, are "hard work, taking in new information, and processing, adapting, and expanding it." "More and more," Tessler said, "I am amazed at the complexity of our problems and how dearly and tightly we hold our habits, even the harmful ones." Alexander lessons provide a way to return to a "child's state of constant discovery and to increase our ability for self-discovery." Tessler's preparation for teaching included three years of training with Joan and Alexander Murray in Urbana, Illinois. Their course is affiliated with the American Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique. In his years of teaching, students of ages ranging from 6 to 93 have sought him for reasons as varied as stage fright, breathing problems, bad posture, stroke recovery, neck, arm, leg, or back pain, tendinitis from playing the cello or hitting a tennis ball, and the desire to be more at ease with clients. Results gained by students often are unanticipated. A tympanist with a bad back alleviated this symptom through lessons. In the process of helping himself, he dropped his preconceived ideas about teaching music and became more accessible to his students' needs. He also heard music in a new way and changed his playing techniques. Doris Ferleger's husband, Steven Halpert, M.D., board certified in internal medicine, observed his wife's progress and took lessons to relieve his own back pain from playing basketball. Within about two months, he said, "My posture began to change in a way that was non-forced. I was standing upright without strain. I was most struck by how strong my back became." He found, also, that lessons were relaxing, producing "a sense of well-being." Halpert suggests Alexander lessons for a number of patients with chronic low-back pain. Ferleger, too, refers patients to Tessler. "Alexander lessons enable people to take better care of themselves emotionally and physically," she said. Another student of Tessler's, Lisa Bardarson, a dancer and muscular therapist living in Mt. Airy, first participated in Alexander lessons as a part of her training in muscular therapy. "Muscular therapists use their bodies to make other people feel more comfortable in their own bodies. If the practitioner's body uses shows greater ease and openness, that individual can deliver a more effective treatment. The Alexander Technique has also helped me see more clearly body patterns that may be affecting a client's muscular tension." "Alexander lessons revise the way we think about ourselves. I came to the lessons from a lifetime of debilitating physical problems, pain, and despair. Now I understand I have, in some measure, created my own problems, and at last I am discovering how to help myself." |