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More options than the one-way street
Discomfort and pain can feel like being stuck on a one-way street. Especially, if it’s taking up a lot of time, it becomes tiresome and isolating overall. It’s not easy to see options out of this situation. This sensation of being stuck is also like a loop, like being in a condition that repeats itself without a possibility of change. Reflecting on this, I ask myself how easy it is more often than not to get used to something that is unpleseant. On the long run the own discomfort, pain and worry ends up being part of the comfort zone, even if it isn’t a conscious choice. Just because something is familiar, it’s the comfort zone, it’s a safe place. To the point that the one-way street can seem a good and constructive place to be. Stuck but comfortable is a kind of paradox. Taking a choice into another direction would mean leaving the comfort zone.
With the Alexander Technique it may become easier to take a new choice and a step into -another place to be- a new awareness. It offers a possibility of clarification, of ease and flow and deep rest. That new choice is not linked directly with getting rid of something (pain for instance) or solving a problem (with analitical thinking/logical thinking). It’s foremost creating a gap / an opening from feeling or being stuck, blocked or on hold. It’s more like a fresh start and a choice for each person, playfully questioning their present moment (their thoughts, their movements) for a better outcome. As it is in everyone’s own hands to take new steps, steps out of the comfort zone, it might be useful to do it with a coach.
The Alexander Technique can perhaps seem artificial or abstract if there is no practical experience with it. Another reason to think that it’s odd, could be that it doesn’t address a client’s pain, discomfort or worry directly. In other fields like psychotherapy or classical medicine there is at least the attempt for a direct and urging solution to the pain. The A. T. doens’t directly respond with a medicine or give a treatment to certain body part or specific emotional state. It isn’t interfering with the person’s initial reason to be treated for. The individual is treated as a whole, or in other words, ‘undivided’. That means that the symptoms aren’t the most important thing. They are to be taken seriously, but they’re not the only part of the entire picture. That's not bad at all, on the contrary. Here is an alternative method to what is otherwise common practice to today’s fast pased world which is a fast solution. Of course it might take time to get acquainted with this idea. In fact, understanding something new, is a thought or a step into another direction, away from the known steps and thoughts. “Just try something new, and observe what happens!”- that sounds to simple to believe, but it has a reliable influence on the individual’s habitual handling of themselves. Of course, the person has to have a chance to recognize their own habits. And the Alexander Technique Coach is there for that. Leave the one-way street, look for a space to go through and dare to look beyond for other ways, unknown paths. Even if just for a moment.
The Alexander Technique gives each person the possibility to improve their physical cognitive self, without analytical confrontation and without effortful exercise, but with experiment. Tiny little new things to try, and always time to pause, that stimulates the nervoussystem in such a way to have positive feedback from it. The lightness in the body does itself, the coming to the present moment does itself. Harmony between body and mind restores itself. The individual relearns to trust the fact that long term changes to the psycho-physical self are worthwile, to last for a lifetime.