A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Friday

I intended to write 20 blogs – Monday to Friday – for four weeks, but then on Wednesday, as I finished writing about Shoko’s lesson, a little voice said to me:

“That’s it. You’re done.”

Since then, I’ve been experiencing some guilt – did I abandon my promise? Is it dishonourable of me? 

To alleviate that, I am writing now and sharing some of the unexpected insights I am gaining from Mari Hodge’s “Pain & the Alexander Technique” with background science support from Tim Cacciatore.

https://webinars.alexandertechniquescience.com/

(No, I don’t get any commission from supporting this course)

Until this course, I would not have thought my ‘guilt’ would be classified by scientists as a form of pain. I was firmly in the biomedical camp – believing that pain was something associated with tissue damage.

WRONG !

One of the mantras of this course is:

“You can have tissue damage without pain - you can have pain without tissue damage.” 

I was in the school of “fix it, and the pain will go away”, which may be true with certain kinds of acute pain (sprain your ankle, cut your finger), but it is NOT true for those with long-term (chronic) pain, which is a mentally disabling condition.

It surprised me to learn that we all have ‘wrinkles on the inside’ - such as damage to intervertebral discs with zero pain. Tiny ruptures are quite common, but pain is not.

Lots of surprises in this course.

I love the compassionate attitude that Mari brings to her work. One message we got at the very start from her was: “All pain is real.” It makes perfect sense, but how quickly do we tire of those who always seem to struggle and complain too much?

“It can’t be THAT bad” when it is.

Why? 

Because another obvious insight on this course is how we can get good at creating pain – putting pain in places where it never existed before. Of course we do. Practise anything; you get better at it, right? How sad to think people – without consciously intending to – slowly develop this skill set to the point where ending their life becomes an attractive option. 

These issues bring us back to the need for higher-order decision-making for the health of our Selves, something that happens in every Alexander lesson: learning how to make informed choices about movement based on sound principles.

The course isn’t over yet.