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Dystonia Set Free

Jun 14, 2018

She was suffering from dystonia in her fingers.

Not good for a professional clarinettist. Fingers shaking uncontrollably - the pinkie refusing to obey her instructions to arrive where required. Musical mismatch.

Am I a dystonia fixer?

Good lord no.

However, I am a truth seeker. I believe that our system is perfect. If her fingers were stammering, there was a going to be a good reason why. Cause and effect.

So what do I do?

What any good BodyChance BodyThinking-trained teacher will do - first, analyse the mechanical need. It requires a reasonably confident understanding of the biomechanical needs of movement.

And the ability to ask relevant questions.

In fact, I find this the easiest part of the job. I become a student - she becomes a teacher - as I learn what a clarinettist must do to make a sound.

We started with her thump - which was going white from having all the blood drained out by the extraordinary effort of pushing it into the valve on the opposite side of her fingers.

CHANCER: Why do you press the thumb so vigorously?

"I need to close both of the valves."

A little discussion about this and Chancer personally checked out the pressure required to close both valves. (About 20% of what she was doing.) And what was weird was her method of sealing the pipe that was above…

CHANCER: Why not rotate your thumb up?

Now she looked puzzled.

Time for some thumb anatomy. Thumps have nine individual muscles operating them, and - intrinsically - people commonly adduct (Adductor pollicis) when they need to flex and rotate (Flexor pollicis brevis).

I took her thumb and showed her these two choices. Which did she think would work best?

In the complex arrangement of her clarinet, this flexion and rotation made more sense than the adduction she was so vigorously pushing.

Time to apply. Back to the whole, back to her new vision of the arms and breathing, now a new movement plan for the thumb. Wow - it was like Alexander's critical moment.

And the dystonia was significantly less. Happy result.

Ask me more on my free session on BodyThinking and how it can expand your ability as a teacher to implement Alexander's discovery in an extraordinary variety of challenging situations…

https://atsuccess.com/register-jeremys-free-bodythinking-webinar-june-25th.html

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