Meditate or Medicate

When you're in pain - what do you do?

I personally follow one of two stategies: medicate or meditate. The first takes the form of netflixing, shopping, drinking - you get the idea. Alternatively, I become the monk: withdraw, go silent, pray, be good and hope insight will lighten my mood.

However, there is a middle way, that straddles two worlds and it all starts with with physical/emotional/spiritual pain.

I find myself - when teaching in BodyChance - telling my trainees over and over:

"Pain is what is right about you."

Pain is not the sign that something is wrong: that you are broken, that you need to be fixed. On the contrary - pain is life's guide towards wholeness. I tell my students:

"If you were not in pain - seeing what you do - THAT would be broken."

Pain is love's way of waking you up.

Recently, an old injury in my lower back was stirred into action, and it preceptiated a revolution in my understanding of how I behave.

My learning spans the physical, emotion and spiritual aspects of an "emergent me" system. Pure reductionism doesn't cut it - you don't find one, simple cause and you're often better off not wasting time in a search for it.

However, a system can be dysfunctional for the simplist reason.

You can find a specific cause.

Years ago, the 2nd Violinist with a renowed orchestra was referred to me. Her bowing arm was increasingly in pain and she was frightened she might have to leave the orchestra. I watched her bow and recognised immediately that her concept of "arm" ended at the gleno-humeral joint - where the arm appears to join the torso.

She believed her "shoulder" was a different part of her anatomy, not an arm.

Dangerous.

By attempting to lift her bowing arm - using the glenno-humeral joint as the conceptual leverage point - she actively opposed the final arc of the movement through what she was calling "the shoulder".

She was imposing her idea on the movement of her system.

That she could play at all was itself remarkable. And the pain she experienced was the gift that put her in touch with Alexander's discovery. While a totally reductionist approach both segregates and disintegrate unified thinking, seeing a specific cause within integrated understand of the movement system can yield dramatic results.

My Online BodyThinking course starts from a reductionist perspective. Just as an artist's talent can mature through specific knowledge of technical issues, so an Alexscovery teacher's talent evolves from knowing the specific actions of muscles groups acting upon joints in an overall action.

However, mechanical dysfuntion is symptomatic of a thought process or belief. Turning around a predjudical belief can result in a systemic reoganisation beyond our understanding - mechanical dysfunction may mysteriously vanish without a trace.

ThinkingBody Online focuses on this emergent perspective.

It is based on the regocognition that there is never one specific cause to be found for "misuse" - even though all dysfunctional behaviour is manifested through the head-spinal complex. I evolved ThinkingBody over 37 years. As a prelimary to offering ThinkingBody online, you can register to watch a preview here…

ThinkingBody Online

Picture credit: Pixabay.com