Pain reduced with expert help
Thankfully, foot and back spasm were addressed and relieved to some degree via expert assistance from skilled professionals. Yoshiro, acupuncturist extraordinaire, helped reduce inflammation in my foot and spasm in my back. His work is mysterious, as in I can’t explain it, but very effective. I left his office with less of a limp and increased ease overall.
My excellent PT, Heidi, used various subtle hands-on manipulations to re-establish structural integrity and reduce the muscular guarding that had become quite fixed. In Alexander terms, my startle pattern had reached glacial proportions.
Heidi also guided me to allow the “wrong” thing while standing, sitting and walking, so that a new response to the ground could be allowed. By “wrong” thing, I mean it felt collapsed to me, but since I have been using the instrument of myself to stiffen away from my foot with great vigor, I have pretty skewed notions of what “right” or “wrong” might be. Faulty sensory perception, a basic notion of the Alexander Technique (“You can’t know a thing by an instrument that’s wrong” F.M. Alexander), becomes a more complex issue once high degrees of pain are involved. We naturally react to stop or avoid pain, and our habitual patterns, combined with heightened reactions to pain, can cost us our overall elastic balance and support. Even with all my years of studying and teaching the Alexander Technique, I need assistance in sorting out my choices in response once pain has become overwhelming. Intervention in areas of skill far beyond mine (Alexander Teachers teach, they don’t directly affect any condition) are needed when structural integration has been impacted dramatically.
So, as a result of Yoshiro and Heidi’s work, I can now think of other subjects besides pain avoidance. Although I am choosing my activities with care, I can sit, stand, and even walk with far less discomfort than yesterday.
I will return to teaching tomorrow, with the intention of best elastic self in that activity. My hope is to further improve in the dynamic quiet that hands-on Alexander teaching requires.