I’ve lived with chronic pain for most of my life. One of the worst pains I’ve experienced is in my lower back. It started when I was 19 and would wake me up after 5-6 hours in bed. Once it woke me up, I couldn’t stay in bed due to the intensity of the pain. I would have to do intense exercise in order to lower the severity, in addition to strong pain medication and a heavy reliance on massages and osteopathy.
Within the first year of starting Alexander Technique, I began to notice that I wasn’t needing the intense exercise to relieve the pain. Instead, I could go about my daily activities and the pain wouldn’t be as bad the next night. And while I was still seeing an osteopath, I wasn’t counting down the days til the next appointment.
Today, when the pain wakes me up I can walk to the microwave to heat up a heat pack and then go back to sleep. There’s two ways AT made this possible. The first is by changing the underlying patterns of my body. Previously, I was quite stiff and so the pain was amplified by this stiffness, creating more pain and requiring more intense methods of release. The second is by giving me a process where I can actively create more ease in my body just by thinking.
The back pain isn’t gone, simply because it’s not mechanical back pain. If this pain were solely due to muscular tension, I’m confident I’d be sleeping soundly nowadays. Because my pain is driven by an inflammatory arthritis it’s a bit more complicated than that. But I haven’t needed painkillers for the past couple of years because I’ve integrated AT into my pain management toolkit.
I’m not the only person to experience how beneficial learning AT is for chronic pain. I know many teachers and students who have similar experiences. Studies have also shown its effectiveness in reducing persistent pain. Learning AT can be a great part of your toolkit, so that you can get on with what you want to be doing.