Most of us just want to be fixed. We want other people to solve our problems. We don’t want to work on ourselves.
If you’re addicted to shopping or eating or sexing or movies to escape from your inner pain, then you are your problem in that respect. Until you stop fleeing from your pain and distracting yourself from your anger, you can’t make meaningful progress with your life.
A foundation of Alexander Technique is that you might be part of your problem. If you are in chronic pain, you’re likely exacerbating the pain, if not causing it, by needless muscular holding around the pain. If you are consistently behaving inappropriately in social settings (like I used to do), then you likely have unnecessary tension patterns that distort your picture of reality.
I’ve found that people are not at all likely to see themselves clearly. Many people who think they are funny are not while people who think themselves dull are often quite sharp.
My students usually don’t notice their habit of leaning back from the hips while they walk and stand. They don’t notice their habit of tipping their head back and compressing their neck every time they get in and out of a chair. They have all sorts of harmful habits that they just don’t see. They need a teacher to point them out.
If you offer a person a free Alexander lesson and then start pointing out some of these habits, you will rarely be taken seriously. I’ve found that people only listen to me in these matters if they’re paying me.
Giving away free lessons in the Technique is usually a loser for both me and the student. People don’t take things like this seriously when they don’t pay for them.
