From the Practioners: Be Present to Solve Chronic Discomfort

I met a women recently who had been told that her shoulders drooped forward. She was advised to correct the habit by imagining holding a walnut between her shoulder blades. Almost unconsciously, she kept hunching her shoulders towards her ears and rolling them back to try to follow this directive.

But this is a maddening place to be. You don’t get to be who you are. In fact, I would posit that it’s an act of cruelty for someone to not let this woman live in her own body as it is. Because now every time she is aware of her own shoulders, she instantly jerks them back. Sounds irritating, right?

I am not advocating that this woman be in pain. But this kind of over-correction is not helping her at all. In fact, years of doing it has likely prolonged the tension pattern and aggregation of stress in this area. If you want a different future, you need to step outside of what you already know and into something you don’t.

The idea is to just stay present. If we let the impulse to “fix” our discomfort pass, even for a few minutes, our next step is no longer predetermined. We are not launching into a series of fruitless habits that have not really helped. Think about it: where along the chain of events will you experience a different outcome if all responses to pain remain habitual?

What keeps us trapped in chronic ache and pain is not just our postural patterns or injuries, but the self-limiting beliefs that prevent us from trying something new.

– by Dan Cayer, Alexander Technique