Eventually my teacher introduced more fundamental ways of getting me to be in touch with my body. I rolled around on the floor, and we used pads and balls and rollers and I don’t remember what else. I did get improvement in my range of motion from this.
I left New York after less than two years of lessons, so I didn’t get far. When I left, my teacher told me she couldn’t believe that I had kept coming back, since I seemed to have no idea what was going on (which I didn’t) and I didn’t seem to get much relief (which I didn’t). My response was that I knew that things were happening that were beneficial. I just wasn’t able to identify them with my mind.
I could tell somehow that I was learning something (I had no idea what), but it was slow. Because my teacher, herself a performer, wanted people like me to have the opportunity to learn, I could actually afford to come back, again and again, even though I didn’t get much in the way of concrete results. What a gift she gave me.
Many years later, when I had gradually built upon the foundation my Alexander teacher had given me, after I had found several ways to work with my body that were noticeably beneficial, I started to find greater range of motion, and some pains began to ease. I knew more about my body, and I had finally discovered that things could improve.
One day when I was working on my range of motion, a “knowing” hit me of the direction that a specific part of my shoulder should go. Then it went there of its own accord, since I sure didn’t know how to do it myself. Perhaps even more interesting to me was the fact that I recognized that this came from my lessons in the Alexander Technique®. All that time, my brain had been working with everything I had learned those many years ago, and when the time came that I was able to recognize its accomplishments, I did. I still have instances where I am informed about my self because of what I learned from the Alexander Technique®.