This ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Massage Therapists and Rolfers Taking Care of Themselves, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical. It will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to create a user friendly and powerful massage technique.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
When I was practicing six hours a day, seven days a week, to become a concert guitarist at the Royal College of Music in London in the early seventies, I developed carpal tunnel syndrome in my left wrist. I went to an Alexander Technique teacher, and within few months I was able to practice as much as I wanted without pain, and I’ve never suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome since.
What was it that the Alexander Technique teacher taught me that got me out of physical trouble permanently? I was taught how to press the strings with the minimum strength necessary, to find the most mechanically advantageous hand position in relationship to the string and guitar neck, and to press the strings without immobilizing my wrist, elbow, and shoulder.
I’ve applied the above principles in my ebook to massage therapists and rolfers taking care of themselves. If your hands are in a mechanically advantageous relationship to the bodies of your clients, and you don’t tense and immobilize your wrists before you work and after you start working, then you will be on your way to healing your carpal tunnel syndrome.
As a bodyworker, you want to support your wrists with released and dynamic (not collapsed), forearms, upper arms, and shoulders. Then you can do bodywork with arms and hands and fingers that are not held unnecessarily tense. Then when you work deeply into a client’s body, there is no damage being done to your wrists, as you use a powerful decompressed upper body backing up your wrists and hands.
Let me explain. If you do bodywork with a static held body and arm positions, then as you continuously change the relationship of the hand to the forearm with held immobilized tension, you’re forcing the bones of the wrists to grind against each other.
Simply, tense muscles force bones together and cause 100% unnecessary wear and tear throughout the whole body.
Why do bodyworkers use too much muscle to do deep work? It is to give the client a profoundly releasing experience. But it is using too much muscle to get the job done, and if you work to hard to heal the client, there is usually push back from the client’s body. This means, as the client’s body intuitively experiences you hurting yourself, then the client’s body will tense in response to your pain, to you damaging your body.
In pain, you may seek out an Alexander Technique teacher who shows you that you can be extraordinarily effective, if you release all of your excess tension, use balanced posture, and trust your hands and fingers go deep without damaging your body.
I want to say something here about injuries being inevitable in repetitive activities that require precision and strength. They are not, but by the time a bodyworker comes to an Alexander Technique teacher with carpal tunnel syndrome from doing deep bodywork, the bodyworker has lived with a powerful belief system that says injuries are inevitable in bodywork.
I show bodyworkers how to get out of physical trouble, and I also ask them to simultaneously question all of the beliefs they have about bodywork. I then ask them to consider giving up all of the beliefs that guarantee they will eventually get injured over and over as a deep bodyworker/healer.
