Paths to the Alexander Technique by Shelagh Aitken

Author:Shelagh Aitken [Aitken, Shelagh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 30245627
Publisher: HITE
Published: 2016-05-18T21:00:00+00:00

Small Surprises When You Don’t Expect Them

Anne Landa

The Alexander Technique has been present in my life since I had a serious problem with my wrist. As an accordion player, when I was seventeen years old I developed tendonitis of my left wrist. Among other therapies, and after asking for a solution ‘everywhere’, a physiotherapist tried to help me by treating the inflammation with cortisone, so I could continue playing. Time passed, and my playing depended on how my wrist responded each time, for each repertoire and each different stimulus, connected to an unknown response. My wrist has been very vulnerable and my worry was always about it. I continued asking for information. In the meantime, a physiotherapist told me that my tendonitis had become chronic.

Some years later, I lived in Rome, where I played concerts, but my wrist was still hurting. For a musician having such a constant negative isn’t comfortable. One day I found an Alexander Technique advertisement and I decided to try it, while being very sceptical.

From the beginning of my AT work with my first teacher, I realised that the problem wasn’t my wrist! It was what I was doing with myself! AT lessons showed me clearly that I wanted to be involved in Alexander training.

I trained in Amsterdam between 1997 and 2001. After, I returned to Spain where my teaching started privately. Later, I initiated a teaching programme for AT in a conservatory (Musikene, Basque Country) in parallel with teaching AT and the accordion privately, in order to develop AT work for musicians in my country. I still give Alexander Technique lessons there, along with teaching the accordion.

But in October 2003, I suffered a terrible car accident (in a taxi, going to teach lessons in the music school). The taxi driver died and I suffered trauma to my head and face – broken socket of my right eye, a broken nose, broken upper jaw bones (both the right and left sides) – as well as a broken pelvic bone, and a broken ankle.

I slept in the intensive care unit for some days in an induced coma until it became possible to operate on my swollen face. Thanks to a tracheotomy, I could breathe through my trachea, and Dr Llop in Cruces Hospital in Bilbao was in charge of surgery that many specialists afterwards considered to be a great success. No doubt, in my opinion, the surgical aspect of the medicine has developed in such a way that human beings have to appreciate it.

My recovery has been a real journey, but I have to admit that from the moment I awoke in the hospital room after the operation, my body was so damaged that I realised that psychological power took over. Somehow I opened my eyes and saw who was there: I felt the happiest person in the world.

My conclusion is that when the physical side is so damaged, the psychological helps and gives you power to smile. Those moments were the happiest ones in my life, even if it sounds incredible.

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