No Right Position, Only Direction

Two kinds of neck pain

When someone first walks into my studio, I spend the first ten or fifteen minutes just listening. People usually arrive with one specific thing: a stiff neck, sore shoulders, a back that won't settle. But the specific thing is rarely the whole story.

Sometimes, as we talk, the neck pain turns out to have a history. I've had this for years. I never had good posture. I played clarinet in the marching band as a teenager, and that posture still follows me twenty years later. Or it has an obvious cause: a deadline, ten hours a day at the keyboard, a twist the wrong way last week.

Other times, the neck pain opens onto something else. Migraines that were never properly addressed. Being tense all the time. Not sleeping. Someone important who died, and a feeling of holding on — or not even noticing the holding, just a tightness through the upper body that won't let go.

Both people are in pain. Both came to me for the same reason. But they are asking for different kinds of help, and much of my work is learning to hear which one is in the room.

Two roots

I work with two traditions, and each deserves to be understood on its own before I talk about how they meet.

The Alexander Technique comes from F.M. Alexander, an actor who kept losing his voice on stage in the late 1800s. Doctors couldn't find the cause, so he watched himself in mirrors for years. He found that the problem wasn't his throat. It was how he was using his whole self — especially the relationship between his head, neck and back — every time he went to speak. What he developed is a way of re-educating that use: learning to notice a habit, pause before it, and choose a different direction.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) comes from Dr. Peter Levine, who spent decades studying stress and trauma. He noticed that animals in the wild go through life-threatening moments constantly, yet rarely stay stuck in them — their bodies shake off the charge and return to baseline. People often don't. SE is a gentle method for working with what the nervous system is still holding: tracking sensation slowly, in small doses, so the body can finish what it couldn't finish at the time.

One tradition starts from how we use ourselves. The other starts from what we carry. On the surface they can look almost opposite. Underneath, they are working with the same thing.

We do what we think

The Alexander Technique is often called a psychosomatic practice, and I think that's the right word for it. Lessons look very physical: hands-on guidance, verbal cues, moving from sitting to standing, specific procedures with specific words. But all of it is working with the nervous system, with our ability to change and to form new pathways in how we decide to move.

We are neurologically wired creatures. Whether we are aware of it or not, we do what we think. Apart from unconditioned reflexes, like pulling a hand back from a hot stove or blinking at a sudden movement, every action starts in the brain: a decision, conscious or not, sent as a signal through the nervous system to the muscles. Most of those decisions happen below our awareness, and so quickly that we never catch them. So we don't track them. We just find ourselves already moving, the way we always have.

This is where the two traditions meet for me. If almost everything we do begins as thought, then thought is where there is room to change. Understanding that we do what we think gives us a kind of liberation: to pause, to think, and to see what that does.

Permission not to get it right

The pause sounds simple. For most of us, it's the hardest part.

Alexander had a word for what gets in the way: end-gaining. Reaching for the result so hard that we stop noticing how we're getting there. We are all end-gainers. We are the good students, the high achievers, the ones who want to do it properly. We bring that into the studio with us, and it is exactly what closes the door. You can't pause while you are reaching for the end.

So early on, I set what I think of as the rules of our engagement. I don't expect anyone to be perfect. I don't need you to be a good student, or to do it right. There is no "right" to arrive at here, just as there is no right position. What both practices invite is something quieter: listening to your body rather than forcing it into a particular action, and noticing what changes without needing the change to be anything in particular.

In Somatic Experiencing, this permission shows up from the very first minutes. Before we work with anything difficult, I invite the person to arrive: to notice where they are, to observe, and to find a resource, something in the body or the room that feels steady or supportive. Starting there sets the ground for slow-paced regulation. It also helps us map the person's window of tolerance, the range in which the nervous system can take in new experience without tipping into overwhelm or shutting down. Knowing that range is what lets us go slowly enough for change to land.

That is where my curiosity lives. Not in the result, but in the noticing.

Direction and invitation

Both practices work through the nervous system, but they come in through different doors.

Take shallow breathing. In an Alexander lesson, I would guide: lengthening through the spine, widening across the chest, letting the breath find its full cycle. It's specific and step by step, with my hands helping the person find a different organization of themselves. The change comes from understanding — from changing one's mind about how to go about it.

In somatic work, with the same shallow breathing, I would invite instead. Can you put your hands on your rib cage? How does that feel? What do you notice? Here the change doesn't come from instruction. It comes in the pause: in the moment of noticing, when there is enough space for a sensation to arrive and for the nervous system to register it.

My own inclination is to begin with observation. Where is this person today? Then I might touch gently into a specific direction, with my hands or with words. Then I pause, and we track what it brings.

People respond very differently to this. Someone who came with a postural question often welcomes direct, guided change — it's what they hoped for, and they feel the difference right away. Someone carrying an unfinished emotional process may find that same hands-on change too much. The cue that is a gift to one person can overwhelm another.

Changing course mid-lesson

In fifteen minutes of conversation, I can't know everything about a person. What keeps me honest is the process itself.

I might begin a lesson fully expecting Alexander work — finding the feet, guiding a movement from sitting to standing — and realize within minutes that something else is happening. The nervous system is responding more than either of us expected. We are moving too fast.

So I stop. We slow right down. I might move us to the table, into semi-supine — lying on the back, knees bent, head supported. We breathe. We notice how the surface holds the back and the shoulders. Can I put my hands on your ribs? On your belly? Does that feel supportive, or like too much?

A lesson like that might end up as ten minutes of talking, ten minutes of Alexander guidance, and the rest on the table, integrating. That isn't a plan gone wrong. Being willing to let go of my plan in the middle of a lesson is, I think, the real skill, more than choosing the right technique. It's the same permission I ask of my clients, turned on myself.

Not a position, a direction

Most people hear "Alexander Technique" and think of posture lessons: sit up straight, stop slouching. That isn't what it is.

There is no proper position to put yourself into: not the one you imagine, and not one I could hand you. What Alexander work offers is re-education in how you use yourself, and a sequence of directions you can come back to. Somatic work adds the patience to notice what that change stirs up. Both ask you to let go of getting it right, and to find the pause.

The clarinet player from the marching band and the person who hasn't slept since a loss arrive with the same stiff neck. One may leave with a new direction to think. The other may leave with permission to stop and notice. Neither leaves with a position to hold.

That is what the two practices give, together: not a fixed answer, but the freedom to pursue whatever you need to pursue.