Simple gifts: The Alexander Technique

Excuse me now, while I go all Old Testament on you. Naaman, a Syrian army captain, has leprosy and heads off, not to Mount Sinai Hospital, but toward Mt. Sinai itself, to visit the prophet Elisha. Oh, he bring his peeps alright, his retinue, his gifts, his caravan, the works. Very impressive. Now, Elisha, doesn’t even come out of his Regulation Prophet Hovel to greet Naaman. He stays inside, and boy, Naaman is pissed. He leaves. That night one of Naaman’s sevants risks his life and says, Naaman, dude, what if old Elisha had asked you to conquer a country, level a mountain. I would have done that, says the captain, piece of cake. Well, how much better then, the servant says, to saddle your ass and go do what the Prophet asked you to do in the first place. Naaman gets the message, follows Elisha’s directive, dips himself in muddy old Jordan (have you seen that skanky stream?) and is cured. Moral, it’s the simple things, the simple steps that are hardest for us. We want to do big things not cultivate the small. The Alexander Technique is the little thing with great consequences. It doesn’t require you to torture yourself, whip, tug, pull, or jerk yourself about. It only requires you to take charge of yourself, of your posture. Simple, right? That’s just one reason, but a big one, why the Alexander Technique might not be the first thing you think of when your back gets cranky. We’re neither skanky nor swanky, and perhaps that’s the problem. We’re just really, really, simple. “Free your neck, in order for the head to go forward and up, in order for the back to lengthen and widen.” Little thing, big result. And it that doesn’t work, well, there’s always Jordan.