Ethan Kind

I've been thinking a lot about why some performers who come to me continue to take Alexander sessions until they're out of physical pain, and why others don't continue to take enough sessions until they can play without hurting and struggling on their instrument. As a former aspiring concert guitarist, I worked intensely with an Alexander Technique teacher, until I could play without pain and strain. So, why doesn't every committed classical musician, who has spent years and hours to be a wonderful performer do whatever it takes to change their physical posture and technique to play painlessly with ease? They're addicted to pain.

What does this mean to be addicted to pain? At the deepest psychological level it means unconsciously that without hurting at the emotional level you believe you would die. What we do to ourselves psychologically/emotionally always manifests physically. What we believe and feel demands consistancy of us. In other words, if you believe that anything of real value in life demands excessive work and endless practice and hard work and suffering, and what you do on your instrument will never be good enough, how could you not hurt? No pain no gain!

This is the wall I hit as an aspiring concert guitarist. I did everything my Alexander Technique teacher asked of me in London and within a few months could play painlessly. Since I didn't hurt physically anymore when I performed, I had to stop playing, because my approach to the guitar and life was still "no pain no gain". In other words, I still used negative reinforcement to force myself to play at a high level, but sine I wasn't hurting physically, I had to stop playing to save my life.

After about a year of not playing I returned to performing, but in that interim I discovered a book called New Pathways to Piano Technique by Luigi Bonpensiere. This book taught me how to play the guitar with total trust to create effortless accuracy, just like a prodigy. Playing guitar became truly effortless psychologically as well as physically. What did I do? I stopped playing again. Why? Because I was addicted to pain, and continuing to play the guitar physically effortlessly and with total trust was a gigantic threat to my pain addicted ego. So, I had to stop playing because the guitar had become too easy and too loving. In other words, whenever I played at this point, I was doing something of supreme importance to me, and I wasn't paying a price. This was intolerable for my ego.

It is amazing how we will do what we've been doing, even if it is tearing up the body, to avoid the intolerable psychological pain of threatening our unconscious belief system. The operative word here is unconscious. There is no way anyone can continue to do what hurts at a truly conscious level. Every unloving belief we live by demands unconsciousness of us. If someone has done a ton of psychotherapy, and if they still do unloving things to themselves, the false beliefs that harshly drive that person demand unconsciousness. In other words, when push comes to shove, if you attempt to do or think or feel out of character, your ego will make you go unconscious and act in character. If you become conscious enough to think and act out of character, your ego will make you feel this threatens your life. (So, for me to play guitar painlessly and effortlessly was a threat to my ego's very existence, so I quit.) This is an amazing place to be and a scary place to be, because at this point of breaking out of character, your ego will either frighten you into giving up, or you will stand up to the ego and choose love. This means you choose to be the conscious inherently loving being you are and play your instrument with only pleasure.

I have now defined the dark side, what is the loving side? You will not die, if who you are and how you make music is based on effortless painless performance. This translates to- if playing a musical instrument is only pleasure, you will not die. I believe it is as extreme as a fear of death, or we'd have a whole lot more great performers out there following their bliss and not their egos.

I'd like to define "addiction to pain" a bit more. The more pain a person grows up with, the stronger they will believe, tell themselves, that the pain has kept them alive. As a performer, this means that pain and practice become synonomous. Here 's the insanity of it all. When you are living addicted to pain, to perform with only pleasure is incredibly scary. It is so scary, that you have to find some way to sabotage it. So, you may start turning up the volume on the critic, telling yourself your playing isn't good enough, and/or you injure your body at the instrument or away from it, so you can't play. Of course this injury will be perceived as your body betraying you, not you damaging your body, so you get to stay unconscious and be a victim of circumstances and not take responsibility.

"It is now safe for me to play my instrument effortlessly with great pleasure." Write this affirmation with your gut response to it at least twenty times a day, until you believe it, feel it, allow it. Find an Alexander Technique teacher, and between the two of you, create a technique that allows your instrument to be easy. How about this affirmation- "My instrument is always easy and pleasurable to play". Trust your hands or voice or lips to hit the mark all of the time. "I trust my fingers to effortlessly play the correct notes with beautiful interpretation."

I want to be clear where I'm coming from at this point as I write this article. I have been doing a whole lot of rebirthing sessions these last few months, and it is within this alternative healing work, that I discovered I was addicted to pain. Through other emotional work before rebirthing, I came to realize I had been a forceps baby. What this means is I was very painfully taken out of my mother with forceps clamped to my head. This birth set me up for how I have lived my life until now. Since my birth ended in pain, then it instantly set up in my body brain and spirit that pleasure always leads to pain. In other words, no matter how good things may be right now, they will always go wrong.

What you believe is what you get, and if you believe this from the get go, which you can do as a preverbal newborn, it will probably run your whole life. You will expect things to always go wrong, expect your parents to be tough on you, relationships to end in pain, and you will cause this be so, so you can always be right for the rest of your life, about a 100% unloving decision you don't remember making.

Because I have now done this and am doing this rebirthing work, as a part of my healing process, which Alexander Technique and Radix (emotionally expressive therapy) have been a part of, I now can guide an Alexander client out of pain safely.