Fund Hailey’s & the BAC’s Mission: Transform CP Care with AT

Hello everyone!

The short story: I am working with a team of Alexander Technique teachers to fundraise for an incredible educational opportunity that involves visiting Leonid Blyum, one of the foremost CP researchers and the founder of Advanced Biomechanical Rehabilitation, the only non-invasive treatment for CP that I know of in the world. He leads a large workshop in Toldeo, Spain, and has invited me and my AT teachers to observe and work with him as we refine our approach to AT to better serve the CP population. When we return from our trip, we plan to share information about what we found, create presentations, and offer workshops on tailoring AT for the CP community–a goal that is deeply meaningful to me. This fundraiser will defray costs of the trip, scheduled for the end of September.

The long story–It’s a good one!

If you’ve talked to me lately, you know that in September of 2023, I started training to become a teacher of Alexander Technique (AT). In case you are unfamiliar: AT, at its heart, is a mind-body awareness practice that allows students to become more aware of their habits of thought and movement, and from that place of awareness, to make new choices about how they move in the world. AT teachers use their words and the gentle touch of their hands to help students release habitual tension patterns, and students bring their own mental engagement to the process so that they can continue that experience of finding greater freedom and ease outside of the lessons.

So far, the journey of my teacher training has been challenging, and also incredible… almost miraculous. I’ve been working closely with Ann Rodiger at the Balance Art Center (BAC), taking the train down to New York every week and staying at friends' houses to complete the intensive 1,600-hour training program. At the BAC, I have found an education that is connecting me with my body profoundly… and in Ann, I have found a teacher who has the time and expertise to dive deep with me and understand the ways that cerebral palsy influences my embodied experience.

AT for Cerebral Palsy

In its most basic form, Alexander Technique is an educational process in which students learn how to increase their own awareness around habits of movement and habits of thought. Once students have more awareness, they are able to make different choices about movement, including recruiting the mind to help release patterns of tension and holding. This can be beneficial for all people, and in my case, it has been extremely impactful in lessening the effects of my cerebral palsy. When I started my AT teacher training, I didn’t understand how much tension I was holding in my body, both tension I was born with, and tension I picked up along the way compensating for CP or trying to hide it.

The education I am receiving at Balance Arts is helping me untangle these knots of tension I’ve held since my earliest days. In class, I’m learning about movement mechanics and the ways I can invite my body to support itself in the most wholistic and gentle way possible. When Ann and the other teachers use the light touch of their hands to teach my body new ways of doing things, it’s like brilliant fireworks that go off in my brain: for the first time I know—there is an easier way to move, there’s a block I can release—and my own mind combined with their gentle hands lead the way, forging a new path.

This new path has brought incredible results. My walking has improved so much that family and friends comment. My singing has also skyrocketed, my voice becoming richer and freer as my body becomes more connected. At Balance Arts, I’m training alongside many other artists and frequently have the opportunity to apply Alexander directly to my singing, and the efforts are paying off… In a recent operatic performance, my mom mentioned I had never moved better on stage.

As I have been experiencing these incredible changes and positive effects, I feel with increasing urgency that Alexander Technique can hugely benefit the CP community at large. Ann agrees: she has worked with two other students who have CP besides myself, and all three of us are experiencing connection and relief from symptoms that we had previously categorized as immutable. Ann and I are now working together to codify and communicate the ways we have experienced AT as a major help for the CP population.

​​After two years of intensely training to teach Alexander Technique, I now have the opportunity for the educational experience of a lifetime: traveling with Ann and my AT team to Toledo, Spain to study with Leonid Blyum, founder of Advanced Biomechanical Rehabilitation (ABR), one of the world's only non-invasive treatment approaches for cerebral palsy.

I'll be traveling with my partner Bethany and my Alexander Technique teaching team (Ann Rodiger, Lindy Rogers, and Tom Baird) from the Balance Arts Center to work directly with Leonid and observe his groundbreaking methods.

We envision this cultural exchange in Toledo as the foundation for an ongoing partnership between Blyum and the Balance Art Center. By combining Blyum's biomechanical insights with the Balance Arts Center's Alexander Technique expertise, we're working to establish a new paradigm for cerebral palsy treatment: one that is non-invasive and student-directed, giving people with cerebral palsy the tools to fundamentally change their relationship with their bodies.

My Journey with Cerebral Palsy

As a kid, I was always aware that I had CP. Yes, I felt some pain in my legs, but I think perhaps even more than that, I was repeatedly spoken about by the medical system as someone who needed to be fixed. I remember feeling from a very young age that there was some kind of perfect cookie cutter version of a human body, and mine was very wrong, and my biggest goal should be to passively accept treatment that would bring me closer to that cookie cutter form.

For the first eighteen years of my life, I received various forms of medical treatment that aimed to “fix” my legs. Botox injections and serial casting held my spastic muscles in a permanent strech for weeks at a time; surgery derotated hip, lengthened my hamstrings, and split and reattached unruly tendons in to new places where they would “hold” my foot in a “straighter” position. I wore plastic braces which held my foot in the “right” position every day and many nights until I was 18. These treatments are not uncommon; at this point, they are more or less the medical standard for CP intervention. Most of my friends who have CP have undergone treatments of this nature.

All of these treatments were painful. At various points, I questioned their effectiveness, to myself and out loud to my care team. I remember, for example, very specifically saying when I was told my calves were too tight, “I don’t think it’s just that my calves are tight. When I do stair stretches, I can do them as well as anyone else. I think it is the way my calf muscles are interacting with everything else when I move.” My concerns and remarks were usually dismissed, or at best, seen as interesting but irrelevant. Repeatedly being silenced made the treatments not only physically, but also emotionally painful. Gradually, my awareness of my legs grew dimmer and dimmer as I learned to ignore them, treating them as an inconvenience that would never be “right,” that no intervention could improve. Also in this experience, I am not alone. Many of my friends who have CP have also described a lack of self-agency in their own care, and the way that that lack of agency created a disconnect between themselves and their bodies. For most, the journey to reignite the connection severed by invasive treatment has been as challenging as the treatment itself.

After years of grasping at straws to reconnect my mind and body, which had been so disconnected through these medical interventions, AT was the first thing that helped. In the context of AT, my body was observed as a whole, not as a collection of maladapted parts.

While most of the treatments I received for CP assumed that my muscles were tight, underdeveloped and weak, AT is the first modality that recognizes my leg muscles as tight specifically because they are tasked with supporting my body in a way they were not designed to do. It’s not that they are weak, but that they’re working too hard! As I have learned to release my overactive leg muscles, the deep support muscles of my body, which had always been almost “asleep” thanks to CP, have been waking up and participating. This has taken enormous pressure off my leg. My chronic pain is almost gone. My foot is changing shape. Muscles that have been underdeveloped my whole life are starting to fill out now that they have space to breathe. These changes feel miraculous and are occurring in an environment that is totally non-invasive, and which depends as much on my teacher’s expertise as it does on my own ability to participate and propel my own healing process. Knowing that, with my own mind and heart, I can advance my own healing fulfills a deep longing that has always been at the center of my heart.

I can see that many of my peers who have CP also long to participate in the care of their own bodies in a more active way. This is a big part of why I decided to train to teach Alexander Technique: once certified, I hope to bring a specialized version of AT to the CP community.

Discovering Leonid Blyum’s work:

Because she knew I was keen to share AT with the CP community, and because she thought it would positively impact my own teacher training, Ann introduced me to the work of Leonid Blyum, a Russian Cyberneticist living in Belgium, in February 2023.

As I watched Leonid’s lecture videos, I was filled with amazement and recognition. He was answering the swaths of questions about CP I had asked for eighteen years. Through his videos, I learned minute details of the interconnected muscle relationships that can be impacted by CP… I discovered explanations for the interconnectedness I had always felt in my own symptoms… I could understand so much more about which movements challenged me and why, because he was breaking it down in a clear and detailed way that surpassed any resource I had encountered before. I devoured his instructional videos and lectures, feeling that, after thirty years of looking, I had finally found the information I needed to understand how my own body worked. For example, I had always known my hamstrings were tight, but even after years of stretching, they never got looser. It seemed like the stretches just didn’t go deep enough. Through Leonid’s videos on the effects of CP on the whole body, I came to realize my tight hamstrings were the result of muscular compensations happening around my back! Together, Ann and I have been studying Blyum’s insights and integrating them into our AT work to great effect… for example, as my back has now become more aligned, my hamstrings are under much less strain and are beginning to stretch out. Similar phenomena have occurred over and over, thanks to a combination of Blyum’s explanations and our ability to integrate them with AT.

This past December, I had the opportunity to meet Leonid over zoom. I was able to thank him for his work, share how impactful it has been for me, and share the hopes Ann and I have for researching CP and AT in order to target our AT work to benefit the CP community. After exchanging emails, in February he invited us to come with the team from Balance Arts to Toledo, Spain, to work with him and observe him working with others. He offers workshops throughout Europe and recommended that we come to Toledo in fall 2025, as it is the largest workshop and will provide the most time to observe and dialogue with him.

This is the opportunity of a lifetime for me. Not only will I get to work with Leonid and experience his practice of ABR, which I can then take home and continue for myself… we will also be able to share our work of AT with him and gain invaluable feedback as we specify our AT practice to serve the CP community.

When I was a child, I would have given anything for CP care that is non-invasive, whole-body focused, and led by teachers who combine deep knowledge of cerebral palsy with genuine curiosity.

I know now that it is one of my life’s callings to be that teacher for others. This trip is an essential step along that path. Meeting Leonid and working with him will deeply inform my AT work and that of my teachers for years to come… and someday, I’ll be able to offer to others the care I wish I’d had for myself.

Trip Details:

To make this trip happen, we need $25,000. We are applying for grants and seeking funding from a variety of sources, and your contributions would mean so much. A breakdown of what funds will be used for is listed below:

Hailey McAvoy, Bethany Pietroniro, Ann Rodiger, Lindy Rogers, and Tom Baird will travel to Toledo, Spain to work with Leonid Blyum.

Airfare: $4,500

Ground Transportation: $500

Hotel: $6,652

Food: $2,000

Leonid Blyum consultation fee: $6,000

Contingencies for unforeseen expenses: $1,000

Taxes paid on donation income: $4,000

Total Budget: $24,652