About SOLV
by Alex McQueen
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Alex is a mind-body coach. She is also a certified yoga and meditation teacher focused on helping people resolve chronic symptoms, improve overall wellbeing and cultivate a deeper connection with themselves. Scroll down to learn more about chronic symptoms and her own recovery story.
About Alex
Alex is fascinated by the way history, culture, medicine, and lived experience come together in the expression of our health. Her background in both contemplative practice and academic studies enables a holistic, individualized, scientifically informed coaching style. Alex is trained in the Sarno x Sachs Solution, Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), Freedom From Chronic Pain (FFCP), and related mind-body approaches. Alex also has an MA in Medical Humanities & History.Â
Alex also comes to this work as an experiential expert: she suffered with several chronic symptoms for years. Alex has seen firsthand, through her own recovery journey (scroll down) and those of her clients’, that not only is healing possible, but that it can open the door to a richer, more empowered life. It has become her purpose to compassionately help others prevent chronic conditions or find lasting relief from them, and ultimately come home to themselves. Alex divides her time between Amsterdam and London. She enjoys history, art, yoga, hiking, and dogs.
About chronic
symptoms
Just as we can feel peace, joy and love, everybody experiences pain from time to time. Pain shows up in many forms; from acute pain such as a cut or a broken bone, to emotional pain such as grief or heartbreak. It’s part of the human condition.
Pain is not inherently a bad thing; it is protective by design. It helps us pull our hand away from a hot stove, signals us to rest, and can help us process, digest, move on and ultimately love deeper.
But pain can also show up as migraines, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, dizziness, tinnitus, pelvic pain - to name a few diagnoses. When those symptoms are recurring or persistent and last longer than 3 to 6 months, they are considered a chronic condition with no obvious solution. People are often told to just live with it and are not taken seriously by the medical model.
But here’s the good news; most chronic pain and related conditions can be SOLVED.
I experienced this firsthand, when after years of suffering from several chronic symptoms I was able to find relief by learning the science behind these symptoms.Â
I understood that chronic symptoms and diagnoses all stem from the same source: a sensitized brain and a nervous system stuck in fight/flight/freeze/fawn. There are several terms for this phenomenon such as Mind Body Syndrome (MBS), Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), and Neuroplasticity.
Chronic pain is increasingly understood as a combination of habituated neural pathways, a dysregulated nervous system, and protective emotional processing. This science offers us the opportunity to live in the solution!Â
That solution is you – your pain is real, but you are not broken. Your brain and body have been running on protective patterns, not defective ones. SOLV exists to help you rewire your brain and alter these patterns by using neuroscience, psychoeducation, self-compassion, meditation, somatics, and nervous system regulation practices. This is the heart of SOLV: to guide and provide you with the tools to resolve your chronic symptoms and build the foundation for a more balanced and freely lived life.
My recovery story
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My story… this is not a fairytale, it’s better, ever-evolving, it’s lifeÂ
One day, when I was a nineteen year old student in London during lockdown, I found myself bed-bound and alone. I was experiencing excruciating pelvic pain. I wasn’t sure if I'd even be able to make it out of the house to the supermarket. That day was one of my lowest points of living with chronic pain.
The immense pain I experienced varied between stabbing, burning and stinging. Besides the terrible pain, I also felt extremely scared and misunderstood. I was dismissed by doctors and specialists. Years passed.
Eventually, I got prescribed amitriptyline, an antidepressant, without an explanation as to why. This did offer some relief, but I had to keep upping my dose with the fear of one day maxing out. Thankfully I came across different mind-body healing modalities such as brain retraining, nervous system regulation and Yoga. My symptoms faded to almost non-existent.
A few years later, I developed unexplained chronic neck and foot pain. I was unable to walk without pain and I even failed my driving test due to the fact that I could not turn my head. At first, I did not think there was any correlation between these new symptoms and my previous chronic pelvic pain.Â
But I learnt that different symptoms stemmed from the same source: a brain and nervous system stuck in protection mode. Dr John Sarno called this phenomenon the “symptom imperative". This understanding made me feel validated and it significantly reduced my symptoms.
But most important, Dr Sarno's work introduced me to Nicole Sachs' life changing journaling method, JournalSpeak, which further propelled my healing. I became chronic pain free!
This new lease on life gave me a growing sense of purpose to help reduce and prevent other people from the unnecessary suffering of many chronic conditions. It is estimated that over 1.2 billion people worldwide suffer from chronic pain.
This led me to Nicole Sachs herself! I got the incredible opportunity to intern in-person for Nicole and her partner Lisa's, company BreakAwake. In June 2025, they brought me on as a faculty member for their yearly Freedom from Chronic Pain retreat. This was a life altering experience, where I was able to write and recite a meditation for all attendees. It made me come up with the idea to record my own meditations.
I also completed several trainings to become a mind-body practitioner. Nicole and Lisa hired me to be in their first cohort of coaches, a job that continues to inspire me daily.Â
In addition, I also work for the Pain Psychology Centre’s new London branch as therapist and intake coordinator. And now, I’m also welcoming clients into my private practice here at SOLV.
Contact Alex
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