Inhibition and Noticing
Inhibition is perhaps the keystone of the Alexander Technique. Despite the negative connotation the word came to have due to Freudian psychology, Alexander never stopped using it because no other term expressed more precisely what he wanted to say. To Alexander, inhibition was the act of delaying the instantaneous response to a stimulus until a response could be made that didn't impinge upon functional balance of the organism as a whole. Inhibition is the flip-side of excitation, but Alexander felt that inhibition was even more important in that it came first. To refrain from an act is no less an act that to commit one and inhibition is the act that sets the stage for all the amazing changes that follow.
In my teaching although I use the term Noticing what I am really talking about is inhibition. Like inhibition the first thing that Noticing gets you to do is stop. It is impossible to change the way you do things if you keep doing them the old way. So, by Noticing before you jump into your old way of doing things, you create the possibility for something new to happen.
The second thing that Noticing does is it switches you out of "feeling" mode into an open-ended state of awareness. Easily paying attention to the openess above your head prevents you from checking your body kinesthetically to make sure it feels ready to move. This is the first thing you do before moving according to your old habits. Before we move habitually, we project on to our body our impression of what we think it should feel like in order to successfully accomplish that movement. Generally, that feeling gets projected so unconsciously, so fast and so often that we believe that is part and parcel of the movement itself and subsequently we can't imagine accomplishing that movement without first having that feeling.
The simple beauty of Noticing is that it disrupts all of that in a flash. By shifting our attention to the openess above our head, which can't be felt, we switch out of feeling mode. This frees us from the assumption/validation cycle that traps us in our habitual way of doing things. As long as we continue to renew our Noticing, our organism can respond according to the needs of the activity and we move more harmoniously.
In my teaching although I use the term Noticing what I am really talking about is inhibition. Like inhibition the first thing that Noticing gets you to do is stop. It is impossible to change the way you do things if you keep doing them the old way. So, by Noticing before you jump into your old way of doing things, you create the possibility for something new to happen.
The second thing that Noticing does is it switches you out of "feeling" mode into an open-ended state of awareness. Easily paying attention to the openess above your head prevents you from checking your body kinesthetically to make sure it feels ready to move. This is the first thing you do before moving according to your old habits. Before we move habitually, we project on to our body our impression of what we think it should feel like in order to successfully accomplish that movement. Generally, that feeling gets projected so unconsciously, so fast and so often that we believe that is part and parcel of the movement itself and subsequently we can't imagine accomplishing that movement without first having that feeling.
The simple beauty of Noticing is that it disrupts all of that in a flash. By shifting our attention to the openess above our head, which can't be felt, we switch out of feeling mode. This frees us from the assumption/validation cycle that traps us in our habitual way of doing things. As long as we continue to renew our Noticing, our organism can respond according to the needs of the activity and we move more harmoniously.
posted by Mio Morales at 10/13/2006 06:31:00 AM
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