Inhibiting

INHIBITING:
YOUR "MOMENT OF COMPLETE FREEDOM"

Joe Armstrong
May 1999
Boston

Inhibiting is really the cornerstone of the Alexander Technique, but it's also one of the greatest challenges to bring fully into daily living. And even though the word has a pretty negative meaning in everyday language, inhibiting actually becomes something very liberating as we use it in the Technique because it essentially means leaving out or reducing to a minimum whatever we might be doing that could keep us from our fullest psychophysical integrating at any given moment. Alexander, himself, liked to say that inhibiting gives us not only "freedom of thought and action," but also "freedom IN thought and action."

ILLUSTRATION

After you read this paragraph, set these pages down and give yourself a few minutes to notice what happens when you get your next impulse to do something - even if it's just the impulse to raise up your hand and arm to scratch your head, or to shift your weight because your feet or sitting bones are tired. Then pick the pages back up again to go on reading the next paragraph once you feel you've made this observation.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Did you respond immediately to the impulse to move, or did you take some time to consider doing it in a way that helped you stay with your overall going up and lengthening and widening? (I'm assuming here that you already have some experience of going up from having lessons in the Technique.) Inhibiting is what you've done if you took that extra time before responding - especially if it helped make your response more balanced and integrated.

In its fullest form, inhibiting gives you the option of keeping at bay all immediate ways of responding that are automatic or habitual - whether they happen only in your thinking or in actually doing something. (Usually the two activities are much more closely bound together than we realize.)

When you can refrain from responding automatically and habitually in the face of any kind of demand, by staying fully free instead of tightening and clamping down, then you have a much better chance of responding in a way that's most balanced, most true to the moment, and that's most humane, even if you need to go ahead and make the same response you were about to make automatically. So inhibiting can also provide you with more of a chance to have a greater wisdom and integrity as your basis for whatever you do or however you respond - especially when you see you don't really need to respond at all, or that it wouldn't be best for the situation if you do. Or you might realize you don't yet have all the facts or information you need for thinking or acting in the most constructive and productive way, and you need to be able to wait openly until you do.

To clarify inhibiting in his writings, Alexander quoted the Nobel prize physiologist, Sir Charles Sherrington, who wrote in The Brain and its Mechanisms, "often, to refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one, because inhibition is co-equally with excitation a nervous activity." (The Universal Constant in Living, F.M. Alexander, p. 110.) So inhibiting is even considered by scientists to be a very basic function in living. Some processes and actions need to be held back so that others can go ahead most efficiently and effectively.

Of course, inhibiting alone, is not enough to create the full freedom in responding that we're looking for with the Technique; but it's the beginning, the starting point. It needs to come first. When you can delay your automatic responding, this then gives you the best chance to direct yourself to go up, lengthen, widen and integrate according to Alexander's discovery for using yourself as a whole. And then that integrating itself actually becomes your gauge and source of choosing more wisely and responding more humanely.

LEARNING INHIBITING

In Alexander lessons, then, when we use getting up from and sitting down on a chair, inhibiting is actually the most basic thing we're trying to help you learn and develop. These two seemingly simple, everyday actions also reveal a lot about how the character of all your responses serves you to your best or worst advantage in any other life situation - especially at those times when you might be trying hard to get some result or trying too hard to make it right or excellent.

Through chair work you can also find out a lot about how you behave under stress, frustration, or too much stimulation, or how other feelings might influence how you think and do things - because reacting to the prospect of getting up and sitting down also sets off the same basic kind of thinking and responding in relation to gravity as reacting to the prospect of anything else happening to you does, whether it's something in the very immediate or the more distant future.

So it doesn't really matter whether it's getting up from a chair, planning out how you'll get to know someone, or solving the problems of the world - the same fundamental use of yourself in relation to gravity needs to be involved in everything you do so that you can stay whole while you do it. This is why Alexander called what he was trying to help people achieve through the Technique, "improving our reaction to the stimulus of living."

One of the things we want most to help you see through inhibiting is that most of the time your automatic or habitual ways of doing and responding usually start out as automatic or habitual ways of thinking. But the whole chain reaction linking thinking to doing usually happens so quickly and so subconsciously that it's very hard to see it or catch it in yourself until you've had a chance to experience the integrated way of being and moving that a skilled teacher's hands can give you while taking you into and out of a chair as you "leave yourself alone" or "do nothing" but maintain your lengthening and widening and going up.

Once you've experienced the integrating and going up that come with sustaining your lengthening and widening both before and during standing and sitting, then you can begin to use it more and more as a basis for finding the freest way of thinking and responding in all other situations. And you can also begin to see more easily that it's really your way of thinking that you need to change or suspend (inhibit) and redirect so that you have the best chance of changing your responding into something more integrated and whole. Just trying to change your responding alone doesn't really get to the root of the issue at all. If that's all your try to do, you'll usually just change your responding into another variation of your old habitual way.

REACTING AND RESPONDING

As you begin to work more on inhibiting, it can be helpful to make a distinction between "reacting" and "responding." Reacting happens first but isn't usually visible to an onlooker, whereas responding is the carrying through of that reacting into ways of moving - behaving - that are usually fairly obvious to anyone watching you closely or carefully. Reacting tends to involve processes in you that happen more "beneath the surface," like changes in your breathing, blood flow, skin texture, and other internal changes that can vary according to what affects you (either consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously) both from your outside surroundings and from within you in your dreaming, imagining, thinking, and feeling. Responding, on the other hand, involves muscular actions which usually lead into movement - even if it's only your eyes blinking or your head moving ever so slightly when something suddenly comes to your attention.

This might seem like a false division to make, because most of the time reacting and responding can seem to be one in the same. Or, at the very least, they can seem to happen in such a direct flow from one into the other that you might find it impossible to tell where any changeover actually takes place. Even so, what we're learning with the Technique is how to free ourselves from the strong chain between whatever is stimulating us and our responding to it. So distinguishing between reacting and responding can help, I think, in giving us a way to extend the time we need for working on choosing the best way of responding.

It takes a lot of practice to develop enough skill at inhibiting to be very successful with it in everyday life, and this skill also grows hand in hand with your skill in directing yourself through the neck-head-torso-limb sequence of integrating according to the best working of Primary control. The better you are at inhibiting your automatic ways of responding, the more it's possible for you to direct your integrating. And, vice versa, the better your integrating direction is working, the easier it is for you to deal with more and more powerful sources of reacting and responding by inhibiting.

PRACTICE I

Alexander figured out a way of practicing to make his own inhibiting stronger and more dependable, and I think we can all benefit by working along the same lines in our learning the Technique too. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that, until you've got this procedure fully "under your belt," you probably don't yet have a complete grasp of the Technique.

To start out, choose an action that you'd like to see if you can do in a better way than you regularly do it when you need to do it quickly or automatically. But choose something fairly short and simple that doesn't always have to be done too suddenly - like singing a note or phrase from a song, speaking a line of a poem, picking up a pen to make a mark, raising your arm to wave hello, taking a single step, etc. Then deliberately set aside a lot more time for building up to doing the action than you'd usually give yourself - even as much as five, ten, or fifteen minutes - though you might actually need only a few seconds when the moment to act finally comes. In other words, give yourself time to WAIT, even though you've definitely decided on what it is that you're going to do.

Don't go right ahead and do it. WAIT.

Then, while you're waiting, use that extra time to make sure you've got your integrating going as well as you can. (I'm assuming here that, to a certain extent, you already understand how to give your primary directions so that they have the best influence on your integrating.) And once you feel you're fairly well in command of your integrating and you're able to go on sustaining it while you're continuing to wait and continuing to delay any responding, DECIDE - only decide - that you'll do the action you first chose you'd do - but in a few more minutes, not immediately. Wait, wait, wait, wait, WAIT!

Try to notice if just making that decision itself causes you to start to change anything at all in your overall integrating. Often it will. And if it does - especially if it does - just go on postponing the action so that you can return to reinforcing your integrating and going up as your main activity.

When you finally come to the stage that your deciding doesn't distract you from your integrating and going up, then you might be ready to go on to the moment of finally doing the action. So go on with your directing to lead into doing the action.

But THEN, just a second or so before you're going to do the action, WAIT again. Don't do the action after all!

Instead, decide again what you'll do, just as if you were choosing all over again from the start. But, this time, give yourself several other possible choices besides your original one. (Alexander called this "making a fresh decision" - this redeciding, at what he realized is your most "critical moment" - just before you turn thinking into doing.)

Then, as before, in this new, "fresh" decision-making, again keep your overall integrating and going up as your main priority while you make your new choice of action from these next four options. Choose either to:

1. go on, after all, and do your original choice of action, or

2. do another fairly different action, or

3. do yet another action than either of the first two, or

4. just continue going on with your basic integrating, directing and going up.

This way, whichever choice you make can have the best chance to be filled with your fullest integrating and going up. So, no matter what you finally do, your integrating still stays your main activity; and the choice of specific actions stays more secondary right on through finally doing one of them. And if one of your choices is something that stirs up a lot of enthusiasm or excitement in you - for instance, like music making often can - this temporary setting aside can kind of let you place it on an imaginary shelf beside you, still "shimmering" with its fullest inspiration and intensity until you're really ready to approach doing it with your best integrating.

This delaying also helps more and more to deflect any power your inspiration or excitement might have over you that could actually stand in the way of your doing the action most completely and wonderfully, especially if it's a deeply ingrained action that you've learned to do subconsciously - like speaking, singing or walking.

In a way, you could say that this fresh decision-making procedure actually equalizes your choices so that you can bring the same power of integrating to all of them. Just waiting and directing (your fourth option) can contain the same directing energy as the excitement of singing a note from a beautiful song. So when you work this way for a while then, it obviously can empower your directing energy as much as it can improve your inhibiting ability.

You might benefit very much from going through this whole procedure several times before you finally let yourself go ahead with the action you ultimately choose to do - especially if it's one you usually tend to rush through in a way that gets you stiff or tired or gets you frustrated because it often turns out less successful or rewarding than you hope it will be.

It should be clear by now, then, that the time just before you act is the most crucial - the "critical moment" - even though it might ultimately mean leaving only a split second more between your deciding and your acting than you usually take. And when you've really left out all the unnecessary extra preparing, meddling and contriving you might be making out of habit to be sure you'll be right, it can often seem like the action just "does itself," without much, if any, sense of effort at all. Alexander's term for it was "non-doing," as distinguished from "doing" - which usually carries with it some quality of "end-gaining."

THE BROADER VIEW

Another thing that inhibiting can expose to us is the fact that that we're actually doing a lot of our preparatory thinking, choosing, and deciding "subconsciously" in a way that we've never really been aware of very much at all. Much of our responding usually starts so immediately after our thinking and deciding because we're also guessing ("preconceiving") so much ahead about what we might need to be prepared for ("end-gaining") that we get taken away from our awareness of what's happening NOW in our going up and integrating. We're often trying so hard to be sure that we'll be prepared in just the right way when the moment comes to act that we actually set ourselves up to be "wrong" when it finally does arrive. And then if something different from what we were expecting happens, we usually have to take extra time and effort dismantling the "wrong" before we can find our way through to the "right" or more appropriate response - for NOW.

It's amazing how many people seem to think they know for sure what's going to happen in the future, especially the future in the next few moments. Or, even if they don't think they know the future for sure, they often feel they can at least do something to make it go their way if they try to control things in some definite, pre-determined, getting set way so that they'll be sure to get just the results they think they want or need (again, "end-gaining"). Inhibiting can throw all kinds of light on these, or any other, habitual tendencies, and it offers a possibility for freeing ourselves from them that is really quite unique.

Alexander wrote of the Technique as a way of "bridging the gap between the 'subconscious' and the conscious . . . by means of a knowledge gained through practical experience, which will enable man to inhibit his impulsive 'subconscious' reaction to a given stimulus, and to hold it inhibited while initiating a conscious direction, guidance, and control of the use of himself that was previously unfamiliar." ("Preface to the New Edition," Universal Constant, 1946. Italics, F.M.A..) Impulsive, subconscious reactions also contain a whole realm of hidden material about our personality, character, attitude, etc.

("Subconscious" in Alexander terms is different from the expression "the unconscious" as it's used in psychoanalysis, for example, to refer to the source of material in our dreaming. In the Alexander Technique, "subconscious activity" refers to anything that we are doing or thinking that we could be conscious of, but often aren't - until, for instance, it's pointed out to us in an Alexander lesson or until we notice it for ourselves when the teacher is helping us to stay aware of our lengthening and widening and we catch our thinking about preparing for an action beginning to interfere with our overall integrating. In the early stages of lessons, much of the time we don't realize that we've been affected by this subconscious interference until we've actually finished making the action and we see that it didn't happen in the most integrated way it could have.)

Eventually, inhibiting can also expose the true nature of our motives for doing whatever we do or for thinking whatever we think ("fixed prejudices," "beliefs," and "preconceived ideas," for example, are some of our main subconscious guiding influences, according to Alexander). Sometimes we might think we're going to do something for a certain reason, or we might believe that we're responding in a certain way that we've deliberately decided on or chosen; but often, when we inhibit and take this extra bit of time between deciding and doing, we might discover that there are actually other, more subconscious reasons behind thinking or responding in that particular way that can make the quality of the outcome seem to betray whatever our best, conscious intentions might be. For instance, when a person seems to be doing something very kind and is trying to be very gentle or positive about doing it, yet there still seems to be a forcing or controlling quality underlying it that leaves the action somehow distorted or unfulfilled. It doesn't really ring true, and that person hasn't really accomplished the gentle, caring thing they consciously intended, even if their heart was in the right place in deciding to do it.

So you can see then that inhibiting in the Technique can even provide us with the chance for a unique kind of "self-psychoanalysis" if we make the fullest use of this chance it gives us to look into our innermost motives for acting and responding. Regular psychoanalysis and psychotherapy often help us understand the reasons from the past that lay behind our behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs, but they don't seem to offer such a practical way of working on unraveling and changing how those motives actually operate in this real-life region between deciding and doing that usually stays hidden and unused - this "gap between the subconscious and the conscious," to use Alexander's phrase for it.

I've known people, for instance, who've done years of intensive psychoanalysis and have developed a deep and refined understanding of how people and events in their past have affected and influenced the way they think and behave. And I can see how this understanding has given them great help in many ways, but I also see that, to a certain extent, they still tend to respond in the very same ways they always have at the critical moments when their most troublesome characteristics tend to get in the way of successful and compassionate communicating and relating.

The most unfortunate thing about this situation, though, is that they often consider that they're dealing with these tendencies and attitudes, etc. as much as possible through their psychoanalytical work and therefore don't allow for the possibility that the Alexander Technique - specifically, inhibiting - can offer them any help in this realm; so they keep the Technique compartmentalized as only being something that can help them on a "physical" level.

The extra time and space that inhibiting provides also gives us the opportunity to look at ourselves and our lives from a much broader perspective. Alexander called on us to try to "cease our muddled examination of the details just in front of us, and try to see our problems in the broad terms of one who can stand back and see life moving through the centuries." (Man's Supreme Inheritance, p. 99) And this larger view can also reveal how tradition, convention, archetype, and myth might be subconsciously guiding our thinking and doing.

As Thomas Moore says in Care of the Soul, "although life seems to be a matter of literal causes and effects, in fact we are living out deep stories, often unconsciously" . . . and . . . "We are condemned to live out what we cannot imagine. We can be caught in myth, not knowing that we are acting as a character in a drama. [If] we become familiar with the characters and themes that that are central to our myths, we can be free from their compulsions and the blindness that comes upon us when we are caught up in them." (p. 224) Inhibiting allows for us to find that split-second where those characters and themes might actually start to play themselves out in everyday life so that we can see past our "blindness" to them and take a more active role in managing our own destinies.

Usually - at least in the early stages of learning the Technique - if we respond quickly, we can be pretty sure that almost all our responding will be habitual (our "habitual manner of use of the self," as Alexander called it); and, if we're responding habitually, we usually don't have the best chances of being truly free and spontaneous or fully constructive and caring. Inhibiting, then, not only gives us more freedom from habit, but it also gives us more freedom to choose new ways of thinking and responding. And I think this is sometimes what can make a lot of people shy away from or resist the Technique when they first encounter it. The thought of finding ways of thinking or behaving that are different from our habitual, automatic ones seems either just too big a demand or just too threatening to our character and the way we're used to behaving in most social situations.

The "herd instinct," as Alexander mentioned, is another force that can be behind automatic behavior: when we get swept away by the emotions, actions, and attitudes of others around us and we find ourselves thinking and doing things the same way as everybody else without making any real choice about whether we want to think or do them that way, or whether we even want to do them at all. "Subconscious imitation," can be another big influence on us too, as Alexander wrote; but we'll look at these facets of the Technique more at length in other sections.

Peter Davison's poem "No Escape," captures much of the essence of inhibiting. He wrote if after studying the Technique for several years and gave me special permission to include it here.

NO ESCAPE

No, not yet, move nothing until
you have filled yourself with
intention, or else

your act will freeze, immutable, and
your thought will have aborted
into misshapen stumbling.

We stammer in the effort to speak, lurch
out of a passion to walk, slump
in lieu of sitting; yet,

within, awareness yearns toward
an attainable state out of which
we seek to direct our selves

as a rider guides the most accomplished of
horses, crupper gathering, hooves
pattering, neck yearning toward

heaven, and the supple trunk
conveys itself over the earth without
anticipation or effort.

This is the ascent into the self,
encountering possibility just as it
flowers into the actual.

We attain fulfillment only if we carry
the breath of the world
without surrender
or escape.

Ultimately, inhibiting can become a constantly ongoing activity while nearly every moment presents us with a whole range of things to respond to that can very easily provoke automatic and habitual ways of thinking or responding. So if you can identify what things are actually going on each moment - both outside you and inside you - then inhibiting and going up in relation to all of them from moment to moment can become your basic way of responding to life - you whole attitude to life . . . your "reaction to the stimulus of living." Then you're inhibiting at the deepest level.

Probably the most challenging place to bring in inhibiting is in speaking and conversation - especially when you're talking about something that's exciting or difficult or talking with people who are competitive, controlling or argumentative in the way they speak. But even remembering for a split second, before each thing you say, to free yourself from the temptation to take a quick breath and rush on into your words, can make a remarkable difference, not only in your own quality of communication, but also in your listeners'. (Again, we'll go into this more in detail in another section.)

PRACTICE II

One simple way of developing your skill at inhibiting in actual daily life is to choose some action that you usually do many times a day - like reaching to open a door, lifting a foot to go up a stair, moving to answer a phone - something fairly simple - and see if you can remember throughout the day, each time it comes up, to pause a moment to give some attention to your freeing and your going up and integrating before you go ahead and do it. Sometimes you might want, and need, to take longer than just a moment - especially if the action is very demanding "physically" or "emotionally" (for instance, if you have to lift something very heavy or if you have to talk with somebody you usually find difficult) - so that you can give your going up and integrating their fullest chance to enhance the activity. Then reflect back at the end of the day and figure out how successful you were at remembering.

In the original way of teaching the Technique, you'd usually be asked to think of inhibiting as "stopping," rather than "pausing" or "delaying." Also, along with "stopping," you'd be asked to "say 'NO'" to any habitual tension you might be about to make or any habitual thinking you're starting to do, whether it's because of any preconceived ideas you might tend to have from what happened in this kind of situation in the past or because of what you are guessing (consciously or subconsciously) might be about to happen that would take some special preparing. In other words, you would STOP and "say No" (in your imagination, rather than out loud) just when you start thinking you know what the future holds - whether it's in the moment before an Alexander teacher seems to be going to stand you up from sitting in a lesson or in predicting and planning for the more distant future. But I find the word "stopping" can sometimes tempt you to stiffen and hold, and I think the words "pausing" or "delaying" often work better.

Ultimately, the Alexander Technique can let you be free from both the past and the future so that you can be more fully present and original in the moment.* This is what inhibiting allows us to do most, so that we can draw on both our past experience, our creative imagination, and our reasoning as wisely as possible in choosing the best course of responding in the present or in planning for the future. But, in the case of the future, inhibiting also allows us to be flexible, so that if what we've planned for or hoped for doesn't happen, then we can be even freer to accept and adapt to whatever else actually does occur. I think this is really what true spontaneity means, and it's also why we often say the Alexander Technique is a technique for the unknown.

* Inhibiting "is really your one moment of complete freedom." Kitty Wielopolska, in Never Ask Why: The Alexander Work and Schizophrenia. At press, Novis, Aarhus, Denmark.

Created on ... November 13, 2000

INHIBITING:YOUR "MOMENT OF COMPLETE FREEDOM"

Joe Armstrong May 1999Boston