06/03/13
One of the Alexander Technique’s key concept is the idea of delaying our immediate reaction when facing any stimuli on our daily life.
The AT teacher frequently asks the student during an AT lesson to pause before answering to any suggestion made. For instance, if the teacher asks you to sit down: stop, wait and then execute the act of sitting.
It is part of the human condition to react to almost everything automatically and unconsciously. However, it is possible to stop before acting and this is exactly the ability that is developed during AT lessons.
There are innumerable benefits coming from this practice of delaying your answer after a stimulus. Just remember the situations that we regretted after saying something. Usually we think afterwards: “ If I just had waited a little bit more before saying that”.
Besides preventing unwanted reactions, when we pause before acting we better understand the causes of bad posture when sitting by a computer, for example.
We often sit in ways that cause ourselves pain and discomfort. If we try to ‘correct’ it soon we are back to that same way we were used to. These are postural-behavioral patterns, which means: we express in our body our emotional and mental states (e.g. boredom, worry, stress etc). In other words, when facing stimuli such as emotions and thoughts, we react through our body language.
With the recurrence of these stimuli, the repeated answers get inscribed in our brain. This, in its turn, sends these answers to the muscles through the nervous system. That is, a fixed and chronic neuromuscular pattern is established. These postural-behavioral patterns are investigated during the AT lessons and the first step in this direction is the practice to stop before the stimuli.
When we prevent automatic and habitual reactions, we find more opportunities for better choices in our daily life and more chances to change ingrained patterns.
The key concept explained here and taught during the Alexander Technique lessons is called neuromuscular inhibition and have the goal to prevent automatic reactions and to create condition to new possibilities of answers.
Deborah Bayardino George
Alexander Technique Teacher
AmSAT Certified
503.753.6436
"You translate everything, whether physical, mental or spiritual, into muscular tension."
F.M. Alexander