ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE IN PREGNANCY AND CHILDBIRTH: INHIBITION

The way Alexander used the word 'inhibition' is very different from the way Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalytic theory, used it to describe an unhealthy suppression of emotions and memories. Alexander used inhibition in the physiological sense of the word, meaning the ability to 'switch off a nervous impulse to a muscle.

Alexander realized that, in order to find a new way of using his voice, and himself as a whole, he first had to stop behaving in his habitual unconscious way. Real change could not happen by just overlaying a new pattern of behaviour on top of the old - this would be a form of suppression. He discovered inhibition - that he had to stop his habitual response to the stimulus to speak before it started. Inhibition is the skill that Alexander devised to give us the ability to prevent our unconscious habitual misuse.

When we go to do something, the muscles get ready in the way that they have learned to do that activity, in what you could call their habitual fashion. For instance, while you are waiting for a traffic light to turn green, you may notice that your muscles are 'getting ready' for you to drive off. Most of the time we do not notice this preparatory muscular activity because usually when we react to a stimulus we act very quickly and automatically. Inhibiting means that when we receive a stimulus to act, we pause momentarily to stop the habitual preparatory tension: this creates a space in which we have a choice about how we respond - we can go right ahead and act habitually, do it differently or maybe choose to do nothing at all. It doesnot involve muscular effort, but is the mental decision not to react in our habitual way. By constantly practising inhibition in our everyday lives, we can gradually break the cycle of responding to a stimulus in a habitual way. The discovery that it is possible consciously to inhibit our initial reaction to a stimulus is what makes the Alexander Technique different from any other method of re-education. To Alexander inhibiting was not a negative but a positive process and the very cornerstone of his Technique.

The next time the phone rings, take note of your habitual response. It is quite likely that you jump up immediately to answer it, and tighten your neck muscles and interfere with the 'primary control'. To change this way of reacting, you may instead like to think of a gentle voice saying, 'Hold on a minute,' and then give yourself time to choose how you use yourself to answer the phone. This may sound, though, as if were we to inhibit all the time we would never get anything done, but in practice it takes only a split second and actually gives us more time and energy as we stop rushing ahead of ourselves.

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