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“People imagine that their bodies are disobedient and unreliable in carrying out their wishes, whereas nothing could be further from the truth.”
About the Book . Excerpt . Reviews . The Author
Thinking Aloud: Talks on Teaching the Alexander Technique
Excerpt
From the essay Non-doing.
“I thought I'd talk a bit this morning
about inhibition because this is a concept most easily
open to misunderstanding. For a lot of people who know
about the work, the whole idea of inhibition, of saying
"no," can be rather off-putting.
The general line of argument against inhibition is that
most people are asleep and dozy anyway. They need stimulating
and encouraging into action, rather than stopping and
preventing. The whole idea of restraint also comes into
play, wanting to do something and being stopped from doing
it and then, perhaps, being blackmailed into the idea
that you ought to restrain yourself from doing it. This
attitude leads to repressing and tension and all sorts
of very disagreeable things. Yet this has very little
to do, in a practical way, with our concerns.
What we are trying to encourage in ourselves and in other people is the practice of non-doing. You can only practice non-doing when you've got the time and opportunity to do it. You can practice non-doing in an Alexander lesson. That's what an Alexander lesson is for, if you're on the receiving end. Everyday life, however, is very much about doing.
Rarely do people manage to stop and quiet themselves and get themselves into a situation of non-doing. Non-doing is, above all, an attitude of mind. It's a wish. It's a decision to leave everything alone and see what goes on, see what happens. Your breathing and your circulation and your postural mechanisms are all working and taking over. The organism is functioning in its automatic way, and you are doing nothing.
If you're going to succeed in doing nothing, you must exercise control over your thinking process. You must really wish to do nothing. If you're thinking anxious, worried thoughts, if you're thinking exciting thoughts that are irrelevant to the situation at hand, you stir up responses in your body that are not consistent with doing nothing. It's not a matter of just not moving - that can lead to fixing or freezing - it's a matter of really leaving yourself alone and letting everything just happen and take over
That is what we're aiming at in an Alexander lesson...”