This ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Meditation (Sitting or Meditating), is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical. It will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to meditate with ease, pain-free, and without tension in your neck and hips.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
INHIBITION is one of the most powerful tools in the Alexander Technique. It gives the person who meditates a tool to change any aspect of her meditation technique and posture that doesn’t work with what works. Inhibition helps the person who meditates identify what is interfering with her meditating with the most balanced and comfortably dynamic technique and posture possible, and then to be able to change what isn’t working.
INHIBITION ALLOWS THE PERSON WHO MEDITATES TO LET GO OF WHAT ISN’T WORKING, AND TO REPLACE IT WITH WHAT DOES WORK IN HIS OR HER SITTING TECHNIQUE.
Inhibition is what you do after you’ve identified what is not working in your meditation technique. Let me explain. By the time a person who meditates has discovered, after years of meditating, that there are aspects of the sitter’s technique and posture that are interfering with the person who meditates ability to sit without wear and tear and at peace, these painful habits are as central to the person who meditates habits as the good body use ones are.
So, how do you throw out the bath water, without throwing out the baby? You identify and list what is compromising your meditating posture, and you also make a second list of what it is that works as you sit, and you only keep the good list.
There are the typical big postural problems – a slumped or over-arched back, obvious tension throughout the body, from hands to legs. Then there are the much more subtle problems, which may be a matter of degree. What I mean, is there may be postural and technique things that you do that are not obvious to anyone but an Alexander Technique teacher.
Ex: If right before the person meditates, she locks her neck, then this can be pretty invisible to most people. If right before the person meditates, she locks her hip joints, this can be almost undetectable. If the person meditating locks and narrows her shoulders as she sits, this can be pretty invisible. If she shortens her spine as she meditates for postural stability, this can put pressure on the nerves that originate at the spinal cord, and this can be hard to see.
So, what is the act of inhibition or inhibiting? If right before you do what you have always done when you meditate, just before you start, you stop and choose to do something new, then you have just inhibited what isn’t serving you.
Ex: Just as the person meditating is about to start, she notices she locks her neck. She stops – doesn’t begin her mantra or watching her breath yet. She now chooses not to lock her neck, and right after that new choice, she then begins meditating.
What I have just described is inhibition or inhibiting a habit. It very subtle and very powerful, because for the first time, the person meditating has chosen not to begin her sitting with an unconscious bad habit.
She has chosen to meditate without unconscious tension and compression of the neck/spine. Bringing this into the person who meditates awareness is moving a poor physical meditation posture from being something you fix, to being something where you are truly experiencing all of your subtle habits, good and bad, you have used as you sit. Now you have the tool, INHIBITION, that will allow you to perceive and choose which habits you want to keep or release.
THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE DOES TWO EXTRAORDINARY THINGS. IT TRULY RAISES YOUR AWARENESS OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING WHEN YOU MEDITATE TO A LEVEL THAT SHOWS YOU HOW YOU COMPROMISE YOUR MEDITATING POSTURE, AND IT GIVES YOU THE TOOLS TO STOP DOING THIS.
