This ebook, Yoga and the Alexander Technique Principles of Good Body Use, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical, and it will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to do the asanas with great poise, posture, ease, and release.
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 yoga practitioner a tool to change any aspect of her yoga technique and postures that doesn’t work with what works. Inhibition helps the yoga practitioner identify what is interfering with the yoga asanas having the most user friendly yoga technique and posture possible, and then to be able to change what isn’t working.
INHIBITION ALLOWS THE YOGA PRACTITIONER TO LET GO OF WHAT ISN’T WORKING, AND TO REPLACE IT WITH WHAT DOES WORK IN HIS OR HER YOGA TECHNIQUE.
Inhibition is what you do after you’ve identified what is not working in your yoga technique. Let me explain. By the time a yoga practitioner has discovered, after years of doing yoga, that there are aspects of the yoga practitioner’s technique and posture that are interfering with the practitioner’s ability to do the yoga asanas without the wear and tear from the tension of controlling a postural technique done very slowly, these destructive habits are as central to the practitioner’s habits as the productive ones are.
So, how do you throw out the bath water, without throwing out the baby? You identify and list what is compromising your yoga asanas, and you also make a second list of what it is that works as you do yoga, 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 yoga practitioner starts an asana, she locks her neck, then this can be pretty invisible to most people. If as the practitioner is doing an asana, and she locks her hips, this can be almost undetectable. If the yoga practitioner locks and narrows her shoulders as she does an asana, this can be pretty invisible. If she shortens her spine as she aligns a vertical back during an asana, 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 start an asana, just before you move, you stop and choose to do something new, then you have just inhibited what isn’t serving you.
Ex: Just as the yoga practitioner starts an asana, she notices she locks her neck. The practitioner stops – doesn’t start yet. She now chooses not to lock her neck, and right after that new choice, she then begins the asana on a released neck.
What I have just described is inhibition or inhibiting a habit. It very subtle and very powerful, because for the first time, the yoga practitioner has chosen not to lock her neck and begin a form with an unconscious bad habit.
She has chosen to move without unconscious tension and compression of the neck/spine. Bringing this into the practitioner’s awareness is moving yoga away from being something you fix, to being something where you are truly experiencing all of your subtle habits, good and bad, you have done the asanas with. 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 DO YOGA TO A LEVEL THAT SHOWS YOU HOW YOU COMPROMISE YOUR YOGA TECHNIQUE, AND IT GIVES YOU THE TOOLS TO STOP DOING THIS.
