“Boiled down, it all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus. But no one will see it that way. They will see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that a pupil decides what he will or will not consent to do. They may teach you anatomy and physiology till they are black in the face – you will still have this to face: sticking to a decision against your habit of life.”
F.M. Alexander (Articles and Lectures – Teaching Aphorisms p203)

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Introduction

LW: When Alexander first discovered the new head, neck and back pattern and tried to maintain it in speaking, he found he could not do so. After much reasoning and experimentation, he finally reached the conclusion that there was an inseparable fusion between the idea of speaking and the body pattern always used in speaking. If he was to get rid of the old body pattern that had caused his voice trouble and substitute the new head, neck and back pattern when he spoke, he would have to get rid of the idea of speaking! He cut through this seemingly impossible impasse by some brilliant thinking. He ‘inhibited’ or said ‘no’ to the idea of speaking, and then focused his mind on each of the component parts of speaking, such as opening his mouth, saying a sound, saying a word, etc. In this way he was able to keep the thought of speaking out of his mind and yet do the things that resulted in speech. In this way, and with severe mental discipline, he was able to maintain the new head, neck and back pattern when he spoke or recited. This, indeed, is the bare bones of Alexander’s technique of ‘inhibition’.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 2 p19)

FPJ: Inhibition is a negative term, but it describes a positive process. By refusing to respond to a stimulus in a habitual way you release a set of reflexes that lengthen the body and facilitate movement. The immediate result of Alexandrian inhibition is a sense of freedom, as if a heavy garment that had been hampering all of your movements has been removed.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 2 p11)

WC: The whole fundamental principle of the Technique is to get people to stop doing things.
(Personally Speaking – part 3 p101)

PM: In Alexander’s sense “stopping doing” means stopping that which leads to over-activity. It does not mean collapse (relaxation), for this is a doing of a different and even more harmful kind. To gain improvement it is necessary to stop thinking in certain ways and to think differently.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p13)

WC: The whole point is that, from a practical point of view, certain things have got to happen and certain things mustn’t happen. And really it’s much more important to see that the wrong thing doesn’t happen than to see that the right thing happens. We’re such creatures of habit that if the wrong thing is allowed to happen, a wrong habit is readily established. People make the mistake of believing that if they carry out an action somehow or another and it’s got a lot of mistakes in it, they’ll somehow be able to correct the mistakes later on. But Alexander used to say: “You never will.” So it’s important to take things very gradually, step by step, without any constraint of time. You’ve got to be prepared to carry out each bit of the procedure in such a way that the wrong thing doesn’t happen. It might take a lot of time, but really it takes the time it takes.
(Personally Speaking – part 3 p125)

General Discussion

LW: Alexander used the words inhibit and inhibition in the physiological sense, not in the Freudian sense. The inhibitory is that function of the brain which says yes or no to the idea of a given activity. ‘Inhibition, as we do it,’ he once said to his students, ‘is not suppression but volition. It enables us to do what we have decided we want to do.’
Each one of us uses this inhibitory function of the mind and says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to various activities all day long. I decide to leave the room, for example; my mind makes a decision and my body carries it out. Or, I may first decide to leave the room, and then I change my mind and decide not to leave it. The inhibitory function of my brain is at work – my body starts towards the door and then stops.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 15 p152)

WC: It is people’s feelings that matter and these feelings involve, “I’m going to do something. I’m going to move. I wonder if I can do it this time. I think I’m going to fail again. I’m going to make a mess of it once more.” These are the sorts of feelings that are attached to it and they are mostly anxious feelings. You are really saying to people that it is not only saying, “No” to the movement but it is “No” to all these sorts of feelings, calming yourself, getting your thoughts and feelings together in such a way that no longer are you so involved in trying to gain this end.
(The Act of Living – Saying and Meaning No p138)

MB: I think that a major difficulty is that the problem lies much further back than most people including a lot of Alexander teachers imagine. Everyone nowadays thinks that what they are doing is inhibiting getting in or out of chairs, but that’s not what it’s about at all. Instead, what has to take place is inhibiting the response to the first reaction to get out of the chair. That is the essence of the Technique.
(Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules – part 1 p32)

WC: If the pupil, on being asked to sit, does not say “no,” doesn’t say “no” and mean “no” and stop, then everything else that follows will be a delicate or not-so-delicate form of doing. You’re asked to sit in the chair and you skip the “no” and you think, “Ah, now I’m going to be sat down or I’ve got to sit, so what I’ve got to do is to direct my head forward and up or direct my knees to go,” or whatever. When you direct those things without first stopping, you are in fact doing the directions.
There’s no difficulty about putting your head forward and up; it just happens not to be useful. You can put your knees forward and away, you can do all sorts of things with yourself. There isn’t any question about doing. You can do it all right, but that isn’t what we want. We don’t want this activity to be carried out by the doing process, we want it to be carried out by a releasing process. The only way you’ll get a releasing process is if you stop.
(Thinking Aloud – Allowing Time to Say No – p53)

PM: The desire “to do” is very strong. Pupils, at least most of them, are very reluctant to give up control of themselves. Like the pupil upon whose leg I was working when she was lying on a table. She was holding it very tightly and I was trying to persuade her to let it go. “Let it go!”, I implored her. “Let it drop!” “But”, she said, “if I let it go it would drop!” She immediately realized just what she had said, however, and after that she was more able to leave it alone.
(On Giving Directions, Doing and Non-Doing – STAT Memorial Lecture 1963)

FPJ: To Alexander, inhibition had a definite, operational meaning. It meant delaying the instantaneous response (learned or instinctive) to a stimulus until the response could be carried out in the way that was best suited to the well-being of the organism as a whole.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 4 p25)

LW: Alexander’s technique of inhibition, therefore, consists of three elements: (1) a continually renewed decision to inhibit or say ‘no’ to the idea of speaking; (2) continually renewed thoughts to activate the new head, neck and back pattern; (3) the breaking down of the act of speaking into its smallest steps and the focusing on each step separately as if it were the end.
These three elements work together – there is a blend or intertwining between the three. It is this technique that successfully eliminated the idea of speaking and made it possible for Alexander to maintain the new head, neck and back pattern when he spoke and recited. With the new pattern operating, his vocal organs were used in an entirely different way and he was freed from his difficulties.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 15 p152)

MB: But where FM was so brilliant was in the way that he gave us the means to improve our use by thinking. The point to note here is that the bad habits we have are in the nervous system. Often people think they’re in the body but that’s quite wrong – habits manifest in the body, but they’re in the brain and the nervous system. If that wasn’t the case, FM could never have got control of the problem. Whatever the impulse as a response to the stimulus was, he realised that if he could stop it at its source – for example, by giving himself the order “No, I won’t speak” he was gradually able to assert conscious control. In the end, he only did what he intended to do rather than something being done by force of habit. He found out that he had to say ‘no’ to his first reaction to the idea, say, to speak, rather than saying ‘no’ to the speech act itself.
(Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules – part 1 p32)

FPJ: Some people have tried to dispense with inhibition in their explanations of the Technique, or to bring it in as an afterthought.
Pupils are asked to say over the directive orders to themselves while the instructor by manipulation gives them the “correct” experience that goes with the orders. Once the experience and order have been linked, they are substituted for the old stimulus-response pattern. This procedure, whether it succeeds or not, is not the Alexander Technique, but a form of classical conditioning.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 4 p25)

WC: One of the things that often makes saying “no” harder is giving the directions in words. It seems to me that telling yourself subvocally, “the head to go forward and up” and so on is a very, very powerful stimulus to do it. If I tell myself things, I usually tell myself to do things. I’m not so subtle in conversations with myself that I just tell myself to give consent to do something. I don’t just say, you know, “Come on, old fellow, just let it happen.” I say, “Wake up at the back there!”
F.M., in talking about these things, said, “Talk to it nicely.” Talk to it nicely means don’t shout, don’t get cross, but do really talk to it. And the problem is getting that mental attitude, that psychophysical attitude. Without that attitude it isn’t possible to say “no.” And without saying “no,” you might as well face the fact that if you haven’t said “no” anything that follows will be doing, and what follows isn’t the reflex working. What follows is you doing it.
(Thinking Aloud – Allowing Time to Say No – p55)

Conclusion

PM: Anything you do, at first, you do wrong. The first thing is to learn to let yourself alone, to be. After you have learned to do that, then you may bring about activity.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p4)

WC: If you can make this inhibition really effective in that way and stop off the old habitual pattern, then you have got the possibility of being able to generate a new pattern and get things working in a different way, in a way that you have chosen and a way that you want.
Of course, this will take time. It will not be quick and it will not be easy. There will be a lot of uncertainty in it because the new way is going to be unfamiliar. Until you actually try and get into it you haven’t got the experience to know what it is really and truly like and what it involves. It doesn’t solve all the problem – you have effectively choked off the old but you’ve still got a tremendous lot to deal with to generate the new. What Alexander is saying and what we all find in teaching is that until you have effectively choked off the old, until you have really learned what inhibition means in that way, you’re not going to get any further and make the change that you want.
(The Act of Living – Saying and Meaning No p137)

MB: Really, every problem that we have been discussing is a failure of inhibition.
(Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules – part 2 p87)