This audio guide is about ‘stopping’, also called ‘pausing’, ‘inhibition’, or ‘the positive no’.
Stopping is the first basic principle of AT. It is a practical skill you will learn from any AT teacher during your AT lessons.
In short, stopping helps you create a pause between a stimulus and your response to that stimulus, so that you can choose your reaction more consciously. You stop to give yourself time and space to prevent engaging in an unwanted habit, such as tensing your neck and shoulders.
At first, ‘stopping’ can be strange: Here you are in your Alexander Technique (AT) lesson expecting your teacher to tell you what you need to do differently to fix your problem, but then you hear that you don’t need to do anything at all! Instead, you’re asked to stop, which means to think differently, in order to prevent interference and let go of unwanted habits.
Unconsciously holding excess tension in your body interferes with your body’s coordination. You can compare it to trying to drive your car with the handbrake still on. The skill of stopping will help you release the handbrake from your body, so that you can move and breathe with ease and flow.
So, instead of asking yourself “What should I do about this?”, you start to ask yourself, “What can I stop doing that I don’t need to do?”, “What can I release?”, and “Where can I do less?”
Over the years, I have come to see that there are three slightly different aspects to the skill of stopping.To clarify them, let’s discuss all three, and let’s call the first one Stopping 1.
Stopping 1 is the definition I just gave you at the beginning. It means that you briefly stop before starting your next activity or in the middle of your activity. You temporarily give up your goal, decide to do nothing, release stress, become calm, and tune into a feeling of inner peace before going into action. In this way, you create a moment of space so that you can give yourself the freedom to choose how you want to perform the activity you’re about to do or how you want to continue the activity you’re already engaging in.
Imagine you’re standing at a crossroads in your brain. If you turn right, you turn into the street of your unhelpful habit. For instance, suppose you habitually crane your neck forward when working at your computer. If you start to work immediately like you always do, you will automatically enter the highway of this unhelpful habit. But by stopping a moment before starting, you can decide to rewire your brain and turn left, into the street of your new, more conscious healthier habit.
You have a chance to let go of excess tension in your neck, and prevent working with your neck jutted forward. Obviously you can also decide to briefly stop working in the middle of your computer work, reset yourself, start over and continue with a clean slate.
Basically, briefly pausing before you do something gives you freedom of choice, because when you pause, you allow yourself time to become more aware of yourself. This way, you will not only have an opportunity to choose how you want do something but you also give yourself a chance to think about how to respond to your own thoughts and emotions or tune in to your needs before responding to a request from someone. In this way, stopping can help you prevent doing something you actually don’t want to do and can help you avoid responding too quickly and habitually.
Read more > “The first Alexander Technique skill: ‘stopping’, or ‘pausing’”