By Last weekend was the annual retreat of my local group of Alexander Technique colleagues. We meet at a lovely cabin on Ripshin Lake in Tennessee and enjoy swimming, kayaking, shared meals, and of course lots of Alexander talk and exploration.
A highlight for me was the discussion around Alexander’s concept of Inhibition. Here are my notes:
Not reacting in life allows us to maintain. Exercising the privilege of not knowing allows for progress.
Inhibition, part 1 = Undoing; to stop doing something.
Inhibition, part 2 = Prevention of grasping; to give up thinking that I know what’s next (or ought to come next). This plays out as giving that Undoing time and space to reveal itself as something new.
Trust in the power of not doing something. Let go of ulterior motives. Let the non-doing have an effect.
Why would it better to let something new, rather than known, happen? What exactly are we trusting to? To what am I yielding, if I allow something outside of what I now know, to operate?
Perhaps this is where the terrain of the psychophysical meets the ocean of the spiritual, where what is known surrenders to the field of possibility. It looks to me like Life has an overarching tendancy toward organization, more than chaos – although chaos or dissolution is an essential part of the transmutation into organization (an example would be how objects combust to yield light and heat; life forms disintegrate to create the substrate for new things to grow). This organization is necessary for things to keep going, and keeping going is what they do – and must do. There’s no escape from Is-ness; there isn’t anything that isn’t.
How is it a privilege to not know?? I believe it’s a privilege to acknowledge that there are much, much larger forces at work than my tiny (albeit significant) perspective. It situates me in a context of the Intelligence of this organizing dynamic. Setting aside my attachment to and compulsion for knowing, exercising the privilege of refraining from this unavoidably limiting function, opens me up to experience myself as part of something unfathomable, limitless – and inherently Good.