This ebook, Taking Care of Yourself and Your Students: Alexander Technique Guidelines for the Music Teacher, 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 teach music without sacrificing your body.
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 music teacher a tool to change any aspect of her teaching technique and posture that doesn’t work with what works. Inhibition helps the music teacher identify what is interfering with the teacher creating the most user friendly music teaching technique and posture possible, and then to be able to change what isn’t working.
INHIBITION ALLOWS THE MUSIC TEACHER TO LET GO OF WHAT ISN’T WORKING, AND TO REPLACE IT WITH WHAT DOES WORK IN HER TEACHING.
Inhibition is what you do after you’ve identified what is not working in your music teaching that is harming your body. Let me explain. By the time a music teacher has discovered, after years of teaching, that there are aspects of the music teacher’s technique and posture that are interfering with the teacher’s ability to do whatever she would like without wear and tear, these destructive habits are as central to the music teacher’s technique 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 music teaching, and you also make a second list of what it is that works in your teaching technique, and you only keep the good list.
There are the typical big postural problems – slumped or over-arched posture, 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 music teacher teaches, she locks her neck, then this can be pretty invisible to most people. If right before the music teacher teaches, she locks her hips, this can be almost undetectable. If the music teacher locks and narrows her shoulders as she teaches, this can be pretty invisible. If she shortens her spine as she teaches, 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 teach a student, 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 music teacher is about to change something a student is doing, she notices she is locking a collapsed neck. The teacher stops – doesn’t start. She now chooses not to collapse and lock her neck, and right after that new choice, she then teaches.
What I have just described is inhibition or inhibiting a habit. It very subtle and very powerful, because for the first time, the music teacher has chosen not to initiate her teaching with an unconscious bad habit.
She has chosen to teach without unconscious tension and compression of the neck/spine. Bringing this into the music teacher’s awareness is moving music teaching away from being something you fix, to being something where you are truly experiencing all of your subtle habits, good and bad, you have taught 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 TEACH MUSIC TO A LEVEL THAT SHOWS YOU HOW YOU COMPROMISE YOUR TEACHING, AND IT GIVES YOU THE TOOLS TO STOP DOING THIS.
