Posts Tagged ‘Tai Chi Technique’

This ebook, Tai Chi 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 tai chi with ease, elegance, poise, and released joints.
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 tai chi practitioner a tool to change any aspect of her tai chi technique and posture that doesn’t work with what works. Inhibition helps the tai chi practitioner identify what is interfering with the tai chi forms having the most user friendly tai chi technique and posture possible, and then to be able to change what isn’t working.

INHIBITION ALLOWS THE TAI CHI PRACTITIONER TO LET GO OF WHAT ISN’T WORKING, AND TO REPLACE IT WITH WHAT DOES WORK IN HIS OR HER TAI CHI TECHNIQUE.

Inhibition is what you do after you’ve identified what is not working in your tai chi technique. Let me explain. By the time a tai chi practitioner has discovered, after years of doing tai chi, that there are aspects of the tai chi practitioner’s technique and posture that are interfering with the practitioner’s ability to do tai chi without the wear and tear from the tension of controlling a movement 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 tai chi, and you also make a second list of what it is that works as you do tai chi, 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 tai chi practitioner starts a form, she locks her neck, then this can be pretty invisible to most people. If as the practitioner is doing a form, and she locks her hips, this can be almost undetectable. If the tai chi practitioner locks and narrows her shoulders as she does a form, this can be pretty invisible. If she shortens her spine as she aligns a vertical back during a form, 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 a form, 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 tai chi practitioner starts a form, 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 form 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 tai chi 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 tai chi 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 forms 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 TAI CHI TO A LEVEL THAT SHOWS YOU HOW YOU COMPROMISE YOUR TAI CHI TECHNIQUE, AND IT GIVES YOU THE TOOLS TO STOP DOING THIS.