For many of us, it feels like the pace of life is accelerating. It’s often a challenge simply to deal with the everyday stuff – so many decisions, so many choices! How do we prioritise between what’s ‘important and urgent’, what’s ‘urgent but not critical’, and what’s ‘really important but somehow keeps getting left behind’? And all of this can be hidden in a whole deluge of distracting yet unimportant things that are clamouring for our attention. Are you drowning under an information overload?
I’ve previously talked about how we can use the Alexander Technique to give ourselves some breathing space. One of the key skills we learn is how to take a moment before choosing how, or whether to respond to whatever life throws at us.
Another way of thinking about this is that we are learning to ‘just say no’ when faced with a stimulus – any stimulus – whether it’s another person asking something of us, or our work emails screaming deadlines, or the noise of social media, or indeed our own thoughts, such as ‘I need to….’, ‘I must get it right’, ‘what if…’ etc.
This doesn’t mean that we literally stop doing anything at all but rather, we give ourselves the opportunity to make a real choice over whether, how and when we respond. I’ve talked in an earlier blog post about this process of how we make our choices.
Something that is really important here is the way in which we ‘say no’ for ourselves. We don’t want to be inwardly bracing ourselves defiantly to fight the stimulus and our habitual reaction to it. Neither do we want to be inwardly shrinking back, worried about possible effects of our non-reaction followed by the consequences of whatever is our choice. The ‘no’ comes from a place of quiet assurance, it comes from a sense of our embodied whole self that knows deep down what we actually wish for ourselves. You can tell how you are saying no by hearing the tone of voice of your thoughts. Is it kind and gentle, or does it feel like you’re telling yourself off? It’s more of ‘well thank you but no thank you, I don’t need to immediately react’. From that place, you may find yourself making different choices – you may literally say no to certain things that you would otherwise not have questioned, perhaps through many years of feeling obliged to fit in. In other instances, you may say ‘yes’ appreciating the positiveness of the choice. Or you may decide to do something else instead, or the ‘same thing’ but in a different way.
It’s quite possible that all sounds a bit theoretical and distant from our lived experience. It does take time to develop this skill and, usually, guidance from an Alexander teacher who can help you put it into practice. We also need to recognise that some stimuli are more powerful than others and that this varies individual by individual. For example, for me, a big challenge (stimulus) is working at my computer to meet deadlines, whereas for a musician the thing that immediately throws them back into habit may be picking up their instrument. This is one reason why in Alexander lessons we usually start by working with what are everyday but usually fairly neutral (not emotionally challenging) stimuli, such as the thought of moving to stand up or to sit on a chair. If we are able to ‘say no’ to going right ahead and doing the habitual way of standing and sitting, we have opened up the possibility of, not only making different choices, but also of moving in a non-habitual way. From there, we can begin to address how we habitually respond to other stimuli. The stimulus itself doesn’t matter other than the degree to which it makes it hard not to simply react habitually.
In the meantime, here’s something you can try out for yourself just as an example. So, I’m asking you right now, as you’re reading this to pay attention to something else instead – so immediately look away from the page now. What did you notice? A couple of possible reactions include complying and looking away without question, or feeling indignant at being talked at like that. It doesn’t matter what you actually did, rather what did that do for you? So, if you did look away, did you consciously choose to do that or was it more of an immediate reaction? What else happened in that moment – did you brace, hold your breath etc? The thing with almost all stimuli is that we usually do react in some way, subtle or otherwise. The skill comes in whether we can quieten ourselves before our habitual reaction has really taken hold, so that we can exert more choice over what we would really like.
