"Awareness Through Movement" is not an easy book to read, and yet it's the most accessible of any of Moshe's books. His writing takes a lot of concentration and energy to decipher. It's full of long, seemingly unrelated tangents on complicated and vague topics. It can be exhausting to read more than a few pages at once unless you're feeling particularly mentally fortified.
Tonight I decided to pick it up and see if I was feeling up for it. I've read parts of it before, and decided to start again at the beginning this time. Rereading anything written by Moshe is a good idea. You'll undoubtedly catch something you missed the first five times you read it. Anyway, I did very well with it, until page 6, when I got distracted by a quote and wanted to write it down. And hey, even better than just writing it down, I could write it down in my blog! And then write about it! That's what this thing is here for, right? So, I'll get back to reading eventually. First I have a quote to share, as Moshe talks about three things that help us create our self-image - heritage (genetics), education, and self-education...
"Every aspiration and spontaneous desire is subjected to stringent internal criticism lest they reveal the individual's organic nature."
Oh god no, don't let your true self show, whatever you do. That would break down all of your carefully built masks, and could ruin any chance you ever had of becoming rich and successful and maybe even famous, and those are the most important things in life, of course. Give in to the Man.
Unless... What if you took Moshe's advice and slowed down? Not just slowed down a specific movement to examine it, but slowed down your whole life and examined it? What would you find? Would you like it? Would you like you? How could you change what you don't like? Moshe spends a lot of time talking about the ways that we live our lives. His work offers a philosophy as well as a physical practice. We get so caught up in our day to day lives and in work and school and in all of our responsibilities that we often lose sight of the things we actually want out of life and forgot about somewhere along the way. It feels really good to stop and pick those up again sometimes.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Why Does This Blog Exist?
About a week ago, around the middle of February, I noticed how quickly March was going to show up. March 1st is the start of Segment 3 of my training, where I will leave work for a month and go practice and learn Feldenkrais 7 hours a day. The Seattle Eastside Feldenkrais Training III (SEFTIII) is a 4 year program made up of 8 one-month intensive segments that happen about every six months. Segment 1 was March '09, Segment 2 was November '09, Segment 3 will be March '10, and so on until November 2012. That leaves time in between intensives to soak up everything you learned and figure out how to use it. This next segment snuck up on me, especially once I realized that since the end of Segment 2, I've done very little directly related to Feldenkrais and I don't know why. Now I feel like I have a bunch of catch-up work to do.
As I was thinking about all the things I didn't do between the two segments, all of the new ideas and physical possibilities that I let slip through my fingers, I remembered an activity from the end of Segment 2. We started talking about ways of learning - individual vs. group, structured vs. emergent, intellectual vs. experiential - and we talked about our preferences in how we personally learn best based on those concepts. We were asked to group ourselves in the room based on those preferences, and I placed myself with the group experiential learners, closer emergent than structured.
We were asked to talk within our groups and examine our decisions about where we placed ourselves and why. Personally, I find motivation from working in a group, insight from experiential situations, and access to creativity when there isn't too much structure. We were then asked to talk about how we could possibly change our habits in how we learn, and become more comfortable in a variety of learning situations. The most difficult learning situation for me is highly structured and intellectual where the responsibility for learning is placed entirely on the individual.
That is why this blog exists. Instead of trying to do a bunch of catch-up work, I thought I'd pose a challenge to myself and how I learn best in the form of a blog. Almost any writing I've done in the past year about Feldenkrais has been private, not very coherent, and definitely not intellectual or structured, so writing about it on a public blog will be a sort of test for myself to see what I can learn from making what I'm doing accessible to people who know nothing about it. It's an experiment, so please bear with me if I make no sense at times.
Here we go...
As I was thinking about all the things I didn't do between the two segments, all of the new ideas and physical possibilities that I let slip through my fingers, I remembered an activity from the end of Segment 2. We started talking about ways of learning - individual vs. group, structured vs. emergent, intellectual vs. experiential - and we talked about our preferences in how we personally learn best based on those concepts. We were asked to group ourselves in the room based on those preferences, and I placed myself with the group experiential learners, closer emergent than structured.
We were asked to talk within our groups and examine our decisions about where we placed ourselves and why. Personally, I find motivation from working in a group, insight from experiential situations, and access to creativity when there isn't too much structure. We were then asked to talk about how we could possibly change our habits in how we learn, and become more comfortable in a variety of learning situations. The most difficult learning situation for me is highly structured and intellectual where the responsibility for learning is placed entirely on the individual.
That is why this blog exists. Instead of trying to do a bunch of catch-up work, I thought I'd pose a challenge to myself and how I learn best in the form of a blog. Almost any writing I've done in the past year about Feldenkrais has been private, not very coherent, and definitely not intellectual or structured, so writing about it on a public blog will be a sort of test for myself to see what I can learn from making what I'm doing accessible to people who know nothing about it. It's an experiment, so please bear with me if I make no sense at times.
Here we go...
What is Feldenkrais?
The most common reaction when I say I am learning how to teach Feldenkrais is "...felda-what?", so I figure I should start with an explanation of what it is. The Feldenkrais Method is a type of body work, created by the physicist, Judo master, and inventor Moshe Feldenkrais. Its purpose is to make movement easier by increasing body awareness.
What does that mean and how does it work, you might ask? Let's say you have a particular way of standing up from a chair where, for whatever reason, you put your hands down next to your hips and push yourself out of the chair with your hands. According to Moshe the physicist, that is not the most efficient way to stand up from a chair. An easier way might be to lean forward a bit so your weight is solidly in your feet, and push from the ground. A Feldenkrais lesson based off of that idea would break down that movement into little tiny pieces, and then slow them all way down, letting you observe in yourself how each piece happens and works. As you get more pieces of the movement, you gain body awareness, and you gain choices for how you can stand up from a chair.
As Moshe said, "If you know what you're doing, you can do what you want." By giving yourself choices and options in how you move instead of only knowing the habits you've developed over the years, any movement can become clearer and easier.
What does that mean and how does it work, you might ask? Let's say you have a particular way of standing up from a chair where, for whatever reason, you put your hands down next to your hips and push yourself out of the chair with your hands. According to Moshe the physicist, that is not the most efficient way to stand up from a chair. An easier way might be to lean forward a bit so your weight is solidly in your feet, and push from the ground. A Feldenkrais lesson based off of that idea would break down that movement into little tiny pieces, and then slow them all way down, letting you observe in yourself how each piece happens and works. As you get more pieces of the movement, you gain body awareness, and you gain choices for how you can stand up from a chair.
As Moshe said, "If you know what you're doing, you can do what you want." By giving yourself choices and options in how you move instead of only knowing the habits you've developed over the years, any movement can become clearer and easier.
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