principles

What are you associations for the word "stability"? What do you think you need to make yourself feel more stable?

We often think in terms of strength and fixed structures. Particularly these days the phrase "core stability" reinforces our view that the only thing between us and nirvana is strengthening our abdominal muscles.

Superfluous effort shortens the body. Efficient action involves growing taller, lengthening the limbs and the spine.

This is a fundamental idea in Feldenkrais. Scan your feeling of height as you sit in your chair reading this. Then clench your jaw--do you grow taller or shorter? Tighten you shoulders. Taller or shorter? Grip your stomach like you've just had a fright. Taller or shorter?

Anything the human skeleton can do can be done effortlessly. That's one of the more provocative claims that is made in the Feldenkrais Method!

In the midst of a challenging lesson, you may pause to recall that, if it weren't for the effort of various muscles getting in the way, your skeleton could easily be configured in the position you're looking for.

When we say that people in general (people in our culture) "live in their heads," this is more than metaphorical. If you watch people moving from one orientation to another, or from one level to another (lying to sitting or sitting to standing), their action is usually organized around the idea of getting their head where it's going. The pelvis is an afterthought.

A hallmark of well-organized movement, according to Feldenkrais, is its reversibility. At any point in an action, can you turn around, go back, change your mind, do something else? An optimally-organized action would be one where you retain the freedom at any point to change your mind (or react to changing circumstances) and do something different.

Our human capacity for learning is extraordinary. We go from tiny creatures who can barely manage our own digestion--and can't manage our own elimination--to being able to play intricate musical compositions, perform acrobatics, paint pictures, form and express elaborate abstract thoughts. We spend months just figuring out how to stand up.

When we act, we use only a small part of our capacity, and a small part of ourselves, to accomplish what we set out to do.

Moshe's early work in Judo (the legend is that he was one of the first European black belts and helped found the French Judo association) showed him a quality of human action that one might call the somatic reality behind maturity:

Today when we hear about the mind-body link and the influence of emotions on health, we tend to think in the "stress" paradigm.