Principles?

Moshe was fond of saying that the first principle of his work is that there are no principles.

Principles may organize our thinking and direct our attention and action, but they also tend to put us to sleep. We discount or ignore aspects of our experience that don’t fit the principles.

When someone asks what we feel, we answer instead with what we know.

Sometimes in Feldenkrais our acute awareness of how knowledge can bypass feelings creates an anti-intellectual bias. Sometimes when someone asks what we know, we answer instead with what we feel. But what would like really be like if we were confined always to the realm of feeling and had no epistemological capacities apart from appreciating sensation?

The claim that the first principle is that there are no principles is a paradox. It is designed to wake us up rather than put us to sleep. Neither the sleep of clinging to principles nor the sleep of floating in the endless sea of experience.

Principles are not to be banished but to be handled intelligently.