The coordination of ourselves in the field of gravity as the fundamental form of action in the world is like the air we breathe, or like water for sea life. It’s so ubiquitous that we don’t isolate it as a process that can itself be investigated and improved–or as a kind of window on anything that we do.
We might study logic and argumentation to improve the quality of our thinking, or rhetoric and literature to improve our quality of expression. In doing so, we thereby improve our capacity in a wide range of fields of action. When it comes to the coordination of our physical body in action, we think that’s something for someone else. Surely top-flight athletes pay attention in a detailed way to the coordination of themselves in action, but you can only do that if you’re already superhuman — strong, accomplished, talented — and you’re attempting extraordinary feats.
Feldenkrais’s method demonstrates that anyone can make intelligent application of processes of subtle refinement (decades of training and natural talent are not required) in order to achieve improvements in capacity that are astonishing, from the point of view of our ordinary “folk science” (or advanced science) understandings of the nature of strength and flexibility.
Through gradual and patient experimentation with options for the coordination of yourself in action, not only do you discover a number of specific keys to improved function, you also strengthen your own capacity to sense more of yourself more clearly in your environment, and learn/discover/create fresh in each moment the most appropriate action available to you for your intention.
Take part in the Do-It-Yourself ATM process to check it out.
Lynette wrote:
I have a dream…an unavowed dream that is about to become avowed…
It is a dream that ca. US$300 a year per practitioner could buy Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioners a professional organization that wouldn’t respond to its members’ requests for support in practice-building with veiled suggestions that real grown-ups don’t expect their professional organization to support such trivial and grubby things.
A dream that we had something, well, like our beloved FGNA only…a little less disparaging of us.
Lynette: I had to hike up the font a little. The better to see it with.
Maybe it is the season. But it seems to me that there may be a lot of unspoken despair within the Feldenkrais Community.
Our community is not a community. Our Mentors are not Mentors. There hasn’t been a mentor since Maxwell Perkins. It is a lost art which goes along with a lost humanity. It seems the mentors came from academic or literary circles, where people had hearts..
The question is : Does this body work stuff make us better people, or does it create criminal types? Don’t laugh!
There is the despair of the aged who can’t do these g.d. ATMs any more. They dread the soreness. Did the FGNA ever address the issue of soreness? Of which we are never to speak?
:}}Life is a tough racket, to be sure. In the Feldenkrais bid’ness it’s either sink or swim.
Part of the problem with our community may be that it waS FOUNDED BY A BUNCH OF 70’S LIBERALS, WHO WERE LOOKING FOR A SWEET RACKET. THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE TO WORK HARD IN THE DIRTY OLDE WORLD ALL us SCMUCKS HAVE TO LIVE AND WORK IN. PARTLY IT WAS FOUNDED AND ABETTED AND SET UP BY A BUNCH OF PEOPLE AFRAID TO LIVE!
DURING THE’80 AND ’81 QUEST WORKSHOPS IN NEW YORK CITY, WHICH I ATTENDED, {I WORKED NEARBY} I SOMETIMES HAD TO TAKE A BREAK FROM THE HEADY ATMOSPHERE OF THE INSULATED INNERLECHUALS IN THE FELDY WORKSHOP AND STAND OUT ON THE STREET AROUND THE PENN HOTEL AND LOOK AT THE LAUGHING SECRETARIES TRAIPSING TO AND FRO FROM LUNCH. THEY WERE JUST LIVING IN THE MOMENT. THEY WERE RACING HEADLONG TO DEATH, BUT, THEY WERE LIVING!
WHAT IS ALL THIS CRAP ABOUT “IMPROVEMENT”?
(sorry for them capitals…didn’t see them).
The move to improve! Are we running away from ourselves.? Are we living is a some state of suspended animation?
Go ask Alice.
Merry X-Miss,
John Quinn