Moshe Feldenkrais on body and mind
Try not to think in words.
Formulation in words inhibits the brain from thinking for itself.
When thinking in words we think in familiar patterns,
in ways we have thought, read, heard, or said sometime before.
Instead, learn to think in patterns of relationships,
in sensations divorced from the fixity of words.
This will allow you to find the ability to make new patterns
and to carry those patterns of relationship
from one discipline to another.
In short, you think personally, originally.
Learning that allows the growth of patterns and their functioning in relationships
is learning that leads to new and different ways of doing things.
This kind of learning increases your ability to choose more freely.
This is the kind of learning produced by
Awareness Through Movement lessons,
where the accent is put not on which movement you deal with
but on how you direct yourself doing it.
Every emotion is in one way or another
linked in the brain’s cortex
with some muscular configuration and attitude.
An emotional state always appears together
with the attitude of the body with which it was conditioned.
Therefore, when a body habit has been resolved,
an emotional complex is resolved simultaneously.
The body and mind are never independent;
such subdivision is entirely arbitrary and unfounded.
They are not just parts somehow related to each other,
but an inseparable whole.
The feeling of being alive relates to
the awareness of growing to be oneself.
Quotations by Moshe Feldenkrais
Photo by Casey Horner
