AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT ( from The Elusive Obvious)
There is an old, Chinese saying: I hear and forget. I see and remember. I do and understand.”
Like all sayings, it is not quite right but it contains wisdom. We do not forget everything we hear and we do not remember everything we see. I do believe, however, that we understand best what we can do. But I have blocks,” phobias,” ties,” inhibitions, “and compulsions” that limit my doing to repetitive patterns with no other choice, no way out. My understanding relates to things I can do. I cannot, for the love of Mike, understand why I feel impotent; I cannot understand why I am depressed; I cannot understand why, today, l am so virile and gay. So, even to do does not make for absolute understanding. Then what does? Resolve the absolute” and you may have better understanding.
When I began to work on myself, or more correctly with myself, because of my trouble with my knees, I did not distinguish between manipulative Functional Integration and group work to produce Awareness through Movement. I used them indiscriminately as I did not realize that there was a difference. Gradually, however, I came to see that what I was doing with myself was not simple, and certainly not easy, to communicate to others. I had no intention of doing that, but it happened that a colleague, a physicist, asked to participate in what I was doing with myself. Thus I had to share my experience with somebody. Imitating me did not satisfy him as he did not know how or where to look, and he was also unable to discern what was essential and what was a mere detail. The more questions he asked the more I disliked his presence; I was irritated by my inability to explain in a few words exactly what I was doing. I found I had to go back into my past to find my way of self-direction, the reasoning, and later the feeling, that moved me to do what I did. I was jealous of the waste of time and annoyed with myself; I disliked his inquisitiveness, and my own feeling of impotence made him a nuisance.
As my work with myself seemed to me self-observation, it occurred to me that self-examination involves judgment, good or bad. My annoyance was that I had to examine myself, whereas when I had been alone I was able just to observe myself as an object which acted and moved. I was far more absorbed in observing how I was doing a movement than I was interested in what that movement happened to be. This seemed to me the real gist of my knee trouble. I could repeat a movement with my leg hundreds of times, I could walk for weeks with no inconvenience whatsoever and suddenly doing what I believed to be the identical movement just once more spoiled everything. Obviously, this one movement was done differently from the former ones, and so it seemed to me that how I did a movement was much more important than what the movement consisted of.
Having someone share the feeling of what I did with myself is like throwing a stone and disturbing the quiet surface of a pool of water. To come to the point, it became clear to me that I was dealing with a process of self-direction and each particular movement was important only inasmuch as it illuminated this process. As the process was obviously not perfect in my case, it seemed that it might also be imperfect in other people. As faulty heredity did not have to be considered, there having been no trouble with my knees for a decade or two, it remained only to discover how I came about learning the process of self-direction the way I did. No baby is born with the ability to perform adult movements; they have to be learned while growing. I had, therefore, to relearn as an adult that which I had failed to learn better in my past. Learning to learn was the thing I had to share with my colleague. I was not a teacher, yet he had to learn how I did whatever it was he saw me doing.
I began by making him realize that learning is very different from doing. In life an act must be accomplished at the right speed, at the right moment, and with the right vigor. Failure in any of these conditions will compromise the act and make it fail. The act will not achieve its purpose. Achieving the intended purpose may be considered as a condition in itself. The intended purpose may be just moving for the sake of moving or dancing for the sake of dancing. Yet, all these conditions for successful achievement in life are a hindrance in learning. These conditions are not operative during the first two or three years of life when the foundations for learning are dug and laid.
For successful learning we must proceed at our own rate. Babies repeat each novel action clumsily at their own rate until they have enough of it. This occurs when the intention and its performance are executed so that they are just one act which feels like an intention only.
An adult learning to play tennis or golf or anything else repeats until he feels that his achievement should be approved by others or that he evokes the approval by actually winning. A baby cannot do otherwise, and an adult does not know what his rate of learning is. His appreciation is distorted by what he happened to impose on himself as the rate of a “normal” person. During his life as a child, at home and at school, with other siblings or children, the parents and the teachers all tried to push him to be exactly like they were, with a rate of learning which was not his own and which he will strive probably all his life to achieve.
In learning Awareness through Movement, proceed very slowly, so slowly that you can discover your rate of learning here, when the demands of your ambition and the rate of others do not make you go faster than you can. In Awareness through Movement lessons everybody is allowed all the time necessary to assimilate the idea of the movement and the leisure to get used to the novelty of the situation. There is sufficient time to perceive and organize oneself, and to repeat the movement as often as one feels is right. No whistle, no metronome, no rhythm is used, no music and no drum. You slowly learn to find your innate rhythm, depending on your structure. Each member of the body has its rate of oscillation,. like a pendulum. With growing familiarity of the act, speed of movement increases and consequently its power. This may not be self-evident, but it is correct. The slowness is necessary for the discovery of parasitic superfluous exertion and its partial elimination. The superfluous in action is worse than the insufficient, for it costs us useless effort. Fast action when learning is strenuous, leads to confusion, and makes the learning unpleasant and unnecessarily tiring.
Learning must be pleasurable, and it must be easy; the two make breathing simple. What is learnt otherwise rarely becomes habitually spontaneous. In Awareness through Movement lessons you make the impossible possible, then easy, comfortable, pleasurable, and finally aesthetically pleasing. I believe it is more important to learn the way to learn new skills than the feat of the skills themselves; the new skill is only a useful reward for your attention. You will feel you deserve the skill and this will help to build your self-confidence.
In order to arrive at the right movement, it is first necessary to think of better movement rather than right; the right movement has no future development. For several Olympiads, jumping two meters four centimeters was the right thing for a gold-medalist to do, and so long as this was considered right even such a superb athlete as Owens could not do better. Today one needs to go over two meters twenty centimeters to qualif~r for competion, and many jump two meters thirty centimeters. The better can be improved—the right remains the limit for ever. Think of such great runners as Nourmi and Ladoumeque, they would not qualify today even for the semifinals. Better can be bettered—right and correct remain forever right and correct and deflate one. This is not just playing with words, as we usually do with words: imagine your attitude of mind when you feel that you have not achieved your best but feel you could have made a little greater effort; compare this with your state of mind when, after a supreme effort, you do not attain your goal and so feel discouraged and diminished in your own eyes. In the first case there is the urge to repeat, not so in the second.
In Awareness through Movement lessons I start with the constituents of the movement, and sometimes there may be as many as twenty different variations of the constituent partial configurations of the final skill. The preliminary ingredient movements do not usually evoke the final act. In this manner everybody is at ease and not urged to go all out to achieve. This is contrary to the prevailing methods of education in which we are often wired in to strive for success and achievement, in spite of our better judgment. By shifting our attention to the means of achieving instead of the urge to succeed, the learning process is easier, quieter, and faster. Striving for a goal reduces the incentive to learn, but by adopting a level of action well within our means we can improve our way of acting and reach much higher levels in the end.
When learning, do not have any intention of being correct; do not act well or nicely, do not hurry, as this creates confusion; instead go slowly and use no more, but rather less, strength than you need. Do not concentrate, for this means literally not looking around, Concentration is a useful principle sometimes in life, but in learning, attention must be directed alternately to the background and the figure. In learning, you have to know first the trees and then the forest where they belong. The shifting from figure to background and vice versa becomes so familiar that one can simultaneously perceive both, without any bothering or striving to be efficient. Elimination of useless parasitic action will make for efficiency surer than just striving for it. Do not be serious, eager, avoiding any wrong move. The kind of learning that goes with Awareness through Movement is a source of pleasurable sensations which lose their clarity if anything dims the pleasure of it all.
Errors cannot be avoided in learning even if we rely solely on strict imitation; learning to us means grasping the unknown. Any act may lead to the unknown. If you eliminate what seems erroneous at the start you may make the learning void of any interest altogether. Errors can be eliminated when we know what is right, but when we know what is right we can do without further learning; simple repetition or exercising will teach us a sort of achievement. Awareness through Movement leads to knowledge of oneself and to previous undiscovered resources in oneself. So, do not avoid errors, but rather use them as alternatives for what you feel is right and their roles may soon be interchanged.
I use the word “awareness” as conscious knowledge, and it is not to be mixed up with simple consciousness. I am quite familiar with my house and my library, but I am not aware of how many steps I have to climb to get home. I am conscious of leaving and returning home all through the years, yet I am not aware of the number of steps on the stairs. If I pay attention once and count the number of acts, such as shifting the eyes and performing whatever movements may accompany them in my head, arms, and legs, then I become aware that before I was only consciously mounting the stairs. Once I am conscious of how I am shifting my attention from one step to the other I am aware of them and I also know their number.
The same train of thought could apply to my library. “Awareness” is used by me to denote conscious-of plus knowledge. I am conscious that I can swallow intentionally for nearly a whole lifetime without being aware of how I do it. Nobody is aware of how we do it.
Speaking of awareness, I have found that even students of mine make the mistake of thinking that I recommend them to be aware of all their actions all the time they are awake. My learning is enhanced by becoming aware that to lift my right foot off the ground I have to mobilize preliminarily my right hip joint which means I have to shift most of my weight to the left, if only for a wink. Once I have learned this new style of walking it becomes semi-automatic; even so my awareness is now triggered into control at the slightest disturbance of the excellency of my walking. In my own case, I have managed to do practically anything with myself with two defective knees, and this is only because I am aware of what I am going to do, and how I am going to do it before I make an irreparable and defective movement. But most of the time, in normal conditions, I walk with simple intentional walking as I did before I became aware of how to walk with defectIve knees. I do not count the steps of my house every time I mount them, and I can allow myself this luxury only because of the liberty my awareness gives me.
Procedures similar to Awareness through Movement can be detected in learning to paint, to play an instrument, or solve a mathematical problem. A painter in front of an easel with pencil, charcoal, or brush in hand, looks at the face or figure before him which he has to reproduce on the paper or canvas on his easel. He looks at the face and at the paper, he weighs his hand, he frees it from power, and this enables him to feel certain that he can draw what he sees. In order, however, to reproduce what is in front of him he has to look at it again and again until he is fully aware of what he sees. Is it an oval face? Are the eyes near the outline of the face or are they more central? And so on. When he learns Awareness through Movement he can appreciate and detect whether he draws or paints better and more fluently when he is breathing in, breathing out, or just holding his breath. This awareness through or while moving will, in the end, produce a painter who seems able to look and draw naturally without any effort. The time spent on self-observation in action—which is movement—is insignificant when compared with the readiness of the resulting excellence and fluency.
A violinist, an actor, a writer, or whoever, who is not aware of the importance of awareness of the way one directs oneself in acting or functioning in life will stop growing the moment he achieves what he considers to be the right way of doing. Some pianists of genius when practicing are always aware of their playing and discover an alternative to the habitual. Improvement of talented people comes through their awareness of themselves in action. Their talent arises from their freedom to choose their modes of action. New modes of action are available to those who have discovered themselves, or who have had the good luck to meet a teacher who helped them to learn to learn. Such teachers teach music and not the this and that of any particular score. The same goes for all human skills and art. The most common feature of people who achieve indescribable and superb performance is the hours of daily practice they all undertake throughout their lives. Hours of repetitive practice is hard work; hours of practicing awareness in movement or action remain the most absorbing and interesting time in our lives. The feeling of being alive relates to the awareness of growing to be oneself.
It was my good fortune to witness an instance of awareness of what we hear. I was leaving the laboratory after the installation of a newly designed Curie balance following the discarding of one which had served several decades. Frederic JoliotCurie, on our way home, called me to see the new instrument of which he was very proud. The instrument had fifteen hundred volts between the central suspension and the housing which was earthed. It was late and every one else had left the laboratory except us. Joliot took another last look, removed his overcoat, and indulged in trying out the instrument. He put a metal strip, which had been left near the instrument, in the chamber and switched on the counter, when there was a stream of clicks in the loudspeaker. Joliot expressed his ire that the notice he had had put up requesting that the last person to leave the laboratory should switch off the instrument had not been obeyed. He put on his coat and we were leaving for home when, reaching for the switch, he stopped as if struck by lightning. Whereupon he took off his coat once more and stood by the balance oblivious of everything else. Listening to the clicking he turned and said, “Can you not hear the dying-out clicking? There is no radioactive material here which has such a half-lifetime.” Once he had switched off the machine as he had instructed we left for home. Next day there was the news that induced radioactivity had been discovered. Had he not become aware of the noises he had heard there would probably have been just a dressing down for the person who had left the machine “not switched off”. It took Joliot nearly a week to make sure, to convince himself and then the world that induced or artificial radioactivity is indeed an experimental fact. He was rewarded by a Nobel prize. I believe that not very many physicists have the awareness available to Frederick Juliot-Curie and that many would just have thought something was wrong with the new machine.
People often explain away incidents like this as intuitive. To me it is a matter of semantics. Intuition works in the field in which the person has both wide experience and a vital personal interest. The sound of sea waves are heard by many, but only Debussy had an intuitive musical theme for his La Mer. Debussy hearing what Joliot heard would, we hope, have had another musical inspiration. Saying that Joliot became aware of what he was hearing seems to me to be a clearer statement, which is more precise both fundamentally and generally. Intuition is an acceptable explanation, but with the reservation that it can apply only to men in the domain in which their entire personality has an intense interest. We have the choice to think whatever we wish. We do, in fact, have alternatives; I choose awareness.
In the four decades of my involvement with human learning I have become aware of the difficulty which even interested and intelligent students have in understanding how it is that I am able to improvise, year in and year out, thousands of movements each with ten or more variations on the same theme until even the slowest in the audience receives the message. The usual explanations people offer me are that I am unique, and that I have creative ability to an uncommon degree. I am deliberately omitting other complimentary sayings and writings, not from modesty but because I see nothing to be proud of. I once heard a saying that struck me; it was that the average man in the street is you and I. I believe that the average latent genius is you and I. Without the inner conviction of offering to my listeners and readers something important to every human being I could not have had the stamina to persist alone for decades. During a lengthy and instructive conversation which I was privileged to have with Jonas Salk in the Salk Institute in San Diego he exclaimed, “People like you and me are alone in the world—we should keep together.” This is not true for we are not alone most of the time but we feel so at low ebb.
I believe that the latent abilities in every one of us are considerably greater than the ones we live with. Moreover, the latency is actively imposed by ourselves because of lack of awareness. I believe that the miseries of life of men since the dawn of known history, ten or twelve thousand years in all, have been so great that our present state is not a failure but just a fact. The immense speculative possibilities opened to humans with the explosive thinking spreading from one discipline to the other present us with the following few issues. We shall find ourselves so at fault with our present brain that we shall have to substitute for it the computers of the future or we shall see an increased evolution in our present ability. I, personally, believe that the prospects for our future are already becoming available. I believe that we already possess a brain which occasionally functions at full capacity, provided we become aware of how we avoid using it. Our present cultural programming of most brains is habitual in content, intention, and scope. We limit our growth to what is immediately useful, just as we always have. We are wasting our abilities by using only those that we need in our condition of misery which we ourselves have created. Just think of the speed of reading which is an immense achievement, but is it really necessary to read at the rate of speaking (three hundred words a minute at its best)? Is it at that rate because we learn to read and write with the help of speech, and so have to continue forever in the same way? We soon kid ourselves that the achieved rate of reading is the limit of our brain. This is when you certainly know that by learning to scan the written or typed script with the eyes and the head only, which is divorcing conceiving the content from subvocal speaking or by inhibiting subliminal utterings, we can read ten times as fast. Moreover, when reading at three thousand words a minute, we improve our retention of the content and its details. Are you sure that we cannot multiply by ten most of our abilities which we have inadvertently limited by some other “useful” criteria, as we have done with speech and writing?
I believe that we actually limit ourselves by an undue and erroneous emphasis on what is important to the society of men at the neglect of how. How each individual can be helped to find his uniqueness and become unique in his contribution to himself and his social environment is too often neglected. There are many Leonardo da Vincis in the human species, yet we do everything that makes full human capacity a rarity.
Our own generation can list musical, mathematical, electronical, and computorial interspatial uniqueness, exhibiting latent, never used abilities of deduction and induction, of carrying pattern recognition from one mental discipline to the other. There are similar discrete jumps in athletics as well. All brain activity flourishes with the familiarity of the domain it dwells on. Operational calculus, large systems, modern genetics, tensor calculus, cybernetics are not extensions of known beginnings enlarged. They are new patterns of thinking that can be detected as latent abilities hampered and made inoperative through scientific ignorance. Education of the young, I hope soon to be able to say, was generally a striving for the smallest common denominator of uniformity. The few geniuses in each generation had their individuality fostered through luck. Here and there was somebody who taught them to learn rather than only teaching a curriculum, no matter how good.
I have formed in my imagination an ideal human brain and function. Ideal means non-existent. It also means that everybody may have one or more streaks approaching comparison with the ideal. It is a very useful auxiliary to compare everyone to the ideal. What is that ideal being? It is a normal or average person who has an average genetic inheritance, who had ideal birth, babyhood, childhood, and growth to adulthood. What sort of conditions are necessary to grow such a monster? I have great difficulty in starting; had there been anywhere an ideal human it would not be so presumptuous to clarify an ideal history of growth. To think it is not so difficult as to describe it in words. When I do not have to account for the logic of saying my thinking I am at liberty to ascribe ideal qualities to each structure and its function. Each function is much easier to idealize. An ideal memory is, of course, a mem-. ory which has ideal retention, has ideal recall, and remains absolutely under intentional control. Idealized antigravity function of the skeleton and its musculature means levitationlike lightness at will in all directions and at any moment.
Observe that this way of thinking of such an ideal set-up does not present much difficulty, as the mind does not have to worry about it.
In this manner you may form for yourself an ideal image of the ideal function of an ideal man. The advantage of such a subterfuge is very considerable, for at a glance you can place “function” of the real man in comparison with the image in your mind and obtain very useful concrete information. I have examined Olympic gold-medalists and found that some jump struggling against gravitation as if levitation never existed whereas others seem light enough and jump even higher with less effort, so much so that you could imagine they feel weightless. All may even jump the same height but how they did it becomes of first importance. One may even be only a silver-medalist but still nearer to ideal levitation than any of the others.
Watching the same person perform several acts I can see him, or her, bending to sit on the floor, waltzing with somebody, and being asked to say something before an audience. I find that this person’s waltzing looks more like my ideal image than the other acts, and I wonder how this far from ideal posture manages to waltz so nicely. Then I observe that most of the turning couples do better than during other actions, and that something in the waltzing has brought lightness to otherwise heavy, clumsy individuals. In most people there is more lightness in rotary movement around oneself than in other movements. Without my ideal image I am at a loss to know what to look for; each function grades itself when compared with an idealized function, and although this is not a measure (as from a scientific instrument) it is still a mental auxiliary of the greatest value to me. It has guided my inquiry in neurology, physiology, evolution theory, and so forth, enabling me to find the pertinent facts which are dispersed in an ocean of knowledge and intelligence which in itself has no ports, only vistas.
Man’s ideal posture is one of the features that I have considered most over the years so that I have arrived at a precise idea—or ideal—reinforced by scientific findings and by long practice. Today, I often start a workshop with an experiment clarifying to the audience the intricate and intrinsic beauty of upright standing in man.
Here is how many thousands have been introduced to the practice of Awareness through Movement. Look at the illustration which shows how a baby just before beginning to crawl, and in its early stages, holds his head while lying on his stomach.
The head is held reflexively just as it would be in the ideal head of an ideal adult. The head is lifted until the eyes look at the horizon, and held freely so it can move right and left with the greatest smoothness and ease the human nervous system can muster. The rest of the body contorts itself so that the cervical spine is in a position to allow freedom of the head to move on the atlas and axis vertebrae. On watching a baby, long before it is a year old, turning or being turned on its stomach, one can see the head orienting itself as if by an
invisible mechanism to the position shown in the illustration. The holding of the head is indefatigable as well as reflexive, and it can remain there to outlast a strong adult, always assuming he can reproduce it. A baby may lower its head every now and then giving the impression that its nose will strike the ground, but this does not happen; the head rights itself in the nick of time as if a switch were turned on.
In the adult, the head turns intentionally and also automatically in reaction to any sudden changes in the teleceptors’ stimulation. In either case, or for whatever other factor, the head turns right or left to locate the source of the change. The head is twisted until the organs of sight, hearing, and smell are equally stimulated, and in the long run even the shortest changes will turn the head to the source. The nervous system has learned to orient the head to the source by the difference in the stimulation of these organs, as well as by their equality when the duration of the change is sufficient. The important thing is that the rotation of the head to face the source of the change organizes the entire musculature to move the skeleton so that the brunt of the weight of the body is carried by the leg of the side to which the head is turned.
Try to imagine something sudden, important, or dangerous happening on your right side and simulate the movement of your head in such. an occurrence. You will realize that your left side is freed from weight carrying so that you can, or actually turn your body to the right. The right side is toneful enough to free the body to turn around the right hip joint, the leg, or the foot, or all of them, to face the disturbance. The immense nervous activity necessary to redistribute the tonus of the entire musculature from one pattern to another is achieved in a wink. It is triggered by the asymmetrical tension in the muscles of the neck that control the head. It is important to understand the mechanism of the movement of the eyes as well as the effect of the cochlear stimulation in the process. But I cannot indulge in recounting the details that can be found initially in the work of Magnus and now in almost every good treatise of modern physiology. The final result of facing the disturbance of the rotation of the body is to turn it as if the object is to restore the symmetry of the muscles of the head and eyes. This is achieved with such great economy in organization and action that the response to danger or vital interests is practically instantaneous. Rotation is so well developed in humans that they turn faster than most animals, and in bull-fighting, Japanese martial arts, boxing, and all such activities, impact with an oncoming object or thrust can be avoided by simply turning sideways. The system is so well structured and so fast most of the time that self-preservation seems miraculous.
The dynamics of moving solids require that the energy be proportional to the square of the velocity, leading one, maybe, to expect that fast rotation requires tremendous effort. This is not so, for in our upright posture the proximity of the weighty matter to the axis of rotation reduces the effort to a minimum. Also our bodies are almost ideally cylindrical, making the moment of rotation as small as possible. In Awareness through Movement a series of fast movements is practiced which gives rise to an exhilarating sense of being lighter and faster than we can believe.
When you remember all my reasons, do’s and don’ts regarding learning, you will understand why, in the examples I am about to give you, I do not wish you to read ahead. It will be much better for you if you work slowly step by step and arrive at the final version your own way. It will then be not my way of doing, but your own way, which is as it should be.
Sit on the floor. Put your hands behind you and lean on them with your arms almost straight at the elbows. Bend your knees so that you can put the soles of your feet flat on the floor in front of you. Tilt both knees to your right using your feet as hinges for moving your legs and knees. Tilt your knees to the left and back to the right. While repeating these tiltings of the knees right and left observe that the knee movement is initiated by your pelvis. Note that tilting your knees to the right is preceded by the stiffening of the left arm so that the push of the left hand on the floor facilitates the initiation of the movement of the pelvis, coinciding with lifting and tilting your head slightly backwards. Repeat your knee tiltings right and left while attending to the preliminary alteration of your trunk, spine, and head, and to your exertion. Go slowly and you will find each time easier until you are aware of exactly when you breathe in and when you breathe out during the phases of the movement. Change. to breathing out at the moment when, in the first instance, you were breathing in and continue until you become aware which makes the tilting easier. Whether your decision is right or wrong is immaterial at this point. For, when your attention and awareness are improved, in a few moments, your judgment will be better, as your sensitivity will increase with the reduction of your efforts. The situation proposed is realizable by either sex, fat or emaciated, old or young, atheletes as well as the not too severely crippled. Keep tilting your knees for a minute or two, or for a dozen times, or for however long you feel comfortable.
The difference between one person and another will be slight and consist mostly in how many rehearsals are necessary for one to become aware of the part the rest of the body has to play in making the intention easily realizable. Becoming aware is the significant part of your learning, and it is not at all important which movement is used for the lesson; even so we might just as well choose one which is also useful in life. You will, in the end agree, that you, as a human being, can move like a cat and about ten times as fast as what you have, up to now, accepted as your “normal”. Remember the rate of reading, and my contention that normal is the potentially possible, deformed and limited to “normality”. The point is so important that it is worth repeating. Except for parts of ourselves, everyone of us uses only a small fraction of our latent ability. The habit of thinking that one must have talent, or be born with it, in order to be good at anything at all, is as true as it is an obstacle to free choice. It is, however, true that we are genetically human, and that what other humans can do, even if it is only one, all the others can. Take the example of speech, and the three thousand different ways of achieving it. Mouth cavities, teeth, tongues, and brains are as widely different as abilities. The refusal to allow oneself the status of not being talented as in the use of languages is part of the mental laziness which is the ill-health of most humans. It is very hard to work to be a genius musician, painter, mathematician, actor, or whatever so as to create an original article or object, so personal that it bears the hallmark of its maker. It is far easier to be one of the multitude which our education renders as uniform as it can be.
By this time you will have rested and become aware of many things you may or may not have known. Sit again in the position to tilt your knees right and left. This time tilt with your knees spread a little apart, until there is room for first one of your legs and feet to lie on the floor between your knees and then the other. Thus, when your knees are on the floor tilted to the right, your right lower leg can lie freely between them with the sole of the foot resting squarely against the left thigh near the knee; of course your left leg and foot are also on the floor. Observe that to achieve this your feet are used as hinges for the tilting legs, and remain practically on the floor at the location that they have found for themselves while you were tilting and spreading your knees. Using the feet as hinges is crucial throughout to the end of the final phases of the movement.
Familiarize yourself with the details of the preparations necessary to make the two symmetrical positions of yourself when the knees are tilted to the right and then to the left. Breathe easily, which means do nothing to breathe other than watching to see that there is no breach of continuity of air coming in or out of your nostrils. Find out which hand on the floor becomes useless when you tilt your knees to your right; one can be lifted without making anything more difficult or causing a halt in breathing. Tilt your knees to your left and back to your right; this time lifting the other hand off the floor. You will then become aware of what you have just read or understood.
Keep on tilting your knees right and left. Lift the hand that you found unnecessary to lean on and carry it in the direction of your knees. Gradually you will find it more and more comfortable to lift the pelvis sufficiently to stand on your knee. Sit, tilt your knees to the other direction until you stand on your other knee again. Sit and rehearse these movements several times. Note that the feet serve as hinges and otherwise do little to assist in the movements and are better left alone to move as they will. You should, however, become aware and watch that they are not displaced without your intention. The lifted arm is carried with the trunk, and you can swing it lightly to assist the trunk and pelvis in being lifted off the floor.
I make such remarks only after I see that the students have already realized and are already doing what I am verbalizing. In this way the student feels he has guessed correctly and his reliance and confidence grow with his awareness. In written descriptions like this much of the highlighting is, of necessity, blurred, the timing of the remarks being dictated by the paper.
You are encouraged to rest as soon as you feel tired and to start again when you are ready. So start again with what you were doing. Turn to your left until you are on your knee, with your right arm flung forward to your left; you are still leaning on your left arm with its hand on the floor. To get up on our feet from this position we usually put the right foot forward on the floor and heave ourselves upright by a concentrated effort of both legs. This immobilizes the moving body, annihilates the kinetic impetus, and makes the getting up slow and laborious. It is the equivalent to putting on the brakes of a car going uphill after it has gathered momentum, when the only choice is to return to the lowest gear, start the ascent again (wasting petrol), and wait for sufficient kinetic energy for higher gears to be used. In the movement that we are learning now we are not yet as clearly aware of bad driving. Start again, tilt your knees to your right, swing them to the left, but this time swing the right arm in front of you upward to your left and continue the pelvic movement in its spiral ascent from the floor until it raises the right hip joint sufficiently (in the direction of your moving right arm) to straighten the right knee. Your right foot will stand on the floor. As the pelvis carries both hip joints, the left one will also rise enough for you to feel yourself standing on both feet with your entire weight. The pelvis moves from the sitting position and twists spirally upward to your left, and if you are sufficiently aware of the trajectory of the pelvis, and do not stop it but let it follow its course, it will complete its rotation until you are facing what was your rear standing on your feet. In this movement you are using the original impetus of your pelvis and trunk, which helped to swing your knees to the left. Start again until you are aware of how you direct yourself while moving. Getting up, starting from sitting with both knees to your right and swinging leftwards to stand facing backwards will be practically instantaneous and effortless. Repeat, starting with your knees tilted to the right and attend to the uninterrupted motion of the pelvis. Your arms, feet, and everything else will then organize themselves perfectly with the pelvis. This is because the head is carried in the same ascending spiral, with the eyes moving to find the horizon when the ascent is completed.
Sit on the floor, close your eyes and see with your mind’s eye the trajectory of your head and pelvis. When you are clearly aware of the movement, then think of the ease and speed with which you rose from sitting to standing in one simple action.
This apparent simplicity is due to the integration of all the complexity of details into one act of intention. Repeat again, starting with the knees tilted to your right as before, but this time do not lift your left hand decisively after all your weight is on your feet, which means you do not complete the movement to be fully upright. Stay in this position and imagine how to return to the initial sitting configuration. You may take as long as it is necessary for you to become aware of your displacement in space. This spatial awareness is but another facet of your kinesthetic sensation. In well learned intentional movement, attention glides so easily from internal contact of muscular sensation to spatial or external contact that we do not feel we are doing it. A single act is simple even if it is as complex as writing this description.
You have probably found that to reverse a movement in space, it is also reversed in its timing. We cannot, obviously, reverse time but we can think of our last movement with the right foot. The right foot will thus start the reversed motion to sit. It has not taken you long to become aware that the pelvis is moved first to lift the right foot off the floor. Now move the pelvis first to detach the right foot from the floor, taking the leg with its knee bent down to the floor to the spot where you sat to begin with. Review the entire procedure in your mind and, when this is more or less clear, sit on the floor. Tilt your knees to the left and visualize swinging them to get up moving to the right in the same way as you did so many times getting up to the left. If you cannot become aware of the pelvic spiral upward motion to the right rear of yourself, stop, rest, and tilt your knees to the right to rehearse the former side. Tilt them to swing left and this time get up again in that one gliding movement you know. Lift and move your right foot again, directing the pelvis back to the floor, tilt your knees to swing to the right. Stand on your right knee swinging your left arm forward and up to the right and see your pelvis moving in a spiral upward to the right to carry your left leg and foot self-direction is being improved, and not any particular movement. The particular achievement is incidental and is a prize gained for better learning.
We may now have the patience to satisfy our curiosity. Sit on the floor with your right foot behind you on the right, knees spread apart to allow your left leg to lie between them, just as we did in the previous start. Lean on your left hand placed on the floor to the left of your pelvis on the spot where you find it will support your body most comfortably. Lift your right arm with elbow slightly bent to raise your forearm. The hand hanging downward is lifted to eye level at a comfortable distance in front of you. Freeze your trunk, your head, and your right arm with your eyes fixed on your hand, and turn the whole to your left to the angle that feels as if no effort is involved to do so, and stay thus, slightly twisted to your left. Breathe quietly with little externally visible movement. After a minute or so turn your eyes to the right; move the eyes only, keeping all the rest motionless. Move your eyes to focus on the hand, and then again to your extreme right, but without forcing yourself above the simple movement of the eyes. Repeat this shifting of the eyes to the hand and to your extreme right a dozen times. Stop. Close your eyes, resolve to stop moving immediately you become aware that you are increasing your exertion, and lift your arm with the Eand in front of your closed eyes. Move, turning to the left without any restriction besides the one made. Turn only once to whatever angle you will, stop, open your eyes and you will realize that you have turned several or many degrees more to the left than at the beginning. Stay there.
Keep your eyes on your hand and move only your head to the left as easily as you can. Repeat a dozen times, moving the head only. Do this by first turning your head and eyes to the left, and then moving only your eyes back to focus on the hand. Again, cease and close your eyes and sit in the first position. Resolve to stop moving as soon as you become aware that you need a greater effort and, lifting your hand in front of your eyes, twist yourself to the left to open your eyes, and find that you have effortlessly twisted yourself through a bigger angle than before. Stop to think how different this is from usual experience. The “exercising” was in direct opposition to where the improvement was wanted, yet it did, in fact, improve. After a rest on your back, during which you become aware that your two sides do not lie the same way, you will realize that one of them has changed through what you have just done.
Sit again as before. Twist yourself comfortably to your left, lean on your left hand, and put your right hand on top of your head. Move the head assisted by your hand as if to touch your right ear on your right shoulder. Reverse the movement to touch your left ear on your left shoulder. The movement becomes easier and more extensive if you become aware that, while your right ear moves toward your right shoulder, the pelvis is rocking so that your right side becomes shorter while the ribs on the other fan out. The hand moves the head the other way round, and the pelvis and side move the other way round. After a dozen bendings right and left close your eyes. Sit in the original position and with your right hand in front of your eyes, and with your resolve to stop immediately you feel you are straining, turn, stop, and you will realize that you have twisted even more. How come? It is again an improvement, with unorthodox training.
Sit in the original position, twist to the left, but this time place both your hands on the floor to the left. Organize yourself to lean on both hands equally; they should be shoulder-width apart on the floor. Twist your shoulder girdle to the left, while turning your face, i.e. head and eyes, to the right. Become aware of the movement of the right hip joint and buttock to start the shoulder girdle motion. Watch the sensation in the spine. Undo the twists and rehearse a dozen times. As you sit, lift your right hand in front of your eyes and turn left at your discretion. You are very likely twisting yourself to look straight behind you. Compare this with your initial twist and you will realize that Awareness through Movement is a more efficient way to learn than just striving and willpower.
Short of writing another book, suffice to say that you have been differentiating eye movement and head movement, which means you have learned to move them in opposite directions. Most people stop their neuromuscular-spatial apprenticeship after moving both in the same direction. The same differentiation occurred between your pelvis and your head and eyes.
Sit. Tilt your knees to the right, leaning on your hands behind you. Swing your knees to the left to get up swiftly, moving your pelvis in the familiar spiral upward movement to the left to stand up, reverse, and stand up again to your right. Continue the complete cycle of standing-sitting-standing and you will soon become aware that the movement to one side is smoother and faster than to the other. Is there any relation to the direction of movement in the last lessons?
Now, sit with your legs to the left and rehearse all the steps of twisting trunk, head, eyes, and pelvis as before, but with one important restriction: make no movement at all at each step except adopting the new position. Sit still, imagining that you are actually moving but without doing so. You will become aware of the muscles being organized in the necessary patterns for performing the movement. If you go through all the steps in this way you will be surprised to find that your twisting to the right has improved and is even better than before. Moreover, it will have been achieved in about one-fifth of the time.
Now that you know what Awareness through Movement means you will appreciate the way it is presented, which provides a good chance for learning to occur. I asked Will Schutz of Encounter fame, who first brought me to the United States, to come with me to an interview at New Dimensions. Here are a few pertinent extracts.
WILL SCHUTZ: I find that your method is what I would call a self-oriented method, as opposed to a guru-oriented method. When I was doing some of your lessons, one particular example stood out. The problem was how to put my feet apart so that they were most comfortable. You told me to put them very close together and feel what that felt like and put them very far apart and see what that felt like, and keep moving them back and forth until it felt right. Whatever felt right, was right, was correct. I also have a thorough Arica training, which I consider a guru-oriented approach. Oscar Ichazo is the guru and you do what he says. I was doing the same thing there, except the rule was that you put your feet one elbow-length apart. If you did not do that, then the instructor would come along and say, “That’s not right. You did not get it correct.” What was right there was to remember what I was told to do and do it properly.
MOSHE FELDENKRAIS: I never force anyone to accept my view. I would never say “this is correct” or “this is incorrect.” To me there is nothing correct. However, if you do something and do not know what you are doing, then it is incorrect for you. If you do know what you are doing, then whatever you do is correct for you. As human beings, we have the peculiar ability which other animals do not, and that is to know what we are doing. That is how we have freedom of choice. Suppose I see you placing your feet apart at a distance which I consider incorrect. Now, why do I consider it incorrect? Not because I think it should be a certain length, but because I feel that you are really uncomfortable, and are standing that way only because you have never actually visualized what distance is necessary in order to feel comfortable. You are not really concerned with comfort. If you were very shy or if you were a virginal girl you would hold your feet together because it is prescribed as being “decent.” If you are a show-off extrovert wanting to show how important and free you are you will open your legs much too wide. Much too wide for whom? Not for me. I do not say “this is right” and “this is wrong.” I say that if you know that you are holding your feet close because you are shy, and you feel awkward spreading them more, then there is no harm. From my point of view, it is correct that you should do what you like. I am not here to tell you what to do; I am here only to show you that you should know what you are doing. However, if you do not really know that you hold your feet like that, and you believe that all human beings should hold their feet together, and you are virtually unable to open them, not because your physiology or your anatomy does not permit it, but because you are so unaware that you do not know that they can be opened, then it is incorrect.
WILL SCHUTZ: I remember an example in one of the lessons I took with you where that was illustrated. We were following some instructions, and one person in the class would not do it the way you said. Rather than bawl him out, you asked the rest of the class to do it the way he did it, then do it the way you said, and judge for ourselves which was more comfortable. The process helped us to increase our awareness of what actually felt better.
MOSHE FELDENKRAIS: There is more to it than that. My point was this. I said something, and the great majority of people did it in one way. There was one who somehow interpreted the same words quite differently. Now, it is possible that he was an idiot, that he could not understand what I was talking about That is alright However, I believed that he was not an idiot, that instead he was so far away from being able to function as I asked that he could not conceive that I meant what I said Now, all the other people did it as I asked, and I told all of them, “Look, look how this person does it. Maybe he is right; perhaps it should be done like that. Can you imitate him?” Yes, everybody could. “Can you do it the way you did it before?” Yes, they all could, but he could only do it his way, and not like all the others. Hence, they had the freedom of choice between two acts, but he was compulsive, unable to change. He did not know what he was doing and he could not do what he wanted. That technique, making you to look at him made it easy for him to look at himself. I could say to him, “Look you have done it as you have. Maybe you are right. These people can do like you, or can do something else, but you have no choice. You are a computer; they are human beings. They have free will; they have choice. You have not. Now, sit and look. Can you see?” By seeing the others imitating him, he suddenly realized that he did not know what he was doing. As soon as he realized that, he did it exactly like all the others. His learning took ten seconds. He recaptured his freedom of choice and regained human dignity.
Understand that there are two sorts of learning. There is the kind of learning which is committing things to memory; for instance, taking a telephone book and learning it by heart, or taking an anatomy book and learning the attachments and origins of each muscle. That learning is independent of time and experience. You can decide to do it at any time. But suppose you want to play the piano. Every time you begin to learn, you say, “Look, all right, I did not play the piano as a child. Now it is so difficult to start it and what’s the point of playing the piano. I am a scientist: I am a radio interviewer. What do I have to play the piano for? If I need piano playing, I listen to somebody playing the piano on records.” But for some people, like Yehudi Menuhin or Vladimir Horowitz, the making of music is more important than your radio or your science. They learn by a type of learning which is almost beyond personal choice. You can learn the phone book if you want to, or not learn if you do not want to, and you can change your mind.
But there is learning in which you have no say whatsoever and that learning is latent in the natural laws which have produced our brain and our nervous system and our body and our muscles. These laws are included in the cosmic laws of the universe. They are so precise and so sequential that you have no say about the order you will learn them in. They must be learned in that order; if not, you will not develop as a normal human being. You will be a cripple or an autistic child, something not normal. Why can you not teach a baby even a year old to hold a pencil and write? The baby cannot write until the capacity develops.
You see, there is a kind of learning that goes with growth. You cannot skate before you can walk, no matter how clever you are, even if you are a genius. You must first learn to walk. You cannot walk before you crawl. If you learn to walk before you crawl you will be a cripple. You cannot learn to speak before you are vertical. You know why you cannot? In the human system each part comes into function in sequence one after another. The functioning helps the growth at each stage as a new part of the brain comes into dominance, and changes the entire way of action. This type of learning must proceed at its own pace. We have no say in it. However, because this learning is done under human direction, it may be done in a different way than was intended by nature.
My way of learning, my way of dealing with people, is to find out for that person who wants it what sort of accomplishment is possible for that person. People can learn to move and walk and stand differently, but they have given up because they think it is too late now, that the growth process has been completed, that they cannot learn something new, that they do not have the time or ability. You do not have to go back to being a baby in order to function properly. You can, at any time of your life, rewire yourself, provided I can convince you that there is nothing permanent or compulsive in your system except what you believe to be so.
I do not treat patients. I give lessons to help a person learn about himself or herself. Learning comes by the experience of the manipulation. I do not treat people, I do not cure people, and I do not teach people. I tell them stories because I believe that learning is the most important thing for a human being. Learning should be a pleasant, marvelous experience. Very often in the lesson, I say, “Look, would you stop? So many of you look so stern, as if you were trying to do something terribly difficult and unpleasant for you. That means you are tired, you will not understand any more. Break it, and have a coffee. Or let me tell you a story so that I can see the brightness in your eyes and a smile on your face, and so that you will listen and find that what I say is important to you.”
WILL SCHUTZ: To me, that is not the main thing you do. You do talk, and you do make these points, but the big thing is what goes on with the hands. And to watch a Feldenkrais lesson for me is almost a meditation. It is very quiet and sensitive and it is in the hands where the things happen. There is a communication from the body to the brain that is going on without words, through the hands. The talk usually comes later.
Summary
All mammals, men included, have skeletal muscles which are of no use at all without senses, especially without the most important, the kinesthetic sense. All of this complexity is utterly useless without the autonomic nervous system and the central nervous system. To act, to move, to feel, to think, to do anything (even speak), all of these structures must function. Each of the items mentioned needs learning to acquire the ability to have many modes of functioning for each sense— feeling, thinking, moving, acting, reacting—if we are to live, flower, and become happier as we grow wiser.
We need habits if we are to act appropriately and quickly. But habits used blindly or as if they are laws of nature, i.e. cannot be changed, are just perpetuated, agreed ignorance. The possible alternatives in our array of means, functions, and structures are staggering. Yet all unhappy sufferers “are made like that,” i.e. like their habits. These make them blind to the enormous choice of alternatives available to them. Because habits are so useful and economic to use, we prefer not to change them.
A great variety of “habits” is available to every one of us. We could use some of them on Sundays and some on other days of the week, some of them when on your feet and some of them when in bed, and choose one for each affair. It is not so easy to help oneself as it may appear, but not as difficult as one may feel. If necessary, turn to people who make it their occupation to assist others with difficulties which they cannot see through by themselves.
