I believe that we are living in a historically brief transition period
that heralds the emergence of a truly human man.
– Moshé Feldenkrais
Once, it was in 2008, I took a book that attracted me from a shelf in a peculiar shop. It was the book by Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais entitled ‘Awareness through movement’. As it often happens in my life, it was ‘about dawn’, even before the period of yoga-like bodyworkers. The author of the book was little known then. Moshé’s works were reserved to only a few.
I remember that I, being a yoga teacher, was struck with exactitude, depth and ultimate laconism which the author used to conceive the heads of chapters and sub-titles: ‘the simpler an action the more retarded is its development‘, ‘a studied method supersedes a natural one’, ‘changes become fixed and turn into habits’, ‘reversibility is a feature of conscious movement’… They were literally ready answers and concepts for bodywork and body awareness. I found the thoughts of a man who sort of articulated all that had long been about somewhere and had been perceived intuitively.
One thought in the truest sense of the word became the fundamental key to understanding the sense of any movement. It was the thought about the ‘institute’ of movement.
Imagine a primitive man, a hunter, procuring himself food day by day. For example, when hunting, he ran after his prey (probably, he also ran away from his prey from time to time) and must be enduring and fast. The best hunters were the best enduring runners. They transmitted their mastery to others who, in their turn, retransmitted these skills and abilities further on… Until, for example, technique of running, breathing, foot position and, cherry on top – Olympiads were invented. As soon as it happened, one could say that technique took a different shape and was separated from humans as some abstractional, featureless method, as an ‘institution’ (Lat. institutum means ‘constitution, usage, establishment’). Figuratively it is a place where refined knowledge about movement was intentionally devitalized in order to be transmitted to further generations. This is the logic of any method evolution. Speaking of which, in modern science any experiment is considered to be high-quality and reliable if it can be approved by other scientists having guidelines and method description.
It all starts with a savage, intuitive (subconscious), animate movement and finishes with a guidebook and a posted board on a wall. It is the case for almost all things in the world. For example, a person willing to master Hatha Yoga using a book, starts from the very end of this movie. He/she takes a ready-made formula, i.e. a picture of a yoga pose, with its brief description and tries to perform it. If body intelligence is not well developed yet, the chance to ‘catch’ the movement, to make everything correctly and not to get injured is actually insignificant. It is because an average modern man is far away enough from primary movements, especially in the used-to-be scope.
The key idea is just to understand what is on the reverse side of body movements ‘according to a book’. There is that very thing there, a savage, primary, animate movement. It is a certain essence that generated the form into which humans try to get while being in the world of institutions (by the way, almost every area of human activity is institutionalized, from family to State).
From my personal perspective, it is better not to fix upon external imitation of body postures, but to concentrate on movement within this form. It can be any subtle movements in the body, ‘breathing away’ of rigid and painful areas and even self-massage. All this can help your body to animate a lifeless book-learned form and to transform it into a lively movement (even if the form is static). Broadly speaking, it is important to move from static or slow movements and forms to more dynamic ones but not vice versa. It is because awareness requires time, especially at the initial stage. A practicing man gradually returns to the very essence of the movement which cannot be erroneous because successful experience of generations lies at the core of it. As a result, a balance between book-learned knowledge and personal life-based experience is achieved, which by no means scores out the importance of personal apprenticeship, but to the contrary enhances its value and at the same time gives to the practicing person an opportunity to make oneself safe, in part or in whole, from a faulty execution of an exercise learned from a book, and to enlarge the number of potential channels through which knowledge may be obtained.
I’m quoting here my favourite Boris Grebenshchikov: ‘but life is alive, my dear, and though is dead…’. One can say that both life and tough are important as well as movement between them is, because they are all parts of the whole which is human dynamic balance. It is possible and it is necessary to understand this concept only through your personal practice, and the same I wish to you all!
ОМ
12 October 2018
Train ‘Kyiv-Zaporizhzhia’
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