Moshe Feldenkrais Quotes

No matter how closely we look, it is difficult to find a mental act that can take place without the support of some physical function.

My purpose is to allow people to move closer to actually being creatures of free choice, to genuinely reflect individual creativity and emotion, freeing the body of habitual tensions and wired-patterns of behaviour so that it may respond without inhibition to do what the person wants.

Standing is harder than moving.

But willpower is necessary only where _ability_ to do is lacking. Learning ... is not the training of willpower but the acquisition of the skill to inhibit parasitic action and the ability to direct clear motivations as a result of self-knowledge. [Introduction]

There are multiple descriptions of the same real world situation. The only justification for language is to empower yourself. If the verbal description you create of the situation you find yourself in leads to paralysis and ineffectual behaviour, then throw those damn words away and find yourself a new set. There is always some useful description of the world that empowers and gives you choices and your task, if you are going to use words at all, is to find that set of words.

Ultimately, we become aware of most of what is going on within us mainly through the muscles.

Our breathing reflects every emotional or physical effort and every disturbance.

Movement is life; without movement life is unthinkable.

Nothing is permanent about our behavior patterns except our belief that they are so.

Make the impossible possible, the possible easy, the easy elegant ...

Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.

The problem is that much of what we have learned is harmful to our system because it was learned in childhood, when immediate dependence on others distorted our real needs. Long-standing habitual action feels right. Training a body to be perfect in all the possible forms and configurations of its members changes not only the strength and flexibility of the skeleton and muscles, but makes a profound and beneficial change in the self-image and quality of the direction of the self.

In order to change our mode of action, we must change the image of ourselves that we carry within us.

Once we come to see that one's degree of self-control directly mirrors one's self-image, we can understand why we find it so difficult to improve our bodily performance by focusing only on the learning of specific actions. Instead, we might well surmise that to improve one's self-image so that it more nearly approximates reality will result in a general improvement in one's bodily actions. And the results of such an improvement would be both quicker and more extensive than the results from any system of exercises that applies only to specific actions.

In short, health is measured by the shock a person can take without his usual way of life being compromised

Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don't divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.

People confound, misuse, interchange thinking and speaking, not realizing that speaking is for communication and thinking is for action ...