Moshe Feldenkrais Quotes & Sayings

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. — Moshe Feldenkrais

In order to recognize small changes in effort, the effort itself must first be reduced. More delicate and improved control of movement is possible only through the increase of sensitivity, through a greater ability to sense differences. — Moshe Feldenkrais

Standing is harder than moving. — Moshe Feldenkrais

If I hold a twenty pound weight, I cannot detect a fly landing on it because the least detectable difference in the stimulus is half a pound. On the other hand, if i hold a feather, a fly landing on it makes a great difference. Obviously then, in order to be able to tell the differences in exertion one must first reduce the exertion. Finer and finer performance is possible only if the sensitivity, that is, the ability to feel the difference is improved. — Moshe Feldenkrais

Make the impossible possible, the possible easy, the easy elegant ... — Moshe Feldenkrais

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. — Moshe Feldenkrais

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

What you truly learn best will appear to you later as your own discovery. — Moshe Feldenkrais

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. — Moshe Feldenkrais

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

We have more experience of movement and more capacity for it than of feeling and thought ... We know much more about movement than we do about anger, love, envy or even thought. It is relatively easy to learn to recognize the quality of movement than the quality of other factors. — Moshe Feldenkrais

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. — Moshe Feldenkrais

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

Learning to inhibit unwanted contractions of muscles that function without, or in spite of, our will, is the main task in coordinated action. — Moshe Feldenkrais

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

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

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. — Moshe Feldenkrais

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

I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning. A brain without a body could not think. — Moshe Feldenkrais

Movement is life; without movement life is unthinkable. — Moshe Feldenkrais

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. — Moshe Feldenkrais

I believe that the person who never avowed his unavowed dreams somewhere in his unconscious, in his dreams, feels he has wasted his life, and when he is old he will realize it. — Moshe Feldenkrais

Our breathing reflects every emotional or physical effort and every disturbance. — Moshe Feldenkrais