Quotes & Sayings About Feldenkrais

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

4. Differentiation - making the smallest possible sensory distinctions between movements - builds brain maps. Newborns, Feldenkrais observed, often make very large, poorly differentiated movements based on primitive reflexes, using many muscles at once, such as reflexively extending their entire arms. They also cannot discriminate among their fingers. As they mature, they learn to make smaller, more precise individual movements. But the movements do not become precise until the child can use awareness to discern very small differences among them. Differentiation, Feldenkrais would — Norman Doidge

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

When you know what you're doing, you can do what you want." -Moshe Feldenkrais — Cheryl L. Ilov

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

Both methods develop increased awareness that can lead to neural changes and neurodifferentiation. (Put differently, when Feldenkrais trained his pupils to refine their sensory awareness of how it felt to perform a movement, he was training them to make more use of the feedback provided by their senses.) Some introductory books on — Norman Doidge

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

And it really can crunch. There is a constant danger of injuries from overwork. Close to performance time, a walk through the hallways near the pit can sometimes seem like a visit to a living catalog of alternative medicines: heat before playing, ice after playing, stretches against walls and doors, tai chi, the Feldenkrais Method, the Alexander Technique - all the major and minor bodywork systems have been used by colleagues at one time or another to make playing easier and more informed. Another way to make playing — Tom Heimberg

3. Awareness of movement is the key to improving movement. The sensory system, Feldenkrais pointed out, is intimately related to the movement system, not separate from it. Sensation's purpose is to orient, guide, help control, coordinate, and assess the success of a movement. The kinesthetic sense plays a key role in assessing the success of a movement and gives immediate sensory feedback about where the — Norman Doidge

5. Differentiation is easiest to make when the stimulus is smallest. In Awareness Through Movement, Feldenkrais wrote, "If I raise an iron bar I shall not feel the difference if a fly either lights on it or leaves it. If, on the other hand I am holding a feather, I shall feel a distinct difference if the fly were to settle on it. The same applies to all the senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste, heat, and cold." If a sensory stimulus is very great (say, very loud music), we can notice a change in the level of that stimulus only if the change is quite significant. If the stimulus is small to begin with, then we can detect very small changes. (This phenomenon is called the Weber-Fechner law in physiology.) — Norman Doidge

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

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

2. A brain cannot think without motor function. Wrote Feldenkrais, "My fundamental contention is that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality, that these entities are not related to each other in one fashion or another, but are an inseparable whole. To put this more clearly: I contend that a brain could not think without motor functions. — Norman Doidge

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

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