Your Amazing Mind’s Eye

Dear Students:
Many Awareness Through Movement lessons include imagining, visualizing or thinking about how to do a movement before actually performing it.  The Feldenkrais Method concentrates on this technic often because of the valuable benefits that occur when you begin to set yourself into motion.  In the moment of mobilizing yourself for action your whole nervous system organizes itself so you can accomplish your goal.  In order to alter a habit you can become very successful in doing so while sensing how your mind works.

In 1981 Moshe Feldenkrais traveled to several cities throughout the United States teaching Awareness Through Movement workshops to the general public over long weekends.  In Washington D.C. he opened the first day with a lesson that students physically did on one side and after a break he had them imagine the other side in their mind’s eye.  During that class he explained why visualizing is so beneficial for a human being.  As he taught this particular lesson some of the profound truths he stated touched me so deeply that it brought tears to my eyes.  I decided to share some of my favorite snippets with you today.

Moshe Feldenkrais said,  “We have only one set of muscles – and our brain is capable of feeling, thinking, sensing, representing, imagining, patterning, inventing, creating, hearing music, imagining mathematics – our brain is capable of a million qualities of action and all of them must have no other way then expressing yourself through that one set of muscles.” Moshe elaborated saying,“It is impossible to feel, to create, to think, to sense, to imagine without the body producing the kind of organization that fits that sort of thinking.”

Dr. Feldenkrais then explained to his pupils that if for example, a fiddle player imagined playing his fiddle he would be able to feel with his entire being the fiddle in his hands.  And the same concept goes for anything you are satisfied that you can do well, such as washing the dishes.  He wrapped it up with his explanation, “Because there is only one set of muscles for all the functions of the brain, for all the functions of your heart and whatever you have, your soul or anything else.”

I hope you enjoyed these words of wisdom as much as I have. Peace to all!
~Donna