FELDENKRAIS QUOTES

from Moshe Feldenkrais’ “The Elusive Obvious”

“Are you satisfied with your posture? Are you satisfied with your breathing? Are you satisfied with your life? I mean, do you feel you have made the best you could of your genetic endowment? Have you learned to do what you wish to do with yourself and how to do it? Do you suffer chronic pains? Do you regret not being able to do the things you would have liked to do? I believe what you wish secretly is not in fact wishful thinking, but that we are all able to live the way we want. The main obstacle is ignorance: scientific ignorance, personal ignorance, and cultural ignorance. If we do not know what we are actually enacting then we cannot possibly do what we want. I spent nearly forty years first learning to know how I was doing what, and then teaching others to learn to learn so that they could do justice to themselves. I believe that knowing oneself is the most important thing a human being can do for himself. How can one know oneself? By learning to act not as one should, but as one does. We have great difficulty in sorting out what we do as we should from what we want to do with ourselves.”

“The aim [of the Feldenkrais Method] is a person that is organized to move with minimum effort and maximum efficiency, not through muscular strength, but through increased consciousness of how movement works.”
-Moshe Feldenkrais, PhD

“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