Spine like a chain, 35 min
Rolling across the spine can unravel all kinds of tension. This lesson opens up the upper back right between the shoulder blades, plus with some oscillation up and down the spine you get up feeling like you have a new back!
(From Unwind the upper back and shoulders in the FeldenkraisTREASURY.)
“Learning never exhausts the mind.”
Thought for August 29: Reduce the urge to achieve and your learning will improve
Here we are at point #9 of Moshe’s ten points on how to learn: We do not say at the start what the final stage will be.
We are so drilled or wired-in by prevailing educational methods that when we know what is required of us, we go all-out to achieve it, for fear of loss of face, regardless of what it costs us to do so.
We have it instilled in our system that we must not be the worst of the lot. We will bite our lips, hold our breath, and screw up our straining self in an ugly way in order to achieve something if we have no clear idea of how to mobilize ourselves for that task. The result is excessive effort, harmful strain, and ugly performance.
The Awareness Through Movement® lessons will help you to reach your inborn potentiality in the best way and avoid giving you just another opportunity for using yourself in the accustomed way which led you, initially, to seek a better one.
By reducing the urge to achieve, and attending also to the means for achieving, we learn easier.
Achieving, we lose the incentive for learning and, therefore, accept a lower level than the potential we are endowed with.
When we delay the final achievement by attending efficiently to our means, we set ourselves a higher level of achievement if we are not aware that that is what we are doing.
On knowing what to achieve before we have learned to learn, we can reach only the limit of our ignorance, which is often general.
Such limits are intrinsically lower than those we can foresee after knowing better.
Moshe’s Ten Points on How to Learn
1. Do everything very slowly
2. Look for the pleasant sensation
3. Do not "try" to do well
4. Do not try to do "nicely"
5. Insist on easy, light movement
6. Learning and life are not the same thing
7. Why bother to be so efficient?
8. Do not concentrate
9. We do not say at the start what the final stage will be
10. Do a little less than you can
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