|
From childhood on, we learn. We learn from our environment and from our teachers. We learn from whatever and whoever surrounds
us. We learn through curiosity, which drives us to reach out a hand, to roll over and sit up, to walk, and we learn from exposure,
from hearing the way people talk to us and interact with each other, and from watching the world go by.
Our teachers
are many: they are in our classrooms, they are our parents, our older siblings, our friends, our foes. They are the people
who have been formally entrusted with teachings us the things deemed to be correct and necessary in the proper way. They are
the people who would have us grow up to think and act like themselves, the people who believe they know what is best for us,
and sometimes they are people who want to feel strong or are afraid and so exert their will over us. A sense of the socially
acceptable and unacceptable is instilled in us both subtly and blatantly. We learn from experience and experience, negative
and positive. Our personality is moulded by the way we absorb the lessons we are exposed to.
Like it or not,
many of us lose ourselves, our "selves", along the way. We get lost in striving to seek approval, to be the best
student, to be loved, to be special, to not make mistakes. We learn to respect external authority in its many forms, and to
suppress our inner voice. In time we find ourselves in situations we would rather not be in (a marriage, a friendship, a job)
or reacting to events or people in a way that upsets or frustrates us, rather than being true to our inner voice. The contradiction
between what we do and say, and what we would like to do and say may be a source of stress or depression, or we may have learned
to suppress our self so well that we don't even know consciously that there is a self. We believe that we are seeing the world,
people, our environment as it really is, when in fact we are looking through many layers of fine cloud, each one draped unseen
across our ability to perceive the external world and, most importantly, across our awareness and sense of ourselves.
With the focus on intelligence, logic and the mind which exists in today's world, words and analytical thought have taken
over our lives. Many people, once their attention is drawn to it, find that they are rarely free of internal dialogues. These
are often even present when we are involved in an actual conversation. They are not intentional and have no aim or function,
no direction and no result other than busying and cluttering our waking (and sleeping?) selves at the expense of being present
in our lives here and now.
But knowing all this, simply possessing all this information, doesn't change much.
Whats important is awareness. The catch is that the harder your try to be aware, the more it becomes a construct of the mind,
a wall of words, another internal dialogue. Awareness doesnt exist on its own, its here all the time, in everything and all
around us and in us - it happens while "..........."
Feldenkrais work is a vehicle for clearing your
mind to access your inner self. It provides a safe environment to explore and observe honestly and non-judgementally what
you do and how you do it, in order to blow away the fine cloud and dust that has accumulated over your real self so that you
can move towards a freer and more awake you.
Our Choices
Group and Individual Work
|
