Reclaiming your inner authority
“You can’t teach anyone anything, you can only create
the conditions in which they can learn.”
— Moshe Feldenkrais
One of my favorite words is autodidact: a self-taught person. It means one is curious, interested, and alive. Eleanor Roosevelt writes that,
“What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person.”
Many people stop sifting their ideas at some point. They give up their inner authority to others. This can be for many reasons: perhaps a professional offers a diagnosis, a family member offers a judgment, or a doctor, from an abundance of caution, fails to suggest a condition might improve.
I have seen this dozens of times over the years, where people default to a self-image based on an outsider’s view of them, whether it’s a medical, neurological, or congenital condition that unduly influences their life choices, or hidden and pernicious chronic pain that they are expected to ignore as “high-functioning” people.
The power in being self-taught is that you are defined by your own choices.
Consider this situation:
A baby with severe brain damage was believed to be a lost cause by physical and occupational therapists, as well as all the doctors. “This baby will never walk,” they all said. That was, in fact, true, this baby would never walk.
BUT. My friend, a Feldenkrais practitioner, looked at this little guy and said, “Let’s not think about that. Let’s look at what he can do.”
So she taught him to roll.
This baby is now an adult and his humanity, his choice, and his locomotion is a joy to behold because someone saw what was possible, not what was decreed. Sure, he would never walk. Yet he can move from room to room.
Thinking outside the box…wait, what box?
My friend set up the conditions for learning and the child uncovered his inner roller. She didn’t force or correct or judge or assume, based on a medical measuring stick, what he should or should not be capable of. She showed him what was possible, and he did it.
Moshe Feldenkrais sought to create the autodidact in every person with every single one of his lessons.
I call it reclaiming your inner authority.
On this subject of being an autodidact, two of my favorite thinkers, Richard Feynman and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, bring an astoundingly prescient view on what that means.
From within their unique and distinct disciplines, they lead you to imagine a world different than the one we have been spoon fed.
In lectures from 1966 and 1970, respectively, they make you think, smile, and then frown, because we still so desperately need curious and original people who encourage us to think for ourselves.
The full lectures are well worth reading, piercing and timely in their wisdom.
Richard Feynman
What is science? 1966 lecture to the National Teachers Association
“I think it is very important—at least it was to me—that if you are going to teach people to make observations, you should show that something wonderful can come from them.”
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
1970 lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature
“Those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force—they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.”
Audio lesson to stream
For one person, this lesson is about softening the low back. For someone else, it’s about fluid arms, for another, it’s about coordinating the walking pattern that emerges with the shoulders and hips.
One thing we can say for sure is that it’s a deceptively simple and luxurious lesson. Feel how the whole spine connects from top to bottom as the arms and legs swing.
Believe it or not, each Feldenkrais lesson teaches us whatever we need to learn in this moment.
The same lesson might be about different things on different days. We humans are just too hard to pin down!
This lesson is from A Flexible Low Back in the FeldenkraisTREASURY.
“What you truly learn best will appear to you later as your own discovery.”
Mark your calendar: Fall online classes start Tuesday, September 8
In Awareness Through Movement® you learn how to move with minimum effort and maximum ease, not through muscular strength, but through increased awareness of how the body works. Lying on the floor you are directed through a series of gentle, non-invasive movements that grow increasingly complex.
Join any class, any time. No experience necessary.
Tuesday, 10:00am, gentle class
September theme: Finding wholeness with the Five LinesSaturday, 10:00am, active class
September theme: A flexible spine for upright sitting and powerful walking
(times are Mountain time, Denver, US)
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You’re awesome, I appreciate it!