Changing focus
“Every light has its shadow, and every shadow has a succeeding morning.”
— Nicolaus Copernicus, who moved the center of the universe
Ptolemy, from the second century A.D., thought all the planets revolved around the earth, which was based on Aristotelian physics from five hundred years before that.
Then Nicolaus Copernicus comes along in the early sixteenth century and changes the center of the solar system. He figured out that instead of the planets revolving around the earth, we actually revolved around the sun. Imagine that! We were not the center of the universe like we thought.
He also figured out the daily spin of the earth, its yearly rotation around the sun, and the equinoxes. Given that the Ptolemaic view of the universe was the norm for over a thousand years, Copernicus fundamentally changed the way we perceive ourselves. he presented a new way of seeing.
This opened up the ground for new and different questions, paving the way for the ideas of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.
Our own lives can be full of smaller, but no less impactful, perceptual shifts, like a kaleidoscope that alters one piece at a time, yet resets the entire picture.
Our perception of choice is the very framework of our lives. It structures how we think about our health, finances, relationships, and our future.
Choice traps or liberates us. If we can’t sense we have a choice, for whatever reason (often a good one), we’re liable to repeat the same thing over and over in our very human, flawed, charmingly neurotic way.
No one is immune from this. Yet, like Copernicus, we are also capable of using our brain, which is literally designed in its shape and structure for learning, to link new pathways and see new things.
Given that every change in perception alters your ability to see, Feldenkrais presents, through movement, a new way of seeing. Who knows, fundamental aspects of your life might change, just like with the center of the solar system.
The one thing Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais always said, among may other things, was that, “I know life can be different.” He distinguished this characteristic in his thinking as different from people who felt trapped and limited, like they had no choice.
I know life can be different. (I am saying this to myself just as much as to you!) How? By increasing the range and depth of our perception. (You know by now I’m going to say, “By getting on the floor and doing a Feldenkrais lesson,” so let’s accept that as a forgone conclusion.)
Here are some questions:
How many health, lifestyle, and emotional choices do you perceive right now?
How many choices do you perceive in how you sit, stand, breathe, reach, bend, or turn?
How vital do you feel?
If you moved your center, what would happen?
All we can do is ask the questions and look into the kaleidoscope for the next shift.
Two amazing lessons about finding your center. If you’ve misplaced it, as we all do from time to time, these lessons will guide you in feeling how to balance. Plus, they just feel yummy to do.
“Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold.
We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind, in which understanding may come to us.”