Awareness Through Movement #234

Standing Backward, part 1 - Marianne Rivington

From Marianne:

I really liked this one…I found it a very pleasant, gentle standing lesson.

“A hidden gem”

Exploring, discovering that hidden gem in you… like a miner… sifting through rocks and soil for the hidden gem… that is your own true, wonderful self.

It brought me right back to the contrast between what I had learned about “good posture” in my physiotherapy training in the 1970’s… I remember standing with my back to a wall, pressing fist my lower back, then the back of my head to the wall, attempting to hold this position as I moved away form the wall and start walking and that maintaining this for 15 minutes was not even vaguely possible…and my revelation in 1980 upon discovering Moshe Feldenkrais’ concept of dynamic posture…

At the end of the lesson Moshe says,

“… And now, a few words to understand (explain). For example. this is done in exercises where you stand next to the wall and push the spine into the walls the spine could be straight, behind. That is called “good walking.” You see this cannot be ”good walking.” This is an extreme of standing. [You] should not stand as you would after doing this exercise for a few hours.

This is the limit of standing backward. There are people who stand like this in parts of their body for their whole life. To place everything standing like this certainly is not comfortable and is not good, despite the fact that most people would look and say that is beautiful.

…We will know how [someone] should stand after we do this-after[we do] the same thing forward, the same thing backward, the same thing going down and without going down-not until the body will find a position that is not to the right, not to the left, not backward and not forward. That means in the middle. We will do it while making all the mistakes crudely so [we] clearly could know what should not be done, so what should be done will [arise] clearly by itself as a result of, “Oh, that is it. That is how it should be.”

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M. Feldenkrais, Body and Mature Behaviour p. 75
“…. again we are hampered by the misleading suggestion of certain words. Ponere and postitura refer to position; a static idea is therefore suggested by the word posture. In reality, the unstable balance is essentially a dynamic state through which the entire system passes in each act as though station were it takes its bearings and readjusts all the instruments sensitive to gravity order to better its relation to space and improve its timing…Successful action is performed with the least exertion from this state of mind and body. Because the capacity and liberty of the frame to attempt and realize any act is gratis in this state, we will refer to it as the potent state”

(Judo…Shizentai…balanced or upright state p 76)

…Any act involves so many muscles and so complete an activity, that it is more useful to describe the function than the mechanism. And this is:

1. that the proper posture of the body is such that it can initiate movement in any direction with the same ease (2) that it can start any movement without a preliminary adjustment; (3) that the movement is performed with the minimum of work, i.e. with the maximum efficiency

There are still many examples of the impossible to maintain “good Posture” model I learned in the 1970’s:

I’ll be thinking of you doing this lesson, please share any feedback,

Marianne.

Lesson below: