Awareness Through Movement #289

Standing on one leg with movements - BALANCE

Moshe has quite a bit to say about the art of standing in this lesson:

The person feels that he must do something to stand. Standing needs to be completely automatic like the heart beating.

“The speed in these things always is a means to deceive oneself,
instead of true ability.
The moment you go quickly,
it is a sign that you stop breathing and fall.
Doing a fast movement of the legs covers up the efforts
that people don’t know how to get rid of.
This is what is necessary to eliminate; and then,
there is not any need for speed.
Then, it becomes possible to do it very quickly and also very slowly.”

“With many people,
particularly those that are used to dancing, the movement with the leg backward is always in the manner of showing off — so as to show, “Look how straight it is.”
It’s this that we need to get rid of.
The leg behind needs to be ugly so as to make it really beautiful.
Make the movement so it is ugly.
You might see that, for those who do not know what is beautiful,
the beautiful and the ugly are the same thing.
They do the same movement.”

“If the neck is ossified, it does not work because you won’t be holding the over the hip joint. Instead, all of the muscles on the other side are holding the head which makes balance difficult.
These muscles are not free to correct or adjust to small changes that are necessary for good standing and it takes time to balance, to let go and to do.
Everything seems too strong and too sudden.
Therefore they cannot stand.
A person that stands on a rope, walks on a rope, or rides a bicycle on a rope, must be sensitive to the smallest movement possible.
The muscles need to be free to make the corrections,
the moment you pass a certain known border, it is impossible to correct.
Keep the breathing soft, simple, the chest hanging more, the neck soft so that the head is free to move, and soften the eyes...
then there is no need to correct because your body does this by itself.”

“This is what we call an improvement of ability, rather than an effort of the will.
The will, or the force stops the moment you forget how to effort.”

“If you pay attention to the difficulties that appear in the background of good organisation, it is possible every time to eliminate another deficiency of bad habits, you can really improve the ability to do what we said is possible the whole time when you decrease the effort and distinguish small mistakes.”

“Actually all our large deficiencies are a large collection of small mistakes which makes it impossible to get rid of them. If the bending increases, you strengthen the muscles that need to defend the body.
The stiffness increases and the ability becomes less, instead the ability becomes what it was before.
Find the difficult place and learn with knowledge, understand distinctions so that you can organise the difficult places to remove them rather than overcome them.”