Awareness Through Movement #305

The line of effort in the back in lifting - MASTERY

I started with using ‘CONTROL’ as the theme for this lesson and it didn’t quite fit the thesaurus shows ‘mastery’ which is probably better yet possibly still not quite it. What’s a gentle word for control? Does mastery come near it?

Tonight we have another what I call pinball lesson… where we become the pinball table and roll a big heavy ball from hand to foot. We touched on it a few nights ago in lesson #303, tonight we get a little more specific - on each side.

too funny, there really IS a human pinball machine!

Today I read a few interesting tidbits in Moshe’s biography that sparked my and could (also) spark your… thought patterns:

I’m at the chapter where Mark Reese, or his wife - (did you know Mark died while writing this book and his wife took over from the copious amount of notes Mark left behind?) wrote about the difference between Functional Integration and Awareness Through Movement - how they each came to be and how Moshe reluctantly agreed that working one-on-one with people also served as a benefit.

“The whole problem is a social one and re-education has much better prospects of success if conducted in groups and not in the seclusion and pretended secrecy of the consulting room. Many students will find sufficient relief in this alone and, helped by clearer understanding of the process of habit formation, may be able to further their maturing process by their own means.

The edge of anxiety is blunted by the dissolution of the anxiety patterns, not in isolation but in a community and without disclosure of details of personal experience even to the teacher”

Given that Moshe was a leader in the human potential movement, together with Ida Rolf and Werner Erhardt (and many others of whom I’m not so familiar)… Ida, who worked with the individual and Werner, in very large groups… to see now the direction these three particular modalities have come in today’s age, all three of them suffering (IMO) for their own reasons.. hhhmmm… it has me wonder how the internet could be used as a tool for bringing methods such as these to life.

Perhaps a topic for conversation, after the pinball lesson… or maybe another time that fits?