Awareness Through Movement #85

Bending the right ear to the right shoulder and the left ear to the left shoulder ANGLES AND DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS

The lesson begins with:

“please sit because I want to clarify something that always is important to know. Many, who weren't present at the beginning of the groups, haven't heard. Even those, who were in the groups from the beginning, do not know exactly why, or how, we do many things. You feel that we do many things differently from anywhere else and there is some connection. There is another strange thing. You see, many people have difficulty with very simple things that seem so easy to others. You say something and a few do it. To others, it seems so peculiar and impossible that it takes them time to learn to do a very simple movement. Someone who comes at the end of the lesson and sees an evolved movement... by then the movement seems like something that needs to be understood... but if you simply say, "to put the feet standing and to push the pelvis" — then you see that there are people who have difficulty doing this. The point is that there is nothing, nothing that we do not learn — in its breadth and understanding since childhood — even the simplest movements. That is why there are very strange things. For instance, if someone says, "Do a movement with the head moving up and down," when the person makes one movement up, you can see that when the person thinks of the movement up and down — he only thinks of the nose. The nose does the movement up and down. If you tell him to think that he is doing the movement down with a point behind his head, it seems strange to him. You will see that there is an enormous difference. The one, who does it with his nose, moves like this and the one, who does it with the point behind the head, does it like this. [do this movement]. That is why you see such different and varied movements between two people. There is another peculiar thing. If you look... if we do the same movement and then tell someone, "Hey, you are not listening to the jaw," then that person will say, "What does it have to do with the jaw?" He never thinks that the movement of the head has any relationship with the jaw and throat. Since childhood, each one learns by imitation a certain movement... the majority of the central movements that are used. Then, he does not know how another person does it, what the other person feels, or what the other person thinks. He believes that the way he does it, is the way it is done. When a person takes out of all the possible head movements — out of all the possibilities that connect the head with the environments only one possibility; then, all the rest remain strange to him. Something peculiar occurs. We will do one movement in its whole circumference — one head movement in its circumference... approximately with all the possibilities that you see in the moment. Actually, after you do it like this you will see that you discover another hundred possibilities. There are endless possibilities. You will see that it is enough to do one movement with the head moving truly throughout the whole circumference in order to change all the content of holding and standing of your body fundamentally changing the way of standing and carriage of the head.
That is what we will do.”

When you think of your ear, which part ‘comes to mind?’ Substack’s AI is glitching again, this photo is taken from their ‘stock’ photo’s.. by Nsey Benajah from Unsplash

We’ve spoken before about these lessons being experientially experimental, that Moshe would do the movements himself, work out how to instruct that particular movement and then he would bring it to the class. And it seems, he would be very often surprised by how what he said landed in a room full of 100 people listening to his very succinct directions. This (I have no doubt) guided him to adapt the variations he witnessed and turn them into lessons as well.

This IS the creative process he included participants in his laboratory. for the…